Teutonic reverence for women, or it is a school of knightly manners, where the castled aristocracy may cultivate a peculiar system of sentiment and language, distinguishing their order from the plebeian world around them. Dante's Beatrice and Spenser's Una are the representatives of one class; Guillaume de Lorris' new version of the art of love, in "The Romance of the Rose," is the type of the other. The former conception breathes its spirituality into the beautiful characters of Shakspeare's women, making the unselfishness of Viola, the patience of Imogen, and the purity of Isabella, at once ideal and credible. The latter inspires the elaborate code framed by the female canonists and casuists of the "Cours d'Amour," which, embodied first of all in the treatise of André le Chapelain, "De Amore," and adapted to the manners of a later time by Castiglione in his "Cortigiano," formed the basis of social etiquette in every court of Europe, and was reflected with all the hectic colouring of decline in the comedy of Fletcher' (iv, 452).

Mr Courthope's 'History' is thus an experiment of high worth in the philosophical chronicle of literature, revealing as it does the play of many forces, partly ancestral, partly international, partly both, upon literary art.

Mr Saintsbury's 'Short History of English Literature' does not show these preoccupations at all strongly, though the author is learned in the writings of many lands. He loses something by this omission; he loses possibly more by a certain exclusion from his view of the intellectual stuff of literature. But he holds finely and firmly to the yet more important, or equally important, clue that writing is an art, and that structure and style are forms of beauty which it is, after all, the main affair of the critic to detect and love. Within the limits of the nation, or with only casual references to foreign influence, he has applied the same canon of design and proportion to his own History, laying out in a single volume, which has only been as yet half appreciated, the natural epochs, groups, and outlines, in just perspective. Some drawbacks, it is true, cannot be ignored. There is a touch or two of political or ecclesiastical predilection. We read that 'Hooker's work utterly ruined, from the logical and historical side, the position of the English Puritans'—a very doubtful statement, and one that might have been spared in a work where the artistic standpoint is almost

always maintained with dignity. Some caprice is shown in the recognition of philological inquiry and its results, which do not profess to do the work of the æsthetic critic, but are there to be used by him. It really does matter to criticism how we sort the poems of the Cynewulfian and Caedmonian schools, and only the linguists can give us the data; but in the 'Short History' the subject is treated with some impatience. It is not unfair to point, lastly, to some degree of hasty or parenthetic writing, or lack of finish, which is less than just to the author's literary gift.

Yet Mr Saintsbury has written by far the most catholic record of our literature. He has a steady will to enjoy all that is good of whatever kind, and to find words for the reason why he does so-a simple creed, and 'pleasant when one considers it,' but rare among critics, who are for ever led off either by the British bane of blind whim or by the other mania of vaporous theorising. Such an open temper-which is the boon of nature nurtured by schooling-ready to perceive the goodness or badness of the handiwork, and the peculiar virtue of the form chosen by each artist, is uncommon. It is present in the 'Short History,' as is the power of orderly grouping, by which the vague bibliography, that often does duty in England for a history of letters, falls into an intelligible pattern. It is something to cover the country from Widsith to Tennyson, and from Alfred to Carlyle, in such a spirit. Lightness and cheeriness of step are wanted to carry the pilgrim all that way, and are not absent in Mr Saintsbury.

We do not care to compare him with the other scholar we have reviewed here, save to say that their gifts curiously supplement one another. Like all good travellers, however, Mr Saintsbury has two distinct moods of admiration. There is the general mood of readiness to grant admiration to whatever is fair, or even is strangely expressive, whether it be in Hobbes or Newman or Shelley or Drunken Barnabee; so obeying the commandment of Plato to 'rejoice wherein we ought to rejoice.' But sometimes the pilgrim is quickened to a different mood altogether, and then his criticism is of the kind which tells us most about both parties to it, though it irritates pedants because it does not pretend to be like a judge's charge. That man is to be pitied who does not get more out of Lamb's sentence that Heywood is a 'kind of

prose Shakspeare,' than out of the meditation that it is decidedly partial. In any case we feel it quickly when, amid the more level and restrained survey proper to a long history, a critic with ample learning and clear canons lifts up his voice. There are authors we chance on, and find they were always ours; and we resent that an opinion should be ventured on them by others. Their voice calls up the echoes of our private whispering-gallery. They may not be the greatest of men. But the involuntary eloquence they communicate remains with our hearers longer than the tempered findings of the historic intellect. It is this kind of note the want of which banishes much of the commentary of our time into the useful field of science. Donne, we have seen, is a difficult poet to divine. Mr Saintsbury, observing that the word 'metaphysical' is strictly appropriate to him, adds :—

'For, behind every image, every ostensible thought of his, there are vistas and backgrounds of other thoughts dimly vanishing, with glimmers in them here and there into the depths of the final enigmas of life and soul. Passion and meditation, the two avenues into this region of doubt and dread, are tried by Donne in the two sections respectively, and of each he has the key. Nor, as he walks in them with eager or solemn tread, are light and music wanting, the light the most unearthly that ever played round a poet's head, the music not the least heavenly that he ever caught and transmitted to his readers.

Such enthusiasm is in place. Who would not wish to be able to speak of his elect authors thus well? Without some such interludes the mapping of international currents and the watching of impersonal forces become a vain thing. The Short History' is therefore to be recognised for its qualities of completeness within its own scale, clear historic grouping, avoidance of crowding, catholic connoisseurship, and the timely betrayal of preferences. Such books minister in their own way, really rather than ostensibly, to that federal ideal of literature which cannot be too often enunciated.

OLIVER ELTON.

Art. II.—GIOTTO AND EARLY ITALIAN ART.

A History of Painting in Italy. By J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle. New edition in six volumes. Edited by Langton Douglas, assisted by S. Arthur Strong. Vols i and ii. London: Murray, 1903.

It would be hard to devise better words of welcome for this great work as now reissued by Mr Murray than those with which Mr Douglas speeds it in an opening sentence of his preface.

'Notwithstanding,' he says, 'all that has been done in the last forty years by archivists on the one hand, and by connoisseurs on the other, with the object of elucidating the history of the central Italian schools, this book still remains the standard authority upon the subject. Of genuine additions to knowledge,' Mr Douglas proceeds, of scientifically verifiable facts, accepted as such by all serious and intelligent students, how little has been added to that particular fabric of human learning which owed so much to Crowe and Cavalcaselle! Much that passed for knowledge a decade ago has been proved to be unfounded theory; and, were it not unwise to prophesy, we would venture to predict that, in the coming decade, the field of art criticism will be strewn with the wreckage of many other pretentious but cheaply built structures.'

It is probable, indeed, that there is no domain in which greater difficulty attaches to the differentiation of theory from fact, in which the subjective and objective are harder to distinguish, even for those most desirous of distinguishing them, than that which presents itself to the critic of early art. But art criticism is valueless unless its methods are scientific; and the very difficulty of achieving such a result renders the attempt more obligatory. Mr Douglas does well to emphasise so important a truth; and if he seems a little eager to anticipate the havoc which better methods may produce, it will appear that he is specially entitled to make the prediction.

Naturally, in the review of a book with the bulk of which the public has been long familiar, it is the element of novelty which claims closest attention; and such novelty, without a doubt, appears most obviously in the

share of the editor. It will not be unreasonable, therefore, to give his work the first consideration.

It is easy to perceive that the work of editing a manuscript which has not received the final revision of its authors involves exceptional difficulties. Any reader who does not shrink from the labour of collating the second edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's great work with the first may soon convince himself of the severity of the problems with which its editor has had to contend. Thus at the bottom of the sixth page occurs the peculiar statement that the face of Christ,' in one of the rude paintings of the Catacomb of St Callixtus, expresses some of the feeling which so nobly characterises effigies of this kind in the fourteenth century.' Can Sir Joseph Crowe have affirmed here the very parallel which, in the first edition, he went out of his way to deny? Such a conclusion will hardly be justified by an attentive perusal of the passage in which the statement occurs. The general verdict is so clearly the same as that given in the first edition that the editor would perhaps have been within his rights in correcting 'some' to 'none.'

An instance of still greater importance occurs on page 133 of the same volume. Sir Joseph Crowe suggests that Giovanni Pisano, 'before he went south, probably carved the celebrated group above the frieze of the eastern gate of the Campo Santo.' The editor points out that, like Morrona and Rosini before him, he has confused two entirely different works; that the Madonna and Saints of the Campo Santo is of a quite inferior order; and that the group by Giovanni is in reality above the frieze of the eastern portal of the Baptistery.' Here again a reference to the first edition (page 143) seems to show that the author's error amounted to nothing more than a slip of the pen. The old frieze of Bonamicus' he says 'on the eastern gate of the Baptistery was crowned by a standing figure of the Virgin and Child between two Saints,' and he proceeds to call attention in a note, first, to the inscription, which shows the work to be Giovanni's (quoted also in the second edition), and next, to the error of certain

* 'Not a trace,' in the first edition.