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BY EDWIN GREENLAW

The announcement of a new history of modern English romanticism suggests a brief review of recent studies in eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature as a means of indicating not only what is being done but also some of the changes in points of view. The time is rapidly approaching when a re-examination of present conceptions of the history of romanticism will become necessary, whether the results of such examination take the form of a new history or of a syllabus for lectures. The groups devoted to the study of the eighteenth century in the Modern Language Association have already done much to clear the way, through their bibliographies, their surveys of work needing to be done, and their use of the principle of cooperation in research. Definitive studies of certain fields, such as Professor Havens's brilliant study of the influence of Milton, are available.

One turns, therefore, with keen interest to the announcement of A History of Modern English Romanticism, by Dr. Harko de Maar, of which the first volume, dealing with "Elizabethan and Modern Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century," has recently appeared.1 Dr. de Maar promises that the second volume will trace the relation between medieval and modern romanticism in the same century, while successive volumes are to carry the story to 1914. While it is obviously unfair to prejudge a work planned on such an extensive scale, the first volume indicates that it is to follow conventional lines. Dr. de Maar shows through his bibliography and to some extent in his text that he is aware of new material; he makes a few additions to Professor Havens's list of poems in blank verse in the eighteenth century; he gives more attention to men like Croxall and Philips than we are accustomed to; but his conception of “Elizabethan " romanticism is the Spenserian stanza and Milton's blank verse. The book is largely, therefore, an amplification of Phelps and Beers, with large additions drawn from Cory and Havens. He insists, rightly enough, that the eighteenth century cannot be denominated "classical" and the nineteenth "romantic," and protests against the dominance of Pope and Johnson as sole representatives of all that was typical about eighteenth century literature. His first chapter even gives reason to hope that at last we should have recognition of the fact that classic and romantic traits are inextricably mingled not only in the literature of the century as a whole but in the work of individual writers.

But this promise is not borne out in the execution. We find no adequate conception of Elizabethan romanticism, yet a history of modern romanticism, rightly considered, must take into account the foundations in earlier literature, and particularly in the literature of the Renaissance. For better

1 Harko G. de Maar. A History of Modern English Romanticism, Vol. L New York, Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1924. Pp. viii, 246.

or worse, the genius of English literature is romantic, not classical; the eighteenth century "classicism," due to the influence of the new scientific spirit and of France, represents a deviation from fundamental characteristics of English literary genius; no history of romanticism can be adequate that does not take into account this fundamental fact. To limit the discussion of Elizabethan romanticism, therefore, to the Spenserian stanza is grotesque. Examples will prove the inadequacy of Dr. de Maar's treatment. A single chapter, and that a very brief one, is given to "The influence of Elizabethan Drama and the Elizabethan Sonnet on the Rise of Modern Romanticism." This chapter does not adequately treat even what Dr. Havens has found out about the sonnet in the eighteenth century, let alone any proper estimate of the significance of the facts thus brought forward. Of the significance of the Shakespeare problem in that century Dr. de Maar betrays not the slightest conception. Criticism is almost wholly ignored. Even the chapter on the "literature of gloom " is elementary and sketchy in the light of Dr. Potts's book on Gray's Elegy. The bulk of this first volume rings the old changes on Spenser and Milton, matters of form only, not of ideas. The book is deficient in philosophic grasp. It is content with a re-presentation of the old material on imitation. Now this matter of Spenser and Milton in the eighteenth century is important. It has been treated fairly well for Spenser by Dr. Cory and brilliantly, for Milton, by Professor Havens. Along with a multitude of other topics it must now be combined into a whole which shall interpret the literature and thought of a great century. In such an interpretation it will form but a part, and that, we think, not the most important. A scholar who professes to give us a history of modern English romanticism must be competent and willing to make a synthesis of all sides of a very complex problem. Whether Dr. de Maar can do this will be disclosed by his later volumes, but we must regretfully conclude that so far as the important influence of Elizabethan romanticism is concerned, he has fallen short of satisfactory interpretation.

One method of isolating the problems which arise in any treatment of the course and meaning of modern English romanticism is to review what is being done toward the clarification of existing knowledge and the addition of new material in certain fields. The present survey cannot take into account numerous important essays in the learned journals, or even all the books and monographs. A few are selected as typical, first of special problems in the study of eighteenth century literature; second, of certain comparative studies, linking England and the continent; and, finally, recent studies of one of the greatest of English romantic poets, William Wordsworth.

1. SOME SPECIAL PHASES

Excellent examples of the study of special topics are supplied by recent essays by Oliver Elton and Logan Pearsall Smith. The history of such

"Reason and Enthusiasm in the Eighteenth Century," by Oliver Elton,

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a word as "romantic" is found in many places, in Professor Babbitt's Rousseau, for example, or in Dr. de Maar's new history. But the two essays now before us are more thorough, include more of the words that appear as counters in literary criticism, and define more clearly the terms, and with more philosophical grasp, than can be found elsewhere. Mr. Elton's essay, which contrasts reason and "enthusiasm " in the eighteenth century, is a defence of reason as the "critical spirit, whose working forms the stuff of intellectual history at all times." While the conflict between the two ideas is carefully traced through the eighteenth century, Mr. Elton insists that it is not dead history, for “the combatants live on under other names; they can perhaps never be reconciled, and neither can ever extinguish the other." Mr. Smith traces the history, through a longer period, of four words, "romantic," "originality," "creative," and "genius," closely associated with the intellectual and literary history of the eighteenth century. In them he finds mirrored the history of the romantic movement, and thus the expression of one of the most notable of English contributions to European thought. He points out examples of looseness in the use of the terms, proposes new terms in some cases, calls attention to the truth that "the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are still forced to accept them as empirical facts. . . . The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought." It is with definition, then, in some philosophical aspects closely related to the correct interpretation of the origin and nature of romanticism, that these two important essays deal. A different sort of definition relates to the work of a writer, or the history of a convention, or to the influence of a new body of legend and history. Examples of such definition of special phases of the period are found in several recent books.

We may begin with a book which at first sight appears to have nothing to do with romanticism, Dr. Houston's discussion of the humanism of Samuel Johnson. Yet one deficiency of conventional treatments of the romantic movement is that it is contrasted with a highly specialized "classicism" without due regard to the humanistic aspects of classical thought and literature. Dr. Houston's book is designed to correct that attitude toward Dr. Johnson which delights in anecdote and in the imaginative re-creation of a great personality while neglecting his intellectual eminence. It is based on a systematic survey of the writings of Johnson,

in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. x, pp. 122-136. Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1924. "Four Words: Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius," by Logan Pearsall Smith. S. P. E. Tract No. XVII. Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1924. Pp. 48.

Houston, Percy H. Doctor Johnson: A Study in Eighteenth Century Humanism. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1923. Pp. vii, 280.

whom the author regards as "the last in the succession of great humanists before the romantic upheaval, which he foreshadowed and strove to meet." To this end, therefore, chapters on his reading, his relation to classical and French criticism, and on his various writings, together with his relation to contemporary literary and social movements and his critical method, give us at once a digest of Johnson's thought and opinions and a valuable contribution to the history of English literary criticism. If the book is less interesting to read than some of those which deal largely in diluted Boswellism, it is more useful to the student in that it deals with Johnson's writings as a body of literature requiring serious analysis and appraisal.

Judged from this point of view, Mr. Houston's book merits unreserved praise. The development of the idea so capitally expressed by the subtitle is less satisfactory. If we are to think of Dr. Johnson as one of a great succession of humanists, it becomes of importance to inquire what conception of humanism the author holds and what were Johnson's relations to this succession. Dr. Houston's book leaves this subject curiously vague. Except for a few passages in the chapter on Johnson's reading we get a very inadequate view of any "succession," and Mr. Houston is concerned mainly with neo-classical literary theory. The passing of the older humanism, from this point of view, into what may be called a new scholasticism, is not fully brought out. Even such personal traits as link the great eighteenth century controversialist with the full-blooded, hardhitting scholars of the Renaissance, are not stressed. His learning is more often asserted than proved. Mr. Houston seems to fear unduly the apparatus of scholarship; the "intellectual curiosity" which he ascribes to his subject is insufficiently illustrated. To take but a single example, Mr. Houston rightly holds that Johnson's notes to Shakespeare "would repay exhaustive study," but gives them "brief and fragmentary treatment." Yet it is not through the longer pieces alone, such as the Preface or the Lives, that we are to estimate either Johnson's learning or his intellectual curiosity, but through such hitherto neglected sources as the notes, his attitude toward textual criticism, and the sources of his attitude toward authority. Mr. Houston gives us some interesting information about Johnson's text of several Shakespearean plays; we could have had more of the same sort of minute study. We have a far clearer idea of the familiar neo-classic material in Johnson than we have of the extent and value of his learning. Mr. Houston gives evidence, if we take his book as a whole, of Johnson's antipathy to heroic plays, to Rousseau, to sentimentalism, and such topics, but these topics are treated in the conventional manner, not woven into clear relation to the fundamental topic of Johnson's humanism. "Neo-classicism" is not humanism.

As an example of a detailed study of a literary convention, we may cite Professor Reed's treatment of the antecedents of Gray's Elegy.

Based

4 Amy Louise Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy: A Study in the

on the older studies by Professors Phelps, Beers, and Reynolds, this new book supplies a more detailed study of poetic melancholy. The first chapter has to do with the seventeenth century conception of melancholy, differentiating Jonson, Burton, and Milton, for example, from the later conceptions. More attention than usual is paid to some of the philosophical aspects of the problem, such as the relation to pessimism, the influence of Lucretius, the political reaction following the Restoration, and elements of revolt against the philosophy of despair found in the writings of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Later chapters discuss the development of the motif through the first half of the eighteenth century, leading to a treatment of the Elegy as the supreme melancholy lyric of the period as Il Penseroso was of the seventeenth century. Important conclusions of the book are that the literature of melancholy up to 1750 "included nothing which could be accurately described as romantic in the modern sense of that adjective," and that the great contemporary popularity of the Elegy was due not to its presentation of novel thought but to its expression of widespread popular feeling.

There has long been need for a first hand study of the Celtic influence in the eighteenth century, and this need has been competently met by Dr. E. D. Snyder." His book consists of chapters on the pioneers of the Celtic movement, Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, Thomas Gray, William Mason, and James Macpherson, followed by a series of chapters on the four decades 1760-1800. The antiquarian researches of Morris, transmitted by Evans, became the material for some of the poetry of Gray, and exerted even greater influence through Gray's scholarly interest in the subject. Macpherson, not a scholar, gave enormous impetus to the interest taken in Celtic lore in England and on the continent. All these matters are fully treated by Dr. Snyder, but such an outline does not do justice to the book, because around these greater names are grouped others, minor poets and imitators, who prove the wide-spread popular interest in the subject. Gray's Bard, as Dr. Snyder points out, grew enormously in popularity as the century passed; innumerable poems and papers on Celtic subjects mark the last forty years of the period; despite the small literary value of much of this material we see in it proofs of the extent to which people were reaching out for new subjects, new moods, new forms of verse, all preparatory to the brilliant period ushered in by the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

From studies of humanism, melancholy, and celticism, we pass to a detailed biography of a man notable for his relations to greater men of the eighteenth century and for the way in which he reflects the intellectual interests and life of the average person of culture of the period. Professor Draper's study of the life and works of William Mason presents

Taste for Melancholy Poetry 1700-1751. New York, Columbia University Press, 1924. Pp. x, 270.

Snyder, Edward D., The Celtic Revival in English Literature 1760-1800. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1923. Pp. x, 208.

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