clearly and thoroughly such a conception. Numerous errors in previous biographies are corrected; proper attention is given to Mason's accomplishments outside the field of literature; his relations with Gray, his ecclesiastical career, and his work as a dramatist, musician, and painter are given much more detailed treatment than in any previous biography. The book, moreover, is pleasantly written in spite of somewhat overelaborate documentation.

2. COMPARATIVE STUDIES

Miss Purdie has put students of comparative literature in her debt through her excellent edition of five essays significant in the rise of German Romanticism. These essays, first published in 1773, were written by Herder, Goethe, and Möser, and were combined with a translation of an Italian essay by Frisi. Besides critical and explanatory notes, the book contains a useful introduction surveying the influence of Ossian in Germany, with the history of early German Shakespeare criticism, and material supplementary to the essays by Goethe and Frisi on German and Gothic art and architecture. National spirit is apparent in all the essays, and forms one differentiation between this early romantic movement in Germany and the corresponding movement in England. Herder's essay on Ossian, also, is important for its emphasis on folk-song and its relations to the ballad movement marked in England by the publications of Bishop Percy. The little book, Von deutscher Art und Kunst is regarded by its editor as a manifesto marking the inauguration of a new school of literature; its importance is thus akin to that of the Lyrical Ballads. The essays are not reprinted because of literary value, but as materials for the study of the history of ideas. Together, they constitute a noteworthy manifestation of the Romantic spirit, "which is a wider thing than nationalism, or medievalism, or any one path of a particular movement in a given period." As such, the essays, with the editor's useful introduction and notes, require the attention of students of the history of modern romanticism.

The beginnings of romanticism in Germany are studied from a somewhat different point of view in Mr. Montgomery's book on Hölderlin. In Hölderlin's case the romantic impulse came not from Ossian and folkpoetry but the classics. Mr. Montgomery prefaces his book by a chapter on the revival of Greek studies in the German universities-the work of Gesner in the early eighteenth century, the influence of the ideal of the

• Draper, John W., William Mason: A Study in Eighteenth Century Culture. New York, The New York University Press, 1924. Pp. xvi, 397. Purdie, Edna. Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. New York, Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1924. Pp. 196.

• Marshall Montgomery, Friedrich Hölderlin and the German NeoHellenic Movement. New York, Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1923. Pp. viii, 232.

Golden Age, and the educational philosophy which sought to make young Germans into young Greeks. Gesner laid emphasis on Horace, on art, and on content rather than on style. Lessing sought a real understanding of the classics, opposing the French theories. His treatment of these and other similar topics shows that Mr. Montgomery's book is less a biography of Hölderlin than a contribution to the history of classical learning. The long chapters on Homer are admirable essays; they illustrate what might be done with a survey of some great literary personality, for example Shakespeare, as an influence on eighteenth century culture in England, and thus show one of the fundamental weaknesses of all histories of English romanticism. The treatment of the Homeric criticism by Mr. Montgomery is linked with the famous Ancients-Moderns controversy, and the accounts of Barth, Gottsched, the influence of Fenelon, Du Bos, and other French critics, prepare for a thorough study of German criticism in the last half of the century from Klopstock to Hölderlin and including Lessing and F. A. Wolf.

Mr. Montgomery does not deal with Hölderlin's classical interests until he has reached almost the end of his book. Hölderlin's college training is outlined; he did not gain in the university or in later studies any philological command of Greek; he took no interest in Wolf's famous Prologomena. Yet Mr. Montgomery's feeling toward his subject is apparently more sympathetic than that of Professor Babbitt, who sees in Hölderlin only a disciple of Rousseau, seeking emancipation from traditional control in his infatuation for "godlike Nature." To Mr. Montgomery, Hölderlin's bent was philosophical, and these philosophical interests included, in the course of his development, the study of Stoicism and the Lucretian philosophy.

We pass now from studies in early German romanticism to two books which deal with a hitherto neglected field, the influence of Italy on early romanticism in England and on the continent. The first of these, a study of Italian landscape in eighteenth century England, by Professor Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring of Vassar, is a contribution of the first importance. It disposes completely of the idea that until the dawn of romanticism the eighteenth century was not interested in natural beauty. With Professor Robertson's study of the background of romanticism, it proves the extent of the Italian influence on the movement. It gives new content to the discussion of the relation of poetry and painting in the eighteenth century. Dr. Manwaring's material, which is very extensive, is presented with admirable clearness. Her study is chiefly devoted to consideration of the influence of Claude and Salvator Rosa, though other painters are not neglected. English interest in landscape at the opening of the eighteenth century, the regard for the pictorial arts throughout the period,

Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England. New York, Oxford University Press, American Branch, 1925. Pp. xii, 243.

on

English knowledge of Claude and Salvator, the influence of Italian landscape on English poetry and prose, and such topics as gardening and the cult of the picturesque are the topics which lead up to the closing chapter "Italian Landscape and Romanticism.” The numerous illustrations add to the value of the book. Though a work of extended and exact learning, it is of absorbing interest to any student who wishes to correct the partial and imperfect views of literary history in the eighteenth century which are characteristic of the conventional treatises. Dr. Manwaring rightly holds that no definition of romanticism can fairly exclude the feelings with which the English in the eighteenth century regarded the work of the Italian landscape painters. Even with Dryden and the Spectator this interest was already manifest. Understanding of art was an essential element in the culture of the well bred Englishman from 1740 Italian paintings, or copies of them; innumerable imitations by English artists; the attempt to reconstruct, in English landscape gardening, something of the romantic charm of Italy; the prints and scrapbooks which polite society collected; the conscious effort by major and minor poets to express in descriptive verse their love of romantic landscapeall these are matters of first importance to him who would understand the foundations of English romanticism. The significance of the book, which can certainly not be left out of account by any future historian of the period, is admirably summed up in one of the author's concluding sentences:

on.

If at the last of the century-beginning with Cowper-there came poets and painters who cast aside the Claude-glass and found beauty in hedgerows and corn-fields, and in Hampstead and Mousehold Heaths, it was because of a long training in seeing landscape pictorially,-a training which of necessity began with the most elaborate and heightened forms of landscape, with the richest and most obvious appeal, and on the most vast and impressive scale.

The influence of Italy on the foundations of romantic thought is treated from a different point of view in Professor Robertson's Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century.10 With the position expressed in the concluding sentences of the book we are in hearty agreement. Professor Robertson warns against the prevailing tendency to classify and schematize, particularly as shown by the conventional treatment of so-called classical and romantic authors and literary movements. In the eighteenth century, as in other times, "nature makes no leaps; and the progress of human ideas, far from being a geometric progression, is an infinitely complicated organic growth, where one thought passes into its antithesis imperceptibly like a dissolving view." romanticism may be regarded as a daughter of the Renaissance. antagonism of classic and romantic thought, by which we are inclined to

Thus

"The

10 Robertson, J. G., Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1923. Pp. viii, 298.

set much store, has, indeed, a strangely insubstantial basis, when it is examined closely. To understand, not the antithesis of classicism and romanticism, but their synthesis, is the way progress lies."

To such a synthesis, Professor Robertson's book is a contribution of the first importance. It is a careful survey of Italian critical thought, from the period of the Arcadians and the reaction against the scorn expressed for Italian literature in Bouhours' Manière de bien penser, to the great work of Muratori, Vico, and the influence of these men in Germany, and, less certainly, in England. The whole movement is related to the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns; it issues in the triumph of the Moderns and the declaration of the freedom of the imagination from the reason. It is a chapter in the history of the human spirit which leads to a better understanding not only of what was going on in England during the eighteenth century but of the great movement which culminated in Goethe and Schiller and the romantic revival in Europe. In it Italy is shown once more to be the pioneer in modern thought; her critics and thinkers prepared the way, as in the Renaissance, for the new renascence of the imagination that was to produce an intellectual awakening scarcely less significant in the history of mind than the great awakening of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Although Professor Robertson is concerned mainly with literary criticism, one gets a very clear idea from his book of larger relationships. The sharp divergence, in the seventeenth century, between the immense fruitfulness of Italian science and the decadence and sterility of Italian literature and criticism; the increasing influence of Bacon and Descartes on Italian thought; the survival, in certain eighteenth century Italian thinkers, of something of that all-round intellectual eminence that had distinguished Leonardo in the earlier Renaissance and Bruno in the later period-these topics find illustration in the book quite apart from discussions of the unities and of other literary quarrels. Conti, who spent some time in England, was a friend of Newton; Maffei, too, was interested in the Royal Society and was a scientist of note. Bacon's influence on Vico was immense, as is proved not only by the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia but by the greater Scienze Nuova. This " new science," which included philology as the science of humanity, seeking the foundations of civilization in language, mythical beliefs, primitive poetry, proceeded to develop a cosmic theory in which the creative force of the imagination was recognized. If Vico, like Bacon in his passionate, mystical universal philosophy and in the unfortunate circumstances of his life, illustrates the survival, or the permanence, of the intellectual force which had given Italy leadership in the Renaissance, other men treated by Mr. Robertson are scarcely less interesting for other reasons. Martelli's L'Impostore (1714) is perhaps the high water mark of the genre to which Dryden's dialogues on the drama also belong. Muratori's Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706) expressed the new liberalism in advance of Addison, Burke, and Du Bos; in its view of the relation of the imagination to poetic truth, as well as in its scholarly method of research and its vigor

ous interpretation of history, the book is much more than a vindication of Italian literature against the criticism of Bouhours. In Gravina, too, this liberal tendency is traced. His learning in the field of jurisprudence, to which he adapted Cartesian principles, his enormous industry, the variety and intensity of his intellectual curiosity, recall, once more, the universal scholar of the Renaissance. He sought for the reason of poetry," della ragion poetica, which deals with what he calls the essence of things; Professor Robertson looks upon him as the first to formulate the aesthetics of Cartesianism.

Detailed discussion of the work of these and other Italian critics of the two centuries is followed by chapters on possible influences on French, Spanish, English, and German criticism. Professor Robertson makes out a better case for Germany than for France, which was hostile, or for England, which was less clearly acquainted with the movement, or Spain, still dominated by gongorismo. But he has written a book of absorbing interest, which can by no means be neglected by any student of comparative literature.

3. THE NEW WORDSWORTH

This tendency toward a re-examination of the critical and philosophical background of the romantic period is nowhere more marked than in the study of Wordsworth. Professor Winchester's agreeable volume, Wordsworth and How to Know Him, was published in 1916. The book was of the conventional type, vague and slight in its treatment of Wordsworth's early period, full and solemn in the account of the last forty years of the poet's life. The point of view was colored by the conception of "the good Mr. Wordsworth," lineal descendant of the "Daddy Wordsworth" of the nineteenth century tradition. It is inaccurate in quotation, the chronology of the poems and any idea of the development of the poet's mind or the spiritual crises through which he passed are neglected; the Prelude is casually mentioned, not studied; "there was not a drop of Byronic blood in him"; Godwin and Rousseau are not mentioned in the Index. Professor Winchester's title has something of the ironic in that his book appeared in the same year as Professor Harper's biography, which broke new ground in its departure from the tradition of the Wordsworth family and Professor Knight. Five years later Professor Harper published his account of Wordsworth's French daughter, and M. Legouis his supplement to an earlier treatment of Wordsworth's youth. Since 1921 each year has seen some new publication, books and monographs that have completely revolutionized our thought of the great poet. Four of these books will be treated here, in illustration of this new point of view.11

11 Legouis, Emile, Wordsworth in a New Light. Cambridge (Mass.) Harvard University Press, 1923. Pp. 44. Beatty, Arthur, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their Historical Relation. Madison, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 1922.