M. Legouis' book is a lecture which gives the substance of material previously published by him and by Professor Harper on the Annette Vallon episode. Here the point of view is the relation of the affair to Wordsworth's early life. M. Legouis cites passages from Wordsworth's poetry about his earlier "shocks of young love-liking" in Westmoreland and at Lake Como; tells briefly what is known of the meeting with Annette, finds the story disguised in "Vaudracour and Julia "; accounts for the separation of the lovers through political turmoil in France, and finds in such poems as "Guilt and Sorrow," "The Ruined Cottage," "The Mad Mother," The Thorn," and " Ruth," evidences of how the poet gradually freed himself from his remorse by uttering it. The mysterious episode told darkly in the Lucy poems, a recollection of an earlier love affair, illustrates in another way how the poet's thought turned definitely from his French love and prepared the way for his union with Mary Hutchinson. Before the marriage, however, there was another visit to Annette and a final parting.

66

M. Legouis tells his story with sympathy, regretting, as who does not, the foolish suppression of the documents for so many years by the poet's family. But he does not see in it more than that touch of the Byronic blood which Professor Winchester denies to Wordsworth. The true significance of the new light on Wordsworth is brought out in two books which do not tell the story but use it indirectly as a suggestion for a careful study of the period 1790-1807, the most important part of Wordsworth's life.

These books, by Professor Beatty and Mr. Garrod, written quite independently, constitute the most important study of Wordsworth's early period and the development of his philosophy that we have. Both writers dwell on the evidence supplied by the poet's own works. Mr. Garrod depends almost exclusively on this evidence, and on the poetry rather than on the prose, while Mr. Beatty's thesis is that a study of the poetry combined with the prose proves a much larger indebtedness to earlier English philosophical writings, particularly those of Hartley, than has heretofore been supposed.

The essential difference between the two studies is that while Mr. Beatty sees a consistent and steady evolution of Wordsworth's thought, Mr. Garrod dwells on the failure of his poetic inspiration after 1807. This waning poetic power Mr. Garrod attributes to the departure of the keen vision, eyes and ears," which had been his chief source of strength. He studies acutely the evidence in Wordsworth's poetry of the succession of moods, partial views of life, through which the poet passed: an earlier period in which the French Revolution molded his thought, tinged with Rousseauism but not to any such degree as M. Legouis postulates; the

Pp. 284. Garrod, H. W., Wordsworth. Oxford University Press, 1923. Pp. 211. Potts, Abbie Findley, The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of Wordsworth. Cornell Studies in English, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1922. Pp. x, 316.

Godwin period, utterly different in its individualism, its conception of society as the great anarch, its hatred of contract theories and of war; and the great period ushered in by the Lyrical Ballads and ended in 1807. How Wordsworth passed from the Godwin sterility to the fresh clear confidence of the Lyrical Ballads, the revolution in his thought evidenced when "Guilt and Sorrow" and the "Borderers," for example, are placed alongside "Tintern Abbey," Mr. Garrod does not explain. Mr. Beatty, on the other hand, passing more lightly over the period 1790-1797, explains the change as not due to Dorothy, or to his gradual but complete break with Annette and all that she had represented in his life, but to his study of English philosophy.

We may see clearly the difference between Mr. Beatty and Mr. Garrod if we compare the interpretations of the great Ode given by the two scholars. To Mr. Garrod, the break, in thought as well as in the interval of time, between the first four stanzas and the end of the poem, is a sign of perplexity and consciousness of waning powers. Between 1802 and 1806 Wordsworth passed through another of his spiritual crises. The doctrine of reminiscence, ultimately Platonic, is really from Coleridge who got it from Fenelon. This doctrine Wordsworth believed, not in Plato's sense of supplying a theory of the origin of knowledge, but as a 66 romance of sensation." In the last stanzas, Mr. Garrod believes, we find the poet's hope that through reminiscence, this visionary gift of youth may form the source of new experience not inferior in depth and clearness. But Mr. Garrod does not think that Wordsworth had, in this, more than a hope, destined, as his later poetry proves, not to be fulfilled. The Ode closes the two volumes of 1807 and marks the end of the inspired period; Wordsworth no longer saw clearly. Mr. Garrod draws upon the Prelude (especially XII, 272-286) to prove the poet's fear of the loss of his poetic vision; "Wordsworth had the sense that the Ode, great as it is, was great in a somewhat fruitless fashion; that, philosophically, it failed." In The Happy Warrior and in other places, he recurs to the idea of drawing on the visionary experience of childhood as a source of strength in age.

Now with much of this Mr. Beatty is in implicit agreement. The difference is that he sees not failure but progress in the change. "Eyes and Ears" to Mr. Garrod is the symbol of the strength of Wordsworth as a poet; to Mr. Beatty it means merely the first of three periods. These three periods, childhood, youth, and maturity, simple observation, simple ideas, and complex ideas,-Mr. Beatty derives from English sensational philosophy. All three stages are referred to in the Ode, as in Tintern, but the last stanzas of the Ode, instead of being a half-hearted attempt to secure something from the impending ruin, constitute an orderly and triumphant development in his philosophy. Like Mr. Garrod, Professor Beatty depends on the Prelude for evidence, but he also draws on the letter published in the Friend in 1809, the tract on Cintra, and other prose.

No brief outline can do justice to these remarkable books. The differ

ences between them are chiefly differences in emphasis. To Mr. Garrod, Wordsworth as poet is the more important; to Mr. Beatty, Wordsworth as a philosopher. Both agree on the change after 1807; they place different values on the change. It should be said, also, that the two books correct many misconceptions of Wordsworth: his mysticism, for example; his sentimental Rousseauism; the idea of his debt to Germany. To Mr. Beatty he belongs to the Bacon-Hobbes tradition, not the Rousseau tradition. In all this is implicit criticism of the views of Professor Babbitt and M. Legouis. This criticism has weight because it is based not on selected passages, or on one period of Wordsworth's development, but upon a careful study of the whole body, or very near the whole body, of Wordsworth's work. And as for Mr. Garrod, it is a pleasure to welcome to the study of English literature a classical scholar capable of applying to modern poetry the methods of study long given to the ancients. “I can not see," he says, "why there should be so great a pother about understanding every word of Homer or Virgil, and, in literature so much nearer to us, a conspiracy of careless reading.”

With the book by Dr. Potts, a critical edition of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, we pass to Wordsworth's later period. In her introduction, Dr. Potts holds that the sonnets are important elements in that development of Wordsworth's genius which corresponds to his own conception of the course of human life." She dwells on Christopher Wordsworth's theory of the "continuous stream of identity" which flowed from the earliest to the latest poems. The Sonnets, therefore, represent his mature reflection on church and state; they set forth a conception of justice revealed in a spiritual State binding together the living and the dead; the interpretation of the progress made by collective minds must be a slower process than in the case of an individual soul. Thus Wordsworth's theme, in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, differed in important respects from the themes of Milton and Dante, and yet was akin.

The editor supplies full information on the history and development of the cycle; discusses the MSS, with a detailed study of MS F., which she believes to be a copy by Mrs. Wordsworth of an early draft of the sonnets; and gives a full account of the structure of the cycle. A list of variant readings, a large body of notes, and a bibliography, complete this very useful book.

The Johns Hopkins University.

An event of importance to students of Tudor

NICHOLAS GRIMALD. poetry is the publication of Dr. Merrill's edition of the poems of Nicholas Grimald.1 Grimald, almost forgotten today, was in his lifetime widely known as a scholar, was a contributor to Tottel's Miscellany, a pioneer in the practice of the sonnet and of blank verse, a teacher of rhetoric and literature and a man of importance in the development of the new Tudor poetry; while as a translator from the classics and the writer of two Latin plays he has still other claims on the literary historian. Dr. Merrill's book contains a biography which corrects many errors in preceding accounts of Grimald and also supplies much information on the history of learning in the period. It contains, besides the minor poems and sonnets, Grimald's large contributions to Latin literature in England, including Christus Redivivus and Archipropheta, with English translations. The Prefaces to the two Latin dramas discuss sources and influence.

Mr. Gaselee's new book comes at a time when MEDIEVAL LATIN. interest in medieval Latin is experiencing a great revival, largely through the work of an extremely active group of scholars. The book contains selections from a wide variety of sources, including inscriptions, the writings of Petronius, St. Ambrose, Gildas, Bede, Asser, Walter Map, with Goliardic poems attributed to Map, down to Tebaldeo, and, for good measure, the Cambridge Doctor of Divinity's Profession of the eighteenth century, and quite un-medieval writers like Baudelaire, Lord Dufferin, and the Abbot of Einsedeln. Mr. Gaselee thus does not limit us to historical records, charters and religious pieces; the book is truly an anthology. Introductions and notes for the several pieces are interwoven most delightfully with the text; a quite unusual amount of attention has been given to typographical matters, the beauty of the book being thus a powerful incentive to reading.

THE ART OF
POETRY.

The

Seven lectures by the late Professor W. P. Ker are collected in an interesting volume under the title Art of Poetry." 3 The first lecture gives the title to the volume; it is a meditation based on a passage in Drummond of Hawthornden on the curse of Babel that makes difficult the transposition of poetry from one language to another, and the way in

1 L. R. Merrill, The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald. Yale Studies in English, LXIX. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1925. Pp. vi, 463. Stephen Gaselee, An Anthology of Medieval Latin. London and New York, Macmillan and Company, 1925. Pp. xii, 140.

2

3

W. P. Ker, The Art of Poetry.

American Branch, 1923. Pp. 160.

New York, Oxford University Press,

which, nevertheless, the spirit of poetry has many times outwitted the demon. Other lectures deal with Shelley, with Samson Agonistes, Romantic Fallacies, Pope, Molière, and Matthew Arnold. Milton's tragedy, he says, was written because he was driven by the strength of his own genius to write it. 'Till that was done he had not uttered himself to the full.” Professor Ker holds that Milton felt that in Paradise Lost he had wasted much of his strength; that he was not content with Paradise Regained, although in it he had broken away from seventeenth century "quaintness and the conception of poetry written in accordance with a preconceived ideal form. He writes his Greek tragedy "because his thoughts have come to be perpetually bent on the tragic idea." The lecture on "Romantic Fallacies" is a protest against some misuses of the term " 'romantic," with many definitions and illustrations.

THE ART OF
CRITICISM.

The vast acquaintance with books and the pungent personality of Mr. Saintsbury characterize the collection of his essays now published in four sumptuous volumes." It would be impossible, save by reprinting the tables of contents, to indicate the full scope of the volumes. Three of them deal in the main with English literature, and most of these with the period 1789-1860. The fourth volume contains essays on French writers. Of the English essays, more deal with prose than with poetry; there are many references to literature prior to the beginning of Mr. Saintsbury's special period, but he has no systematic treatment of earlier English literature; the only exceptions are the essays on Milton, Shakespeare, and the Grand Style, and, for foreign literature, on Dante. From Crabbe and Hogg, who open the first volume, to the essays on the English Novel in the third, we cover a considerable number of major and minor writers and works. All these essays are marked by Mr. Saintsbury's downright expression of his personal opinions, by the constant evidence of his acquaintance with his subject, and by the flavor of his style. Most of the subjects are purely literary, and they find impressive epilogue in the essays on "Twenty Years of Reviewing" and the admirable defence of the classics in the address on "The Permanent and the Temporary in Literature"; but we are thankful also for the two essays on the Cookery of Grouse and Partridge, and for the vigorous and sensible essay against so-called spelling reform.

BODLEY HEAD
QUARTOS.

There has long been a need for inexpensive reprints of rare Elizabethan and Jacobean tracts and fugitive pieces, and it is therefore a splendid service that Mr. G. B. Harrison and his publishers are rendering through the new series called "Bodley Head Quartos." 5 They are delightful

The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury. New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1923-1924. Four volumes.

The Bodley Head Quartos, edited by G. B. Harrison.

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