He lets the problematic Whitman alone, but three others essay their several winnowings. Emory Holloway, in the Cambridge Short History, treats him punctiliously as touching backgrounds and career, but palely as touching portraiture. There is no contribution here. Professor Foerster does much better and extracts some real values, particularly in his finely discriminating analysis of the quality of Whitman's humanitarianism, a much misunderstood matter of real critical importance. Mr. Lawrence, in his own diabolic fashion, seizes Whitman, "sieves his proper worth," exposes the sham in his 'mergings' and in his egoisms, and reveals his potential sympathy as something rather higher than Professor Foerster finds it,-as a cosmic, inevitable thing. To our mind, a constant disadvantage in Whitman, aside from his unnecessary defiances and experimentalisms, is that he failed, as subtle Ogniben would express it, to preserve the proportions of his sympathy.

I desire to be able, with a quickened insight, to descry beauty in corruption where others see foulness only; but I hope I shall also continue to see a redoubled beauty in the higher forms of matter, where already everybody sees no foulness at all.1

There is such a thing as an uncatholic catholicity, as a systematized disregard for system, as an egotistic charity. Whatever of virility or openness there may be in Whitman, his work is too often lacking in root reverence, in reserve power, is too often geared to mere adroitness and advertisement. How strange it is that the same spirit should conceive Starting from Paumanok and Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, should speak of "the aimless sleep-walking of the Middle Ages" and yet write Great are the Myths!

Mr. Lawrence's book, especially in the cases of Franklin, Cooper and Poe, manages to get rather startlingly close at times to critical reality, but for the most part it is brilliantly tangential. Like certain other English critics, notably Morley Roberts, he sees Hermann Melville too large; to Hawthorne he is teasingly unjust; and with Emerson he does not concern himself, although

*Robert Browning: A Soul's Tragedy, Act II.

Emerson remains one of the most thoughtful, and therefore one of the most permanently influential, among American men

of letters.

To go back to Professor Foerster's Nature in American Literature, it is, of course, chiefly concerned with the literary naturalists. It treats Bryant and Whittier justly, although not novelly; and its excursions into the consciousnesses of Emerson and Thoreau are finely fruitful. Professor Foerster does not restrict himself to the theme of naturalism in these essays: that is their occasion, but their end is criticism,-honest, wholesome, reasonable, and, not unseldom, usefully wise. The papers on Lowell (reprinted from the SEWanee Review) and on Burroughs and Muir, are of hardly less value than the two we have most to praise.

It is regrettable that the Short History makes no reference whatever to John Muir, and but few to Dana and Burroughs. In the main, however, it is aware of its duties and its difficulties. Its best essays are easily those on Poe, by Professor Killis Campbell; on Hawthorne, by Professor John Erskine; on Mark Twain, by Professor Stuart P. Sherman; and on Henry James, by Professor Joseph Warren Beach. The work as a whole, perhaps almost inevitably, lacks tonal and critical unity, some twenty-four writers contributing thirty-four papers. Some of the writing is hardly more than journalistic appreciation; much more of it is sound and useful; and some of it is distinguished; but the book remains rather a convenient reference work in condensed form than a well-proportioned text-book having a companionable personality of its own.

In American Prose Masters Mr. Brownell considers six menCooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Lowell and Henry Jameswith a finely judicial and happily humanistic mind, and with a style as winning as it is exact. The sweetness and light of his culture and of his judgments are the result of a fortunate fusion. in Mr. Brownell of temperament, training and disciplined taste. His approaches are anticipative; his approvals heartfelt, yet governed; his dissents lucidly regretful, yet enquiringly persuasive. He knows critical joy. The papers on Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe and James are particularly valuable, not merely as

critical references for students of these writers, but also as models in thoughtful methods and urbane style. Note, for example, such successful precipitations as the following:

It [Emerson's style] is that of the pulpit modified by the lyceum, and the forensic element struggles in it with the literary.-Emerson.

Eloquence, in fact, either of word, phrase or passage, pervades his style as a flavor; it is present as a distinct, and indeed, dominant element and governs the entire technic, already germinant in its inspiration.-Emerson.

Many of the tales are tone and nothing else—not even tone of any particular character but a reticulation of relations merely in admirable unison.-Poe.

Thus he achieves atmosphere, but an atmosphere which is less the envelope than the content of his work. - Poe.

Intensity of effect was accordingly his end, and artifice his means.-Poe.

The essay on Poe, indeed, contains an unusually just appraisal, although we regret that both here and elsewhere Mr. Brownell does not more clearly discriminate between the artist and the artificer. Poe is, we think, both more and less than "the purely scenic artist." He is less in that his preoccupation with the scenic almost automatically restricts him to the programme of artifice as against that of art,-to grotesquery, over-reliance upon the theatrical, the psychophysically tinkling and alluring. But he is more in that his manipulation of moods, at its best, becomes something other than merely skilful manipulation, and does at times actually succeed in katharsis, despite Mr. Brownell's feeling that Poe lacked love and humor and heart. Granted that much-too much of his work is only unusually effective devicefulness, the ingenious exemplification of acute yet artificial theorizing, yet it remains true, we think, that the spirit of Art, although no doubt regarding Poe's service as awry, nevertheless left him not wholly unblessed of her, but sometimes, if rarely, promoted the practician into poethood and momentary power.

G. H. C.

BATTLES AND ENCHANTMENTS. RETOLD FROM ANCIENT GAELIC LIteraTURE. By Norreys Jephson O'Conor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1922. Pp. x, 168.

Those who are expert in philology and ancient Celtic lore tell us that Mr. O'Conor has handled his subject carefully from this point of view. He is at home in the myths and is sufficiently adept at the language to disentangle difficult questions with skill and clarity, or to keep away from them, which perhaps requires equal tact and common-sense. But we, the unlearned, do not ask him for erudition, but for charm, which we find in ample measure.

The substance of the book is the old Irish legends, the obscure, traditional peopling of the country by successive tribes of invaders, who overcame one another, or mingled with one another, bought, and fought, and bargained, and cheated, and left their names and their vague memories attached to every mountain and lonely tarn, in the sweet, evanescent suggestions of fairy lore. Strife and love,-these are the basic matter of all our human life, no matter how much later civilizations disguise them, and in Mr. O'Conor's old stories strife and love are necessarily woven and interwoven over and over, but always with new phases of laughter or tears.

Strange, though, how this Ireland has always been the country of conflict. There is another island, in the blue Mediterranean, of about the same size, which has also been made the subject of endless song and story, that sunny Sicily, which also has its mountains and streams spread out in exquisite diversity of charm. But Sicily is the region of pastoral beauty, of dancing nymphs and satyrs, of shepherds piping and fluting all day, by the blue ocean, under the clear southern sky. It is the Sicily of Theocritus, in which no doubt men suffered, as they have always done, only their suffering did not get into those gracefully flowing verses, at least not with the tragic sense of weary, interminable strife.

But Ireland? Whether you take her history in the sixth century, or in the sixteenth, or in the twentieth, always battle, always conflict, always strife and hatred, party passions ceaselessly striving for a suicidal dominance, always cruelly tearing at each other's throats!

Only, in Mr. O'Conor's old legends, the bare violence is bathed in a golden haze of what Matthew Arnold so aptly called the Celtic magic. The sunrise-tinted mists that hang over those Irish hills and rivers veil the crude passions of men, and give them a glamor of poetry which makes us linger with them with delight, even while we bewail the eternal strife at the bottom of them. Something in that Celtic touch carries grace with it. Even the names are beautiful, Eri, and Elotha, and Dagda, and Eriu, and a score of others. Even into the title of his book Mr. O'Conor has contrived to infuse something of the inherent charm. Battles and Enchantments,-what a quaint and delicate mingling of old, forgotten far-off things, which make the heart quiver and tingle with anticipation of delight!

But what to me crowns the magic of the book is the ending, the fairy transformation of those vanquished people into legendary creatures, spirit memories, haunting forever the spots which they have loved. What a bold and beautiful idea, that great company moving out in the splendor of the morning sunlight, waiting calmly for the solid mountain to open before them, and then marching into it solemnly, with all their banners, and all their splendor, leaving behind to their enemies the country they had conquered, and to the world the tradition of a race which had died only to live!

Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD.

UN DEMI-RO1: Le Duc d'EPERNON. By Léo Mouton. Paris: Perrin et Compagnie. 1922. Pp. 275.

Americans doing research work in the Bibliothèque Nationale soon become acquainted with M. Mouton, who presides over the study-room, and whose courteous help and fruitful suggestions are always so readily extended to fellow-workers. For M. Mouton is himself a finely capable research worker and has published a number of carefully documented books or monographs in the fields of history, biography, and archæology.

The times of which M. Mouton treats in the present volume are those of Catherine de' Medici and of her three sons, with their licentious but magnificent courts; of the Wars of Religion