BOOKS.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM.* Tim critical work of the seventeenth century deserves more respect and attention than it usually receives, and Professor Spingarn's collection rof the literary essays of the period is a welcome step towards the fuller appreciation of a brilliant and fascinating age. Professor Spingarn's introduction is an illuminating piece of work, laying down the main lines of his -subject .with admirable clarity, and following theta up with real forre,and inaight and that rare -kind of erudition which never grows pedantic. The essays themselves are interesting from many points of view. The fact that they include none of the work of Dryden--whose critical essays, edited by Pro- fessor Ser, form two companion volumes in the same series— is not without its advantages, though it is true that the ClitiCifini of the.seventeenth century without Louden puts one in mind of the play. of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Dryden undoubtedly ranks as one of the great critics of the world. In all the qualities peculiarly essential to criticism— sympathy, discriminatien, breadth of outlook, and power of exposition—he far serpassed his contemporaries, and he possessed the crowning grace of an exquisite prose style. Yet it is sometimes worth -while to put on one side the giants a an age, and to consider those smaller figures of the second and the third rank who represent the intelligent public opinion of their generation. Sometimes the giant so far overtops Jile fellows that his head is lost among the clouds and his prophecies pass unheeded. But in the present instance this was not the case. Professor Spingarn's extracts prove.coaclusively that the maineurrent of seventeenth-century thought was flowing in precisely the direction which Duden himself was pointing out; and it is at least-possible that even if Dryden had never lived the same results would have followed. In any . case, the fact that the great mass of enlightened taste in England did Orange so completely and so consciously during the _course of the century is of -the highest interest.. it gives to Professor Spingarn's .volumes something of the .glamour of romance. We are shown the beginnings of anew idea,,tituid at first and fluctuating, then ,gradually strengthening, at last triumphant and supreme; animmense revolution has been accomplished ; and the century which knew. Shakespeare in his prime has become the nurseof Pope.
To our own gen-elation these essays should be particularly interesting, becanee they give expression to a view of literature which is,altegether opposed to those‘of the present day. On the subject of Shakespeare, for instance, we find Thomas Rymer in his review of Othello declaring : "There is not a monkey but understands nature better, not a pug in Barbary that has not a truer taste ofthings." To us this isnoneenee, and blasphemous nonsense. Yet Rytner!was neither -a, fool nor a brute ; he was-a clever-man-whose opinions were highly respected by his contemporaries, and who was pronounced by Pope to have been, "-on the whole, one of the best critics we ever had." What is the explanation of thin? Haw is it possible that a sensible man could ever have given utterance to such stuff, and that other sensible men tolerated it for a moment.? The -answer is that even the best jadge.of wine will lose hisrpalatelor port after drinking nothing but =deka, and that the later critics of the seventeenth century were in a similar situation. They had become fascinated and obsessed by an ideal of beauty so completely alien to that of the Elizabethans that ,even abuse of -the masterpieces of Shake- speare seemed to-themmeither outrageous nor absurd. What this newideal of beauty was receives ample illustration in--the present volumes. Perhaps it was never summed .up more concisely than in !Bird-ohm. Denhatn's Imams apostrophe to the Thames at,Cooper's Hill ;—
"Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull ; Strong without rage, without o'erflawing full."
it was an ideal of lucidity and order and polish, of easy • Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. J3dited by J. E. Spingarn, Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New 'York. 8-vole. 'Vols. 1. and'''. ,Osterd r at the Clarendon Press. Ds. net es0.11.] majesty and finely discriminated -sense. Undoubtedly it received a powerful impetus from the example of France, whose literature, with the establishment of the Academy and the rise of Corneille, was entering upon its most characteristic phase ; and the eventual triumph of the new school became assured during the exile at Paris of the English Court, with its poets and men of letters, beforethe -Restoration. Equally strong was the force of the natural reaction against the decay- ing traditions of the Elizabethan age. Literary schools, no less than nations, have their mysterious periods of growth and of decline, and the great literature which Spenser and Donne had started -on its victorious -career guttered out amid the unformed diffuseness and the incredible contortions of those strange "Caroline poets," whose works have lately been brought to light by Professor Saintsbury after centuries of oblivion. It was only to have been expected that men of intelligence and taste should have rebelled against the poetics system of a Benlowes, according to whom the souls in bell "frying freeze, and freezing fry," or of the amazing " Pharonnida,"—a poem so immense and so entangled that the author forgets the name of lais,own hero in the course of it. Besides these influences, we must take into account that unexplained law by which the poetic inspiration of an age seems to follow -what may be Galled, for want of a better term, a nation's "centre of gravity." With the Elizabethans the centre of gravity was among the middle classes,—the country gentlemen like Drake and Raleigh, the country yeomen like Shakespeare, and ,the University scholars like Marlowe and Ben Jonson. After !the Restoration the centre of gravity moved more and -more -rapidly towards the aristocracy, until at the beginniag of the eighteenth century it became fixed in the great Whig families who had achieved the Revolutien. And .simultaneously literature toek on the qualities of aristocracy, grew refined, brilliant, and -ordered, and concerned itself exclusively with the life of London drawing-rooms. In fact, the new ideals which governed literature were the ideals of "high society." The emphasis which critics belonging to this school laid -upon the "rules" of Aristotle, the "three unities," and the rest of the pseudo- classical conventions is, as Professor Spingarn points out, somewhat delusive,..for the real -foundation ler the -new spirit was to be-found in the -present, and not in .the past. When Samuel Butler exclaimed in his pungent doggerel that, according to the critics of his day,
f` Not an actor shall presume to squeek Unless he have,a. license.for't,in Greek, Nor Whittington beneeforward„selliiis eat in
Plain vulgar gnglish, without mewing Latin."
he was arguing beside the point. It was not -becalm of their antiquity that the new critical school adopted-the Aristotelian formulae, but because -they seemed to -fit in with -an ideal of -literature which was pre-eminently, as the phrase went, "correct." This was the attitude of the majority of the critics, from Dryden downwards. The ,Elizebetliane, with their imaginative :exaltation, their "wild enormities," their adventurous inteneity, of spirit, seemed uncouth and barbarous, and-even-shocking, to minds completely penetrated with the beauties of refinement and restraint. The general view, indeed, was less uncompromising than ,Rymer's ; the elder dramatists were, an the whole, in a somawhat ,shamefaced way, admired in epite of their "rfaults." Dryden's praise of Shakespeare, with all its qualification, is passionate and splendid ; and lesser men !followed where Dryden ,led. "Shakespeare and Fletcher," says Sheffield, "are the wonders now" -"Consider them andrread them o'er and o'er, Go see them played, then read them as Were. Tor though in many-things they grossly fail, Over our passions still they so prevail That our own grief by theirs is rocked asleep. The dull are forced-to-feel, the wiee to well)."
That is a flue panegyric, and yet, clearly ,enougb, it has been extorted by the feelings against -the dictates of the intellect. "In many things" Shakespeare "grossly fails"! Sheffield's attitude suggests that of a man of fashion towards some country -milkmaid whose beauty was too magnificent ,nnt to be ,admired ; but, without a hoop and without a fau, with such an oi)oaltir complexion -and such an untrattunelled gait-..-alre opal Amer be presented at Whitehall!
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