guage of cultured Italians, he set to work to eliminate the dialectisms and Gallicisms in it, and the result was that in pure Tuscan the novel appeared, after seventy-five reprints of the first edition had been made, in the perfected form of 1842. Its main plot is simple; for the central story is that of the long-deferred marriage of two peasants, Lorenzo and his beloved Lucia. A tyrannical local potentate, aided by the proverbial Italian bravos, forbids their nuptials, because his own evil fancy has fallen upon the girl, and her parish priest, whose duty it is to perform the marriage ceremony irrespective of all exterior influences, avoids doing so through terror of the tyrant, Don Rodrigo, and his bloodthirsty satellites. Eventually a pest carries away Don Rodrigo, and the union of the lovers is effected. They are married by their own timid parish priest, Don Abbondio, who has, in the meantime, been taught his duty by his noble superior, the saintly Cardinal Carlo Borromeo.

Following Sir Walter Scott, whom he expressly acknowledges as his model for his methods, Manzoni gave to his novel an historical setting, adapting it to the Romantic sentiments then dominating the literary world. He chose for the period of action the three years between 1628 and 1631, during the Spanish supremacy at Milan, when a terrible famine and pestilence made desolate that part of Italy, and he confined operations between Lake Como, which he knew so well, and the city of Milan. Before undertaking the writing of his great work he made a serious study of works dealing with the pestilence and with administrative affairs of the time in which it occurred. Then, with the intuition of the true artist, having the historical and social conditions well in mind, and possessing the power to analyze the most delicate of human feelings, he assembled a number of characters of divers sorts, through the play of which he presents us with a vivid picture of Lombardy in the early seventeenth century.

Next to Dante and Ariosto, Manzoni is, perhaps, the greatest of Italian authors, the most universal in appeal. His worth was quickly acknowledged abroad, by Goethe in Germany, by Chateaubriand in France, by Scott in the British Empire, and the last named was proud to have provoked imitation on the part of a genius of so high an order.

CRITICISM AND THE ESSAY

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I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION

BY PROFESSOR BLISS PERRY

O ONE can turn over the pages of The Harvard Classics without realizing how much of the most delightful writ

ing of the last three hundred years has taken the form of the essay. No literary form is more flexible than this, and no form except lyric poetry has touched upon a wider variety of topics. Yet there is one subject of enduring human interest to which essayists are perpetually turning, and upon which they always find something new to say. It is the subject of Books and Reading. In the essays which deal with this perennially interesting topic, there is a constant expression of literary judgments-judgments that convey racial and national convictions, the ruling ideas of a generation or a school, or the likes and dislikes of individuals. These judgments, properly collected and classified, become the material for a history of literary criticism. Indeed, a surprisingly large proportion of the epochmaking documents of criticism are really essays, both in form and mood.

IMPORTANCE OF THE ESSAY IN LITERARY CRITICISM

The significance of the essay in the formation and perpetuation of critical doctrine is also apparent if one turns to the formal histories of criticism. Systematic treatises on the theory of the fine arts, including literature, have appeared at intervals since the time of Aristotle. The science of æsthetics, as we know it, was developed in Germany during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it forms an integral portion of the philosophical system of Kant and of many other philosophers. But these formal treatises upon the nature of beauty, involving as they do the analysis of the beautiful as it exists in the natural world and in works of art, appeal primarily

to a few thinkers and scholars, and not to the general public. It is true that men of genius like Goethe, Schiller, and Burke have the faculty of discussing the philosophic basis of æsthetic theories in such a way as to make them interesting and highly instructive to the general reader. But as a rule the systematic treatises upon the nature and history of the fine arts, and of literature in particular, have been necessarily addressed to a limited audience. The discussions which have really caught the ear of the public have been the casual utterances of brilliant men in the act of attacking or defending a literary creed, of writing a preface to a book or a play, or of hazarding, in some dialogue, pamphlet, or essay, a new opinion about beauty, a new theory of poetry or of prose.

WHAT IS AN ESSAY?

To understand, therefore, the history of actual critical opinion, one must study the essay. It is a very variable, highly personalized literary form: resembling now a dinner-table monologue or dialogue, and now a letter to a friend. Here it is a mere sparkling fragment of some solid mass of philosophical theory, and there it is a tiny jewel of paradox, interrogation, or fancy; here an echo of some great historical debate over tragedy or comedy, and there the first faint stirring of some new, living idea, which by and by will be tossed about with all the winds of doctrine. But however changeable this literary type may be, one who reads the various essays in The Harvard Classics can hardly fail to get a general notion of the nature of “the essay.” The type will gradually make itself clear to him, as something different from the formal treatise, the dialogue or the letter or the magazine article. He will learn to watch the type emerge into clear outline with Montaigne' and Bacon. He will see that it modifies itself under the influence of national traits or of the fashions of successive historical periods, that it differentiates itself into species and varieties, precisely as other literary types undergo variation and development under specific conditions. It will flourish in one age and decline in another, as do the drama and the lyric, although, like them, the essay represents a certain permanent mood which never goes wholly out of fashion.

THE CRITICAL ESSAY

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The reader who is interested in literary criticism will soon find that the essay has been a particularly convenient form for conveying literary theories from one mind or age to another. The "critical essay," while conforming in general to the flexible laws of "the essay," is used for a specific purpose. It deals with the emergence, continuance, and disappearance of critical opinions; it records, in an informal but none the less effective manner, the judgment of Europe upon books. Let us take a specific example. Charles Lamb's "Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare" is a singularly perfect specimen of "the essay" type. It is personal and casual. It opens with the sentence: "Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick"; and then Lamb passes, with apparent artlessness, from the affectations and tricks of actors to the profound question of the possibility of an adequate representation of the personalities of Hamlet and Lear upon the stage. This personal essay, with its odd whims and fancies, deepens page by page into a masterly critical essay, which makes a distinct phase of the attitude of the English mind toward England's greatest poet.

In similar fashion, Victor Hugo's preface to his drama "Cromwell" is a capital example of a personal essay-an essay "rampant" in its defense of the author's own literary creed. But that creed as it happens, becomes also the triumphant creed of the young French Romanticists. They rallied around the preface to "Cromwell" as soldiers rally around a flag, and the essay became a concrete embodiment of a new reaction against Classicism, a significant document in the literary history of modern Europe.

NATIONAL CHARACTER IN THE ESSAY

The two essays which have just been mentioned-personal in their immediate character, and yet even more significant as representing doctrines which came to be held by a generation or a school 3 H. C., xxvii, 299. H. C., xxxix, 337ff.

-may also serve to illustrate a third aspect from which essays may be regarded. One may study them, in chronological order, as successive indications of a national point of view. Thus the English critical essay, in the Elizabethan period, in the seventeenth century, or in any subsequent epoch, reveals the precise extent to which the English mind accepts, modifies, or rejects the main body of European critical doctrine. As affording material for such a chronological study, it is not essential that any particular English critical essay should be marked by personal distinction of style, or by special critical acumen. The undistinguished mass of book reviews, of gossip about writers, about the stage and other forms of contemporary art, is often the most valuable evidence of the instinctive working of the English mind. What does an average bookish Englishman, in a given decade, understand by the words "tragic," "comic," "heroic," "the unities," "wit," "taste," "humor," "Nature"? The historian finds the answer in a thousand casual expressions, each one of which bears the stamp of the period and the race. The Englishman interprets the general laws and phrases of European criticism in terms of his own neighborhood and time, and a collection of English critical essays thus illustrates the traits of the English national character.

THE HISTORY OF THE WORD "ESSAY"

Let us now turn from the broader relations of the essay with criticism, and endeavor to ascertain precisely what the word "essay" means. The older English form of the word is "assay," i. e., a trial or experiment. It is derived, through the French, from a late Latin word "exagium," which means a standard weight, or more precisely, the act of weighing. The word "examine" comes from the same Latin root. As defined by the "Century Dictionary," "essay" means I, A trial, attempt or endeavor; 2, An experimental trial or test; 3, An assay or test of metal; 4, In literature, a discursive composition concerned with a particular subject, usually shorter and less methodical and finished than a treatise; a short disquisition. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was himself one of the most famous essayists of his day, defines "essay" in his Dictionary as "A loose sally of the mind; an