acts in their remembrance and to follow the same, wherein they shall find many joyous and pleasant histories and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardyhood, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil and it shall bring you to good fame and renown. And for to pass the time this book shall be pleasant to read in; but for to give faith and believe that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty. But all is written for our doctrine."

This last sentence sums up the chief points in the professional faith of the father of English printing. Edification was assumed by him as by his age as the prime, if not the only, justification for writing and publishing. Yet, in spite of this narrow assumption, Caxton and the authors he did so much to make accessible were clearly sensitive to the element of delight as well as of instruction in literature; and enough has been said of the contents of these Prologues to show how rich they are in indications not only of what the Middle Ages read, but why they read it.

As for Caxton's own motives, if we took him literally, we should suppose that he translated and printed mainly to save himself from the sin of idleness. Yet a more generous impulse is easily read between the lines; and it is no mere self-regarding purpose that finds utterance in the words he penned as he closed wearily his long labor on the "Recuyell of the Histories of Troy": "Thus end I this book, which I have translated after mine Author as nigh as God hath given me cunning, to whom be given the laud and praising. And for as much as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyne dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, and my courage not so prone and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body, and also because I have promised to divers gentlemen and to my friends to address them as hastily as I might this same book, therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print, after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them at once."

III. THEORIES OF POETRY

BY PROFESSOR BLISS PERRY

MONG the various critical essays presented in The Harvard Classics no group is more interesting than that which deals with the theory of poetry. Our consideration of the literary form or quality of the essay has already shown us that we should not expect from the essayist an exhaustive treatise, but rather a free and spirited and suggestive discussion of certain aspects of his subject. To write adequately upon the general theme of poetry, expounding its nature, its æsthetic and social significance, and its technique, would be an enormously difficult task. But there are few poets who have not uttered at one time or another some of the secrets of this craft, or some phase of their admiration for it. Let us glance at the essays of eight English and American poets, ranging in time from the age of Elizabeth to the Victorian epoch: Sidney, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Poe, Whitman, and Arnold. Four of this group, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, and Arnold, are acknowledged adepts in general literary criticism; while Sidney and Shelley, Wordsworth and Whitman, have given expression to some of the most eloquent and revealing things that have ever been written about their own art of poetry.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," 1 like Shelley's, is a reply to an attack, but neither poet is very angry, nor does either believe that his opponent has done much harm. Shelley's antagonist was a humorously Philistine essay by his friend Peacock. Sidney is answering somewhat indirectly a fellow Puritan, Gosson, whose "School of Abuse" (1579) had attacked the moral shortcomings of ancient poetry and the license of the contemporary stage. Yet Sidney's "pitiful defense of poor poetry," as he playfully terms his essay, is composed in no 1 Harvard Classics, xxvii, 5ff.

narrowly controversial spirit, but rather in a strain of noble enthusiasm. He brings to his task a sufficient learning, a knowledge of the poetics of Plato and Aristotle, and an acquaintance with the humanistic critics of Italy and France. He knows his Homer and Virgil, his Horace and Ovid, but he does not on that account despise the "old song of Percy and Douglas." The nobility of Sidney's tone and his beauty of phrasing are no less notable than the clear ordering of his thought. In one close-packed paragraph after another, he praises the poet as a teacher and creator, compares poetry with history and philosophy, and finds, as Aristotle has done before him, that it is nobler than either. He discusses the various types of poetry, testing their capacities for teaching and moving the reader. Then, after a skillful refutation of the current objections against poetry, he turns, like a true Englishman, to the poetry of his own race, which was just then beginning, though Sidney did not foresee it, its most splendid epoch. He condemns, for instance, as being "neither right tragedies nor right comedies," that type of tragi-comedy which Shakespeare was soon to make illustrious. This opinion is now reckoned, of course, a heresy, as is Sidney's other opinion that verse is not essential to poetry. Yet no one who loves Sidney can quarrel with him over this or that opinion. His essay has proved itself, for more than three centuries, to be what he claimed for the beautiful art which he was celebrating-a permanent source of instruction and delight.

DRYDEN AS CRITIC

One hundred years after Sidney's untimely death, the prince of English criticism was John Dryden. He made no pretense of actual government: he "follows the Rules afar off." He is full of contradictions, reflecting the changing hues of contemporary taste, compromising between the classic and the romantic, changing his views as often as he likes, always readable and personal, always, in the best sense, "impressionistic," always, as Professor Ker has said of him, "sceptical, tentative, disengaged." His early essay "Of Dramatic Poesy" is full of youthful zest for Shakespeare and romance. Then he turns conformist, aiming "to delight the age in which I live" and to justify its prevalent neo-classic taste; but presently he comes

back to his "incomparable Shakespeare," praises Longinus, and abandons rhyme. In his next period he turns rationalist, and exalts "good sense" and "propriety." In the last dozen years of his life his enthusiasm for highly imaginative literature returns; he translates Juvenal and Virgil, and modernizes Chaucer; he is “lost in admiration over Virgil," though at heart he "prefers Homer." It is in this final stage of his career as a critic that he writes the charming praise of Chaucer, which is reprinted in The Harvard Classics. It is the perfection of essay writing. "Here is God's plenty," as he exclaims of the elder poet, in whom he finds a soul congenial to his own. Dryden did not, it is true, quite understand Chaucer's verse, else he could never have found it "not harmonious," yet he makes royal amends by admitting that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect." In his earlier "Apology for Heroic Poetry" (1677) he salutes "the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,'" then three years dead, and calls Milton's masterpiece "one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced."

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Dryden's best pages of criticism tempt one, in brief, to agree with him in declaring that "Poets themselves are the most proper, though I conclude not the only critics." The critical writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge confirm us in that opinion. Wordsworth is less facile than Dryden, and he does not range so far. Coleridge, by natural endowment one of the greatest of literary critics, is desultory and indolent. But the two men, when focusing their masterly powers upon the defense and interpretation of that mode of Romantic poetry in which their own creative energies were for a time absorbed, produced criticism which has affected the whole subsequent development of English literature. Coleridge's lecture on "Poesy or Art," for instance, is full of those flashes of penetrative insight which reveal the born critic: Art "is the power of humanizing nature"; "passion itself imitates order"; "beauty is the union of the shapely with the vital"; "the subjects chosen for works of art should be such as really are capable of being expressed and conveyed within the limits of 2 H. C., xxxix, 153ff. 3 H. C., xxvii, 255ff.

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those arts." Wordsworth's "Preface" to his epoch-making early poems should be read in connection with Coleridge's comments in the "Biographia Literaria,” and in the light of the well-known fact as to the proposed division of labor between the two young poets in the composition of the "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge intended to treat supernatural objects as if they really existed. Wordsworth wished to find in natural objects elements of novelty and surprise, that is, the romance of everyday experience. The two methods blended of course, like the colors at the extreme edges of the spectrum. Wordsworth's successive statements of his purpose emphasize now his use of "the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes," as if it were mainly a question of poetic diction; then he stresses the necessity of truth to "the primary laws of our nature," and debates the æsthetic question of “the association of ideas in a state of excitement"; finally, he qualifies his first utterances by pointing out that the diction should be a “selection of language really used by men," and that the incidents and situations treated by the poet should have "a certain colouring of the imagination." Such criticism as this, if accompanied by close study of the verbal alterations which Wordsworth made in the text of his poems as his theories changed, is in the highest degree stimulating and profitable.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The influence of Coleridge is traceable throughout Shelley's “Defence of Poetry" (1821). Shelley rides into the lists with as high a heart as Sidney, to repel the attack, not of the "moralists" but of the utilitarians. He is not conscious, like Sidney, Dryden, and Arnold, of the history of criticism. He has steeped himself, it is true, in Plato, but he writes with the enthusiasm of a new and personal vision. Poetry, to him, is primarily the expression of the imagination: "it redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man"; "it is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds"; "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth"; poetry "acts in a divine but unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness"; "a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one." Though the 4 H. C., xxxix, 267ff., 292ff., 311ff. 5 H. C., xxvii, 329ff.