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the subject of dispute, and a situation entirely abnormal will have to be faced by the King's Ministers, to whichever party they belong. With a House of Commons supporting Ministers, might not be very difficult to make arrangements to tide over the next three months; but for Ministers in office who do not enjoy that confidence the problem would be an extraordinarily difficult if not an impossible one.

The crisis at which we appear to have arrived need not and ought not to have occurred. It has been brought about by the extremists of both parties, by their violence of language on platforms and in the Press, and the silent The Edinburgh Review.

acquiescence of the large bulk of moderate men in the extravagances on their own side of politics. The rejection of the Finance Bill by the House of Lords involves much more than party tactics. It concerns political principles of the most fundamental kind, and it will entail far-reaching consequences. Even yet it is not too late to hope that prudent statesmanship will regain command of the situation, and that the House of Lords and the country will be saved from the impasse into which wilder politicians with light hearts and loud shoutings would recklessly drive them.

A great nation is seldom over-modest, and yet it does seem as if in one department at least our compatriots are unduly self-depreciatory. It is a rooted superstition that England, so great in poetry and fiction, has been starved for the lack of great critics. In special studies, lives, commentaries, and editions we may be more than able to hold our own, so it is often contended; but we have had no SainteBeuve! We have had no Sainte-Beuve, it is true, but we have, since the days when Macaulay and Villemain were in the ascendant, had a succession of critics fully comparable to those of France. With the exception of Arnold and Pater they have not, as a rule, been so academic as the great critics of France. They have lost something in respect of environment and of the difference of taste which seems in England to retard the acceptance of literary essays until their authors have won their spurs in some quite separate

"A Literary History of the English People." Vol. III. From the Renaissance to the Civil War II. By J. J.Jusserand. Fisher Unwin.

12s. 6d. n.

field. In the event, however, it may be doubted if any French critics of their generation are more alive to-day than are Bagehot, Symonds, Stephen, Henley, Stevenson, and it may be four or five others. The real superiority of the French is seen, not in the open fields of biography and criticism at all, but precisely in those special codes or treatises and long exhaustive studies of particular writers which need steady perseverance, prolonged and arduous toil, ingenuous faith, fervent self-denial, the discipline of a strong back joined to that of an exceptionally subservient brain.

The same qualities that are needed in the elaboration of the wonderful monographs on Burns, Thomson, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and the like, which French scholars have given us during the last ten years, are indispensable in the incubation of literary history. Here again the self-sacrifice and devotion of French scholars supplies us with an object-lesson, from which, in order to achieve its full salutary effect, the ele

ment of shame should not be wholly lacking. For what do we see in the case of such historians of our literature as Taine and M. Jusserand? Not one or two years merely, but a whole period of a life-time devoted to the laborious work of general preparation. To see how seriously Taine estimated his attempt to render the beautiful madness of sixteenth century poetry in England-aerial and fantastic in the case of Spenser, "like soaring on the wings of a beautiful swan," or, it may be, the rapid, tormented, and dazzling fairyland of Shakespearean comedywe have only to consult the grave and enthusiastic letters that he wrote to his intimates upon the solemnity of his enterprise. By M. Jusserand, in like manner, the privilege of interpreting this fairyland to French readers has long been courted. All his literary work for twenty years past has been shaped to this end, and this is, one is made to feel, the apex of absolutely devoted study and collecting for the best part of a lifetime. Balzac's parable of Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu reveals to us the danger of such life-work being overweighted and foundering under the burden of a species of monomania; and we have been familiarized with this danger by the comparative miss-fire of books in many respects so great as Carlyle's "Frederick the Great," Grote's History, Samuel Rawson Gardiner's History, and Masson's "Life of Milton." The French writers, fortunately, have recognized at an early stage the enormous difficulty of vitalizing literary history at all, and they have sacrificed, where necessary, to this supreme object of keeping their readers variously interested. This is where the English literary histories have markedly failed. Continuity and variety of interest have been sacrificed remorselessly to suit the student's voracity for "facts." Full of the exhalations of the class-room, the histories in

most request are just herbaria full of dried opinions and, if possible, still dryer data for the use of adolescent critics in the examination room. Life and humor are rigorously excluded to make way for the algebraic formula applicable to a three hours' test-paper. A Frenchman could not be induced to persevere with such heroic labor upon such terms.

When Mrs. Thrale was in Paris in 1785 she tells us that she saw Pilâtre de Razier and his brother go up in the first balloon from the Luxembourg Gardens. When they had disappeared she expressed her anxiety as to whither they would be carried, whereupon a grave man, a complete stranger, instantly made reply, "Je crois, madame, qu'ils sont allés, ces messieurs-là, pour voir le lieu où les vents se forment." And commenting upon this, thirty years later, she observes, "What fellows Frenchmen are! and always have been!" To this extent they are, at any rate that, even in a history of literature, a Frenchman must have an opportunity of scintillating now and again, and of saying pretty things pretty often, or he will perish. M. Jusserand, for instance, cannot demean himself continuously as if he were boxed up in a study and had nothing to do but deal out and appraise books. He refuses to believe in a tiger without a lady, or a garden without a serpent. He must show us how all this old literature lived and throbbed and moulded and was modelled, like potter's clay, by everyday existence in the brave days of Eliza and our James. Symonds tried vigorously, of course, to achieve this very same thing, but, as assuredly, he overcharged the picture. He saw everything through a haze of exaggeration, lit up by colors that never were by sea or land. M. Jusserand does it with a more finished touch and a far sounder antiquarian basis, together with a pellucid French clear

ness and a vitality and humor that are all his own. Symonds, as a writer on the English drama, was obsessed by the overture; Jusserand gives us the whole banquet from the eggs of Lyly to the apples of Shirley. The relation of the present volume, it may here be stated, to the French original of 1904 is deliberately obscured by the method of publication. No information is supplied as to the translator, the changes effected, or the progress anticipated. The present volume, of just over 640 pages, is the third of the English version, and it covers five chapters only (V.-IX.) of the second volume of the "Historie Littéraire du Peuple Anglais. De la Renaissance à la Guerre Civile," issued from the Librairie de Paris in 1904 in 994 closely printed pages. The chapters in the original, dealing with the Reformation, the Tudor Monarchy, with Spenser and the poets, the novelists, historians, and critics, have already been packed away into the second volume of the translation. The third volume in its English dress sheds the chronological table ("Memento Historique"), but assumes a frontispiece (the Southwark entrance to London in Shakespeare's time, after Visscher), a considerable number of new and pertinent footnotes, and a greatly improved index. There are some additions to the text, such as the account of the commission given to Shakespeare by the Earl of Rutland to devise an impresa for the Whitehall tilting on the King's Birthday of 1613; but these appear to be exceptional. The new work is dovetailed into the old with dexterity, and the production of the translation as a whole leaves nothing to be desired, unless it be a little less secretiveness in informing the reader in what respects the new version differs from the French of 1904. M. Jusserand is frequently in a position to correct his English predecessors-Symonds, for example, in his extravagant pretension that

the chronicle play was peculiar to England; but the predominant feature of this book, as it now appears, is not novelty, or profundity, or controversial energy, but in an especial degree brightness, lucidity, point, perspicacity, modernity, but, above all, vivacity.

The start of the present volume is a brilliant one for M. Jusserand knows all the approaches to the Elizabethan theatre incomparably well. First, we have Broker Henslow, dealing in plays as an outside broker of to-day deals in Berthas or Kaffirs, suppressing the price as often as he can, so that he may charge double to the players within. Then the midday-ordinary, haunted by the wits and play-critics of the hour, who get their dinner in exchange for their powers of entertainment and successful demonstration of "What's What." The consequent squabble with the watermen, the flogging of many oars, and the "roaring" of the gallants who exhibit their importance by the bigness of their oaths-"Row, row, row, a pox on you, row!" All is bustle on the Bankside. Even in the lord's room "much new satin smothered to death"; and, in the gallery, an ill-flavored crowd of stinkards, groundlings, or penny-knaves are packed like seeds in a sunflower. The eclectic gallants go first into the yard and carry their eye through every gallery. "Then like unto ravens," says Gosson, "where they spye the carrion, thither they flye and press as neare to the fairest as they can and give them pippines." The throng was probably more particolored than a modern house. The attraction that magnetized it had sprung up, like the virtuosity of our modern "Halls," in less than a quarter of a cen tury. To put it on its very lowest level, it is one of the Seven Wonders of the history of human entertainment. M. Jusserand makes us feel all this amply before we come to the spring. Every statement is supported by refer

ences to chapter and verse in accordance with the strict letter of the tradition inherited from Beljame. As regards pedals it must be admitted that the historic present is generally kept down. The color is not less vivid than in a history painting by Mr. Abbey. These "effects" will influence readers differently; but of conscious or deliberate exaggeration they will have, in all these pages, exceedingly little to complain.

The audience in a sense was the condition and centre of all these spectacles, and M. Jusserand does well to enable us to picture it. He has his prepossessions, of course, and some of his old theories (which he might have adapted as a prophylactic against Taine's theory of English nationality); he thinks, for instance, that he can analyze the three race-layers at work in an Elizabethan audience. The readiness of speech of the Celts, the lyricism and gravity of the Anglo-Saxons, the inquiring, ingenious, and practical minds of the bullet-headed Anglo-Nor

mans.

It

Saxon seriousness and Norman irony combined to make English humor. This is excellent, especially from a grave writer such as M. Jusserand, who can hardly find words severe enough for those who collect facts merely to bolster up preconceived theories. A vast amount of our present knowledge of the Elizabethan theatre is derived from erratic generalizations. One of the most useful of these is one specially dear to a Frenchman. deals with the sense of measure, the self-restraint, the art of selection, the desire to concentrate attention on one single, central point, with other sedate and refined tastes common to the Latin races, but wholly absent from the Anglo-Celtic or Saxo-Norman blend. Though chronologically hopeless, Scott in Kenilworth is artistically correct in representing Elizabeth as torn by the distracting claims of playhouse and

bear-garden. What the Elizabethan crowd thirsted for was strong emotion. It is true enough that it had little sense of form, no idea of unity worth speaking about. Tragical and bloody sights, heroic utterance, noise, surprising occurrences, dogs, horses, starvelings or living skeletons, fat men, ghosts, coarse scenes with servants, foundlings, disguises, gory heads and choppingblocks, strong patriotic or topical allusions-here you have the kind of theatrical fare for which the souls of the Elizabethans craved. In the early days there was nothing to make a play so sure as a fine pyrotechnic display of murder as a finale. Kyd's Solyman and Perseda affords a conspicuous example. First Amurath kills Haleb, then Soliman kills Amurath, Erastus is strangled, Soliman kills the two janissaries that strangle Erastus, two false witnesses are thrown from a high tower on the stage, the lord marshal is killed, Soliman kills Perseda, then Basilico, then Piston, and then takes poison himself. "Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead." Even this record is beaten in The Battell of Alcazar, or in Marlowe's Rich Jew of Malta, where Barabas, after blowing up a whole army and poisoning a whole convent is boiled to death in a caldron before our eyes. The purveyance of all this to the public by an elaborate machinery of common play-plotters, farceurs, artisans of dialogue, and other engineers duly commissioned by the rival producers and presenters of 1600 is admirably worked out by M. Jusserand.

He makes a valiant effort to galvanize the facts of Shakespeare's personal career into a semblance of interest. The absence of internal light and the encroachment of bibliography upon biography make this the most difficult part of his work. It is here, more than anywhere, that he is writing for a distinctively French audience.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice appeal to him in the fullest possible sense. Twelfth Night, on the other hand, which is, perhaps the favorite among all the comedies in England, seems to him overpadded with buffoonery. From the Russian peasant who said that Hamlet could not make up his mind, that was why he talked so much, to the cowboy who listened awestruck to Polonius's advice about quarrels, from the cowboy to the Baconian, who detects a mystic significance in the title, the attraction of Hamlet is universal, and M. Jusserand submits to it. The terror and remorse of Macbeth seem to him appalling. But he cannot away with King Lear. He laments the exchange of these Stormy Night's Phantasms for the Midsummer Night's Dreams of an earlier and happier day. His remarks on King Lear are interesting from their flat contradiction of Lamb's. The horror here, he maintains, is so continuous that it forces us to perceive that the darkness is artificial. Our conscience revolts and convicts the author of play-acting horrors to order.

M.

As regards the sonnets, M. Jusserand is too polite to say that the dominant theories on the subject are a mere mass of assumption and guessing, but that is evidently what he means. He maintains the agnostic position that "Mr. W. H." is a genuine addressee of the sonnetteer, but a personality unknown, with great spirit. "Something morbid exhales from these poems." Jusserand is an unfriend to Bacon, describing his work as valuable, but deceptive, gardens offering paper flowers and artificial ornaments, and the whole effect strikes him as "Cunning's Labor's Lost." His merit is universally admired, he is related to the highest in the realm, his counsels are full of recognized wisdom; and yet, his fortune progresses very slowly. He has the

best theories in the world for pleasing, but does not please; he only half pleases; his ideas are deemed interesting, but not his person. This Dr. Fell theory is ingenious, but it hardly seems to do justice to the profound, as apart from the plausible, sides of Bacon's speculation. Bacon owed much to Montaigne, but it is doubtful if this debt should be extended, as by M. Jusserand (on p. 491), to Overbury and the "characters." Their first debt was surely due to Theophrastus, and the second to his translator of 1592, Isaac Casaubon. The last two chapters are in some respects rather sketchier than those which have gone bfore. In the section dealing with Shakespeare's Posthumous Fame, M. Jusserand is completely at home and selects with a very apparent mastery. He tells us, for instance, not all the strange places in which the great name may be found, but the strange omissions and the singular perversions of a nascent celebrity. The great reputations of Pope, Johnson, and Garrick blow the spark into a flame. A new Flaubert might add a delectable chapter to "Bouvard et Pécuchet" on the subject of Shakespeare critics, quarrelling as to whether a given reading is a miracle-or a misprint; whether Shakespeare's classical learning is that of Scaliger or Smith minor. By successive stages sufficiently amusing to trace, Shakespeare becomes a religion, with holy places, bonzes, ritual, schism, heretics, modernists, and excommunications. The ambassador informs us impressively that a Royal princess of the house of Plantagenet went on her knees at the threshold of the house Shakespeare is alleged to have been born in at Stratford-on-Avon, that a European sovereign has translated some of the plays, and that a European prince has played the title rôle in Hamlet!

It is rare to encounter an individual