Ovid, to Lucan, or even to Statius, on the ground of "rhetoric," stands selfcondemned. Professor Tyrrell appends to his book an interesting analysis of recent English translations of Virgil, supplementary to a lecture by the late lamented Professor Conington; his entire volume may be commended as in the highest degree scholarly, graceful, and suggestive. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE MODERN ENGLISH POETS. Ir may be still an open question for the critics whether thought should be considered as lying within the scope of poetic art, or should be rigorously excluded from its productions; but in the mean time the world has had the habit, from the dawn of the earliest religions, of getting a good deal of its thinking done for it by the poets. For the thought of the poet is generally intuitive, if not inspired, and has been tested in the crucible which makes it one with the word. Its influence is the greater that it does not appeal primarily to authority or argument, and is therefore less likely to arm resistance or waken doubt, but enters as a little wind of suggestion through open doors of the mind, and is most sure of access at the most susceptible and formative period of life. To seize this sometimes elusive thought, to distinguish it from the evanescent mood and from the idea dramatically conceived, to trace its development and define its relation to the times, is one of the highest tasks which the critic has to perform. It is one in which a considerable risk is taken; for to detach the thought of the poet from his art even for a moment is to incur the danger of bringing it into wrong perspective, so essential in criticism is that unity of treatment which makes of its author a living whole, finding the springs of reflection and act in personality, harmonizing art and impulse, failure and achievement. But there are other wholes in literature besides the individual. And it is often possible, whether in dealing with one author or with a whole epoch, to gain new light by isolation of a single phase. Miss Vida Scudder, in the book before us,' has taken as her individual unit the pure poetic thought of the century on things pertaining to the spirit. She has traced its progress through different movements, its expression in unlike personalities and under varying ideals, and she has succeeded to a high degree in giving it unity and sequence, in showing the laws of its development, and gathering from it certain definite fruits of conviction. To a critic preoccupied with the question of genius, or making constant comparisons of style, the progress of poesy in this nineteenth century would not inevitably appear an uninterrupted one. That of poetic thought, or rather of spiritual life in poetry, is in these pages a triumphal march. Miss Scudder has a peculiar aptitude (and it is a rare and valuable gift for a critic) for depicting intellectual movement, for registering changes of thought and holding the clue to an idea through many ramifications. Everywhere in her book is the evidence of a mind actively at work, constructing, coordinating, proceeding with method and plan as well as with rapid insight. Her sympathies, too, are active, and are with the idea that moves. Not that she looks at one aspect alone, or ignores contradiction and hindrance. On the con 1 The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets. By VIDA D. SCUDDER. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1895. trary, her sympathies are many-sided, her intelligence is peculiarly alive to the existence of complex streams of tendency. She seeks for affirmation, but is susceptible to doubt, and keenly sensitive to morbid phases of thought, though she has not the morbidness of accepting them as abiding-places. She enters with special comprehension into the doubt that is in motion, the doubt that is struggle, not negation, and she welcomes every note of hopefulness and triumph, not because it is final, but because its way is onward. She is an admirable interpreter of the development that has taken place in complexity and definiteness of theological idea in poetry, and while the various phases of which she treats have all been analyzed again and again, the entire trend and outline of English poetic thought, from Wordsworth and Shelley to the latest writings of Tennyson and Browning, has never, to our recollection, been brought out with equal vividness. charm. But she too often injures her charm by abruptness, and the fineness of her thought by not writing sufficiently close to it. Her arrangement, on the other hand, is always well knit. Her book consists of separate essays, but the sequence of idea is no more interrupted than if they were merely chapters, the headings serving only to gather up the lines of the argument and to mark its advance. Her mapping out of an intellectual region is very good. The influence of science is considered under the different heads of the idea of force, the idea of unity, and realism, that is, in the light of the stimulus given to poetic thought by the vastness of scientific theory and speculation, and that given to observation by the increase of exact knowledge. Much of this field has been covered by Mr. Dowden and other writers, but Miss Scudder's treatment is in some points fresh and suggestive. Her essay on Wordsworth and the New Democracy brings out the humanitarian side of the poet, who in Mr. Dowden's résumé stands as the type of transcendental thought. It says something for the breadth of this great thinker among great poets that he can be equally well placed in either category. Yet the height of his spiritual significance is perhaps better reached from the side of Mr. Dowden's criticism, partly from the fact that Wordsworth's love of man and feeling for rural life have been merged in a larger democratic stream and become part of every-day experience, while his more transcendental thought still remains distinctive, a cooling draught in none of its tributaries so pure or so refreshing as at the spring itself. But to separate Wordsworth's poetry into two streams is to leave each the shallower. Taking Wordsworth at the beginning of her thoughtsequence, Miss Scudder gains impetus for her progressive argument in dwelling on the political aspect, for here comes in that descent into Lost Leadership which has been so often bewailed, and The criticism to which her work comes nearest in scope and spirit is perhaps to be found among Mr. Dowden's studies, where some of the same questions are discussed, particularly in regard to the influence of science upon modern poetry, the ideas growing out of the French Revolution, and the spiritual message of Tennyson and Browning. Mr. Dowden has many defects as a writer of criticism, chief among them being a certain looseness of writing, both in expression (especially in the use of figure) and in arrangement. At the same time he has qualities of sympathy and perception which set him above more finished but less impressionable critics. Miss Scudder, too, has sympathy and insight, with perhaps more quickness of apprehension than Mr. Dowden and less justness of perception. As a writer she resembles him in a tendency to inaccuracy of figure and phrase. She has a well-stocked vocabulary, and the movement noted above in her ideas extends to her style, giving it spring, energy, and at times which seems to have been an intellectual abandonment of the reason and will of the race corresponding to that forsaking of the reason and will of the individual which takes place in every conversion to Christianity. Miss Scudder has already written on Shelley, as may be remembered by readers of The Atlantic; the papers on the Prometheus which form the introduction to her edition of the play having first appeared in these pages. She does not repeat herself, nor does she leave unheeded the witness of so ardent a spirit. Mr. Dowden took Shelley and Byron as representatives of the thought growing out of the Revolution. Miss Scudder, looking at the more reflective and permanent element in that thought, has made Wordsworth its type, while she takes Shelley as representing the primary impulse and idea of the Revolution. From this dawn of the modern world, she looks back to that other dawn of poetic impulse in the Renaissance, and to the Christian thought which lies as light behind them both, and groups together the Divina Commedia, The Faerie Queen, and Prometheus Unbound as presenting three ideals of man's redemption: in Dante, redemption through submission and purification; in Spenser, through knightly quest and battle for the right; in Shelley, through liberty and the freeing of the spirit regarded as inherently pure from an evil oppressing it from without. She takes due account of the fact that the three poems are by no means equal in importance, but she rightly discovers in the formlessness of Shelley's the protoplasm of many altruistic and socialistic ideas which make it significant as a text. Into this theme Miss Scudder has put her highest activity of intelligence and fervor of feeling. Her style, too, is at its best, with very little exaggeration, with thought and word welded together so that the little rift is scarcely perceptible between them. Her appreciation of the poems shows not only reading and study, "A but immersion in their spirit as well. Her remarks on the symbolism of the Paradiso are particularly happy; she does not fall into the common vacuity of taking for granted its inferiority to the other poems, but sees it rightly, not as more or less powerful, but as their fitting crown and consummation. future satisfying, nay, transcending every desire, glorifying all experience, a future for which it was worth while to descend into hell, this he has given us." To one point only in Miss Scudder's Dante criticism would we take exception: to his being cited, for the sake of a progressive contrast, as one who lacked "the passion to redeem." She would appear to wish him to insist upon redeeming the lost who have already met their fate, or the penitent who are already working out their salvation. She does not ignore, indeed, but too often loses sight of the fact that he wrote his poem for the purpose of calling upon souls still on earth to seek salvation in time. Miss Scudder understands Dante too well to have any right to join with the many who misunderstand him in setting him up as the opposite of Abou Ben Adhem. Shelley's desire to be "the saviour and the strength of suffering man" was a pure and altruistic sentiment, but the interest of Dante in sinful man was not less profound. A new misery, as Miss Scudder shows, has come into the world, since Dante's time, in the development that has taken place of intellectual doubt from a condition of revolt against a single definite creed to a state of creedless uncertainty. "To choose the Good was the struggle of Dante; to find the Good is the struggle of to-day." Miss Scudder carries the torch of inquiry into the literature of doubt in modern poetry, from the simple affirmative negation of Shelley to the skepticism "serene, yet tinged with infinite desire" of Arnold, the struggle towards light of Clough, the questioning and attainment of Tennyson. "The Poets of Search" make a definite link in the chain of her criticism. "The Poets of Art" are more difficult to work in, and she hardly reaches the vein of melancholy philosophy that was hidden under the art of Rossetti, though she extracts some spiritual significance from his mysticism. Tennyson and Browning are left to the last, save for an essay on Browning as a humorist, where humor which is a gift seems to be somewhat confounded with that grotesqueness which is an intention. In taking the two poets at the date of their later rather than of their earlier work, Miss Scudder is in the right chronology, for they outlived, or at least outwrote, many successors as well as contemporaries. Then their thought was progressive, taking on new shades of meaning to the very last. In the treatment of Tennyson it is interesting to compare criticisms. Mr. Dowden dwells chiefly on his inherent reverence and love for law, his cherishing of the ideals of an ordered life. He insists upon the permanency of this trait, and the Tennyson of his paper is unchanged throughout, neither younger nor growing old. Mr. Myers devotes himself to Tennyson's later cosmic poems, and makes him the prophet of a new religion, taking care to assure us that he has the poet's own authority, given in his conversation, for thus representing him. But Mr. Myers's wish, as the founder of the religion, to have prophesying done in its name, may have been the father of this assurance. The prophecy in Tennyson reads like the final utterance of his sense of law, the expression of that aspiration which in his poems goes hand in hand with reserve. To Miss Scudder, Tennyson is primarily the poet of In Memoriain, and that poem, published in 1850, "is the central and most representative poem of the century; it is the climax of the Poetry of Search." She finds in In Memoriam, of which she gives a close analysis, the agnosticism of modern life. "He marks the final stage of agnosti cism, feeling its way towards faith." The process by which he wins faith is minutely traced and with delicate insight. The clue is sought in that curious recurrence in In Memoriam of the same thought at different stages of development. "Facts of nature and of the soul come to the poet, whose love is clasping grief with desperate instinct, as mocking, hideous, serene denials of the spiritual truth for which he longs. . . . Long after, when much new experience has been entered, when the spirit has been strengthened by courageous endurance and the conquest of practical solutions, the same fact will recur; and behold! it is no longer dark with insidious denial, but the radiant witness to faith. In the mystery of sub-consciousness the great change has been wrought." She sees also in Tennyson the effect of the will to believe. "This method of double interpretation is at the very heart of the intellectual life of Tennyson; it is the key to his spiritual victory. Sometimes the aspect of faith comes to him as a gift after long and seemingly remote brooding. Again, and perhaps more often, it is won by deliberate and resolute choice. In an open question he claims the right to the hypothesis of consolation. It is easy for either the ascetic or the cynical impulse to brand him as insincere; yet effective life must be lived on some assumption." If Tennyson won faith, Browning had it. The affirmation of Browning is the victorious crescendo in the symphony of poetic thought as Miss Scudder interprets it, and Christianity five centuries after Dante finds a new embodiment in poetry. But how about Wordsworth and Coleridge, who also believed, as poets ardently, as pillars of the Church of England stanchly? And Shelley and Keats, who believe in poetry? They are brought up in the last pages and reëxamined. The Faith of the Poets of the Revolution is compared with that of the Victorian poets. The earlier poets believed in "a world interpenetrated 66 by a Divine and Living Soul;" the later poets believe the fuller Christian revelation of a more intimate personal relation to God and to humanity. The earlier poets listened for truth; the later struggle for it. Contemplation was the watchword of our earlier poetry; action is the cry of that which presses nearest to our lives to-day." And in action is salvation and the life of the spirit; it is not only as the poet of faith, but as the poet of action and of the deed, that Browning stands at the summit of the century's aspiration. This is all true, and very finely brought out, though a comparison on some other lines between the poetry of Browning and that of Wordsworth might suggest the inquiry whether, while action is undoubtedly the most effectual agent in the development of character, contemplation may not possibly be a greater power in the production of poetry. One thing is clear from Miss Scudder's sequence, - that for critics of modern English poetry to represent the age as a wailing and hopeless period is to import their ideas ready made from France; for the actual quantity of skeptical and gloomy verse is a small outfit in agnosticism, while the optimistic tone of the large bulk of English nineteenth-century poetry ought certainly to afford us consolation. COMMENT ON NEW BOOKS. Fiction. Under the Man-Fig, by M. E. M. Davis. (Houghton.) The odd title of this book carries an interesting reminiscence for the reader, since it reminds him, what he might carelessly have overlooked, how cleverly Mrs. Davis makes a village chorus introduce the characters and story, comment on the persons and facts at critical points, and finally sum the whole business up. The author has caught well the easy-going life of the Southwest, with its touch of fading aristocracy, and has used an innocent piece of mystery in such a way as to intimate a tragedy without forcing the note. Possibly the passage which will make the most vivid impression on the reader will be that in the chapter headed The Palm-Tree Girl, a striking piece of negro romance. - Messrs. Holt have brought out two new volumes by Anthony Hope, whose tales follow one another with surprising rapidity. A Man of Mark is the inner history of a certain revolution in the South American republic of Aureataland, told with the writer's usual epigrammatic and incisive cleverness. The narrator, the untrustworthy guardian of the English bank in the republic's capital; his friend and patron, the president, a former citizen of the United States; and other persons in authority, of varied nationalities, comport themselves after the manner of Tammany statesmen, with the local advantage of revolution in time of need. Fortunately, the story is tolerably sure to be read at a sitting, else the unblushing rascality of all the personages principally concerned in it might prove a little wearisome, as, unhappily, the picture of the statecraft of Aureataland cannot be regarded as an altogether romantic imagining. In Sport Royal and Other Stories, the leading tale, which fills about half the book, is in its author's lightest and most entertaining vein, but the trivial sketches which accompany it might well have been left uncollected. Bog-Myrtle and Peat, by S. R. Crockett. (Appletons.) Mr. Crockett can rival Mr. Hope, not only in a quickly gained popularity, but in the diligence with which he takes advantage thereof. In this collection of short tales and sketches, the studies of the humors of rural Galloway easily take the lead in naturalness, spontaneity, and insight. When the writer goes further afield in search of material, a tinge of artificiality is apt to appear in his work, as well as slight but marked affectations of style. Possibly some of the productions of Mr. Crockett's liter |