BOOK REVIEWS

COMMONS DEBATES FOR 1629. Critically edited, with an Introduction dealing with parliamentary sources for the early Stuarts. Edited by Wallace Notestein, sometime Professor of History in the University of Minnesota, now Professor of English History in Cornell University, and Frances Helen Relf, Professor of History in Lake Erie College. Minneapolis: Research Publications of the University of Minnesota. Studies in the Social Sciences, Number 10. 1921.

The word 'definitive' should be cautiously used among scholars, but I believe it may with safety be applied to the present edition of the debates of the parliamentary session of 1629. Little or nothing can be done to alter or reverse a scholarship so painstaking that it searches out and compares forty-six copies of the True Relation, hitherto the main source of less careful historians, in order to establish a definitive text. For these and for additional materials on the session, manuscript collections in England and in the New World have been ransacked. The present volume contains the fruit of this research in two extended diaries of the session and several shorter manuscript relations of the shorter parts of it as well as a text of the True Relation arrived at by an elaborate system of comparison.

In considering the text of the True Relation thus established, it may be well to summarize the very interesting introduction on source material for the parliamentary history of the early Stuart period. The editors dismiss the printed journals for most of the sessions as merely the rough notes of the clerk and not in any sense a finished journal of legislative proceedings. Other materials hitherto used for a history of the session of 1629 are analyzed down to their first elements. These, it is concluded, are the 'separates', or copies of speeches, documents, remonstrances, etc., obtained by members for their friends and for the information of their constituents, and copied again and again until many various readings arose. The notes of proceedings for specific sessions have a similar origin and use. Inaccurate copies of these proceedings, worked up by scriveners in news letters which they supplied day by day to persons anxious for news of parliamentary events, were preserved and finally bound up with

various of the separates, making the numerous volumes of parliamentary complications which are to be found in English manuscript collections. The True Relation, the editors believe, a compilation of news letters from two different sources with the separates, was first printed in 1641 under the title of Diurnall Occurrences. The editors have undertaken to arrive at the proceedings reported by the True Relation, by an elaborate balancing of texts. Often, they frankly admit that a speech in its final form is precisely identical with none of the extant copies. Perhaps such editorship is a little daring, but as the elaborate footnotes indicate every variation of reading in the various texts, the student who does not feel satisfied may at any point make his own version.

Other materials printed are the notes of Sir Edward Nicholas, the royalist source used by Gardiner, the notes of Sir Richard Grosvenor, three letters of Sir Francis Nethersole to the Queen of Bohemia, and an account of the proceedings of March 2, 1629, based on two different copies. In every respect the editing comes up to the best standards of American scholarship. The editors promise similar publications for other sessions of the period, and all students of the Stuart period will hold them to this undertaking strictly.

The general reader, accustomed to take his history in homeopathic doses, will be somewhat startled that so stout a volume is needed to set forth the proceedings of a session of Parliament of which he is apt to remember only that dramatic climax, the putting of Eliot's resolution while Holles and Valentine held the speaker down in his chair. He may question why the volume is necessary. Again the editor's introduction affords him an answer. The opposition party of the Parliaments of the Stuarts took care to give to the nation and posterity an account of the proceedings that put them in the most favorable light possible. The balance of extant sources has sometimes blinded even Gardiner, the master of the period, with whom the editors, like most serious students, differ only with the most profound respect. With broader sources to use historians may come to modify the verdicts that have put the Parliament always in the right and the king always in the wrong. The editors remind

us that, in case the Lancastrian and Tudor periods are subjected to the close and scientific scrutiny that the Stuart period is now undergoing, many of the rights and constitutional customs which the leaders of the Stuart Parliaments so stoutly maintained may be found to have but an uncertain historical basis. When results in these fields shall finally be laid side by side with our results for the seventeenth century, we may come in the end to conceive of that century as a struggle of two fundamentally different interpretations of the past, of which the one might seem to have little less validity than the other.

THEODORE C. PEASE.

The University of Illinois.

THE ART OF LETTERS. By Robert Lynd. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1921. Pp. 240.

In Robert Lynd we have a critic so alive in opinion and temper that his urbanely phrased findings seem to be our findings, the result of parleying committee work. He reads; he thinks; he imagines; and he is himself. In this volume the author of Old and New Masters discusses Pepys, Bunyan, Campion, Donne, Walpole, Cowper, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, Meredith, Morris, Wilde, Young, the Georgian poetry, criticism, some critics, Elizabethan plays and the politics of Swift and Shakespeare. He says, justly enought, that—

. . the chief duty of criticism is the praise-the infectious praise-of the greatest poetry [p. 90]. Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. There is all the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends to be literature" [p. 220].

If in his wide-ranging apreciations he sometimes jostles his critical scales, at any rate he has scales and weights. Apparent contradictions prove sometimes to be desirably shifted viewpoints. This would explain his belief that the best of the Elizabethan dramatists were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident. "The greatest of them apart from Shakespeare might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never existed" (p. 85). And yet,-"the greatest poets, both of Greece

and of England, took their genius to that extremely popular institution, the theatre. They wrote . . . for mankind" (p. 87). The essays on Shelley and Coleridge are hearteningly good; the analyses of Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Gosse and Professor Babbitt as critics are sagacious; the paper on Georgian poets is, on the whole, as right in its conclusions as in its spirit; and the "temporary criticism" of Tennyson prescribes very frankly and kindly some of the minus signs that must go to a final evaluation. Mr. Lynd has given us a really memorable collection here of some thoroughly interesting reviews and essays. G. H. C.

MODERN THOUGHT IN THE GERMAN LYRIC POETS FROM GOETHE TO DEHMEL. By Friederich Bruns. Madison: University of Winconsin Studies in Language and Literature, Number 13. 1921. Pp. 101.

The soul of a people lives in its lyrics; consequently this compact discussion is at this time particularly welcome as affording to the American public (although it will be read chiefly by university people) these glimpses of insight into the German mind. The discussion has been limited for the most part to three problems: "the conception of the deity, the question of the freedom of the will, and the valuation of life". But "an absolute limitation to lyric verse for the sake of mere consistency" did not seem "feasible nor desirable". What happens in one sphere or department of literature tends sooner or later to spread wavelike throughout the entire area, and this limitation to lyric verse would therefore have been impracticable; so the writer notes (page 13):

"In the nineteenth century we have instead the song of suffering Das Lied vom Leide. In Germany it is the century of the rebirth of tragedy: not only did Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Richard Wagner, and Hauptmann create the modern tragic drama, but the great tragic poets of the past became vital factors once more, above all Sophocles and Shakespeare."

Using lyric as a guide, then, we are to follow this clue of song through the maze of the past century or two, stopping to note such signposts here and there as Goethe, Romanticism, Welt

schmerz, Realism and a New Faith in Life, Pessimism, the New Optimism-a development parallel, one might add, to what has occurred in other literatures. Language creates an artificial bar. The influence of Hebbel is still to be felt in its proper intensity on our own literature and perhaps that wave has swept by. He is here awarded fuller recognition than some critics think he merits, but he is a very great poet in spite of their dislike, and the present writer, without troubling about his philosophy, had long ago found enjoyment in his sombre yet powerful dramas. Platen, too, an old favorite, receives place in the Lyric Canon; few German poets drew a more direct inspiration from the Greeks and fewer still have been so successful in the adaptation of classical metres to the German language. Nietzsche's debt to Hebbel is sufficiently indicated, but from darkness he draws a lurid light; his Uebermensch finds a curious and imperfect parallel in Thomas Hardy's The God Beyond. But it must be admitted that these philosophies are often pursued with more enthusiasm than understanding, and that to the poets philosophy plunges all too readily into mysticism. Professor Bruns has drawn a path, however, that can be followed and his interpretations of the writers of lyric constitute a genuine service to criticism. J. B. EDWARDS.

Wells College.

PLATO'S STUDIES AND CRITICISMS OF THE POETS. By Carleton Lewis Brownson. Boston: The Gorham Press. 1920. Pp. 157.

When a philosopher expresses his opinion of the poets, even to-day, there is apt to be a shrinking of sensitive souls. The poetic instinct and the critical faculty are more likely to 'mix' than to mingle when they meet. Doubly difficult must it be when the philosopher is a poet also; yet in this case his animadversions will be aimed rather against the content than the spirit of poetry that excites his protest. At the same time there exists a certain kinship betweeen poetry and philosophy: one shapes an ideal world, the other insists that we try to live in it.

Professor Brownson has initiated an inquiry into Plato's studies of the poets and his condemnation of them, his final criticism. of poetry and his estimate of the function of poetry in the