Recent Literature

THE verification of Troy, at once the most famous and the most mythical of towns, would have satisfied any ordinary archæologist. Dr. Schliemann, in whose career, shaped by his romantic enthusiasm for learning, it is hard to discover anything Ordinary, had no sooner effected it than he pressed on to something almost equally important. From the vanquished city and the scene of the immortal ten years’ struggle he turned back further to illustrate the story by researches in the country of the victors, and particularly at the capital of the commander-in-chief, our old acquaintance Agamemnon, “ king of men.” It will be remembered that in finding Troy, the third down in a series of four superposed ruined cities, forming débris fifty feet thick above the surface of the soil on a hill at Hissarlik, Dr. Schliemann overturned two beliefs : that of a number of studious archæologists, who held that it was located at Bunarbaschi and other points, and the more general belief that it never existed at all. In the resulting controversies, which are not yet over, there were even some scientists who had the appearance of holding both beliefs at once. The doctor is not of the a priori school. He narrowed down the argument, by digging indefatigably into the locations named and showing the incongruity of their remains with the data afforded by Homer, to the certainty that Troy was at Hissarlik, —where the remains and the data remarkably correspond, — or nowhere. But the coincidences of fact with theory, both there and at Mycenæ, are too strong to admit of reasonable doubt,

We have to thank Dr. Schliemann for greatly abridging the region of myth and adding to that of history. A result of the labors of the late school of archæologists,— of which Dr. Schliemann is so sinning a member, — perhaps as important as their actual discoveries, is the stamp of authority they have affixed to the ancient historians. It is by the new rôle of following the ancient descriptions implicitly that they have attained their successes. These proving so unexpectedly correct, a corroboration is given to their remaining contents, though beyond the possibility of a similar test. The good-natured allowance we have been making for Strabo, Pausanias, Herodotus, and the rest, as persons of a literary taste who supplemented the lack of accurate information in a time when facilities for travel were few by a lively fancy, and to whom we ought to be grateful for preserving any account at all, however loose, of an age so different from our own, is succeeded by a thorough-going respect. They are henceforth to he established rather upon the same plane of credibility as the Humes, Prescotts, and Motleys, and to be judged by the same standards.

To the interest of the part of the Homeric events belonging to Mycenæ is added that of one of the strongest of the classic tragedies, treated by the three great Greek dramatists in turn. Mycenæ is the scene of the fury of Orestes, and of the slaying by him of his mother and her paramour who had murdered his father Agamemnon. Distracted by the same cruel grievance as Hamlet, the less complicated nature of the early Greek allowed him to devote himself, with few of those vacillations we note in the strange character of the Dane, to its redress. The new discoveries ought to do something, among their other benefits, to ameliorate the hard lot of the college undergraduate. Those of us who thumbed wearily through the Electra of Sophocles in years gone by would have welcomed the refreshment of this elegant volume, with its wealth of realizing particulars, and perhaps have been inspired by it with an appreciation of the late-discovered interests of the texts which it has not always been too much the result of academic training to arouse.

Schliemann traversed the road through the ancient territory of Argos, pointed out by the friendly servant to Orestes at the beginning of the play, passed the famous temple of Hera in the middle distance, and came like him to “gold-abounding Mycenæ and the sorely afflicted house of the Pelopidæ.” He; went through the Gate of Lions, after heroic excavations in debris filled with huge bowlders cast down from the walls above more than twenty-three hundred years before, into the Agora, and there unearthed five royal tombs full of indications that the drama was not an idle picture, but stern historic reality. In this expedition he followed Pausanias, who recounts his visit to the ruins of Mycenæ in the year A. D. 170. Others, too, had attempted to follow Pausanias in searching for the tombs, but had erroneously interpreted his text. It was left to the acumen of Schliemann to discover the true meaning. He finds a certain wall within which Pausanias locates the tomb of Agamemnon — and outside of it those of Clyteranestra and Ægisthus, as unworthy of closer proximity to their victim — to have been that of the Acropolis, still standing, instead of, as had been supposed, that of the city proper, long since disappeared. He considers the situation of affairs at the time of Pausanias, and rightly infers that he could have spoken only of such walls us he saw, and not of those which he did not see. “ He saw the huge walls of the citadel, because they were at his time exactly as they are now ; but he could not see the wall of the lower city, because it had originally been very thin, and it had been demolished 638 years before his time.”

The work is a series of such cogitations, a constant process of logical deductions, comparisons, analyses, balance of probabilities, with the severest penalties of useless toil and expense attending mistakes. The experience of the indefatigable German and the confidence arising from his success at Troy add to his efficiency in the new undertaking. He plans his campaign with masterly foresight, and proceeds with greater expedition. In spite of severe hardships in six months he is in possession of all that Mycenæ can tell him.

“Mrs. Schliemann and I,” he writes, “superintend the excavations from morning till dusk, and we suffer severely from the scorching sun and incessant tempest, which blows the dust into our eyes and inflames them ; but in spite of these annoyances, nothing more interesting can be imagined than the excavation of a prehistoric city of immortal glory, where nearly every object, even to the fragments of pottery, reveals a new page of history.”

There is only now and then one of these personal touches. We wish there were more. The interest in the explorers delving into these strange treasures of antiquity would have been scarcely less than in their work itself. All the details of an experience so unique would have been gladly welcomed. But we are only given to know that there were one hundred and twenty-five men and four horse carts employed in the work, at wages of about forty-two cents a day for the men and one dollar and thirty-six cents for the carts, and occasionally that the Archæological Society of Athens is remiss in some promised cooperation. The author is entirely wrapped up in the multitude of pots, knives, beads, whorls, cones, and fragments he is continually turning up out of the soil and is called upon to contemplate in their relations to each other and the problem as a whole.

The present volume,¹ like its predecessor on Troy, is in the form of a journal of progress. As such it has a certain freshness and spontaneity, but lacks the completeness of structure it would no doubt have possessed had it been offered as a finished retrospect. From so hardy an explorer, so well versed a scholar, and so able a logician it would be unjust to demand more; but if something of a literary character could have been given to it, it would have even greater present favor than it has, and a more permanent existence in its present form. Very full maps and sections elucidate the whole course of the investigation. Its trophies are displayed in a vast number of cuts and colored plates. The illustrations are not a mere luxury in this case, but of prime importance, since the original treasure-trove is in the hands of the Greek government, and therefore not even accessible at any of the leading centres. For all the main purposes of comparison the carefully made illustrations sufficiently supply their place. New York possessors of the volume will be interested to visit, with it in hand, the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum. There is a very definite resemblance, establishing some relationships not yet fully followed out, between the yield of Dr. Schliemann’s shafts at Mycenæ and these late contributions from prehistoric Cyprus.

The valuable preface by Gladstone resumes in a succinct form the various considerations of Schliemann, and in the main coincides with his views. The most important of them, namely, that the tombs in the Agora are really those of the once mythical Agamemnon and his companions, he summarizes as “supported in part by a number of presumptions, but in great part also by the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of offering any other suggestion which could be deemed so much as colorable.”

— Few plants can be cultivated in modern dwelling-houses with such facility as ferns. They grow luxuriantly under the protection of a few square feet of glass, and give to summer and winter alike a wealth of verdure. In the dry air of our furnace-heated homes, with the impurities caused by the combustion of ordinary coal gas, to say nothing of the escape of a trace of unconsumed gas now and then, all house plants have a desperate struggle for life. Only a few species can sustain the unequal contest, and these are the tough and somewhat ungraceful varieties now in general cultivation. By a careful selection, in the first place, of species like the Cape Pelargoniums, or socalled geraniums, which are very patient under ill usage, and then by more careful weeding out of the poorer sorts, florists have given ns a few desirable plants, hardy under the ordinary conditions of window culture. Here and there we may find a lover of flowers who has a charmed hand and can lead a window full of foliage through our tong Northern winter and capricious spring. But most of us who care for house plants have surrendered at discretion, and are content with a fern-case in whose shelter we can leave the most delicate varieties to fairly favorable conditions of moisture and good air. When a fernery is well filled and well cared for, it is a glimpse of tropical vegetation worth having; when it is filled carelessly with undesirable and unsuitable varieties, it soon falls into merited neglect and contempt.

Now to aid in the right selection and to assist in the trifling care comes a timely and charming book by Mr. John Robinson.² It is the second in a series of popular handbooks now being issued by the enterprising publisher of Professor Eaton’s Ferns of North America. There has long been felt a want in this country of clearly written and short treatises upon special topics of natural history, like, the many upon English mosses, ferns, grasses, and the like.

Mr. Robinson’s hand-book is a most useful guide. It gives in plain language some account of the history of ferns in general, and of the cultivation of special varieties. First he examines ferns in their homes, and details with much minuteness the incidents of their earliest life, their development and propagation. Next he looks upon them as inmates of our homes, and gives judicious hints respecting a proper choice of species. The trifling points of management are presented in a manner which disarms distrust of one’s ability to cultivate the plants; in fact, many who have failed with their ferneries will be encouraged to try again. The illustrations are well done, and are mainly for the definite purpose of conveying information, and not to attract purchasers. The pretty photograph, vised as a frontispiece, gives us a glance at Mr. Robinson’s conservatory. The graceful arrangements of the fronds of the ferns there portrayed will make many of us wish to exchange the modest fern-case for a fern-house, and for the care of the latter we have many a hint from the painstaking author. We have nothing but words of welcome for the volume, and for the projected series. We may suggest that in future editions, which we hope will be many, Mr. Robinson’s publisher may add to the title of the book, Ferns in Their Homes and Ours, the following line, By one who has long been at home with them. For it should be known by all who use this little work as their aid in the cultivation of ferns that Mr. Robinson’s advice is based upon much experience gained during a long and very pleasant intimacy with these charming plants.

— Carthage, with its great civilization and all its power in the ancient world, has narrowly escaped the fate of many mighty kingdoms in leaving no worthy trace of its grandeur. The Romans did not anticipate the wants of people in the present day when they crushed an enemy, and their vindictiveness wiped out every memorial of any foe that had once withstood them. Even the record of the Punic wars has been incompletely preserved to our time, and we have the testimony of but one side concerning what is nearly the most remarkable event in military history, the success of Hannibal, The deadly struggle between Rome and Carthage has been described by Livy and Polybius, and in every Roman history the events of the war have been set forth, but it has been left for Mr. Bosworth Smith to collect in one volume all that is known concerning Carthage and the Carthaginians,³ and to add to a full and clear history of the wars. He writes with ease, and, what is more important, with a good backing of scholarship. He makes the tantalizingly little that is known of Carthage do good service, yet without exaggeration, and he sets before us without bias the leading characteristics of the two contesting nations. To be sure, he says that if one of the two civilizations had to go, it was better that it should be the Carthaginian that should disappear; but while it would be idle to contradict this, for there is no day-dreaming more extravagant than rewriting imaginary history with everything just as it was not, it may yet be said that almost every one’s sympathies are with the beaten side and not with the Romans. A civilization that was built np on commerce might have done more for the world than one that was formed by fighting, to fall by its own corruption. At any rate, it is to that notion, which is what marked the Carthaginians more at least than it did the Romans, that the world is approaching nowadays, and after a good deal of experiment of the other plan.

The whole story of the three wars is well told, audit is impossible for even those most familiar with the events described not to feel renewed admiration for Hannibal’s wonderful generalship. The remissness of Carthage in backing him, whatever may have been the cause, contrasts with the energy of Rome; but if this were in any way, as is strongly implied, the consequence of a love of peace, surely that is a commendable fault, and one which in these modern days should be pardoned. But without building up imaginary Carthaginians it is better to look at those who once lived and at what they did, as they are described by Mr. Smith.

The volume is full and entertaining, .and, so far as we know, the completest book, in English at least, on the subject. One English officer, whose name we cannot at this moment recall, wrote some years ago about Hannibal’s campaigns from a military point of view, and that book might well be read in conjunction with this clear and excellent volume.

— Viewed as a book of travel, Greek Vignettes⁴ has no value whatever, as no confidence can be put in the author’s statements, some even of those which he goes out of his way expressly to make being the exact oppoite of the truth, as, e. g., that the Varvakion (Bapβá����������) is a private collection, that the Tsakones (not Tsakoni, as the author writes) live in Arcadia, etc. Here is a young man, a graduate apparently of an American university, with some knowledge of ancient Greek and a smattering of German, French, and Italian, and having been “no inconsiderable traveler,” who, “with a portmanteau, an umbrella, a pair of spectacles, a shawl, an overcoat, and a duster,” sets out to enjoy an emotional thrill-andtint debauch in the most frequented parts of Greece. His portmanteau apparently contains a few popular books relating to Greece, such as About’s La Gréce Contemporaine, Mahaffy’s Rambles (characterized as “a work of scholarship”!), Schliemann’s “charming Ithaque, Peloponnèse, Troie,” Tuckerman’s Greece of To-Day (always referred to by its title in Greek), etc., a Manuel de la Conversation Grec Moderne, probably that of Laas d’Aguen, and a “ blood and thunder Italian romance ” which the author is “ obliged to abandon every moment” to gaze on “ enchanting landseapes,” one of which is thus described : —

“ It is like the finest scenery of Lake Como or Lago Maggiore — the sea one sheet of waveless blue, the atmosphere so limpid that you seem to see, behind the mountains whose crests stand out in it in a thousand bright and illustrated forms, ships becalmed in this Circe-like lake, a flight of tremulous zephyrs hovering about your face and hair all the time, the whole one picture of radiance and voluptuousness. ... It is the crystal sky of Hellas, the ' surpassing ether ’ of Euripides, the land of the snowy egret and the crested hoopoe, of light and affability [!] and brilliance. We shall soon be passing down the huge Acroceraunian Mountains [the author is on board an Austrian steamer], in among the islands scattered like a shivered necklace over the sea, . . . islands full of wine and sharp aromatic scents, silver-leaved olives and glowing oleander. . . . There is indescribable refreshment in this light, buoyant air. ... It is not the attar-of-roses atmosphere of Italy. There is a spice of Greek airiness and lightsomeness in it, just the difference between a winged epigram of Archilochus [1] and an ode of Petrarch.”

In excusing the short-comings of his book, the author tells us that it was written “in the fields ... or sauntering through olive groves with the thermometer at 100° Fahrenheit.” We should think a good many things might be excused in a book that had the peculiarity while being written of sauntering through olive groves at any temperature. As to the matter, it is mostly simple gush over “ transcendent landscapes,” “fairy gulfs,” “pale and perpendicular mountains,” “ soft and sunny shapes,” “delightful beauty,” etc., — gush in which the different senses are often made to do duty for each other, as for example where the “ ruddy tints ” of the Bouté in Athens “ blend harmoniously with the velvet air.” One wonders how an eye can be constructed that can see “ chess-hoard bands of red.” There is, here and there, a little variety, when the author goes to his meals and gives us a minute account of all that is set before him. It is a pity he was not able to spell or accent the names of Greek eatables ; but unfortunately his modern Greek is nearly always written incorrectly, and his accents are thrown on with a pepper-caster. These defects too must not be laid to the charge of the printer, for many of the words occur, twise, e. g., ảμαξή,Ξϵνοδόχϵ��ον, κῆ������ ��ῶ ả������ó�������� N������ῶ��, ��ῶ for ������, etc.

On the whole, as we have said, but for a certain psychological interest, this hook is below serious notice. Most of what Mr. Harrison thought he saw in Greece is not there at all, and most of the things that are worth seeing he did not see.

— The author of Shakspere, His Mind and Art, has prepared a little book⁵ for the series of Literature Primers that Mr. John Richard Green, author of the well-known Short History of the English People, is now editing, in which he attempts to give in popular form the method and results of the latest criticism of the world’s poet. It is briefer than the similar work that Mr. Furnivall has prepared as the introduction of the Leopold Shakspere, but it goes over the same ground, and does not differ from it in the general conclusions arrived at.

In the space of 167 small pages Dr. Dowden crowds seven chapters and an appendix, touching almost every topic that a beginner will need to study, He first describes the England of Shakespeare’s day and the condition of the drama. By slight allusions he shows in a clear way how plays were brought out, how the stage properties were managed, and how plays were legitimately published or pirated. Then follows a sketch of the dramatist’s life, and an account of the various editions of his works, making plain the allusion to quartos and folios which are met in all extensive books on the subject.

The fourth and fifth chapters present the evidence for the chronology of the plays, the groups into which Dr. Dowden arranges them, and the periods he makes in the author’s career. This work is all very similar to that of Mr. Furnivall, upon which we commented at length in a late number of The Atlantic. The four periods in Shakespeare’s life are now pretty well established, and it only remains for new commentators that they give them new names. Those of Dr, Dowden are, In the Workshop and In the World, in the sixteenth century, and Out of the Depths and On the Heights, in the seventeenth, the division of the centuries being taken as a rough mark between the two decades of Shakespeare’s literary life.

The necessities of most readers demand only that the plays be assigned with some certainty to these general periods of the dramatist’s career, and the difference of a year or two in a date is of no consequence to them. There is satisfaction to the methodical man in knowing the order in which an author’s works were produced, though he may not read them in that order. We prefer to take the historical sequence as our guide in regard to the plays based upon English history ; for, though they may not have grown in the author’s mind in that order, he must have intended that they should form a unit of interest. In fact, with the single exception of Henry VIII., they were all produced before 1600, and belong to the earlier years of the author’s life.

Dr. Dowden makes twelve subdivisions of the plays, as follows: 1. Pre-Shakespcarean Group (touched by Shakespeare): Titus Andronicus and 1 King Henry VI. 2. Early Comedies: Love’s Labor’s Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Midsummer Eight’s Dream. 3. MarloweShakespeare Group (Early History) : 2 and 3 King Henry VI. and King Richard III. 4. Early Tragedy: Romeo and Juliet. 5. Middle History: King Richard II. and King John. 6. Middle Comedy : Merchant of Venice. 7. Later History (History and Comedy united): 1 and 2 King Henry IV. and King Henry V. 8. Later Comedy: (a) rough and boisterous: Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor; (b) joyous, refined, romantic: Mitch Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; (c) serious, dark, ironical All ’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. 9. Middle Tragedy: Julius Cæsar and Hamlet. 10. Later Tragedy: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens. 11. Romances : Pericles, Cymbeline, Tempest, and Winter’s Tale. 12. Fragments: Two Noble Kinsmen and King Henry VIII.

An examination of this schedule by the side of the scheme of Mr. Furnivall will help one to understand both. Most who read this one will he surprised to find Troilus and Cressida among the comedies, and they will probably think Shakespeare’s work in the Two Noble Kinsmen so very fragmentary that it has no right on the list. As a general remark, it may he said that the classification is too minute, though Dr. Dowden supports it on the ground that it is well not only to trace the chronology of the whole body of the plays, but also to arrange the three separate lines of comedy, history, and tragedy in the same way.

A few of the expressions used may be excepted to. It offends ns to read the point-blank statements, “ Maivolio is made an ass of, " “ Troilus is an enthusiastic young fool,” a “ noble green goose,” at whose “disillusioning” Ulysses assists. There are other such words and pit rases, but they are not numerous enough to mar the book materially.

Dr. Dowden shows that though Shakespeare is so remarkable for creating character, he is not distinguished among dramatists for inventing incidents. “ Having found a situation which interested his imagination or was successful on the stage, he introduced it again and again with variations.” He points out the recurrence of mistaken identity, the frauds practiced on vain selflovers, which all will recognize as characteristic of the comedies.

The usefull little volume closes with a chapter on Shakespeare’s popularity from his death to t he present time, and a list of books useful to students of his works.

— The circumstances attending the loss of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Poetry for Children,⁶ as related by Mr. Shepherd in his preface to the recent reprint, modify one’s natural surprise. The book was for children, and did not hear the authors’ names upon the title-page. One edition only was printed. It was before the time of stereotyping, so that there were no stereotype plates to tempt a publisher, and libraries did not then take such an interest in the humbler classes of literature. Few books go out of actual use so quickly as books for children, and it may be added that the collection as a bulk had not such striking qualities as would serve to keep it alive, especially as a considerable portion of its contents reap pea red in school-books published shortly afterward. The two little duodecimo volumes, preserved by some kind fate in a single copy, were found, early in 1877, in South Australia, and furnish the present reprint. It was discovered also that the book had on its first appearance been reissued in America, hut there also had died the natural death which befalls most distinctive children’s literature.

The reissue now, under circumstances likely to give the hook special prominence, is interesting to all who have at heart the best reading for children, since it starts again the question, What is the best poetry for children ? and, Are we better off than families in Lamb’s time ? It is fair to presume that had this little hook been placed by Lamb among his acknowledged writings, and so secured an uninterrupted life, it would not have had a general reading at this time. There is nothing in the book which would give it a perennial existence, more than in Mrs. Leicester’s School or the Adventures of Ulysses. Each of these books may still he bought, but it is only through Lamb’s name that they find buyers. It is because of Lamb’s connection with this volume that readers will now be found; hut after a literary curiosity has been satisfied, the volume itself will drop out of notice, and the poems will again have such life as they formerly had, in anthologies and class-books.

Meanwhile, we are glad to think that the book has at this time found readers not only amongst those curious of Lamb’s genius, but amongst those for whom it was originally intended, children of tender years. We should like to believe that it has become familiar to some, for, in spite of the somewhat prosaic character of many of the pieces, the tone of the book is in hearty sympathy with an unspoiled childhood. The difference between its straightforward, simple, unpretending, kindly spirit and the strained, affected, involved, ambitious poetry for children, so common nowadays, is world-wide. In the older poetry we have a mannerism which is just sufficiently oldfashioned to amuse us a little, without its being: strange to an ordinary child, and we have the homely tale, the appeal to honest feeling, the freedom from fine distinctions, which mark the literature for children that sprang up in England contemporaneously with Wordsworth. The ferment in politics, religion, and education worked good in this direction. Children were looked to as worthy of thought and care in literature, almost for the first time; it was part of the eagerness with which men looked to the new world which seemed opening amid the crash of thrones and empires. The criticism which has slowly been spreading over literature has introduced a new and unnatural element into books for children, and with this has also gone a taste for luxury which renders much of the reading intended for the young as hurtful to their minds as highly-seasoned food is to their bodies.

This contrast, which is suggested afresh by the new reading of Lamb’s poetry for children, may make us fairly question whether we have not to push forward into a condition of life and literature which will render unpalatable a good share of the literature for children which is now published and bought. Let us hope, as we easily may believe, that large masses of books for children published in 1877 will perish impreserved ; in 1944, removed as far from this last year as that was from the date of the first publication of Poetry for Children, it is possible that some book now enjoying a temporary popularity will be reprinted as a literary curiosity. We will try to think so well of our posterity as to believe that they will not be sobered by the contrast, but only filled with a genuine pity for their ancestors.

— The late Mr, Richard Simpson, one of the learned workers of the New Shakspere Society, left behind him at his death a collection of old plays, with an introduction, which he had prepared for the press, to be published under the title, The School of Shakspere.⁷ It is now given to the world by Mr. F. J. Furnivall in two volumes, which are rendered complete by the addition of a glossarial index by Mr. J. M. W. Gibbs, the dramatic critic, who has also enriched the volumes with notes and sketches of the plays. It was the intention of Mr. Simpson to include in his collection all those plays which were acted by the “Lord Chamberlain’s Company ” of players during Shakespeare’s connection with it, and other plays that tradition assigns to him, excepting such as are found in the works of the old dramatists and in accessible miscellaneous collections.

Such a work as is thus described would be valuable in itself as adding to our knowledge of the Elizabethan drama; but if it shows the growth of our poet’s mind under the schooling of the public demands upon the pen of one who was called the Johannes Factotum, or presiding genius, of the London Stage, it must rise much higher in our estimation. That Shakespeare was the factotum of the period we have the well-known assertion of his enemy Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit: —

“ There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast, out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country.”

These words, though the utterance of a profligate literary adventurer, show plainly that, m 1592, when they were written, Shakespeare was rising in public esteem rapidly enough to make less capable and less reputable men envious and malicious. They brought friends to him, one of whom assured the public that the young author was civil in his demeanor, upright in dealing, and of a “facetious grace in writing that approves his art.”

It is plain that if Shakespeare was so near to being a monopolist of dramatic production, and was so useful to the players so soon after his arrival in London, he must have done much work of which the reader of the ordinary collections of his plays gets no intimation whatever. It is Mr. Simpson’s belief that this preliminary work was his dramatic schooling, and that a study of it will give a new view of his life and character. It is, of course, impossible for critics to agree upon any general identification of the passages which were produced by the young playwright during this period of apprenticeship, and every student must and will balance the evidence which Mr. Simpson adduces in favor of his assertions.

The plays here given are, The Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, Nobody and Somebody, Hisrrio-Mastix, The Prodigal Son, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, A Warning for Fair Women, and Faire Em. Mr. Simpson considers lightly that during its palmy days “ the English stage was the most important instrument for making opinions heard,” and was used by the greatest writers for making their comments upon public doings and persons. This will be readily granted. The rival theatres would be expected to represent opposing views just as rival journals now do, and it is a fact that the two principal companies—the Lord Chamberlain’s and the Lord Admiral’s — actually did exhibit distinctive traits after 1594. Shakespeare was connected with the former, to which he gave a character noteworthy for the artistic, philosophic, and political unity of the lessons it inculcated, while the other company, directed by Henslowe and Alleyn, catered for present popularity at the expense of consistency. This marked division of the metropolitan stage did not exist before 1594, but even before Greene’s attack upon Shakespeare the rising dramatist must have been extraordinarily active in work of a comparatively humble nature, which was preparing him to give to the plays of the Lord Chamberlain Company the traits which they received at his hands. While, therefore, the whole of the Elizabethan drama may properly he called Shakespeare’s School, as Mr. Simpson says, the name is eminently appropriate when applied to those plays assigned to him by tradition or acted by his company of players. Many of these plays are already available to the student, and it is the purpose of the book before us to give more of them to him.

Our space will not permit us to present the reasons, more or less conclusive, for connecting each of these plays with the name of Shakespeare, and we must content ourselves with pointing out the nature of the volumes without giving more than a suggestion of the variety of their contents.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.

The Goethe literature has already shown signs of rivaling the vast number of books that have been written about Shakespeare in English and German, arid it is especially in his native country that the modern poet has received almost innumerable tokens of the vast interest that he has inspired in enthusiastic students. Yet in foreign parts, although naturally to a much smaller extent, some excellent volumes have been written concerning the life or works of this great man. The book under investigation⁸ to-day is deserving of warm praise. It is written by a Frenchman, a young man, one of the new writers who by their scholarship and literary skill do their part so well in maintaining, or, it might he said, in renewing, the palmy days of French letters. Under the empire there was a lull in the production by new hands of books of substantial worth, while the market for light literature was continually open. Taine, Bréal, About, and others had finished their academic education shortly before Napoleon III. began to rule, and they have had no successors until within the last few years. Of course it is easy to see nothing but evil in the empire, and it has become a favorite object of abuse on the part of a good many people who might have praised it if it had lasted till today; but this coincidence about the absence of serious literary work is surely worthy of note.

Lichtenberger’s book is a serious study of Goethe’s lyric, poetry. This is certainly a tempting subject, for even those who most wonder at Goethe’s fame, who do not admire intensely his plays, excepting Faust, and who cannot read his novels, — and the number is not small, — acknowledge, if they can read German at all, the wonderful and indescribable charm of his shorter poems. Here he was easily master, and we notice no gap between his aim and the execution. It would be extravagant to call him a faultless poet, but it would be hard to find one Who had an exactor knowledge of the technique. of versification, of the melodic and harmonic arrangement of words and sounds; in short, a more delicate perception of form. Yet in his prose writing there is but little of this; indeed, at times it is the opposite fault that is most conspicuous. His Goetz von Berlichingen is a series of detached scenes; the Elective Affinities lacks case and grace of construction; and the list of faults might be easily extended. This, it will be noticed, is speaking merely of the, form in which he wrote, and in no way presumes to criticise the wisdom of so much of Goethe’s writing, His poems, then, are a tempting subject for a writer, because they call only for praise, and their great variety and biographical obscurity keep the commentator busy. The field has been thoroughly gone over by countless German scholars, but Lichtenberger, while he has made full use of the material they have accumulated, has found plenty of dark points on which he has thrown light.

In laying out his task, Lichtenberger divided the poems, according to their form, into songs, odes, ballads, epigrams, and elegies. This is the usual and evidently the natural division, with the additional advantage that it runs very nearly parallel with the classification a biographical division of the subject would require. As the author points out, Goethe wrote no elegies in his youth, and no odes after he was forty years old. The only form of verse he never abandoned was the song, and the songs he wrote at different periods are here discussed in their chronological order. There is nothing more interesting than Lichtenberger’s neat classification of his subject, and his thorough treatment of it. It is not necessary to linger over the early love poems, —those addressed to Friederika and Lili ; not because they lack interest, but the personal relations they express are better known to those familiar with Goethe’s biography than are some of the obscurer points which Lichtenberger makes plain when he comes to speak of other verses. Certainly the reader who cares for Geothe’s biography will find new material in the chapter devoted to Frau von Stein, as well as in those devoted to the poet’s earlier loves.

With regard to the few scattered poems to be found in Wilhelm Meister, Lichtenberger says, after mentioning the beautiful lines beginning, “ Ueber alien Gipfeln,” that “it is the music of the lines which distinguishes also the poems inserted by Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister. It would seem as if before going to Italy to abandon rhyme, the Lied, the poetry of the North for many years, he had wished to condense into a few pieces its purest essence, its most delightful charm.”He does not, the author goes on to say, “distribute his poems by chance, mal à propos, to actors whom nature has not inclined to song. All the Lieder, except Philim’s song, belong to two mysterious beings, who represent, in this picture of life, idle contemplation, melancholy reverie, consuming passion which does not betray its object; they are the Harper and Mignon.” He then goes on to a completer analysis of the poems beginning, “ Kennst du das Land,” and “ Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt.” noticing, among other things, the sound of ei, and its predominance in Goethe’s plaintive poems.

The chapter on the Roman Elegies is excellent. In speaking of the form in which they are written, Lichtenberger points out the unsatisfactoriness of all modern, or at least all German, imitation of classical metres, on account of the prosodical difficulties ; and he says, what all will agree with, that the Elegies do not, like the Lieder, give the impression of faultless work. The spondee is not to be found in German, and Goethe has almost always replaced it by the trochee, to the evident detriment of the verse. The dactyl, too, the only other foot to be found in hexameters and pentameters, is almost equally rare, for the unaccented syllables have by no means the same value, as in Zufrieděnhěit, for example. But yet, Lichtenberger goes on, “when we consider the Roman Elegies, the general tone of the work, the breath of antiquity that inspires them, we see no form more appropriate than that of the distich. That is what Goethe felt even thirty years later, when he said to Eckermann, ‘ There are great and mysterious effects dependent on the difference of poetic forms. If the ideas of my Roman Elegies were to be translated into the tone and metre of Byron’s Don Juan, they would seem truly diabolical.’ ” The reader will also find some admirable remarks on a more delicate question which is called up by the unconventional nature of these poems.

Then Lichtenberger goes on to discuss the Venetian Epigram and the Xenien, and it is while speaking of these last-named attacks on German literature that he has made an important contribution to their comprehension. The poem Der Deutsche Parnass had always been a stumbling-block in the way of those who sought the interpretation of Goethe’s poems. It was evidently a parable, but its exact meaning had been lost. It was supposed to be an attack on the exaggerations of the Sturm und Drang period; but this explanation hardly held water, and it was left for this brilliant and painstaking commentator to heat the Germans on their own ground. He came across an epigram of Gleim’s against the authors of the Xenien. This epigram, it would seem, was taken by Goethe as a text for his longer poem, which was an ironical attack against himself and Schiller. Many of the lines it contains are to be found, in less smooth form, in the Antixcnien, and there are countless other indications of the sources whence Goethe drew his inspiration. Yet the irony was too subtle for detection. Goethe felt sure that Körner and Humboldt would see through the veil; but they did not. Lichtenberger modestly rejects all credit for this discovery, which he says was made by accident; but accidents of that kind happen only to careful students.

In going on to discuss Goethe’s later elegies, his Alexis and Dora and the New Pausanias, the commentator shows his sensitiveness to what is best in poetry, and his warm admiration for the work of the German author. Surely, the Alexis and Dora is one of the best of modern imitations of the antique, both in the nature of the subject and the impersonality of the treatment. Lichtenberger shows the same appreciative merit when he speaks of the ballads. He points out clearly the distinction between the work of Goethe and that of Schiller in this form : “ If a romance is a tale narrated after the manner of a lyric and a ballad, a Lied clothed in an epic or dramatic dress, we can say, generally speaking, that Schiller wrote romances and Goethe ballads. The first would fully develop what he had to say, the other employed a more restricted method; one narrates in a clear and uniform way, while the other is occasionally mysterious and rugged. Schiller’s style is free, brilliant, and copious; Goethe’s, delicate, supple, concise. . . . He alone has the secret of happy, suggestive allusions, of enchanted images called up by a single word, of feelings expressed in the rhythm and the verse,” Moreover, he adds, “ Schiller did not choose a subject for itself, for the poetic interest he found in it, and the grace he promised to give it, but for the idea, the moral sense, the noble and great truth of which this matter might become the transparent veil. The moral of all these romances is either expressed directly by the poet, or clearly indicated by the dénoûment : The Diver, like Horace’s ode to Virgil’s ship, not to tempt the gods by foolhardy undertakings; the Ring of Polycrates, like the ode to Grorphus, not to count.on perfect happiness: — ... ' Nil est ab omni Parte beatum.' ”

And so it is with the other ballads. With Goethe it is different; save in some rare cases, when he has been led by the example of his friend, he has remained faithful to his own nature and his poetic instinct. “ He gladly gives himself up to his subject, and invites us to do the Same. He prefers to create rather than to instruct; he seeks to cast illusion into our eyes rather than to give counsel to our minds. He rules the imagination instead of moving and directing the heart.” After this general discussion, Lichtenberger goes on to speak of the bestknown of the ballads, pointing out their distinctive qualities. It is not necessary to follow each step of the critic in his study of Goethe’s poetry. He leaves no division of his subject untouched, and he shows the same intelligence in treating of the personal questions — the women to whom the sonnets were addressed, the identity of Suleika in the Westœstlicher Divan — as in the more purely literary matters.

In his final summing up, Lichtenberger points out how many things there are about which other poets have written that Goethe did not sing ; how, neglecting religious song, the description of nature, the glorification of friendship or patriotism, he devoted himself principally to one subject, — love. “ Almost all the Lieder, the Roman Elegies, the sonnets, the odes, the chief books of the Divan, are consecrated to the painting of this feeling. If love was the most familiar subject of his poetry, as it was the most persistent passion of his life, it must he confessed that there was nothing more favorable to his poetic genius. ... His Leipzig songs described the artificial emotions of youth, but the Strassburg Lieder and those of Seseuheim and Frankfurt expressed the keen and deep emotions of a really touched heart. In the odes and the Roman Elegies he celebrated the worship of visible form and beauty, and in his sonnets that of a purified, ideal, almost mystic love.” This diversity of feeling, he adds, “ seems to lessen the unity of the impression which we always like to perceive in those great men we admire; but yet it is no less keen and penetrating in his poems than in those of Horace or Petrarch, Musset or Byron. He has especially the gift of grace, of rhythm, of beauty. He enchants us when he speaks of suffering; he pacifies us when he describes the storms of the heart; he delivers us from the emotions he awakens in us.”

Students of Goethe will find this volume a most delightful aid to a better understanding of the poet. There are few books on this subject at once so sympathetic and so full of valuable information. It is a real credit to French scholarship.