poet?" In his criticism of Browning's poetry our author at least once is tempted into a certain grotesqueness of statement, a fault of Browning which he does not allow us to forget, and quite overlooks the true significance of the poem in question. "The Flight of the Duchess," he writes, "is an expression of the longing for escape which is heard in Youth and Art, or in the tale of Jules and Phene. Go off to the gypsies, like the Duchess, or to a garret and live on love, or to some unsuspected isle in the far seas!' Go with your mate, your lover, and damn the consequences, for 'God's in his Heaven!'" (III, 371). Browning, if we mistake not, was more intent on ridiculing that from which the escape was made than in defending the escape. He had in mind a fad then too common in England of attempting to restore the lifeless customs of a dead past because they were thought aristocratic. Our author also seems to forget that this poem is put in the mouth of an eccentric character.

But to attempt to record all of the points on which we disagree with Mr. Elton is futile. They are few and widely scattered compared with those on which we are in accord, and perhaps are still fewer compared with those on which we have no decided opinion, and about which we are content to learn from his words of wisdom. For the most part we feel that he brings his message fresh from his reading; only now and then betraying a too implicit reliance on memory, as for instance, in his account of Landor's The Empress Catherine and Princess Dashkof he mistakes Dashkof for Catherine's lover (11, 36); or makes Browning's Ivan Ivànovitch kill his own wife instead of Dmitri's (III, 389); or has Eppie in Silas Marner chance "on the discovery of the long-murdered body" (IV, 268); or supposes the son in Byron's Werner really falls in love with the daughter of the victim (11, 167); or when he quotes Pope's line on Defoe as "Earless, on high, stands unabashed" (11, 138), instead of "Earless on high, stood unabash'd," as Pope wrote it.

Professor Elton is a critic with strong convictions, but not with prejudices. He approaches his subject with no passionate attachments to defend or inveterate antipathies to revenge. His remarks are everywhere characterized by the spirit of fairness, the desire

to present the truth with no personal bias; by a conservatism that seldom betrays him into such a sweeping and doubtful assertion as: "He [Byron] has affected the spirit of poetry more than any modern man except Shakespeare and Goethe, and on the whole he has deserved to do so "" (II, 181); by an inclination to find as much merit and praise as possible; and by no eagerness to linger over faults and scandals. His estimates strike home with a brevity and felicity of expression that startle and please.

The work is very readable, inspiring while it instructs, in a style that is terse, lucid, occasionally tinged with humor or irony, but never carried beyond the bounds of scholarly accuracy on a tide of unrestrained enthusiasm. We have found nothing in the work better than the chapter on Blake; we believe the author more at home with Tennyson than Browning, with Thackeray than Dickens; and admire without applauding his defence of Byron, Macaulay, and Arnold; while we suspect he does not entirely catch the purport and spirit of Carlyle and Newman. On the whole we prefer the first two volumes to the last two, but should not care. to lose any. We regret that the valuable notes at the end of each volume did not find a place at the bottom of their respective pages where they would be more serviceable, and that the author did not give us a separate bibliography instead of burying it in his notes. It is to be hoped that in the next issue of the work the separate indices in volumes II and IV will be combined. On the whole this is an excellent, much needed work that will not soon be superseded.

Cornell University.

L. N. BROUGHTON.

The American Novel.

By CARL VAN DOREN. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921.

Mr. Van Doren's work is not a series of biographical and critical studies of more or less eminent American novelists. It is, as it professes to be, "a chapter in the history of the American imagination." The term novel is consequently interpreted as including "long prose narratives in which the element of fact is on the whole less than the element of fiction," and the method is historical rather than critical. The result is the most valuable contribution

made in recent years to our apparatus for the study of American fiction.

Five of the ten chapters into which the book is divided deal with periods and tendencies: the romance that preceded Cooper, with its three subjects-the Revolution, the Settlement, and the Frontier; Cooper's successors in the romance of adventure; the blood and tears of the dime novelists and the domestic sentimentalists; an account of the rich variety of the productive decade 1880-1890; and a discussion of two reactions from realism-rococo romance toward the right and naturalism toward the left. Interspersed among these are chapters which bear the names of individual authors, who thus emerge as the great names in the history of the American novel. They are Cooper, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Howells, and Henry James. The preeminence of these five will be conceded by most readers; and Mr. Van Doren's comments on them will be found to be informing and acute. He reminds us that Cooper, whom fate chose to be "the principal romancer of the new nation," showed a tendency toward realism that is sometimes overlooked. "Cooper," he says, . . . " is not to be neglected as an historian. No man better sums up in fiction the older type of republican - rather than democrat - which established the United States. No one-unless possibly Irving-fixed the current heroic conditions of his day more firmly to actual places." Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, with which the American novel reached its maturity of art and which remains our supreme example of literary skill, Mr. Van Doren discusses convincingly. His comment on Howells and the realism of which he is our most notable exponent is illuminating. The distinction of writing the first American novel which may be called realistic in a modern sense belongs, he says, to Colonel John W. De Forest of Connecticut for his Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty.

Howells Mr. Van Doren regards as the most democratic of novelists. "Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne, both Democrats, could still never leave off complaining that democracy lacks the elements of saliency and color upon which they thought the prosperity of the novelist depends. What his predecessors shrank from, Howells ardently embraced, thoroughly satisfied to portray the plain universe which lay before him . . ." The "sudden, almost explosive, fame of Mark Twain," for which The Innocents Abroad

supplied the match, culminates, in the opinion of Mr. Van Doren, in Huckleberry Finn, a "glorious" book, which he contrasts with The Scarlet Letter as its only possible rival for first place in our fiction. It is a glorious book, in spite of its looseness of structure; and its value as a social satire-its portrayal of slavery from a contemporary point of view, for example is not always recognized. It is not so much hatred of kings that is the first article of Mark Twain's creed as hatred of every kind of oppression and a blazing espousal of the cause of the under dog. Witness his exhibition of the cruel futility of the Kentucky feud. But his picture of slavery in the little river town is tempered by an understanding of the institution as it actually existed.

Mr. Van Doren's style is agreeable, free from the smartness of paradox, and lighted by whimsically fresh and compact phrasing. He is probably not aware of an overuse of that latest fashion in tropes, gesture; we have Pathfinder's "grandiose gesture of surrender," a "gesture of sentimental asceticism" in Fanshawe, and Henry James's conception of "a romantic American gesture quaintly like that of Daniel Boone," which on the same page becomes "this ingratiating gesture." In both style and matter, however, the book is eminently satisfying. It whets the appetite for that promised further volume in which the same author proposes to discuss fully the American novel of the twentieth century. JOHN C. FRENCH.

The Johns Hopkins University.

CORRESPONDENCE

La Galerie du Palais1

66

(1) I did not overlook "the lack of liaison between scenes 9 and 10 of Act I." As Dorimant and Lysandre go off to dîner ensemble," Hippolyte and Florice come on, returning from the Galerie. There is no lack of liaison. (2) My omission of M. Roy's name was quite unintentional. (3) I cannot agree with Professor Lancaster that the author of the coup d'essai (102) must be the same as the imitator of Marino (100). The text, far from indicating this, indicates exactly the reverse. In line 98 the Libraire offers Dorimant two books, not one. Obviously one of them is by the imitator of Marino; and Dorimant having rejected it scornfully, the Libraire, referring to the other, says:

Ce fut son coup d'essai que cette comédie.

1Cf. MLN. XXXVI, 427-430.

I do not profess to have proved that the date is 1633. I do suggest, however, that the internal evidence supports this date, or, in any case, does not invalidate it; and, as to the external evidence, there seems to be none whatever to suggest 1632 rather than 1633. That line 105 refers to Corneille himself seems substantiated by the poem quoted on p. xlvi. Moreover, the year 1633 fits in well with the suggestion that the imitator of Marino is Saint Amant, although Théophile would fit in almost as well, possibly, and Malleville even better than either. The assumption of 1633 as the date of the Galerie, the assumption that the "coup d'essai" is Mélite and that either Saint-Amant, Tristan, or Malleville is the imitator of Marino, fit in together. The triple assumption makes an hypothesis, which is not contradicted by any facts that have come to light. T. B. RUDMOSE-BROWN.

Trinity College, Dublin.

A REPLY

1. Professor R.-B. evidently confuses liaison des scènes with unity of place; there is certainly no liaison between these scenes. 3. I repeat that there is no reason for assuming that in this passage Corneille had any special play or author in mind. He was writing what his audience could understand; he was not interested in creating puzzles for future philologists. But if he did have some one in mind, it is far more likely to have been Scudéry than himself, for the person to whom he refers is accused of imitating Marino. Professor R.-B. seeks to avoid this difficulty by explaining that two authors are referred to, but the son of line 102 must refer to the person discussed in the preceding line. This is not only my interpretation, but that of several Frenchmen to whom I have submitted the question. Professor R.-B.'s whole argument falls to the ground with his misinterpretation of this construction and there remains no reason for believing that the play was written in 1633 rather than 1632.

H. C. LANCASTER.

MILTON'S Comus, 93-94

In Mod. Lang. Notes xxxv, 441, and XXXVI, 414, Professor John A. Himes puts aside all the usual interpretations of "the star that bids the shepherd fold" in Milton's Comus 93-4, on the ground that the "evening star (or planet) does not at folding time appear at the top of heaven"." He proposes for the single star the constellation Leo (with its bright star Regulus), because "in May, the critical month for flocks, the constellation Leo is in the zenith shortly after sunset." He adds, as the lion, ac