mine. One hardly knows where to choose among the beauties it contains-the story of the wreck and the voyage in the open boats, the story of the ghost-tiger (not new but perfectly told), the appearance of Mr. Parsell, and some scores of descriptive passages. One of these last will make, perhaps, the best specimen :

The berg rose out of the level forest by the river, and to Colet it was anomalous. It was an isolated mass of white limestone, a lofty island in the ocean of jungle. Its pale cliffs fell sheer to the green billows. Its summit was flat, but was so near to the clouds that its trees were but a dark undulating strip. Its walls, when glimpses from below through breaks in the roof of the forest could be found, appeared to overhang, but there were scarves and girdles of green on their bare ribs. An eagle soaring athwart its loftier crags was a drifting mote. Stalactites were pendent before the black portholes of caves in upper stories, like corbels over the outlooks of a castle of the sagas. If the number of those dark apertures meant anything, then the berg was hollow, was honeycombed with cavities. This enormity was not inviting, even in a morning light; not in such a land as that. The unexplored dungeons of such a castle might hide anything.

To my mind this otherwise perfect paragraph contains one 'momentary false notein the seventh sentence. But, even if my judgment is right, it is no more than momentary: it does not alter the effect of a description which Conrad could no more have written than Mr. Tomlinson could write The Secret Sharer.

After some aberrations, spaced out over an unduly long period, Miss Romer Wilson has returned to her earlier promise and almost fulfilled it-which is a great deal to say. Greenlow has some nonsense but more sense and it has also a little indescribable drop of something magical, of something, however minute the drop may be, that has not been distilled in literature before. It is the story of Jillian Holt, a Yorkshire girl with a little farm in the valley of Greenlow. She is persuaded into love by her cousin Jim, a" bad hat," who is an engineer in Sheffield. Jillian, if I read Miss Wilson rightly, is man-ripe and would like to yield to Jim but will not, because of her sister and many other intangible things, unless he marries her. There comes into the valley a visitor from London who falls in love with her and tries to take her away from Jim. One side of her answers to him, the other to her first love. She is wounded by Jim's unwillingness to fulfil her condition, though he excuses it by his own uselessness. She has a decided character but she cannot help standing aside while the two men struggle for her. And, throughout the book, she is plentifully and boisterously kissed by both.

It is really in the headlong and exuberant succession of these kisses that Miss Wilson shows her genius. They neither cloy nor disgust. I have made no statistical abstract but there are, at a moderate guess, some hundreds of them, and not one, I think, that does not further the story. Mr. D. H. Lawrence wrote a book called Women in Love. It contained some remarkable things but not so much, in the whole of it, relevant to that important theme as could be found in any twenty pages of Greenlow. Jillian is a woman in love, though with whom remains debatable after the last page has been turned. Not every woman, I daresay, is like Jillian, but she has in her something of every woman. Her story is told, too, with a natural ease and run of language almost beyond praise. If Miss Wilson can go one step further in her next book (or in her next but two) her position is secure. I cannot think of any other novelist under forty of whom half so much is to be expected.

When Mr. Wells had a vision of primitive man he saw him on the borders of Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire-what was, at that time, his own country. M. Anet sees him" in the place which is now known as the Eyzies de Tayac, on the banks of the Vézère, a few miles from the spot where it flows into the Dordogne." He has,

perhaps, the more convincing remains for a basis, the remains left by the CrôMagnon race. He has also given himself more room to fill in the details of the picture and, having these two advantages, he has made a very vivid picture indeed. Much of it is highly debatable. The initiation ceremony is drawn, of course, from many books on the life of savage races but we do not know that the Crô-Magnon people were savage in precisely that way. The analogy from peoples that are savage now to those that were savage once is a highly dangerous one, in spite of many suggestive parallels. There must be something that has kept them savage and this strain may disclose itself precisely in the traits and customs which we are too apt to consider characteristic of all undeveloped humanity. M. Anet has done nothing more than make a brilliantly persuasive guess based on the hints which our present inadequate knowledge gives him. Mr. Wells did the same thirty years or so ago. Let us not suppose that either tells the truth or that, short of supernatural means, the truth is at all discoverable. But M. Anet has made a most ingenious use of his inadequate hints and has written an interesting story.

The same phrase may be applied to the last three books on my list. I cannot tell what Mr. Beresford is doing with a book of which nothing more can be said. The hero of it behaves rather like a fool when he sacrifices himself (to the extent of acting as accessory after the fact) for a cousin of whom he has no reason to think anything good and whom he does not even like. His love-affair is mawkish beyond credibility. He confesses to an earlier affair and says "We had been fooling and I—I caught hold of her and kissed her cheek. I meant to tell you that, even if you hadn't asked.” This happens on board ship, but the recipient of the confidence, instead of immediately tipping Phillip into the sea, says (" in a small, still voice "): "All the same, I rather wish you hadn't kissed her even in fun." All the same-the story is eventful and well-knit and the interest is maintained. I wish Mr. Beresford had given me something better to say or else left me with nothing to say at all.

The author of Sweet Grapes, whose sex is unknown to me, though I suspect it, has also written a well-knit, eventful story but hardly demands the standards which one cannot help applying to Mr. Beresford. Novels of this competent sort grow increasingly rare, so that sometimes Mr. W. J. Locke and Mr. A. E. W. Mason seem to be the last of the mammoths. D.H. S. Nicholson is a likely successor and is to be recommended.

Miss Dorothy Sayers has done two things which are unusual in a detective story. She has invented a new method-which is, I am informed by competent medical opinion, reasonably credible—of inflicting death. She has also brought the breath of life into characterisation and dialogue. Her previous efforts in this genre have been readable: the latest is very good.

EDWARD SHANKS

LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM

THE HAUNTED CASTLE. A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. By EINO RAILO. Routledge. 25s.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Selected by K. BREUL. Heffers. 78. 6d.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BLAKE. By MAX PLOWMAN. Dent. 4s. 6d.

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. By J. B. PRIESTLEY. English Men of Letters Series. Macmillan. 58.

FLAUBERT'S YOUTH. By LEWIS PIAGET SHANKS. Johns Hopkins Press. $2.25 THE COURT MASQUE. By ENID WELSFORD. Cambridge University Press. 258.

F

"RENCH scholarship has decided to hold 1927 as the centenary date of the triumph of French Romanticism; and, since a considerable portion of Europe still considers Paris a literary centre, there has recently been much talk of Romantics and Romanticism, both in books and periodicals. Probably only the first two books on this list are directly" centenary " books, but the others, curiously enough, nearly all have a direct, and sometimes important, connection with Romanticism. That fact alone would serve to show how considerably we are all still concerned with Romanticism. But what is Romanticism? Of course, among the side-shows of this centenary, special booth has been appropriated to the famous twins, Romanticism and Classicism, descendents of the old family of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and first cousins to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To my humble and non-metaphysical mind any attempt to furnish an exact definition of Romanticism, valid on all occasions, is as senseless as trying to define poetry itself, or Infinity which by definition is indefinable. But Romanticism existed and still exists; and it would be hard luck on busy reviewers if they were compelled to abandon the use of such a convenient term. Abandoning any attempt to set up an absolute Romanticism, I shall here simply consider the books named above and their relation, or the relation of their subjects, to Romanticism.

Historically it is quite easy to give an account of Romanticism. In large and loose terms, it was a renewal of sensibility and the imagination, following a fairly long period which had been chiefly intellectual and rational. But this applies to almost every poetic renaissance, and if we try (as some theorists do) to identify Romanticism with imagination and sensibility, we are really only saying that nearly all European art and literature are Romantic. No, what we have to look for are the things which stimulated peoples' sensibility and kindled their imaginations between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries-roughly the crest of the "Romantic movement." The state of mind which responded to the stimulus of these objects and ideas is "Romantic." To us, who have passed out of that state of mind, who seek the same stimulus elsewhere, many of these "Romantic " objects and ideas seem strangely obsolete, absured, fantastic, mere bric-à-brac. Mr. Railo gives us long accounts of some of these in his well-documented book on the English "HorrorRomantics," who played a pretty considerable part in this revival, and were greatly admired and even copied by great writers like Byron, and Balzac and Flaubert in their

器

youth. Mr. Railo tells us about haunted castles, criminal monks, wandering Jews, blighted heroes and blooming heroines, ghosts and storms and midnight castle bells and blasted heaths, and a myriad other "properties " which for us have lost interest. But I am convinced that it is a profound mistake to suppose that even the wildest imitators of Maturin and Lewis, the most deplorable "Byronic" youths, were necessarily posers or foolish dupes. Schopenhauer comes to their aid with his " the world is my representation." All this motionless and dilapidated puppetry was once alive, not with a life of its own, but with the sensibility and imagination of men and women who found in it fascinating symbols for the expression of new and deep emotions. This is the world of ideality, of "subjective idealism," and it is quite absurd to laugh or sneer at it merely because the symbolism is outworn. (Nobody laughs at Homer's gods or Dante's cosmos, which for us are all dead symbols.) In any case, the same necessity for ideality remains, and no doubt our efforts (surprisingly feeble ones) to escape into a dream world of symbolical emotion and idea, will seem very funny to the twenty-first century, if it ever bothers to look at them. M. Duhamel put the dilemma of the artist pithily: "Accept or evade," i.e., realism or romanticism, describe life as it is or life as it might be.

Consequently I cannot share the scorn for those who are so merry at the expense of Mrs. Radcliffe, and all the other curious figures in Mr. Railo's book. And why drag in Jane Austen? There is no basis for comparison. The really dangerous line of attack against the Romantics is that they were often inferior artists, tasteless and uncontrolled. But even the absurd horror-novelists helped to renew the sensibilities of Europe; and if I had to choose between the kind of mind which expressed itself in The Mysteries of Udolpho and the kind of mind which produced Benjamin Franklin's preposterous Poor Richard, I should go for Udolpho every time. After all Mrs. Radcliffe was no fool and she had a vivid imagination; I rather like some of her pompous descriptions of scenery and one or two of her ghosts, while the stupendous purity of her heroines can surely be excused in a work of ideality. (Exactly the same trait occurs in Poe, whom everybody admires.)

Can there be any doubt, then, that Romanticism satisfied a very real need in people's minds? The necessity to "evade," to escape into an ideal world is only too obvious in Blake, whose peculiar imaginings Mr. Max Plowman tries to interpret in his study. The strongest and most hostile minds were affected by it, if only to the extent of satirising it. Mr. Priestley's monograph of Peacock, which is quite a little model of its kind, sensible and acute, brings this out. Peacock, like Landor, had a good deal of the eighteenth-century in him and with his "classic" dislike for excess spent much energy in satirising Romantic extravagance. Yet Mr. Priestley recognises, quite rightly, that there is a Romantic even in Peacock. We may put Nightmare Abbey aside as a parody of the Romantic novel, but I assume that Peacock meant Anthelia and Mr. Forester (in Melincourt) to be taken seriously. They are typical Romantic figures; and every one of Peacock's novels contains what the professors call "Romantic elements." That a satirist, a humorist, and a classicist like Peacock should show this curious antinomy is only one more proof of the strength of Romanticism. Even he could not avoid wholly the general trend of literature in his time.

But the most interesting and successful example of resistance to Romanticism is Gustave Flaubert, who, with Madame Bovary led the way out of Romanticism in France. (Anatole France likened him to a literary Saint Christopher, carrying French literature from Romanticism to Realism.) In his youth Flaubert was the wildest of Romantics. His curious early works, produced in great profusion, rival the maddest efforts of Monk Lewis. Professor Piaget Shanks has written a very close study of

Flaubert's youth, and shows how the great French novelist wrestled with himself and finally broke free from sick dreams and wild imaginings. Someone asked Flaubert: "Who was Madame Bovary?" And he replied: “ Madame Bovary, c'est moi." That novel is the most deadly criticism of the Romantic temperament which has yet appeared. What precisely is the weakness of which Romanticism dies? SaintBeuve says "le faux," which is true enough; but Flaubert goes deeper and says "seeing oneself as other than one is." The Romantic thinks himself (or herself) far superior in every way to what he really is; he imagines a compensatory world in which such a superior person is fully provided for; but he is not content to stop there. Either he falls into profound gloom because the real world will not square with his ideal world; or he tries to carry out his extravagant imaginations in real life. The whole tragedy is perfectly symbolised in the character of Madame Bovary; and after closing the book one feels that ideality of this intense sort is only safe within monastic walls and under the hand of a dogmatic Church much skilled in psychology. Those who only know the later Flaubert will find Professor Shanks's study very illuminating.

Romanticism, in all its modes and varieties, was not, of course, confined to England and France. In its origins it was nearly as much German as English. Mme de Staël's De l'Allemagne, which had an immense effect throughout Europe, created for her readers a fairy-tale Germany of sweet Teutonism which was firmly believed by many people outside Germany, until 1870. Mme. de Staël saw the Germany she wanted to see; her book is curious and more readable than is usually supposed. It was only partly her fault that her prose poetry was taken as fact. Yet there can be no doubt that German Romanticism was an important thing, nearly as important in its way as English Romanticism, and productive of nearly as many original geniuses. Professor Breul's volume of selections goes from Novalis to Heine and makes an excellent elementary handbook for those who wish to obtain a first knowledge of the range of the German Romantics.

Miss Welsford's book on The Court Masque is not connected with Romanticism, though masqueing was highly approved by the Romantics, who gave a last flicker of life to expiring carnival. Miss Welsford has written a very scholarly book, tracing the origins of the masque, its brief period of splendour, its relations to popular festivals, and its influence on the drama, particularly on The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. It would be absurd to try to criticise in a few lines a book so weighted with information and argument; I shall only add that I have read The Court Masque with interest and admiration, that I intend to re-read it, and that I warmly recommend it to all students of drama and dramatic literature.

RICHARD ALDINGTON