Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen
is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from the Quartos' resolved lines—to consider only that which is a matter of simple enumeration—can be taken quite apart from the soundness or unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the development of this theme as play after play is examined.
It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is not printed as he should be printed—that is, with "the clear and uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"—and that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of Sejanus he finds that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe (with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.
Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse. We can but conclude with wishing Shakespeare's Versification a fuller index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of the text.
Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in imitation of Love in the Valley? She thinks it too well known to make quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste; yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that haste and to hope for better work.
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By Irving Babbitt. Houghton Mifflin Company. 17s. net.
Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise. Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.
Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good, and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a philosopher and not a poet.
Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians, in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America. It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby. Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.
What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest at the door of the foundling hospital.