atonement and reconciliation was not necessarily a weaker workman than the Shakespeare who triumphed in Macbeth and Othello.

"Q" asks us to notice that every artist of the first class tires of repeating his successes, but never of repeating his experiments. Your inventive master never cares for a success but as a step to something further. What he achieves may be unworthy of his powers, but he is still trying: he has the divinest of discontent, discontent with achievement.

In point of fact, the workmanship of Cymbeline is masterly, and the final scene almost the last word in dramatic skill; nine-tenths of the weakness of Pericles is most likely not chargeable to Shakespeare at all. It must be remembered, too, that while Shakespeare was writing, the scenic resources of the stage were being steadily developed; moreover, the masque was coming more and more into fashion, both items to be reckoned with when we come to sum up his latest achievements.

The critic makes a valiant effort to vindicate Cymbeline from the heaped-up charges brought against it by Doctor Johnson; as "Q" says: "There is a truth of imagination, a truth of emotion, and a truth of fact." The fact that stands out about Cymbeline is the complete perfection of Imogen, “ the most adorable woman ever created by God or man.' When we start picking Cymbeline to pieces we find ourselves disheartened; Cymbeline is an inferior Lear, Iachimo an inferior Iago, Posthumus an inferior Othello; Cymbeline is constructed out of fragments, but what about the total effect? "Why on earth should it be a reproach against Cymbeline that in Lear Shakespeare did something better than this, in Othello something better than that, when out of

the inferior this and that he has built the incomparable Imogen?" Johnson made too much of the incongruities; "Q's" complaint lies complaint lies against the complexity of the plot.

In The Winter's Tale he asks us to believe that Shakespeare was attempting to work into one drama two different stories in two separate categories of Art; in a world where Nature mixes comedy with tragedy, Art must always be impatient of hard definitions; the fault lay not in Shakespeare's attempt to do this, but in the astounding carelessness which he showed. Why did he take no trouble to make Leontes' jealousy credible? Why bring in the naughty superfluity of the bear to polish off Antigonus, unless the Bear-pit at Southwark had a tame animal to let which the Globe used as a bait to draw the public? What possible difference could Autolycus make to the action? Why was the Recognition scene scamped? The truth is we never think of the total play, but ever of separate scene after separate scene, particularly the unapproachable one in which Florizel and Perdita find themselves the centre, being young and innocent and in love.

"Q's" first lecture on The Tempest is an admirable résumé of the controversy which has raged so long over the date of the play, reviving the strange story of the forger, J. P. Collier, and the misjudged Peter Conningham, and incidentally upsets the theory that The Tempest was written to celebrate the wedding of that wonderful woman, Elizabeth of Bohemia. "Q" then asks us, as usual, to test the play by its workmanship; first there is the identity between The Winter's Tale and The Tempest in stage devices, about a dozen of which are cited, but with how much greater skill Shakespeare works in The Tempest is evident

everywhere in Antigonus's counterpart, Gonzalo, for instance, for whom the critic has a very warm place in his heart, praising even his Utopian visions; in Ferdinand, who is an improvement on Florizel in every way, in the spirit of his wooing and his courage, and so on. Having convinced us that The Tempest resembles The Winter's Tale in dozens of ways, and improves on each one of them, he proceeds to prove that The Tempest came after it in point of time by repeating his phrase that every artist tires of repeating his successes, but never of renewing his experiments.

The theme which Shakespeare seeks to engraft upon his old ones is that of Reconciliation; the difficulty of presenting a complete story dwelling on this in two or three hours was almost heartbreaking; again and again it beats him. Suddenly, in The Tempest, he brings off the trick by marvellous stage-craft; is it likely that having succeeded he would turn back in The Winter's Tale to imitate old failures? Such an argument seems to me to clinch the matter, so far as it is important at all that we like to feel that Shakespeare left off on a top note. That it was written for the Court, and for a wedding, "Q" seeks to prove in his final lecture, by its resemblance to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "notion" of the play, and its position in the First Folio (a most ingenious theory!); he passes on to conjure up a vision of the first night most ably visualised, dwelling again on one of his favourite first principles to help us appreciate the storm and shipwreck: "If you are an artist and are setting out to tell the incredible, nothing will serve you so well as to open with absolute realism," quoting in happy illustration the opening sentence of Robinson Crusoe. Of the wonderful

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Miranda he refuses to say more than that Coleridge has expressed what we all feel of her, and that it is just in Shakespeare's creation of such a peerless girl that his genius vanishes and leaves us hopelessly foundered; he invented Lady Macbeth and Miranda, both to be acted by boys." The thought is in itself stupefying, and proves, if proof were needed, that it is folly to think of Shakespeare as limited by the conditions of his craft. Of Caliban he can find it in his heart to say: "If he were to come fawning into the room, our impulse would be to pat him on the head-Good old doggie! Good monster,' that would be the feeling," which is in itself a lightning flash of criticism, revealing exactly what excellent qualities "Q" brings to his art as a critic.

He notes as a curious point of similarity between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream that these two require to be acted by amateurs; "the professional never made any hand with either play." He asks us to believe that Prospero was no photograph of an individual, neither James I nor Shakespeare. "For in truth that is not the way of the imaginative artist; and if the reader will not take it from me he may take it from Aristotle." "Q" concludes his thesis by boldly declaiming that were the choice offered him "which of all the books ever written I would select—not the Odyssey, not the Aeneid, nor the Divine Comedy, nor Paradise Lost, nor Othello, nor Hamlet, nor Lear, but The Tempest should be mine. The Tempest forces diviner tears, tears for sheer beauty; we feel that we are greater than we know. So on the surge of our emotion is blown a spray, a mist-and its colours are wisdom and charity, with forgiveness, tender ruth for all men and women growing older, and perennial trust in young love."

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IV

ALICE MEYNELL AS CRITIC

WR

E must study other men's inventions in our closet, but need we now print our comments on them? Exposition, interpretation, by themselves are not necessary. But for controversy there is cause." So does Alice Meynell, herself one of the most polished of our prose writers and most mystically gifted of our poets, excuse herself for writing Hearts of Controversy. Whatever the excuse, whatever the cause, we cannot but feel thankful that she felt impelled to be controversial about Tennyson, Dickens, Swinburne, and the Brontës, for she sheds a clear light on each of these in her criticisms.

Her essay on Tennyson, for instance, is a precious gem, clear-cut, crystalline for all its poetic cadences; for Alice Meynell writes prose as a poet writes it, as her own beloved Francis Thompson wrote it.

"If there ever was a poet who needed to be ' parted,' it is he who wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally for all time, and who had both a style and a manner; a masterly style, a magical style, a too dainty manner; a noble landscape and in it figures something ready-made. . . . We have the style and the manner locked together at times in a single stanza, locked and yet not mingled . . . but the little nation of lovers of poetry . . . cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once majestic and magical in Tennyson. . . . How, valuing singleness of heart in the sixteenth century,

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