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

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.

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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

W

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,

splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the eighteenth, how shall we long disregard these virtues in the nineteenth-century master for the insignificant reasons of his bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness. . . or what not?" Who would disparage a poet who can write :

On one side lay the ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full?

"His blank verse is often too easy; it slips by, without the friction of the movement of vitality; ... he shows us that of all merits ease is the most dangerous, but ease in him does not mean that he has any unhandsome, slovenly ways. . . . In the first place, the poet with the welcome style and the little unwelcome manner, he is, in the second place, the modern poet who withstood France." Not the Elizabethans were more insular. We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. "Tennyson has more imagination than imagery. His homely unscenic scenery makes his vision fresh; but he is equally fresh with the things that others have outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves. . . in his horns of elfland' there is the remoteness and light delirium of rapturous and delicate health. . . . There is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again.

"Tennyson is an eminently all-intelligible poet. . . . Where he hesitates his is the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. It has been said that midway between the student of material science and the mystic, Tennyson wrote and thought according to an age that wavered between the two minds, and that men have now taken one way or the other. Is this true? The religious question that arises upon experience of death

has never been asked with more sincerity than by him. If In Memoriam represents the mind of yesterday, it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. . . In so far as the poem attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of human anguish and intellect; I say intellect advisedly; he doesn't slip into the errors of a Coleridge, whose senses were certainly infinitely and transcendently spiritual, but who told a silly story in The Ancient Mariner (the wedding guest might rise a sadder, but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man), or those of Wordsworth, who imagined that grass would not grow where a stag had died. Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack on our reason and our heart as this. . . . But he is, before all, the poet of landscape; the sense of hearing, as well as the sense of sight, has never been more greatly exalted than by Tennyson; his own especially is the March month —his 'roaring moon.' His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and storms; his was a new apprehension of Nature, an increase in the number of our national apprehensions in Nature.

"Tennyson, the clearest-headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little foppery we know of in him, that walking delicately, like Agag; wild, notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish; notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat misses the mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers are his-wild winds, wild hearts, wild lights, wild eyes!"

We may not agree with Mrs Meynell's estimate of Tennyson any more than we agree with her on the subject of Dickens, but we can scarcely withhold