rates the two poets, as the following expressions will indicate: L'irréductible contraste sera, nous le verrons, dans les tempéraments” (P. VII). Une chose est certaine, c'est que, comme le remarque son biographe et disciple favori, Hebbel n'avait point la fantasie légère d'un Goethe ou d'un Shakespeare: il lui manquait cette mobilité divine, cette ironie souveraine etc. . . . . Ce qui le sépare de Goethe, c'est toute la distance du sourire hellénique au sérieux germanique (P. 837). Thus the author provides his own corrective for wrong inferences that might possibly be drawn from such passages as the one discussed above.

For each of the collections of poems the author gives an analysis of the poet's language, his metaphors, vocabulary etc., reserving, as has been said, the treatment of the versification for a complete investigation at the end. In discussing the collection of 1842 he comments on the relatively large number of abstract words in Hebbel's vocabulary, and indicates in the succeeding pages (369 f.) that his verse is somewhat wanting in sensuous elements. En fait de couleurs, n'apparaissent guère dans ce lyrisme que la lueur vive de la flamme ou le rideau épais des ténèbres. . . . . Certaines de ces métaphores ne manquent pas de fraîcheur, on ne peut refuser à d'autres de la simplicité et de la force; mais ou sont celles qui révéleraient le sens de la couleur et l'amour du pittoresque? Hebbel's chief art, he thinks, lies in his power of describing movement, action, i. e., even in his lyric verse in the qualities of the dramatist. His language is moins colorée et pittoresque que construite pour l'analyse psychologique et la dialectique dramatique (P. 372). L'originalité de ce lyrisme.... ne consiste pas en beautés extérieures et sensibles (P. 374). Now there is no doubt that the power of lyric poetry to express emotion does not depend on its so-called picturesqueness, or its plastic qualities, not to mention the frequency of color allusions or any other thing that may be counted or weighed. "The lyrics of Schiller's youth show relatively more frequent resort to visual impressions than do Shakespeare's sonnets and poems. Byron, as far as examined, is about on a par with Shakespeare, while Goethe, strange to say, falls far below the average" (Gubelmann: Studies in the Lyric Poems of Hebbel, Yale University Press, 1912, P. 78). Professor Brun might legitimately consider this another striking similarity between Goethe and Hebbel-if only it were true of Hebbel, as he seems to think. The view he gives countenance to here is at variance with the results of a careful actual count. Gubelmann, whose work on this subject is, as far as I can find, not mentioned in the bibliography, has shown, particularly in his Chapter III, on colors, that Hebbel's language in his lyric poems is by no means wanting in color. The very opposite is in fact true, and Gubelmann concludes: "It is safe

to assume on the basis of our examples and illustrations from Hebbel that he approaches the modern poets in his constant resort to visual media (op. cit. P. 79).

Hebbel's personality was complex and full of contradictions. He himself frankly recognized the warring elements in his nature. His critics early began to characterize him and his works in terms that seemed little short of being mutually exclusive, so notably Julian Schmidt. While some exhaust their vocabulary in censure, and some in praise of him, most of those who write about him find it difficult to avoid the appearance of self-contradiction. But the real contradiction lies in the subject. Professor Brun, it seems to me, is successful in his treatment here. He neither suppresses anything nor does he overstress anything. He would not, as we have seen, commit himself to Tibal's view, that Hebbel's personality was peu sympatique. Yet he does not, as for example on page 614, fail to mention some traits of that personality to which such a term might apply. Perhaps the following sentences (P. 615) contain as good a brief summary of his estimate as any: "Cet être noble et tendre se fit une réputation de grossièreté par l'intransigeance de ses gestes. Non seulement ses biographes, mais sa correspondance, temoignent d'un coeur foncièrement bon, secourable et sans rancune." In short, the author's description of Hebbel as a human being is in the same tone of fairness, comprehensiveness, and sanity as his characterization of the poet.

Even at the risk of prolonging this review unduly, I wish to quote a few sentences from the author's summary of his special study of Hebbel's versification (P. 816). He compares the poet first with himself, then with other German lyrists. Nous le voyons, armé de ses seules dispositions naturelles, adopter d'abord les rythmes libres, puis cultiver tour à tour le genre populaire et les formes savantes; dans le recueil des Gedichte son originalité s'affirme et ses poésies nous émeuvent davantage par leurs harmonies profondes que par leur perfection formelle; le recueil des neue Gedichte nous montre son souci croissant de beauté; le caractéristique l'intéresse moins, sa préocupation de l'élément formel grandit; de 1848 à 1863, la technique s'efforce de devenir classique et déploie son maximum d'habilité et de souplesse dans les cadres les plus simples et les plus réguliers; l'inspiration, par contre, n'est pas toujours en progrès, mais lorsque, dans certaines ballades, dans quelques lieds, et surtout dans les émouvantes confessions personnelles des derniers mois, le fond et la forme s'accordent et sont a la même hauteur, la maîtrise de Hebbel poète lyrique remonte a son apogée et ajoute les plus beaux fleurons à sa couronne de joyaux.

Professor Brun agrees with Fischer that rhyme was a weakness with Hebbel. And in estimating him finally as a versifier he

to only repudiates a comparison with Goethe and Heine, he Daces him below Novalis and Hölderlin in the dons musicaux 2. 817).

This book as a whole can be heartily welcomed by students of Hebbel. His enemies may quote it in part, but his friends may take it as a whole. Even those of us who have never questioned, with the poet, whether his great talent was lyric or dramatic, can be well satisfied with this further indication that the fruits of his toil are being valued more and more beyond the limits of his native land.

Randolph-Macon Woman's College

T. M. CAMPBELL

THE HISTORY OF HENRY FIELDING, by Wilbur L. Cross. 3 volumes. Yale University Press, 1918.

In the title of this biography Professor Cross does himself the pleasure of imitating that of his hero's masterpiece, and in the Preface he intimates that Fielding called Tom Jones a "history" because it was to appear as a biography "that places in the proper social background all the incidents in the life of a man essential to knowing him, in conjunction with a sufficient account of the persons who bore upon that life for good or evil." It may or may not be worth while to question this explanation, so far as concerns Tom Jones. Mr. Cross, at any rate, gives a quite different one in another mood, telling us (ii, 161) that the novel was so called because “many of its characters were drawn from real men and women," and "many of its incidents had come within [the author's] observation." In fact neither reason is either certain or necessary, since the ordinary use of "history" as the equivalent of "story" was a sufficient explanation of the title-page to every eighteenth-century reader. But this is by the way. Certainly Mr. Cross's History of Fielding undertakes to place all the incidents of Fielding's life "in the proper social background," and, in general, to do what used to be implied in entitling a biography from the "Life and Times" of its subject; and it does this with extraordinary thoroughness, clearness, and sustained narrative energy. To those familiar with the same writer's Life of Sterne it is almost suficient to say that he has produced a companion biography worthy of the earlier work, but even more obviously the fruit of long and affectionate research. And the Yale Press, issuing A volumes on the William McKean Brown Foundation, has Ced the quality of appropriately sumptuous form.

yogre, for instance, "The History of the two Children in the Wood," www of two Modern Adventurers," "History of the Unfortunate The Princely History of Crispin and Crispianus," not to go sling's own period,

It would be ungracious to complain that an endowed printer made possible a too tempting liberality in space. The theme of Fielding and his art suggests "God's plenty" to one who treats of him, and the length and versatility of his career give scope for detailed study of certain aspects of his age which one is grateful to find so amply fulfilled. In particular, Mr. Cross's researches in the period of Fielding's work for the stage, and again in his period as a publicist, properly expand the biography beyond what the mere student of Fielding the novelist would anticipate. Yet it is also true that even these sections, and certainly the work as a whole, are longer than need required. In part this is due to a fondness for leisurely periphrastic synopses of one or another portion of Fielding's work, where the passage either might be assumed to be familiar, or might better be rehearsed in his own words. Mr. Cross seems to think it more elegant to paraphrase, somewhat in the manner of a British reporter, than to quote:

"To this picture were given, said Fielding, various interpretations. Some readers thought the ass symbolized the author himself. . . . . Again, he had heard it suggested that the Jesuit stood for the old Chevalier. But all these resemblances to particular persons were, Fielding avowed, fanciful. He hoped that no offence would be taken at the emblem, for none was intended." (ii, 68.)

Of this the most remarkable instance is the elaborate retelling of the immortal account of Parson Adams' visit to Parson Trulliber (i, 329); any reader who was forgetful of this would be most unlikely to peruse Mr. Cross's book.

We are here concerned with a deep-seated, though no very important, matter of taste; and it may be that some light is thrown on it by a passage in Mr. Cross's Preface to the late Professor Lounsbury's work on the Life and Times of Tennyson, where the amazing statement is måde that the author's "mastery of style" places him among the "foremost prose writers of recent times." One would have said that all scholars had agreed in admiring the acute and stimulating character of Professor Lounsbury's criticism, and at the same time in lamenting that he seemed to find it necessary to make his writings of something like twice the length which the material demanded, and to indulge himself rather too freely in a kind of juvenile mannerism of ponderous triviality. To students of literary influences it may, then, be a matter of some interest to find in this History of Fielding not merely the familiar method of agreeable redundancy, but sometimes such a passage as the following, in the veritable Lounsbury manner:

"Scott] had reached the last chapters of Rob Roy before he saw that if Francis Osbaldistone was to be rewarded by the hand of Diana Vernon a fortune must be found for the young gentleman. As it happened, the only way to give him a fortune was to make him the heir to his uncle Sir Hildebrand. But unfortunately several strong, healthy sons of the old knight were still living.

There were, I think, five or six of them. The number, whatever it was, did not daunt Scott. One by one he rid his plot of them, letting them die a violent death or quietly in bed, until they were all gone and the novel could conclude." (iii, 207.)

It is also of the essence of this method to introduce conjecture into positive history, because of its usefulness in filling in details where the known facts provide only outlines. Mr. Cross does this with perfect candor, not confusing the known and the guessed; yet the total impression is not always such as a scholarly conscience can approve. The identifications of anonymous authorship are frequently of this character. Quoting from the Jacobite's Journal a sufficiently ordinary passage on the death of Thomson, Mr. Cross comments that "this good feeling, finely expressed," shows "the unmistakable mark of Fielding's hand." (ii, 65.) The unknown authors of various papers in the Covent-Garden Journal are guessed with a kind of intimation that there is more in the guess-work than can be proved. "It is hardly more than conjecture to say that W. W. conceals Arthur Murphy." "Again, it would be mere conjecture to identify Benevolus with Dr. Ranby." A review of Gibbs' translation of Osorio's History of the Portuguese "may have been prepared by the translator himself." An elegy on Prince Frederick, surely such as might have been penned by almost any versifier of the period, "appears" to show "the imagery of a Christopher Smart;"-it will be noticed how the margin of safety is subtly increased by the indefinite article. After such identifications as these, one is disarmed by the ingenuous admission, "The identity of the persons whom we have met has not been always quite determined." Again, Mr. Cross repeatedly discerns Fielding's own hand with the aid of his fondness for the antiquated third person "hath," and thereafter depreciates the whole process by the cautious reminder that "Fielding was not quite alone in employing obsolescent forms of the verb." The fact is, of course, that such identifications depend very greatly upon the indefinable processes of a competent reader who is saturated with the manner of the person and the period concerned; and so far as Mr. Cross invites us simply to trust him on that ground, few would be disposed to refuse to do so.

These are minor matters. The most important aspect of the History is the question of the total impression of Fielding's personality, both in itself and as expressed in his novels, as related to current critical opinion. This is Mr. Cross's own view as to his principal achievement, and he admits that he began the work with a single prepossession, "that the author of Tom

2 "The goodness of his heart, which overflowed with benevolence, humanity, universal charity, and every amiable virtue, was best known to those who had the happiness of his acquaintance," etc.