A SUBJECT-INDEX TO THE POEMS OF EDMUND SPENSER by Charles Huntington Whitman, Professor of English in Rutgers College. Yale University Press, 1918. In his Subject-Index to the Poems of Edmund Spenser, Professor Charles H. Whitman has brought within the limits of a handbook a very large amount of useful information conveniently arranged for ready reference. The book is a good deal of a concordance, something of a dictionary, and a bit of an encyclopaedia; for one finds among its alphabetically listed items not only words that Spenser uses but such general topical headings as Sports and Pastimes, Agriculture, Church Offices, Astronomy, etc., with cross-references to more specific entries. As Professor Whitman has recognized, it is hard to name a book so variously useful; Subject-Index is certainly not satisfactory. It is to be regretted that Professor Whitman, having gone so far, did not go a step farther and give to his book something of the character of a variorum. Where opinions vary so widely as they do in interpreting Spenser's allegory, the more or less confident interpretations of the better known commentators would have had considerable interest, if only in emphasizing the tot sententiae. In his reading of the riddles of the Fairy Queen Professor Whitman is usually conservative; but his conservatism has here and there perhaps made him ignore interesting identifications. He retains, for example, the old equation of Satyrane with Sir John Perrot but finds no place for Padelford's opinion that Cranmer, or possibly Latimer, is here figured. On the other hand, while accepting the customary view that Duessa is Mary Queen of Scots, he says nothing of the time-honored identification of Orgoglio with Philip II. A good many other cases of omissions might of course be cited to show that the compiler made a loose application of his principle that allegorical interpretations should be admitted whenever he found "sufficient evidence to support them." Where, as in the case of Sir Calidore and Mirabella, two identifications are given, it would have been well to cite authorities. If it is not captious to criticise further so useful a book as the Subject-Index, one might express a regret that Professor Whitman takes no account of the small body of Spenser's prose. Accordingly, the Index contains no mention of the Areopagus, and under Rosalind there are no references to the HarveySpenser correspondence. The limitation that the compiler has set upon his book justifies him in omitting references to the View under the heading Lord Grey, but there can be no excuse for failing to refer to the dedicatory sonnet to Virgil's Gnat under the Earl of Leicester. H. S. V. JONES THE SATIRE OF JOHN MARSTON. By Morse S. Allen. Princeton Ph.D. Dissertation. Columbus, Ohio. 1920. Dr. Allen's dissertation is a careful summary and revaluation of all the problems which concern Marston as a satirist. It begins with the two quarrels with Hall and Jonson, passes on to an analysis of the verse satires, Pygmalion's Image and Scourge of Villainy, and concludes with a summary of the satiric elements in the plays. The principle of Dr. Allen's work is prudence; he has no radical theories to present, and gives short shrift to the guesses of previous scholars. The result is a study of Marston that is eminently safe. In crossing swords with Hall, Dr. Allen believes that Marston was moved not by any contemptuous references to himself, but by Hall's strictures on contemporary poets. He does not think that Hall ever replied to Marston, or took any notice of him, except possibly in the epigram which Hall is credited with having had pasted in every copy of Pygmalion which came to Cambridge. Accepting Jonson's statement to Drummond that his quarrel with Marston arose out of Marston's representing him on the stage, Dr. Allen finds that origin in the character of Chrisoganus in Histriomastix. This he feels convinced was a satire on Jonson, and he is equally sure of Lampatho in What You Will. His reasons in both cases have a good deal of force; not so strongly supported is his argument that in Brabant Senior, the unsympathetic railler of Jack Drum, Marston was again aiming at Jonson, not so much at his person as at his habits of mind. To quote Dr. Allen's own words: "What he did was to rebuke Jonson for a characteristic of his dramas, and incidentally satirize his arrogance, and his disdain for contemporary literature." As to Jonson's representations of Marston, Dr. Allen will accept only Crispinus of the Poetaster as certain. Otherwise he detects only occasional fleers at Marston's style. Thus he will not agree that either Hedon or Anaides of Cynthia's Revels is a portrait of Marston. And he protests against the habit of reading personal satire into the plays involved, or supposed to be involved, in the controversy. His basic premise is that "it was only the exceptional Elizabethan play which contained any personal satire."2 Accordingly it is in this light that he interprets Jonson, a man by the way who saw everything in a very personal light. "His Brisks and Hedons represent a general type much more than they do any particular individual." This is as near to a bias as Dr. Allen comes, and surely he could not have a safer bias. 1 P. 37. 2 P. 39. His treatment of the stage quarrel, therefore, is much simpler than most others, as is gauged by the fact that he will admit of only seven plays as having been in any way concerned. These are Histriomastix, Every Man out of his Humour, Jack Drum's Entertainment, Cynthia's Revels, What You Will, Poet aster, and Satiromastix. Dr. Allen's treatment of the literary aspects of Marston's satire is in the nature of analysis rather than argument, and calls for little comment. He finds a dualism in Marston's personality comprised of a genuine distaste for corruption and desire to reform, on the one hand, and on the other a strong curiosity as to vice. "At the bottom Marston was indignant at the world, and contemptuous of it; he had something of what Swinburne apostrophized as his 'noble heart of hatred.' . . . Taking this wider outlook, I feel sure that Marston regarded himself as being like his own Malcontent or Fawn, in the world but not of it." At the same time, "when lust is so carefully and lingeringly dwelt upon, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that its consideration was pleasing to the author." Dr. Allen finds a parallel in Dean Swift, who in other respects seems to him to echo Marston's personality, especially in the intellectual, non-emotional character of his filth. The satire of Marston disintegrates, we are told, in the later plays. At first, "Marston had possessed the younger, more hopeful mood where satire is administered to reform vice. Now it sours into something very close to hatred for the world as a whole. He certainly despises man." This disintegration, begun in What You Will, culminates in the Fawn, where the satire is base and nauseous. The Fawn also represents the breaking up of the Malcontent type, with which Marston himself was becoming disgusted. The last plays, Sophonisba and the Insatiate Countess, are crude attempts to recapture the doubtful glories of the Antonio plays. Dr. Allen concludes his survey by wondering whether Marston would not have been happier in the age of the novel; "had his gifts for satire, depiction of real life, and vivid characterization, been employed in the looser form of the novel, it is possible that his name would bulk much larger than it does in literary history." To which one might reply that inasmuch as Marston's genius was of the stage stagey, it is doubtful if it would have thriven better elsewhere. HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND University of Illinois P. 119. 'P. 97. • P. 159. 7 P. 161. THE FORMATION OF TENNYSON'S STYLE: A Study, Primarily, of the Versification of the Early Poems, by J. F. A. Pyre (University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, Number 12). Madison, 1921. Professor Pyre has undertaken the sort of evaluation of Tennyson's works which is suggested by the sub-title of his monograph. He has adjudicated the relative importance of Tennyson's poems by examining their prosody. This metrical examination has enabled him to arrange Tennyson's work in three chronological groups. There is in his youth the period of exuberant experimentation with a variety of complex stanza forms. Out of this groping for the forms best adapted to express his personality, developed the mature work of the 1842 volume. In this volume the prevailing forms were blank verse and the four stress or the four and three stress iambic quatrain, both of which were employed with skilful but limited modulations. The final period, if we except In Memoriam, was one of decadence, in which the security of the laureateship or of popular applause insidiously promoted a revolt from the standard that had been attained and a return to the freedom and the experimentation of his early years. This general view is not new. So far as prosody is concerned, it is implied in Saintsbury's chapter on Tennyson in his History of Nineteenth Century Literature. It is the view of those men, like Fitzgerald, who in his own day or since have been attracted chiefly by the melody of Tennyson's verse. Professor Pyre's method of substantiating his thesis is as familiar as the thesis itself. This method, which was first given its scholarly basis in Robert Bridge's treatise on Milton's Prosody, assumes that English verse is primarily accentual rather than quantitive or syllabic in its nature. Once this position is taken, if English metrics are to be properly understood, an inquiry must follow into the relation between stresses. This inquiry implies a more thoro investigation than would be necessary in French or Latin into the nature and frequency of the mediums that may be used to break or modify the regularity of stress recurrence. In the hands of most commentators, including the present one, the inquiry becomes an intricate statistical analysis of inversions, cesuras, final feet, extra syllabic lines, and so on. Applied to Tennyson, this prosodic method reveals the poet's attainment at his maturity to a comparatively simple norm in line and stanza, as the following summary shows. In the 1830 volume there are scarcely two poems in the same meter. The irregularity of the stanza forms is shown most apparently by the fact that even in the few sonnets included the normal structure is violated. The best poems according to Professor Pyre are those that are most regular; and of these Mariana is noteworthy, for the last four lines of this stanza, when detached, become the form later used for In Memoriam The 1833 volume is marked by similar variety, but shows a tendency to retain the same stanza form without modification during a whole poem. In the 1842 volume the norm has been attained. Many of the poems of this volume are thoro rewritings of poems in the 1833 issue. Professor Pyre gives us once more the familar analysis of the differences in the structure of A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art (p. 50) in the two editions. There are thirty-six new poems, besides, in this volume. Of these, two are ballads, two anapestic, two trochaic, two iambic in meter; but nine are in blank verse and eighteen in four stress or four and three stress quatrains. Herein then lies the norm, which Professor Pyre believes Tennyson worked out for himself without external aid. This normal poem is short, slow of movement, regular of stress. The foot is prevailingly iambic, seldom trochaic. The diction is simplified and chary of polysyllables. There is a moderate use of beginning and cesural inversions. There is an avoidance of weak syllables at the stress and at the verse end. There are few double endings and few cesuras; in other words, there are few extra syllables and predominantly masculine pauses within the line. A moderate use of spondees aids in the production of a slow line by strengthening the unstressed syllables (p. 115). Professor Pyre gives accurate statistical verification for these generalizations. This norm is somewhat relaxed in the Morte d'Arthur; which Professor Pyre agrees with Fitzgerald in believing Tennyson's finest poem (p. 139). But here there is a compensation. "Freedom of syllabing and stress modulation, then, are skilfully balanced by careful maintenance of the verse unit and regularity in the disposition of pause" (p. 147). After the 1842 volume, with the exception of In Memoriam, Tennyson issued nothing of comparable merit. In Memoriam meets with Professor Pyre's approval because, being a series of short poems in a simple meter, it affords adequate opportunity for Tennyson's prevailingly lyric gift to express itself. Its verse form, tho used by certain previous poets (Jonson, Sidney, etc.), was evolved independently, and is skilfully modulated. The pauses come generally at the end of the first line and towards the end of the third, so that the central couplet is not over-emphasized and is connected in sense with the concluding line (p. 186). In the rest of the later poems, degeneracy is evidenced as a result of the demand for fluency in the long narrative poems which enticed Tennyson at this period. This fluency, which the dramatic character of the later work demanded, Professor Pyre does not justify, for he has little respect for Tennyson as a narrative poet. The Princess is a tour de force of uncertain |