further evidence, somewhat irrelevant, of his central thesis.

The rest of the preface is taken up with Pope's theory of translation, a theory presenting a middle ground between loose paraphrase and literal fidelity, the theory which is essentially that accepted by the best translators since Pope's day. Whatever we now think of Pope's application of this theory, we can hardly condemn the principle as it is here presented; and we may even question whether any translation since gives us as much of Homer's beauty and power as this gave to the audience for which it was designed.

RICHARD An adequate representation of Dick Steele STEELE within the limits of this volume is even more difficult than that of Pope. Steele's criticism is so informal, so occasional, that it never takes the form of books or pamphlets, rarely of whole papers in the Tatler, Spectator, or Guardian. Nowhere does he formally enunciate a theory of poetry, nowhere set forth his critical principles in due form and order. Here a sentence, there a paragraph-perhaps a reference to Shakespeare or Milton, perhaps to a contemporary like Prior or Ambrose Philips, perhaps to the Bible or a Lapland song-in any case a touch and go affair, sometimes trivial and worthless, sometimes illuminating and suggestive.

The very fact that he thus approached criticism, however, helps to place him, to show him for a man impatient of formalism, impatient of elaborate parade of knowledge, a critic satisfied to record the impression he personally received from a work of art, and consequently a critic whose words derive their weight from the fact that Dick Steele's impressions are worth knowing.

Such a passage as that about Macduff represents the kind of criticism we know as 'impressionistic', a kind which at its best, as here, reveals beauty unnoticed by the casual reader or spectator.

When, as in the twelfth Guardian, Steele did attempt a more methodical setting forth of his views, he uses the tests of reason and good sense, the almost inevitable tests of the age; but he is still opposed to those critics who found good sense and the rules inseparable, or who demanded the support of ancient authority for their opinions. Steele, like other impressionistic critics, is at his weakest when he attempts to account for his likes and dislikes at his best when he lets his taste be its own justification.) But at all times he clearly belongs with the critics of the left wing, the free lances who refuse to be restrained by any formal critical code.

JOSEPH

Addison, although intimately associated with ADDISON Steele, although lumped with him by Gildon and Dennis in their attacks on Spectator theories, although sharing much of Steele's general conception of poetical theory, was a critic of another type. His more pretentious series-such a series as Steele would never have attempted-are so familiar that it would have been labor lost to have reprinted them here. The papers on Milton, on Chevy Chase, on the Pleasures of the Imagination, are known to every student of criticism.

They are known, yes, but they are not always read without prepossession. How often has Addison been called a classicist for testing Milton by the rules of Aristotle, how often ridiculed as pedantic and uninspired. Yet what should he have done? Unless we are to content ourselves in criticism with a mere record of

our feelings when reading a poem, or with a list of the purple passages it contains, or with a bio-genetic analysis dealing with heredity and environment, what are we to do? Is it absurd to ask whether a poem contains certain qualities which are to be found in other great poems of similar type? Is it pseudo-classicism to ask, for instance, whether Lear is a unit, and where that unity lies? Do we gain nothing from the attempt to discover whether the character of Hamlet is inconsistent with itself? There can be no doubt that by proposing and answering such questions we gain an insight otherwise unlikely. The absurdity begins only when we condemn a work of art because it does not meet all of a pre-established set of standards, not when we merely ask whether it does meet them or not. Addison, in the papers on Milton, analyzed a great poem in the light of others, assuming its greatness beforehand; and in so doing wrote a criticism which has for us little freshness and value merely because we are familiar with his opinions before we read his essays.

Similarly with the Chevy Chase papers. It is preposterous to assume that Addison admired Chevy Chase because he found that it would endure the application of some of the supposed principles of the epic. What really happened was, that he liked the poem and wanted to make others like it, and so tried to show them how it had in it some of the qualities they liked in poems with which they were already familiar. It must never be forgotten that the writers of the periodicals were pedagogues, that they wished to better the taste of the general public, and that they used devices not unlike those of the modern teacher. But where would many members of our English faculties be left were it assumed that their teaching devices represented accurately their own critical processes and theories?

By reason of his admiration for the ballads, for Milton, and for Shakespeare, because of the stress he lays on novelty and curiosity in treating of the pleasures of the imagination, and because of his ungrudging recognition of a distinction between those geniuses which require the aid of conscious art and those which do not-because of these characteristics of his criticism it is fair to say that Addison stands close by Steele as an opponent of a narrow rationalism or classicism. Certainly Gildon recognized him as such an opponent. But his most important function was not as a champion of any principles, old or new; it was as a teacher and a popularizer. Thus it appears that the two Queen Anne critics who were most widely influential, the two who had a really considerable effect upon popular taste, were not on the neo-classic side at all-that in so far as they fit in any pigeon-holes they belong with the romanticists.

LEONARD Welsted's Dissertation is that of a man WELSTED influenced rather than influential. Coming

as it did almost at the turn of the quartercentury, it serves to indicate something of the critical temper of that time. It touches on various matterslanguage, the rules, the usefulness of poetry, the state of prose without making points extraordinarily true or untrue about any. It is precisely what one might expect from a somewhat supercilious mediocrity.

The point upon which he lays most stress, and that which, perhaps, most interests a student of criticism, is the uselessness of the rules. He sees no reason for accepting or rejecting them; for they are of no importance-they will neither make nor unmake a poet. Why, says he, quarrel about the great and fundamental rule of painting that a lady's face should be supplied with a

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nose? Or that commonly a head should be represented as crowned with hair? In so far as Welsted's attitude is typical, it shows that the rules were approaching the last stage of most dogmas, that at which they have less to fear from hostility than from indifference. This stage foreshadows a new difficulty, no longer that of guarding against their too autocratic sway, but that of getting men to remember that something may be said for some of them, that they really have some importance after all.

The one tenet of the old creed which still seems to have weight with Welsted is the assertion that poetry must instruct through pleasure, of course, and indirectly—but still it must instruct. It is peculiarly unfortunate that the English, into whose keeping, as a nation, the dogma of the ethical value of art seems to have been entrusted, should usually hold this dogma in its crudest and most repellent form. By their manner of advocating this thesis the English have done more than any other race to make people believe that there is art which is devoid of ethical effect. Leonard Welsted is not peculiarly bad in this respect; he rather avoids the grosser form of statement; yet one feels sure that like Dennis he would have advocated the doctrine of poetical justice, had he ever written his promised treatise on the drama. To one unfamiliar with the precedent mental processes it is almost incredible that men should seriously have maintained that art to be true must lie about life.

When Welsted touches the question of the excellent in prose style, he is unhappily vague. One suspects that his purpose is chiefly to defend his own languid and trailing sentences feebly reminiscent of the stately, cadenced periods of seventeenth century prose. At any rate he censures Addison for the frequent recurrence of the full pause in his work, and regrets that Addison's manner is