Even formally it is something more than a bare transcript; for though the writers did not succeed in making a correct sonnet, they did occasionally succeed in making something which is not a wholly unacceptable substitute.

Not causeless were you christened, gentle Aowers, The one of faith, the other fancy's pride;

For she who guides both faith and fancy's power, In your fair colours laps her ivory side.

And as nor tyrant sun nor winter weather
May ever change sweet amaranthus hue,
So she, though love and fortune join together,
Will never leave to be both fair and true.

Lodge: Phillis, xxviii.

And in modifying the movement and the character of the stanza in accordance with English conditions they did also prepare a genre in which Shakespeare was finally able to deliver himself as he might not have been able to do otherwise.

And surely this is no slight failing. To pass judgment upon these sonneteers in the absence of Shakespeare is very much like eliminating its chief practitioner from a consideration of the Elizabethan drama. What a sorry thing it would be under those circumstances and how false our notions of it! And yet Mr. Lee, finding the sonnet without Shakespeare to be nought, has turned about and applied this

conclusion to the belittlement of Shakespeare's. Nor is it altogether clear that he has fully perceived the intention of these sonneteers in themselves. The very possibility that all this work was actually meant in the main to be the very thing it is an essay in ingenuity, an attempt to produce an "intellectual" poetry by a group of "wits,' who were in a manner precursors of Donne and the "metaphysicals," and who would have resented the imputation of mere prettiness or even passion as bitterly as Cowley himself-such a possibility he seems to ignore altogether. And hence it is that, failing to relate it to life on the one hand, and on the other missing its most important literary affinity, he has failed, in so far, to grasp its vital significance as a poetic manifestation.

Will it seem unprofitably dilettanteish, then, if we add, in closing, that while a discussion of this kind is invaluable from one point of view, there is at the same time something rather dreary and unfilling about it, as there must always be in the discussion of matters purely formal? At all events it is certainly permissible to wish that so acute a scholar might have found time for some of the very significant ethical problems rising around his subject. What was there, for instance, in the disposition of the human spirit in the sixteenth century to give the sonnet such an immense vogue? What has

been the result of such a determination upon our own social and individual culture? With reference to the former question M. Doumic has an interesting article in a recent number of the Revue des Deux Mondes. In default of any answer to the second it may be excusable, for the sake of forming some idea of the relation of all this literature to life, to risk ourselves for a moment to a generalisation rather more hazardous than a writer of Mr. Lee's reputation for accuracy would probably care to undertake.

on

The young man who grows up into life nowadays finds his behaviour and even his emotional attitude toward the other sex regulated for him largely in accordance with certain generally understood traditions and conventions. No matter how uncritical his boyhood may have been, he now finds three sets of feelings thoroughly, elaborately discriminated -romantic love, marriage, and desire, and the psychology, calculations, tactics, and so proper to each defined and codified. After a little experience he himself is no longer in danger of mixing matters; or if he should happen to do so, he brings society with its average common-sense about his ears. The distinction, however, is obviously modern. The Greeks knew nothing of it at least systematically. Euripides' Hecuba, in appealing to Agamemnon to avenge the death of Polydorus, conjures

him by his love for Cassandra, whom she speaks of as his wife but who is in reality his concubine-a confusion intolerably shocking to the present sense of propriety. And how ambiguous to our minds is Helen's case! As a matter of fact it is to the poets of the Renaissance and their later imitators and successors, the French Pléiade, the Elizabethan sonneteers, that we are indebted at least for the love part of our code. Their conception of love is a sort of humanistic blending of the Platonic admiration of abstract beauty with the mediaval adoration of woman, and consists, therefore, of two elements, answering in this fashion to the constitution of the humanist himselfa scholastic and a social ingredient.

To all these particular partitions-romantic love, desire, and marriage-there is naturally a common ground of passion patent or obscure. Between imagination and passion the connection is exceedingly close and compelling; and a vast amount of poetry has been inspired by the subterraneous promptings of this emotion, as Mr. Santayana has justly indicated in his essay on the Sense of Beauty. Such was undoubtedly the original motive—or at least one of thembehind the love poetry of the Renaissance. But as the separation between love, marriage, and desire was widened and confirmed by scholastic and other influence then at work, passion was

restricted more and more to desire, while marriage became more subject to prudential calculation, and love itself to affectation until it gradually lost all its initiative and spontaneity. Virtually, therefore, the love sonnet, while preserving the convention, had by Shakespeare's time become sexless, and except for its personal pronouns might just as well be applied to men as to women. It is very significant, however, to notice that Shakespeare's sonnets do break through the convention; he is singular in admitting passion into the love sonnet and confounding the categories-a fact that would lead one to infer that Mr. Lee has in his life exaggerated the element of artificiality and imitation in Shakespeare's work. But however this may be, it is evident that the modern feeling for women is changing so rapidly as to be no longer represented by this old literature, the appreciation of which is obviously waning, though we still employ something of the old form and circumstance and shall continue to do so until we can beat out a new ethics—that is, in all probability for some little time to come.