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APPLETON & COMPANY, No. 72 Fifth Avenue, New York. THE DIAL A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Biscussion, and Information. THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by check, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING Rates furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to POETRY AS CRITICISM OF LITERATURE. We have heard much (something too much, indeed) of poetry as a criticism of life, since the time when Matthew Arnold, in his essay on Wordsworth, started that famous phrase on its career. Its inadequacy has been pointed out by many critics since, and it is now, we should say, definitely relegated to the limbo of halftruths that fascinate for a time by virtue of their novelty, but that speedily become discredited. Probably the most convincing of the many protests it evoked was that of the writer who urged that, so far from being a mere criticism upon life, the greatest poetry is life itself, in direct transcription. But, while we must regard as whimsical the notion that poetry is nothing more than criticism, even glorified criticism, we may freely admit that there is to be found in poetical literature a large element critical of life and of many other things as well. Among those other things, literature itself is of considerable importance; and we here wish to say a few words about the treasures of literary criticism that are among the precious gifts brought us by the poet. In this age of the multiplication of anthologies, it has for many years been to us a matter of surprise that some one did not prepare a volume of "Poems of Poets," to go with the "Poems of Places," the "Poems of Books," thePoems of Nature," and the many other special collections. Within the last year or so, the want has been supplied, after a fashion, by two independent collections; and the lover of poets, as well as the owner of dogs and the smoker of tobacco, is now provided with his own anthology of favorite pieces. There is still room for a better collection than has yet been made, but the needs of a deserving class of readers have at least received recognition. It has often been urged that the critic of any art should be at the same time an adept in the practice thereof. This view doubtless rests upon a misconception, being analogous to the view that no one can intelligently read a foreign language without speaking it as well. In the case of the language, as is sufficiently obvious, the process by which one acquires its The contemporaries and immediate followers of Chaucer had at least one English poet to panegyrize; and so Gower, and Occleve, and Lydgate, to the best of their mean powers, paid tribute to their master. Even to-day, do we not feel some thrill of sympathy when we read Occleve? "O maister dere and fader reverent, My maister Chaucer, flowre of eloquence, O universal fader in science, Allas! that thou thyne excellent prudence In thy bedde mortel myghtest not bequethe What eyled dethe, allas! why wolde he sle thee?" When we come down to the Elizabethans, we find the poets rioting in versified criticism of one another. Shakespeare is a notable excep use for reading is essentially unlike the process by which one learns to speak it. To speak psychologically, the nexus of associative tracks worn by much reading of French or Latin is one thing, and the nexus worn by much speaking of a foreign tongue quite another. To be more exact, we should perhaps say that the associative stimulus, while going over the same nerve-track in any particular case, takes one direction in the case of reading, and the reverse direction in the case of speech. Because the passage from word-symbol to concept is easily made, it by no means follows that the passage from concept to word-symbol will present no difficulty. A similar situation, although a far more complicated one, is presented when we compare the practice of literary composition to this rule, and in the one case in which tion with its criticism. But it is nevertheless true that the reader of a foreign tongue is better prepared to get its full significance if his associations have been trained to work freely in both directions; and it is likewise true that the critic of literature who has made literature himself is, ipso facto, in some respects better equipped to understand just what has been accomplished by his fellow workers. Only we must not go so far as to say that creative power brings with it the critical faculty; the former may indeed add something to the effectiveness of the latter, but the intuitional character of the one is still permanently differentiated from the reflective character of the other. That the poets are capable of writing good prose criticism of their art, it needs no argument to show. We think at once of Lessing and Goethe, of Voltaire and Hugo, of Shelley and Coleridge, and of fifty others. We are now concerned to call attention to the fact that some of the most acute and sympathetic criticism of the poets that we have is to be found in poetry itself. Since English literature best illustrates this fact, although other literatures might profitably be adduced in further support of it, we shall be content with English examples alone. The good work of poetical criticism was begun by Chaucer, who labored under the disadvantage of having no fellow-poets of his own speech to sing about, and who was thus compelled to find subjects for his "House of Fame" and other critical ventures in the great names of classical antiquity or of contemporary Italy. From Chaucer's time to the present, the work has gone merrily on, and the last of our great poets has written more good poetry about his fellow-singers than we owe to any of his predecessors. he displayed enthusiasm for a contemporary, and spoke of "the proud full sail of his great verse," he forgot to tell us whom he meant. There is a good deal of log-rolling, and no little malice, in all this personal poetry (such things have been known in later times, even in our own), but many of these tributes strike a note of sincerity, and display an insight, for which we must ever cherish them. How true, for example, is Drayton's familiar description of Marlowe: "His raptures were all air and fire"; and Barnfield's of Spenser: "Whose deep conceit is such, as passing all conceit, needs no defense"; and Jonson's of Shakespeare: "He was not for an age but for all time." In It is curious to note, as we work down the centuries, how the taste of each age is reflected in these appreciations of poets by poets. the seventeenth century, Milton and Dryden, indeed, as we might naturally expect of the two greatest men of their age, showed an understanding of Shakespeare's supremacy that leaves nothing to be desired; but the lesser men of the time clearly preferred the lesser Elizabethans, or the decadent artificers among their own contemporaries. The poets of our so-called Augustan age usually referred to the great English classics in a perfunctory sort of way, and gave them but a grudging recognition. It is very amusing to find Addison, with all the airs of the Superior Person, saying of Chaucer that "In vain he jests in his unpolished strain," and of Spenser, that he "In ancient tales amused a barbarous age," writing on the other hand of "Great Cowley then, a mighty genius," and going into rhapsodies over that "harmonious bard," the "courtly Wal ler." Equally amusing contrasted citations. might be made from Pope. It was only in the later eighteenth century, with Collins and Gray, that poetry acquired a saner outlook upon itself, and began to grope back toward the old truth that art is better than artifice. The nineteenth century is so rich in the homage of poet to fellow-poet, that an essay, rather than a paragraph, would be needed to do it justice. Wordsworth's sonnet to Milton, Shelley's "Adonaïs," Keats's "Chapman's Homer," Landor's sonnet " To Robert Browning," Mrs. Browning's "Wine of Cyprus," Rossetti's "Dante at Verona," Arnold's "Thyrsis," Tennyson's Alcaics," and Mr. Swinburne's sonnets on the Elizabethan dramatists, are a few of the countless examples that will occur to every reader. And we would call particular attention to the fine critical quality of the mass of work which these poems so imperfectly represent. Their writers have good reasons for the faith that is in them; they do not merely eulogize, they illuminate as well. If this were not so, the present article would have no excuse for existence. We do not know where in prose to find better criticism than Wordsworth's of Milton: "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; or Landor's of Browning: "6 'Since Chaucer was alive and hale No man has walk'd along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue or Arnold's of Goethe: "He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And said: Thou ailest here, and here!'" Or Mr. Swinburne's of Dante mourning over a country recreant to its mission and dead in spirit: "The steepness of strange stairs had tired his feet, As the most bitter love, like God's own grace, Wherewith he gazed on that fair buried face." We hope that some one will undertake the preparation of an enchiridion of poetical criticism more comprehensive than has yet been attempted, a collection of the best things that have been said in the poetry of half a dozen modern literatures about the best poets of the whole world. Such a collection would be of the greatest value to the student of literary criticism, and would deserve to stand on the shelf beside the "Poetics" of Aristotle, the treatise of Longinus, the impassioned pleas of Sidney and Shelley, and the essays of Coleridge, Arnold, and Pater. THE PASSING OF CHIRSTINA ROSSETTI. For her to whom breath was prayer, Who had knelt in the Holy Place And had drunk the incense-air, It was only to slip her free Toward the west, For a robe more lustrous white It was only to shift her clime, Of a strain so thrilling rare We shall hunger on earthly wold It was little for her to pass From this storm-sea, sorrow-iced, To change the dream and the spur KATHARINE LEE BATES. COMMUNICATIONS. THE HUMANITIES AND COLLEGE EDUCATION. (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) The plea for the humanities as essential to genuine culture, in the editorial article of your last issue, is greatly needed in these present days, when the philistinism of Herbert Spencer is too rapidly making its way in the faculties of not a few of our Western colleges. You put it too mildly, however, when you say that the humanities "may fairly demand as much attention and as large an expenditure as the sciences of nature." Should they not in the curricula of our secondary schools and colleges demand more? The naturalists are not modest in their claims. Accepting, as many do, whether consciously or unconsciously, the view that man is merely the product of his material environment, they quite logically exalt the study of that environment above the study of man himself. Moreover, in so far as they study man it is rather as naturalists than as those who recognize and feel the deeper powers and significances of human life. But physics, chemistry, physiology, or even physiological psychology, cannot rightly and adequately teach us of man. As Paulsen, who claims that in the university the sciences of nature should have equal footing with the sciences of man, yet says, “Man sociology, language, literature, psychology in its true lives in history, the brute in nature." Hence history, sense, philosophy, and the great religious books of the |