Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/289

Rh reproducing the salient works shown at the Pavillon de Marsan. M. Bouchot’s enthusiasm as shown in this work is delightful. He has all of the masters duly parceled out into schools. From this book one would judge that in the time of the Valois there were scattered over France any number of painters actively engaged in interpreting the ideas of their native land. But to the disinterested student Flemish influence is written so clearly across the face of every one of these pictures that to take them as purely French products seems an almost incredible assumption. The school was a school of echoes. It had gifted members, of that there can be no doubt. Some of the religious paintings reveal poignant feeling. Some of the portraits are superb. But in the main these Primitives suggest neither national temperament nor individual genius, and they are plainly deficient in mere beauty. If the reader questions M. Dimier’s verdict against the Primitives as the first purely French painters, let him go carefully over M. Bouchot’s plates, keeping the early Netherlandish masters constantly in mind. The odds are that he will adopt M. Dimier’s hypothesis as conclusive.

magnitude of the service which Dr. Furness is performing in the successive volumes of this monumental edition has long been enthusiastically acknowledged by all students of Shakespeare. The new volume shows no abatement in thoroughness, conscientious zeal, or scholarly discrimination. As before, he supplies us with full apparatus for textual criticism and interpretation, a carefully condensed summary of previous scholarship in matters of date, sources, and the like, and the kernel of the contributions of all the more important æsthetic critics. In addition to all this he writes a preface bristling with stimulating and provocative suggestions, and forming an original contribution of serious importance for the history of Elizabethan literature.

The most startling feature of this preface is in connection with Euphuism. For generations the statement has been handed down from teacher to pupil, and from textbook to textbook, that the style of John Lyly’s Euphues not only called forth literary imitations, but affected even the conversation of the courtiers of Elizabeth. No one seems to have questioned the belief. Sir Walter Scott held it, and on the basis of it made an unfortunate attempt to embody it in the character of Sir Piercie Shafton in The Monastery. Modern editors and students of Lyly, men like Mr. Bond and Professor Baker, Dr. Landmann and Professor C. G. Child, have committed themselves to it. And now, at this late date, Dr. Furness takes us all aback by telling us that he sees no good ground for believing it.

His method of attack is twofold. He exposes the weakness of the positive evidence, and produces negative evidence. The positive evidence consists solely, he holds, in the statement of a bookseller, Edward Blount, who issued in 1632 an edition of six of Lyly’s comedies. In a prefixed address “To the Reader” Blount says: “Our nation are in Lyly’s debt for a new English he taught them. Euphues and his England began first that language. All our ladies were then his scholars; and