Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/467

 Reviews and Notes 463 The Expatriated Poets and the Italian Movement. He adds another chapter on Forty Years of Satire, Parody, and Bur- lesque; and closes his account with a cautiously destructive discussion of the terms Romanticism, Classicism, and Realism; and some prognostications regarding the future of authors of the ''romantic generation." The purely critical element in his treatment of the leading writers is somewhat incidental and not particularly significant. As is becoming in a professor of literature, his sympathies are temperate, his taste eclectic and generally healthy, his judg- ments academically orthodox, without avowed thesis, and without marked severity except towards Wertherism. By way of illustration, he approves of Scott both as novelist and as poet, considers Keats potentially the greatest poet of his day, thinks Shelley's philosophy a fog and his moral code a mirage, holds Byron a destructive force with no valid claim on admira- tion but his energy and then just as one is about to pronounce him a mild anti-romantic, he inconsequentially ventures the suggestion that "in the age of the submarine and iron order the mysticism of Blake may prove a rock of refuge in a weary land." This is not the only remarkable thing that he says of Blake. He says also: "Certain temperamental likenesses can also be traced between Blake and Shelley, in whom no common external force appears to have acted." With the fundamental critical questions raised by the revolution of ideas in his period, it is not clear that Professor Pierce has grappled very resolutely. Indeed he does not seem entirely certain that there was a revolution. He insists that Byron, most popular of the Romanticists, clung to Pope and the Augustans ignoring the fact that till Byron in practice deserted Pope and the Augustans he produced nothing Byronic, nothing saturated in his own temperament and in the intellectual and emotional ferment of his age. "The main reaction," Professor Pierce declares, belittling the notion of a conscious and theore- tic "revolt" against "classical" principles "the main reaction was against the senile old age of literary traditions which in the days of Dryden had been young and vigorous." This explanation is captivatingly simple, and there is a great deal to be said for it, which Professor Pierce says very well indeed, reenforcing his argument with the results of wide reading in many neglected authors once known to popular fame. But it is too simple. It lures one on to the still more captivating simplification of all types of poetry into two: the good and the bad, or the living and the dead. And this is the legitimate inference to be drawn from Professor Pierce's last words on the romantic generation: "The common intel- lectual element of the age," he declares, "lay in its all-pervading curiosity, not in the direction along which that curiosity