POETS AND POETRY,
EARLY TUDOR POETRY.*
Pxorxssox BERDAN has been happy in his choice of a thoroughly second-rate period for the subject of his book. For, with the beautiful instinct of scholars and mothers, he has entered upon the defence of his ugly duckling with such persuasivo and patient cunning that he has made the reader feel on closing the book that here is, after all, the most interesting of epochs. Incidentally, the internal evidence of the book disproves the frightful heresy of which the author is guilty in the introduction. " The first requirement," ho says, " for the critic is not taste, not appreciation, however valuable and desirable they may be— it is a knowledge of literary history."
His book proves that the first requirement of a critic is gusto. A knowledge of literary history is salt ; interest in the thing studied, appetite. Though he speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love—that is, a love of history, meta- physics, poetry, or whatever he may be analysing—the critic is a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. He may speak with tongues, quote French, Spanish, Russian, Czecho-Slovak authors in support of his contentions, he may cast out and unmask literary devils as much as he will, he will never be a useful, readable, revealing, and constructive critic if he has no stomach for his subject. Nothing but a love of the poets and of the time which he has studied could have enabled Professor Berdan to give such life to a bad literary period. It was truly Cotter- dammerung on Parnassus. Chaucer, as Professor Berdan shows in a most interesting way, was not only dead, but so was the language in which he wrote. We, with our well-edited texts, read him much more easily than did Barclay, Skelton, Caxton, or the Earl of Surrey. The Elizabethans had not yet flushed the horizon. But Professor Berdan makes us see the writers of these intolerable allegories and sympathize with their diffi- culties, the chaotic state of the language, the break in the literary tradition, the illiteracy of their readers, the veneration for classic authors which oppressed them. See, moreover, how much their pioneer work cleared the way and stabilized the language for their masters. Incidentally, the book is a very amusing general history of the period, with its copious quota- tions from Luther and Erasmus and the dispatches of the Venetian ambassador—all our old friends. Professor Berdan's chief plea for his period is that for their proper appreciation the Elizabethans ought not to be read in vacuo ; to do so is to give them at once too much and too little credit. When we con- sider the results on the public mind of such unrelated reading of Shakespeare, we realize how much an extended knowledge may increase our sensibility.
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