passing through a period of disintegration and reconstruction, through "processes of death and re-birth."

These last words are taken from Sir Henry Newbolt's address on "The Future of the English Language," which fittingly comes first in order, not only on account of its date of delivery, but because the problems of language are preliminary to all others. Words are wholly, or in part, the raw material of the poet, the dramatist, the actor, and the pamphleteer, and the painter needs them when he passes from the practice to the theory of his art.

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Those who, like myself, sat for two years on the Departmental Committee on English under Sir Henry's chairmanship will read with special interest his address, which, in a sense, is a personal epilogue to the Committee's Report. He identifies himself with the view of which Professor Jespersen of Copenhagen has been the chief exponent, that English, having passed out of the stage of unnecessary terminations and vain repetitions," has "been perfected as an instrument of intelligent speech." It need therefore not take to heart the charges of linguistic decadence made by an earlier school of philologists. But just because it is the speech of a far-flung Empire, and indeed since the war is becoming increasingly the lingua franca of the world, its vocabulary and syntax are day by day subject to corrupting influences, of which Sir Henry gives some highly amusing examples. But I, for one, share his confidence that the genius of our language will absorb, as it has done in the past, any novelties of idiom that are worth preserving, and will reject the rest. Let us give shelter and their chance of survival to even the most bizarre Trans

atlantic colloquialisms, rather than admit the existence of a separate "American language," and thus break in two the English-Speaking Union.

In the future development of the English tongue the theatre is likely to play an increasingly important part. The performance of such plays as Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie " and " Diff'rent" will help to familiarise London audiences with strange patterns of speech. But it is with the production of the Shakespearean plays that are the common heritage of the Empire and the Republic of the West that Mr. Granville-Barker is chiefly concerned in his lecture on "Some Tasks for Dramatic Scholarship." It is a happy chance that this appears in print while the Tercentenary of the First Folio is being celebrated. Himself an actor, a dramatist, and a producer—in the fullest sense a man of the theatre-Mr. Granville-Barker speaks with exceptional authority when he asserts that "the scholar and actor have need of each other." Too long has there been division between them, with unfortunate results both in the library and on the stage. It would be well if all future Shakespearean actors and editors had Mr. Granville-Barker's "main contention " graven on the tablets of their heart:

"Dramatic art does demand the service of pure scholarship-and in the case of a period such as the Elizabethan, so uncertainly documented and with the threads of its traditions so broken-of various sorts of scholarship. But drama can only be profitably considered in its full integrity. We may have, for the purposes of its service, to divide it into categories, to treat of its literary, its technical, its histrionic aspects. But unless we always can visualise

our plays as completed things-living in the theatrewe shall always tend to be astray in our conclusions about them."

It is noteworthy that another representative man of the theatre, Mr. John Drinkwater, has recently at the Folio Tercentenary luncheon in the Stationers' Hall spoken to the same effect. For the suggested practical applications of Mr. Granville-Barker's thesis readers will turn to the address itself. His vision of not one, but twenty National Theatres, dedicated especially to the production of Shakespeare's plays, would include not only those already projected for London and Stratford-on-Avon, but others in every great centre of population. And his sketch of "a various edition of a new sort, one that would epitomise Shakespeare the playwright," makes one anticipate joyfully the day when such an edition will appear with Mr. Granville-Barker's name on the title-page.

While Mr. Granville-Barker is engaged in clearing away the traditional obstacles to our full understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare on the stage and in the study, Mr. Alfred Noyes is concerned with a novel and more fundamental danger to all that poetdramatist stands for. In his essay on "Some Characteristics of Modern Literature," he deplores the fact that a large part of this literature has "turned from the world that contained the souls of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and insisted on pointing us to the dust and ashes in which it says that these and our whole universe must end." Mr. Noyes' address is frankly a pronunciamento, a ringing challenge to all those tendencies in recent literature, especially in poetry, which appear to him to be negative, destruc

tive, anarchic. With the authority of one who is himself a poet, and with the courage of a first-class fighting man, Mr. Noyes does battle with all and sundry for the continuity of our tradition. He stands unflinchingly for the principle that the "basis of the universe in an ultimate harmony is the first postulate of all thought, all science, all art, all literature.'

It is all to the good that these questions should be so fearlessly, so explicitly, so eloquently raised. It is possible, I hope, to accept Mr. Noyes' main principles and be grateful for his championship of them, and yet to have an ear for the warnings of literary history that authentic new voices have in the past been unrecognised, and may be so again. But this is not our main immediate danger. The nemesis that has followed on the stupid bludgeoning of Wordsworth and Keats, of Wagner and Ibsen, is that criticism to-day, with the fear of Swift's "Prince Posterity before its eyes, is unreasonably shy of condemning any novelty, however eccentric or extravagant. Mr. Noyes may help to put new courage in its heart, and fresh strength in its hands.

Professor Paul de Reul's essay on "The Centenary of Shelley " forms, from one point of view, a pendant to Mr. Noyes' lecture. For revolutionary as were Shelley's religious, political and social views, he poured them forth through the time-honoured prosodic channels. His all-dominant passion for freedom did not extend to "free verse. This is also true of Swinburne, of whom Professor de Reul (who holds the Chair of English Literature in the University of Brussels) has recently published an elaborate study.

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Shelley, in spite of his humanitarian cosmopolitanism, has not had the same popularity on the Continent as Byron. It is therefore interesting to note the increasing attention that is being paid to his poetry among the Latin peoples. One outcome of this was Señor Salvador de Madariaga's recent essay on Shelley and Calderón." Professor de Reul's centenary lecture is another. Though he classes himself with justification among true Shelleyans," he is no blind admirer. He holds that we "ought to improve the occasion of a centenary anniversary by attempting a judgment, calm and impartial, definitive as far as human things can be of the hero we are celebrating." He thus in the first half of his address plays the part of devil's advocate, analysing those flaws in Shelley's art to which the French intelligence and temperament are peculiarly alive. But his criticisms are merely the prologue to an interpretation of the essentials of the poet's genius, which is a fitting garland to be laid on his tomb " the completion of his first century of immortality." It needs an effort to realise that Shelley and Cobbett were contemporary products of rural society in the English home counties. Each was at war with the social order of his time, the one on abstract revolutionary principles, the other on hard, practical grounds of experience. Each attained his own

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supremacy of style," the one in lyrical utterance, the other in racy prose. It is the beauty of Cobbett's Billingsgate, and its value as an element in English speech, that Mr. Chesterton first emphasises. Here his paper links itself with Sir Henry Newbolt's, and with our President Lord Crewe's, essay in last year's