THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Vol. i. FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE CYCLES OF ROMANCE. 'THE history of a nation's literature cannot be divorced from some consideration of its political, religious, and social life, including its manners as well as its phases of sentiment and fashion, its trivial thoughts no less than its serious moments.' I read this sentence in the preface of the new History of English Literature, and, so far as it goes, I find the principle therein enunciated good. True, as a folk-lorist, I should have liked some recognition of those obscurer, more instinctive, more primitive manifestations of the racial or, as I should prefer to say (the term racial being prejudiced by its pseudo-scientific associations), national, consciousness which are in so large a measure the objects of our study. Still here the principle is asserted, that literature must be regarded, not as a fortuitous succession of individual manifestations of talent unrelated to each other and to the life out of which they spring but as the revelation of the intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual ethos of a community, which ethos has been in the past and is in the present dependent upon conditions which we can analyse and determine. As a folk-lorist my concern with the present volume is chiefly to consider in how far it has carried out this principle, and I necessarily disregard nearly all that most reviewers, dealing with it from the standpoint of literary history as commonly understood, make the subject of their comments. I should, however, like to express my appreciation of the utility of the work; it contains a great deal of information accurate in itself and lucidly presented; its merits in this respect are such as to entitle it to a place on the shelves of all students of our early national past; a reprint will doubtless be called for before long and in anticipation thereof a few remarks upon its plan, and upon the way in which that plan has been carried out, may be thought not out of place. The plan is that of the Cambridge Modern History: special sections of the subject are dealt with by different writers, the various with each other by the editor, who provides birds'-eye surveys of the main periods and tendencies. I cannot but think the plan a mistaken one. It necessarily leads to overlapping and duplication, serious drawbacks when the literature of well-nigh a thousand years has to be surveyed in 400 pages. A flagrant instance is supplied by chapters ix. and x: Latin Chroniclers from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, by Prof. Jones; Latin Literature of England from John of Salisbury to Richard of Bury, by Dr. Sanday. It would have been far better to allow Prof. Jones to treat the whole of this literature, upon which, despite the variations of subject matter, the form and historic antecedents of the language impress a character that distinguishes it from work in the vernacular, whether French or English. The worst fault is undoubtedly the assignation of the Metrical Romances (1200-1500) to two writers, Prof. Ker and Mr. J. W. H. Atkins. It is of less consequence that the two not infrequently differ as that on the whole they go over the same ground without either subjecting it to that exhaustive and penetrating survey we have a right to expect. Thus despite the really excellent 'linking and harmonising' chapters of the editor, Mr. Waller, the reader obtains no clear broad impressions; he must himself in large measure supply his own synthesis, and he is handicapped by the fact that the materials therefor reach him in vertical instead of horizontal sections and thereby hinder a clear insight into the evolution of the literature as a whole. The capital error of the book remains to be noticed; it is one which defies the excellent principle I quoted at the outset of this review, and one of which the disastrous nature is especially apparent to the folklorist reader. An attempt has been made to treat in one volume two markedly distinct periods in the growth of our national literature, and thereby facts, which were to exercise a most potent influence upon the whole subsequent development of English letters, are slurred over or distorted. In a period of 350 years, 700-1050 in round figures, English literature exhibits a development which it is comparatively easy to trace, characteristics which are comparatively simple and homogeneous, a formal body and an animating spirit which are obviously the product and conception of life and its problems. The same, bearing in mind the infinitely greater complexities of modern life and the infinite amount of variation thereby engendered, may be said of English literature from the days of Chaucer to our own time. But the intervening period is one to which no parallel can be adduced in the story of any other great literature. For over a century the nation is dumb, if we take account solely of utterance in the national tongue; for another century it is slowly and painfully asserting first its right to exist and then to dominate, and when at length the long struggle is over, and Englishmen once more express their highest thoughts and boldest imaginings in English, a tremendous change is apparent: vocabulary, syntax, metre, literary convention whether in prose or verse, nature and choice of subject matter, all have altered, and altered so profoundly that at first sight there seems to be no connection between the two bodies of literature. And yet the writer of the fourteenth or the twentieth century is an Englishman just as was he of the eighth or tenth; and yet throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when English was dumb or content to take a humble place, Englishmen were thinking and fancying, but it was in Latin or in French that they shaped their thoughts and fancies. Periods so markedly dissimilar as 700-1050, and 1050-1300, required entirely different modes of treatment to do justice to the problems they present. Moreover an unique opportunity was lost cf exemplifying the principles set out by the editors in their preface. Pre-Conquest English literature is compact, limited in extent, clearly defined for the most part as regards chronology and locality; the people which produced it is small and fairly homogeneous, possessors of a culture of which the constituent elements are known with singular precision and the growth of which under well-known influences can be clearly traced. In no other section of the world's literature are the elements of the standing problem of all literature-its true relation to the environing life-so simple and so manageable. All these considerations called emphatically for a separate treatment of this period, and for recognition of the fact that here, if anywhere, the ideal study of literature as expression of a special form of life It remains to say a few words about those sections which more specially concern the folk-lorist. Unfortunately it must be frankly stated that, with one exception, they are the weakest of the book. Mr. Chadwick's chapter on the Pre-Christian element of early English is meagre and inadequate in the extreme, a mere dry-as-dust enumeration of facts which neither sets out the fascinating problems involved nor makes any essay to solve them. Moreover it is exasperating to find a portion of the bare twenty pages allowed to this complicated subject wasted upon such extreme examples of German misapplied ingenuity as Kögel's hypothesis that 'epic poetry originated among the Goths, and that its appearance in the North-West of Europe is to be traced to the harpist who was sent to Clovis by Theodoric.' The couple of pages given to Widsith seems to me an exemplary instance of failure to apprehend the real issues involved, and of baffling statements of the writer's own views. Of the two chapters devoted to the Metrical Romances I have already spoken. As in all Prof. Ker's writing we find much that is suggestive and illuminating, especially in his too brief remarks on the parallelism of certain traits in English and North Teutonic treatment of romance during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But from his command of all the literature to be considered, and from his fine and sound critical gift, we had a right to expect far more. Is it too much to hope that we may one day receive from him that account of romance in the vernacular as it developed in the period 1050-1250 which he is better qualified than any living scholar to furnish? Such an account must, I think he would agree with me, emphasise the underlying unity of all the varied manifestations of the romantic spirit and their mutual relation to definite common historical and psychological causes. But Professor Lewis-Jones' account of the Arthurian literature may be heartily commended as a sane and scholarly statement of the facts, which should be corrective of the idle talk upon the subject that is finding its way in ever-increasing measure into print. perhaps he is a little too sane. A touch of the awen, under the influence of which the Principal of Jesus' studies are mostly enchanted forest of Arthur-land one must not mind taking one's scientific life in one's hands. I am unable, as will be seen, to regard the Cambridge History as more than a stepping-stone to that adequate account of what the men and women of our race have achieved in the realm of fancy and thought. None the less does it mark a distinct stage in the progress towards the realisation of such an ideal. ALFRED NUTT. COMPENDIUM OF THE PUNJAB CUSTOMARY LAW. By H. A. ROSE. Lahore, 1907. Law, as is well known, assumes two forms in India: first, the priestly legislation, embodied in the Institutes of Manu and other authorities to be found in Max Müller's series of Sacred Books; secondly, a body of local or tribal usages, which are sometimes complementary to, and sometimes at variance with, the Brahmanical codes. It is peculiar to the Punjab that the tribal organisation is very stable, and this fact has saved Hinduism from destruction by the forces of militant Islam. For many years the Local Government has devoted much attention to the tabulation of this local or tribal usage, and at each periodical revision of the land revenue opportunity has been taken to collect from the people themselves a record of their customs in connection with marriage, the devolution of property, and other matters connected with their social life. These materials, which are of great bulk and complexity, Mr. H. A. Rose has now codified with admirable care and precision. The result is a collection of primitive tribal usage which is probably unique. The chapter on marriage throws fresh light on questions such as endogamy, betrothal, and polyandry. That on inheritance exhibits the various methods by which the wisdom of the grey-beards has adapted a system of property to the varying needs of the poly |