meant " a wounding of such a sharp, inveterate nature that nothing shall be able to tent it, i. e. search the bottom, and help in the cure of it." Steevens, also quoted by Furness, missing the sig nificance of Theobald's explanation, says that “ tented woundings may possibly signify such wounds as will not admit of having a tent put into them."

un

W. J. Craig, in his excellent edition of the play, after a careful consideration of the passage in question, accepts Nares's explanation: "Unappeased, not put into a way of cure as a wound is, when a surgeon has put a tent into it." The most surprising explanation of all, as coming from a physician, is that of Dr. Bucknill, who says: "Untented appears to mean, not to be tented,' wounds the bottom of which is not to be reached." All these interpreters have forgotten that the term "tent" was applied not only to a probe, for the purpose of searching a wound, but also to a piece of some medicated material, lint or sponge, introduced into an abscess cavity for the purpose of stimulating healing; to stimulating ointments used in the healing of wounds; and to a cylindrical roll of some absorbent material, usually of lint, introduced into wounds-and retained there for the purpose of absorbing the acrid and purulent discharges of the abscess or fistula. In other words, a tent is what is now commonly called a drain, and "untented - in accordance with a common Eliza

bethan usage means "undrainable, not capable

of being emptied of its purulent contents, not ceasing to discharge pus." Stated medically, Lear is cursing Goneril with chronic purulent ulcers affecting all her organs of feeling. This is certainly far more vivid than wounds that are too small or too deep or too sharp to admit of the introduction of a probe or tent or medicament. Besides, such wounds do not exist. Even a superficial examination of any medical work of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries will suffice to confirm our definition. The curious reader may consult Clowes's "Treatise on Gunshot Wounds," 1596, (passim, referred to by Craig), any translation of the works of Hippocrates, or the book entitled "Natura Exenterata; or Nature Unbowelled," London, 1655. We cannot, in concluding, refrain from quoting a very interesting passage, illustrating the use of the word "tent," in "The Muse's Looking Glass," a play by Randolph (1638): "The land wants such As dare with vigour execute her laws; Her fester'd members must be lanc'd and tented."

SAMUEL A. TANNENBAUM, M.D.

New York, Jan. 11, 1916.

SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMATIC DIRECTNESS.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

I am one who did notice the point of fact your correspondent in a recent number of THE DIAL brings forward as one usually ignored by editors, concerning the minor incident in Plutarch used by Shakespeare with his transfiguring touch in "Coriolanus," I, ix, 94ff.

To make Coriolanus forget the name while remembering the deed of a benefactor, at a time when most men would be full only of themselves,

is one of those multitudinous trifles of invention that speak eloquently of the characterizing and humanizing genius of Shakespeare.

In my brief notes on the "cunning" of "Shakespeare's little changes" and his "human touch, quite beyond Plutarch" in this passage (" First Folio Edition" of "Coriolanus," pp. 174-5, 178-9), I also brought to bear upon these changes another little fact not noticed by your correspondent, the fact that the poet keeps back until now the faintness mentioned by Plutarch, earlier, before the close of the battle: "Then they prayed Martius that he would retire to the campe, because they sawe he was able to doe no more, he was alreadie so wearied with the great woundes he had upon him."

Shakespeare dramatizes here at one clear and rapid stroke the historical, physical, and psychological facts upon which he builds the climax of this scene and the stage mechanics of its exeunt. The Roman general, instantly granting the boon just asked for the benefactor, gives the order "deliver him, Titus." To carry out the order, Titus asks "Martius, his name?" This question brings out the reply: "By Jupiter, forgot: I am wearie, yea, my Memorie is tyr'd: Have we no wine here?" His general's comment is clear and direct. It reinforces this explanation by Coriolanus that he forgot because his very capacity to remember within his wounded head was faint for loss of blood. Cominius notices that the blood has ceased to flow, is drying, a token of its exhaustion implying the need of care and nourishment. So he says, "The bloud upon your Visage dryes, 'tis time It should be lookt too: come." And thus they go off stage.

The trouble with a more involved and roundabout explanation of the dramatic fitness of this climax and this exeunt is that it falsifies them. It is against the dramatic sincerity of the scene and the characters and the direct and sufficient explanation elaborately to suppose that Coriolanus forgot, as your correspondent puts it, because he scorned to remember a name that "would have suggested" his benefactor's "plebeian origin."

If this were designed by Shakespeare he had the skill to make it plain. Why did he take pains rather to reinforce the explanation offered? Why should a dramatist who is sure of touch and master of his purpose go about to make it dark and double?

Remember, too, that he prepared earlier for a special loss of blood in the head. This dauntless hero took his wounds headlong, confronting the foe. His face was scarcely recognizable in I, vi. It appears as if it were flayed. It needs to be verified as his by the sound of his voice. In the present scene, he says that when he has washed and his "face is faire" those about him may be enabled to perceive whether he blushes at their praise or no.

The assertion remains to be proved, moreover, that merely because the benefactor is poor he is therefore a plebeian.

What sequitur is there in that for an audience? What sequitur is there in that for a patrician soul

like that of Coriolanus, who is so un-American, shall we say?—at least so not at all up to date as in this very scene to despise a mercenary measurement of his own worth?

The idealistic scorn of the material coming out in the hero's characteristic refusal to "take a Bribe to pay my Sword" shines rather in an intentionally enhancing light because the Volscian benefactor whom he remembers is poor of purse and noble of nature. There was nothing to be got by the request he makes for him. Shakespeare selects from Plutarch for special mention here only those facts about him that suit and serve the scene. The other details, that he had been rich (therefore was not a plebeian we could with more reason suppose if it were worth while to go into that irrelevancy) and was now a slave of war- - all these details were simply needless or inconspicuously implied in the statement of Coriolanus that he once lay at his house," He us'd me kindly, He cry'd to me: I saw him Prisoner; But then Aufidius was within my view, And wrath o'rewhelm'd my pittie: I request you to give my poore Host freedome."

In this scene, evidently, sympathy with the nobleness of the hero is all Shakespeare wants from his audience. Later, when he sits in gold and when his friendliness with Volscians against his country is to his discredit, there is there as here no taint of mere money return suffered to blacken him. CHARLOTTE PORTER.

Boston, Mass., Jan. 10, 1916.

A BACONIAN TO THE DEFENCE.
(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

The authorship of the Shakespeare plays is undoubtedly the greatest of literary problems, and it cannot be belittled by an article such as the review in your columns by Mr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum, of Mr. James P. Baxter's solid work on the question.

The reviewer seems to have made a special study of the facts connected with Shakespeare's application for a coat of arms, and he is enabled to correct Mr. Baxter on one or two minor points regarding the application. His triumphant manner of doing this might lead anyone to suppose that he believed he had thereby established his hero's claim to the authorship of the plays. Another point on which Mr. Tannenbaum lays special stress is the praise of the Shakespeare works by various contemporary writers. In using this argument he quite ignores the fact that none of these writers, with possibly one exception, identifies the author with the Stratford actor, and this possible exception is by no means a clear exception. The phrase "our English Terence" suggests a pseudonym, if the Terence plays were the work of Caius Laelius. Mr. Tannenbaum's reasoning would be paralleled by stringing together a number of passages in praise of George Eliot's novels, and proceeding to argue that the author of the novels must have been a man of that name.

Dr. Charles William Wallace, who some few years ago discovered in the Record Office in Lon

don the document containing Shakespeare's Answer to Interrogatories in a petty lawsuit in which he was a witness, unwittingly proved conclusively that the actor was unable to write, because his name is written by a law clerk in law script, and the deponent made his mark beneath the signature.

Mr. Tannenbaum is greatly displeased with Mr. Baxter for distinguishing between the actor's name, Shakspere, and the author's pseudonym, Shakespeare or Shake-speare; but Mr. Tannenbaum's displeasure does not alter the fact that the difference does exist, and it exists quite as clearly as the difference between Tannenbaum and Rosenbaum.

The article contains the usual sneering suggestion that all Baconians are insane, though it is doubtful whether Mr. Tannenbaum would have dared to say this of von Bismarck if he had been in Germany during the heyday of the Chancellor's E. BASIL LUPTON. Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 10, 1916.

power.

"Our present letters do not show the diphthongal characters of ch, sh, ng, th and zh." ("Essentials of English Speech," by Frank H. Vizetelly, page 290.) I take it this means that the sounds indicated by the italicized letters were diphthongal in Dr. Vizetelly's best understanding of the subject at the time the book was written.

"Every one of the great dictionaries has decided that the sound of these letters [those italicized above] is diphthongal." (Ibid, page 291.) This seems to state in plain language that all the great dictionaries actually set forth that the sound of these letters is diphthongal.

These are the points at issue, these and these alone. In contradiction of Dr. Vizetelly's statements I arrayed against him every dictionary. Not daring and he dares much to deny their authority, he preserves a brilliant silence on both the points at issue, which must be taken as a tacit confession that he is wrong. This settles the controversy. It only remains for him to correct his book, quite useful in several other respects, in the light of the understanding that, I am sure, once imparted, will slowly dawn upon him- surely, but slowly.

phonetic authority, quoting volume and page, it pleases me to find him citing not one authority against that array in his letter of Jan. 6, 1916,not one. As he has cited pretty nearly everything else he could think of which does not bear directly upon this point, I take it that he is on his dilatory way to conviction that he is wrong. And he is grotesquely wrong. For he has chosen the use of digraphs to represent elementary sounds as an excellence of the alphabet he is apologizing for, when it is a weakness. It may well pray to be defended from such a friend. This, too, will eventually come to him.

A paragraph, "(4)," in his latest letter requires attention as bearing upon the main question and not upon matter wholly extraneous. In it Dr. Vizetelly says: "nowhere in my book do I individually say 'most phoneticists analyze this sound [that of ch] as a combination of t and sh,' as Mr. Rice asserts. It is true that the words appear upon page 291 of the book, but there they are quoted from the edition of Webster's International Dictionary.'” The italics are the good Doctor's; as usual when he italicizes, it is to shout something that he ought not to whisper. Here the book follows the quotation from Webster with a sentence of his own, "This being the case, let us be guided by the expert phonetist." "This being the case," it might seem to those with understanding, can mean only that Dr. Vizetelly does individually say what his letter with equal explicitness denies he has said individually, while the words "expert phonetist" mean nothing more or less than that the authority quoted is, in his individual opinion, an authority which has his individual endorsement. Possibly, however, judging by other positions he has taken, his categorical statement that the case is "this" signifies that he individually believes it different. What his per

sonal views on the subject of ch chance to be at this moment, provided he has any, is a matter for smiling conjecture.

66

Only less confusing are Dr. Vizetelly's partial quotations from three dictionaries, ignoring five others, regarding the meaning of the single word diphthong. No one doubts that the words consonantal diphthong mean "a blending of two consonants in one syllable." That is not the point in issue; the noun without its modifying adjective means only a blending of two vowels in one syllable." The use of the noun and adjective in the definition from the "New English Dictionary," quoted in parenthesis, emphasizes the point; so do the two instances of use brought forward to support it. This is no less true of the citations from the other two dictionaries. If Dr. Vizetelly had quoted the instances of use or had allowed their weight to enter his understanding, he might have admitted the correctness of my position. He might, I say; there is nothing in his controversial method to make me think he would.

As for the rest, it is without the issues. Where I have been corrected in errors of fact when the haste of an instant reply compelled my reliance upon impressions rather than demonstrable facts, I am thankful, as I have been for correction

VARIANTS IN A CHRISTMAS FOLK-SONG. (To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

In the January 6 number of THE DIAL one of your correspondents, Mr. Crawford, quotes "The Twelve Days of Christmas" at length. He says the version was given him orally and that he has never seen it in print. By a curious coincidence these verses were published as a children's game by Mr. George E. Johnson in the December (1915) number of "Something to Do," an excellent new juvenile magazine.

Mr. Johnson gives a slightly varying version which it is interesting to compare with Mr. Crawford's. His final stanza is:

"The twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Twelve lords a-leaping, eleven ladies dancing, ten pipers piping,

Nine drummers drumming, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming,

Six geese a-laying, five gold rings, four colly birds, three French hens,

Two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree."

Mr. Johnson's "twelve lords a-leaping" are not so absurd with "eleven ladies dancing, ten pipers piping, and nine drummers drumming." Indeed, it seems quite natural behavior under the circumstances!

It is amusing to note how the oral transmission has changed the "four colly birds" of the one verse into the "four colored balls" of Mr. Crawford's, and even the "six geese a-laying" into "six chests of linen."

VERA ANNETTE PRICE.

Bucyrus, Ohio, Jan. 12, 1916.

A WORD FROM THE PUBLISHER.
(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

I have been interested in reading the review, in your issue of Dec. 9, of Mr. Lewis's book, "Sport, Travel, and Adventure." If anyone is to blame for not including stories and adventures of every traveller, it is the Publisher! Mr. Lewis, a member of my staff, had the opportunity of quoting from over one hundred and fifty volumes published by this house, and therefore all the books from which he has quoted bear my imprint. If you will refer to the Bibliography, you will note that the Editor has quoted from fifty-four books. In several instances the books are by American authors for whom I have published in England.

London, Dec. 29, 1915.

T. FISHER UNWIN.

The New Books.

THE VERSE OF THE BRONTË SISTERS.*

There was a time in Victorian days when readers slaked their thirst for an innocent melodrama with the novels of Charlotte Brontë, when her hysterical rhetoric, the plaintive heroines, and their black-browed suitors (of mysterious past) moved readers to strange and deep emotions. Those days are gone, and with them the peculiar thrill. The demoniac laughter of "Jane Eyre" and the nun-like spectre of "Villette" stir us no longer, or, at most, move us to irreverent though indulgent mirth. And yet, despite the changes of literary fashion, there has been no decline in the Brontë stock. The age which allows George Eliot to moulder on forgotten shelf has preserved the fame of Charlotte and practically created the fame of Emily Brontë. Volume after volume about them issues from the press. Their works are published in sumptuous "library editions"; their lives are written by Mr. Shorter, M. Dimnet, and Miss Sinclair; there is a "Brontë Society," with its own series of publications; the microscopic romances, in the fabrication of which the sisters passed away a lonely hour of girlhood, fetch magnificent sums in auction-rooms; the moors of Yorkshire have become "the Brontë country"; and now Mr. Benson, gathering up all their verse, puts forth a volume entitled "The Brontë Poems."

The

It

The Brontës, in a word, have become a fad. They have entered a sphere with Chatterton, Blake, and Byron, where interest in an author's literary work merges into a larger but perhaps less legitimate interest in his whole story, his life and environment, and mere literature is viewed in the light of the whole. The explanation is simple enough. Brontë story challenges the imagination. is as though the spirit of Byron had mingled with that of Miss Alcott, and then projected itself against the bleak background of the northern moorland. There is a bitter realism in the story at times, suggestive of Balzac or even of Zola, but the whole is softened by the spirit of girlhood and is solemnized by the atmosphere of a brooding fate. To much of this Emily Brontë gave enduring expression in "Wuthering Heights"-crudely, to be sure, but with amazing power. Charlotte

Brontë, forgetting her pedagogic primness, expresses it at moments, but never fully. For

BRONTE POEMS. Selections from the Poetry of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brönte. Edited, with Introduction, by Arthur C. Benson. With portraits. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

the complete revelation of it, you must know the Brontë story.

Now it is for its connection with this story that most readers will open Mr. A. C. Benson's reissue of the poems. They are by no means new to the world. The sisters as every one knows -put forth their first volume of verse in 1846; the verse has been reissued in various forms, and additions to it have appeared at various times. various times. Mr. Benson, who has had access to the Brontë papers, can add but little that is new: six poems by Charlotte, two by Emily, and five by Anne. This is hardly an event in literary history, for the poems now first published contain nothing particularly significant, and a perusal of the entire volume will but remind the average reader that the Brontës have become very old-fashioned. The poems, with one or two notable exceptions, derive their interest not so much from their intrinsic merits as from the significance lent them by the circumstances out of which they spring.

The Brontës were all, by common inheritance, versifiers; none of them was a poet, though Emily and, at times, Anne produced poems. The lack which is felt throughout the work of them all is that of discipline. There is surely some subtle hereditary relation between the vice of Branwell's life and the vice of Charlotte's style. In the poems, as in the novels, emotion is everywhere astir, but it is crude, frequently callow, self-conscious, wholly uncontrolled, and always plunging into language, wreaking itself upon expression, set down hurriedly in all its rawness, never, by any chance, recollected in tranquillity. With the Brontës, to experience an emotion is to express it. They consume no smoke, and therefore a collection of their verse must always remain a somewhat murky record of their riot of emotionalism. After reading them for a while one longs for the professional touch again, and turns to Landor or to Mr. Bridges, to Hellenism and discipline and an experienced artist's control of technique. The atmosphere may be colder, but it is clearer.

The nocturnes and études of the Brontës are passionate and moving, but the performer is for ever striking a false note. Emily, for example, can write about the stars in a really beautiful and affecting way:

"I turned me to the pillow then
To call back night, and see
Your worlds of solemn light again
Throb with my heart and me."

She could write that, and then she could add:
"The curtains swayed, the wakened flies
Were murmuring round my room,

Imprisoned there till I should rise,

And give them leave to roam."

The same slovenliness of technique, the same passion spoiled by rawness, appear in the poems of Charlotte. Her lyric, "He Saw My Heart's Woe," now printed for the first time, might come straight from the most lurid pages of "Jane Eyre":

"Idolator I kneeled to an idol cut in rock,

The Granite God had felt no tenderness, no

Of all the Brontë group the one who came nearest to self-restraint was Anne. She, the gentlest of them all, craves direction and control, finds it in her Christian faith, and submits herself to the higher power. Her verse is prevailingly religious, her moods less stormy than Emily's, her notes few and simple, reminiscent of eighteenth century hymnals and, in particular, of the poetry of William Cowper. Her verses to the memory of that poet are something more than a young girl's sweet tribute to a favorite; they are instinct with the very spirit which she admires in her master, and it is pleasant to feel that among all the verses written in his honor none would have gratified the recluse of Olney more than these. It is the spirit of Cowper, moreover, that moves in what is almost certainly the best poem she ever wrote, the "Prayer," which ends,

"I cannot say my faith is strong,

I dare not hope my love is great;
But strength and love to thee belong;
Oh, do not leave me desolate.

"I know I owe my all to thee;

Oh, take the heart I cannot give!
Do thou my strength my Saviour be,
And make me to thy glory live!"

If the name of Anne Brontë is to live in verse, it must, as she foresaw, be in some such simple way as this.

from a certain horror at the misery of the general human lot. In her powerful lyric, How Clear She Shines," she says:

66

"While gazing on the stars that glow
Above me in that stormless sea,

I long to hope that all the woe

Creation knows is held in thee!" This is the essential mood in her verse, this rather than the more pagan tone of the following poem (given in its entirety):

"One pause upon the brink of life,
Before it breaks in headlong strife,

Upon its downward road;

One insight through the waters clear,
Before their pictures disappear

In the fierce foaming flood."

But there was one experience which shattered Emily's life-long sadness, and lifted her to a plane of solemn joy, and that experience was death. In her last lines, "No Coward Soul Is Mine," she transcended herself, and lifted her dying voice in a pæan of faith from which the note of desperation has been banished by the calmness of eternity; and, though the verses have been hackneyed in every anthology and in every essay on her work, they must be quoted once again as a measure of all that was best in her and as gathering into one piercing ray all the broken The last two lights of her earlier verse. stanzas of this poem are these: "Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee. "There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou - Thou art being and breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed." That is an utterance destined to survive. In the opinion of the present writer it is even destined to survive that popular creed of the present hour in which it is asserted, with more force than conviction, that man is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.