of style these are among France's lineaments. Instead of striking a balance he too often plays upon either the credit or the debit side of the ledger. In these conversations he censures patriotism in one breath and defends it in another. He denies eras and affirms them. His old age finds existence now beautiful, now intensely disagreeable. Even so docile a disciple as Le Goff can make nothing of France's sympathy for Bolshevism. "His brazen adherence to principles his whole life belied gave the impression of a forced attitude maintained not by a sympathetic adherence of the mind, but by a persistent act of the will." He attributes France's attitude to his scepticism, his iconoclasm, and his world-weariness. His views of Caillaux, Clemenceau, Lloyd-George, Wilson, and other political figures are as shrewd and sometimes as just as his remarks on Verlaine, Bergson, Bourget, Rolland, and Tolstoy. Perhaps the best that can be said of his books is what Piaget Shanks has said of them, that they "will best recall the delicate age which found its object in an Epicurean cult of art and self. For he alone has avoided the formal dangers of its romantic subjectivity, building not in agate nor in porphyry, but in the cool yet glowing marbles of the Greeks."

III

The treatments of Pushkin and of Gogol are, like Aldington's "Voltaire," whose format is also theirs, limited and concise. Nikolay Vasilievitch Gogol-Yanovsky (1809-32) sought to be at once realist and romantic, because life is so and because he believed life and literature to be co-terminous. In his naturalistic examination of the commonplace he has the idealistic purpose of discovering something of the intense and eternal significance behind the apparently more sordid aspects of life, exhibiting thus what his biographer calls an "inverted romanticism." And he had much more humor— flexible term as that is-than we normally associate with Russian writers, although his humor did not prevent him from regarding himself as a potential historian. Indeed, he

gained in 1834 and abandoned in 1835 a professorship in that field, and once planned a nine-volume history of the Middle Ages. "Taras Bulba," however, is a really great historical novel. Although in his later morbidity he disliked "The Inspector," it remains one of the best among Russian comedies, in the clever plot Pushkin gave Gogol, the zest for types, the gay humor and the natural dialogue. The tales of Little Russia found in "The Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” “Mirgorod" and "Petersburg Notes" are equally lifelike and exhibit an even finer art. His masterpiece, the scheme of which was again supplied by his friend Pushkin, is the unfinished trilogy, "Dead Souls," partly a one-person prose epic of the adventures of Chichikov, its chief hero; and partly a reflection of huge, various, sprawling Russia. "It is just a series of genre pictures, of types painted with an incredible skill and plastic sense.

Mr. Lavrin has placed Gogol accurately in his initial chapter, showing how Pushkin and Gogol, "the two main pillars at the entrance to modern Russian literature," and Lermontov, who wrote the first Russian introspective novel, were the true inspirers of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky. With similar discernment he analyzes, compares, and evaluates Gogol's chief works, although he makes a rather superfluous apology for doing so, pointing out that "it is impossible to understand his works unless we approach him both as man and as writer, thus combining the æsthetic and the psychological analysis." Is there any other really effective method in dealing with an artist? He concludes that "the whole of Russian literature fluctuates between the great and simple objectivity bequeathed to it by Pushkin, and that morbid subjectivity which received its first impulse from Gogol."

Alexander Sergéyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) was a less complex figure. Of mixed origin (he had Ethiopian blood in his veins), he proved an indifferent student in his schooldays at Tsarskoe Selo and a frank profligate afterward in

Petersburg. After a visit to the south, fruitful in literary inspirations, he lived at Mikhaylovskoye, continuing to set down in verse his vivid and somewhat Byronic transcripts of the life about him. Following his marriage in 1831 he wrote his famous story "The Captain's Daughter”—a landmark in realistic Russian literature. He received a mortal wound in a duel fought at Petersburg in 1837. His boyish work was precocious, as in "Ruslan and Lyudmila;" his mature work remarkably prolific. His masterpieces are "Eugeni Onegin," the famous drama of "Boris Godunov," and the poem called "The Bronze Horseman." Pushkin, like Gogol, rescues romanticism from mere sentimentality and understands the dignity of the real. He mingles hardly less successfully the impetuous passion of youth with a purity of technique almost unrivalled in Russian. His relation to Gogol has already been indicated. He was not only a great artist, but evoked by his psychological prescriptions greatness in Gogol. Prince Mirsky's book is more informative than critical, yet it relieves the factual framework of a rather dramatic life with an occasional excursion into creative criticism, especially when dealing with the poetry of Pushkin; but much more should have been made of his technique in both prose and verse, his dramatic skill, and his persistent influence.

IV

Mr. Nicolson's success in disengaging the master from the meretrician in Tennyson has led him to attempt a similar task for Swinburne. But it is more difficult here, because Tennyson is simpler in his poetic processes and because he has as yet had no treatment at once so intimate and so thorough as that which Mr. Gosse has given Swinburne. The present essay (first in the New Series of "English Men of Letters") is as criticism almost too facile, but it sometimes achieves searching judgments. The author explains the present reaction against Swinburne as due in part to the general feeling about the monotonous fixity of his technique, and

to the general opinion that his work lacks intellectual and spiritual core. Admitting that Swinburne has "no sense of audience," that the "acoustic tremor" of his words lulls overmuch and hypnotizes, that he makes an "ill-organized use of images," Mr. Nicolson shows that none of these reasons for the reaction is so cogent as the very abnormality of Swinburne. He is a specialist poet, and an intensely personal and eccentric one, whose work is limited by its creator's arrested development and by his relative imperviousness to impressions, especially after 1857. His real internal centre, thinks Mr. Nicolson, was made up of "two dominant and conflicting impulses, namely, the impulse towards revolt and the impulse towards submission." No little is said and quoted to support this by no means strained conclusion, but to the mention of these two impulses (which both appear in many other poets, as in Sophocles, Shelley and Clough) I should add Swinburne's dreamy detachment from empirical realities, which grew at last into a longing for deliverance from the need and choice of either submission or revolt. Still, there is no doubt that "the balanced tension between the two impulses" does give to Swinburne's best work (as in "Atalanta" and "Songs before Sunrise") a sustained singing harmony of vibrating power and charm.

Mr. Nicolson's review of the poet's elfin boyhood and eccentric Oxford days touches accurately the personal influences which quickened him then, and the motives and enthusiasms which drove him into his magnificent but sometimes muddled hero-worship. This hero-worship “was a deep and persistent religion, and the most potent of his incantations was ever 'Let us now praise famous men.

The critical treatments that follow of "Atalanta," "Poems and Ballads" (first and second series), and "Songs before Sunrise" are valuable, although Mr. Nicolson's anxiety that these treatments shall sustain his central thesis (and they do sustain it) makes him seem unaware of the merits of poems not quite "in the picture." The chapter on

the Watts-Dunton tutelage at "The Pines" in Putney gives us too little of the personal impression Swinburne made on those suburbanites who valued his presence and quietly observed his ordered outside routine. The identification of roundels with rondeaux is unfortunate, and in general this chapter is a disappointment. But the quick appreciation that follows of the qualities of the poet's prose style, good and bad, and of his worth as a critic, is one of the best parts of the book. I like especially the emphasis upon Swinburne's belief that love (in the sense of imaginative sympathy) is indispensable to good criticism. As Emerson puts it, “Every man is entitled to be judged by his best moment," and Swinburne himself: "Love and judgment must be one in those who would look into such high and lovely things." But the biographer becomes a little trite and tiresome when he adds that while "sympathy is admittedly essential to criticism," yet it "should be mated with discrimination, and praise should keep careful accounts." We all know that Swinburne is not a judicial critic, yet we need his criticism, as we need Lamb's and Blake's, and for much the same reasons. I wish, too, that the love of children which all three of these men possessed might have been made more of here, and that Swinburne's religion might have emerged more clearly in these pages as the finely poetic (and therefore religious) thing it is at its long and high moment.

GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE

NOCK'S JEFFERSON

Jefferson. By Albert Jay Nock. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.75.

T

HIS is the most recent of the numerous books on Jefferson called forth by the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is also one of the best written and most