way for the monstrous animal forms which appear on many of its works, such as the Book of Kells. He describes them as due to "le goût de la bizarrerie, qui a toujours été dans le sang de la race Anglaise," though how this theory will explain the fantastic taste of the Celtic monks of Ireland one does not easily see.-American scholars are beginning to devote attention to Church history and archæology. The John University is a richly endowed university, some eight or ten years old, Its professoriate is a numerous body, whose members seem all possessed with the adventurous spirit of vigorous youth. They publish a monthly University Circular, embodying contributions on all possible topics of study. In April of last year the Professor of New Testament Greek, Mr. J. R. Harris, published a brief article on the Angelology of Hermas, where he pointed out that the Shepherd of Hermas (Vis. iv. 2-4) embraces a quotation from Dan. vi. 22, and that not in the true Septuagint version, but in Theodotion's recension of it. This offers an important help towards fixing the much-disputed question of the date of Hermas. Professor Hort of Cambridge discusses the same point in the Circular for December last, as also does Harnack in the Theologische Literaturzeitung for March 21. All agree that Hermas must be later than Theodotion, and must, therefore, be assigned to the middle of century ii. "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" has continued to occupy the minds of scholars, both English and foreign. Space would fail me to tell of the new editions of it by Canon Spence, Professor Sabatier of Paris, and others, among which I can only note M. de Romestin's as the most useful for teaching purposes, and Canon Spence's as the most elegant in finish, binding, &c. Every conceivable date has been assigned to it, from the days of St. Paul and St. James to the times when Montanism flourished. Hilgenfeld discusses the book in the first number of the Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Theologie for 1885. He devotes thirty pages to the subject, largely taken up with replying to the theories of Harnack, as I have expounded them in previous records. Hilgenfeld assigns the "Teaching to Asia Minor, and dates it during the Montanist movement. The British Quarterly Review for April, 1885, has an interesting article by Rev. Edward Venables, of Lincoln, summing up all the arguments, theories, and information on the subject. But the truth is, that practically nothing has been added to the information contained in the original edition of Bishop Bryennios. The "Jahrbücher für Protestantische Theologie," edited by the learned Jena theologian, Professor Lipsius, has also an article by Holtzmann in the first number of this year, discussing the "Teaching." Owing to the German fashion of substituting letters for names-D., for instance, for Didache, H. for Hermas-this article reads more like a page of algebra than of criticism. There is in the same Review an interesting article on the Roman senator Apollonius, who suffered for his Christianity under Commodus. It identifies the apology which Eusebius says he presented to the Senate with the "Cohortatio ad Græcos," attributed to Justin. If this be the case, we should have recovered, or at least identified, another interesting work of secondcentury Christianity.-But this record must come to an end. I have only space to notice that, after a long interval, De Rossi's "Bulletino di Archeol. Crist.," has appeared again after a long interval. A notice appears at the end of the last number that 1883-1884 will be counted as one volume. The last part contains many interesting notices of fresh discoveries among the catacombs.-I can only mention a few English works which have lately appeared. The Luther anniversary has produced a curious attack on the Reformer's character, from the Roman Catholic point of view, in a book by J. Verres, D.D.,* which easily enough gathers up many coarse and unguarded passages out of his writings; while Dr. Rae has on the other side produced an equally laudatory biography.+ Dr. Rae does not give us the coarse passages, but he gives letters, as on p. 394, from which a mind determined to find fault might draw unpleasant conclusions. This biography is, however, the most interesting and readable produced by the Luther commemoration, and offers, perhaps, too ideal a picture of his home-life. The Religious Tract Society has translated Lechler's "Life of Wycliffe." It is a very thorough work, embracing chapters on Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln; Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh; the vision of Piers Plowman, and the other influences which combined to shape the Reformer's life. It analyses carefully his work and writings, and furnishes the reader with numerous references for further investigations. This work is the most comprehensive Life of Wycliffe yet attempted, as Dr. Lechler had access to the great store of MSS. contained in the Imperial Library of Vienna. The last works I can notice are the S.P.C.K. series of Diocesan Histories. They are useful little books of various degrees of merit. They will serve to stir up local interest, and will enable men to realize the continuity of national as well as diocesan life. Two volumes are lying before me : one on Norwich,§ by a very competent writer, Dr. Jessop, who is quite at home in medieval England; and the other on Lichfield, by Mr. Beresford. The Lichfield volume has many curious facts gleaned from the past. Among others, that Irish bishops of the fifteenth century seem to have been very fond of leaving their own charges to do episcopal work in Lichfield, a fashion which has not yet quite died out. On p. 178 he mentions several instances. Some of their titles seem to have puzzled him. But surely a diocesan historian ought to have known how to spell and translate Laonensis Eps., which is simply the Latin for Bishop of Killaloe; as also that Connor, one of the dioceses ruled by Jeremy Taylor and Mant, is spelt with a double n. GEORGE T. STOKES. II.-FICTION. THE critic who compares the novels of our own day with those of a former age is sensible that a change has come over the spirit of fiction. It has grown more ambitious than it was. It used to aim at interesting its readers either by the delineation of incident, as in Scott's novels, or of character, as in those of Miss Austen. At a later date it took a more serious turn, and aimed at pointing out social ills, and "Luther: an Historical Sketch." By J. Verres, D.D. Burns & Oates. 1884. "Luther: Student, Monk, Reformer." By John Rae, LL.D. Hodder & Stoughton. * 1884. "John Wycliffe and his English Precursors." By Professor Lechler, D.D. Translated by Professor Lorimer, D.D. London: Religious Tract Society. 1884. § Diocesan Histories." Norwich.' By A. Jessop, D.D. "Lichfield." W. Beresford. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. By representing the wrongs of classes, as some of Mrs. Gaskell's novels and some of Dickens's. But in our own day fiction has expanded to take in new provinces, while it has perforce somewhat neglected the old. It has more of the interest of the essay, and less of the interest of the story. We can hardly open a novel nowadays without coming upon some allusion to the deepest problems of life, and what is espe cially significant and entirely new is that it seems felt legitimate to use these problems as mere material of fiction; the writer who touches on them does not always intend to bring any contribution to their answer, only to paint life as it is. The change is full of interest as an index to the new influences moulding society-an index more faithful, perhaps, than that afforded by any other department of literature, for none so immediately reflects the interests of the average mind. As bearing on the character of fiction itself, we must regard it with mixed feelings. The notion that ideas and thoughts which give interest to real experience lose that interest when they enter on the domain of fiction is a strange superstition, less potent than it has been, but it is a dangerous temptation to a clever writer to suppose that this interest can stand alone. To this temptation Miss Bertha Thomas* appears to have fallen in her attempt to rest the whole interest of a story almost without incident on the iconoclastic creed of her hero. The "portrait," as she calls it (whether with the meaning that it has an actual model, her reader has not been able to discover), is one that needs, and at first promises, interest of a high order, but, when this fails, there is absolutely no other to supply its place. In a second edition of the work which preceded "We Two," on the other hand, we gladly recognize that the public is ready to welcome an attempt to bring serious purpose into fiction when it is allied with imaginative power. "Donovan "t is a religious novel, but it is also a lively and pathetic story, by no means depending for its interest on the thread of serious purpose that runs through it. The author's endeavour to set forth the witness that is latent in all human relation to a relation above humanity, and find in the emotions of torn human hearts a message from a realm of supreme calm, seems to us as full of truth as of beauty. The remarkable writer who calls herself Vernon Lee has shown her capacity elsewhere than on the ground of fiction, and we cannot but hope that she will continue to exercise her literary activity on the same soil. She seems to have the qualifications for producing work much more valuable than ordinary novels, but just to lack the power for producing extraordinary ones. Interesting as is her first regular novel, it does not seem to us interesting in proportion to its power, and we cannot but surmise that these thoughts on art and life would have had more literary effect if given in some other form, although they would of course then not have had so many readers. This is the temptation that is corrupting able writers. They have seen from the example of a great genius that thought, worked up into fiction, may be made to interest the thoughtless, and forget that it needs exceptional skill to load a small basis of narrative with a great weight of moral purpose. "Miss Brown" is a denunciation of the new Pagan * "Ichabod." By Bertha Thomas. 2 vols. T. Fisher Unwin. Miss Brown." By Vernon Lee. 3 vols. Blackwood & Sons. ism by one who treats Christianity as dead, but offers no substitute either for the faith she ignores or the culture of which she displays the inadequacy. The greater portion might be read as a sermon on the vanity of the most seductive substitutes for Christianity, and the author, who evidently thinks Christianity has proved itself just as vain as they, does not feel it worth while to embody in her narrative any protest against misconception, partly perhaps because she regards Christianity as too entirely bygone to be worth opposing, but partly from what seems to us a sort of grand confidence in even the merely negative aspect of what she clearly discerns to be truth. The book might be described as a translation into prose of Tennyson's "Palace of Art," but what Vernon Lee exhibits is the debasing influence rather of the worship of beauty than of the worship of intensity. It is (according to this creed) not that all ugly things must be out of sight-they are in their way nearly as interesting as beautiful things; it is only the commonplace which must be banished. The life of the artist must be a kind of distillery, in which the material for every kind of emotion is welcome; whatever is capable of giving a sensuous thrill can be utilized here. Unnatural wickedness is as valuable as supreme beauty; that which stirs horror is as much in place as that which stirs admiration. The channel by which evil reaches the hero is not sensual pleasure, but artistic taste; by temperament chaste, and even cold, he is drawn into profligacy by the covetous intellect of the artist. The conception of such a character is a very original one; but there is some feebleness in the execution, and the central figure is shadowy. Perhaps to some extent he is intended to be shadowy. We are continually reminded that he is effeminate and mawkish; but we are also informed that he took a certain place in the world's attention, and this we are never made to feel. It is impossible for a critic to say how we should be made to feel that a personage in the dramatis persona is a great poet. But, nevertheless, it is a flaw to tell your readers that your hero is a man of genius, and not somehow make them feel it. It is for this reason that genius never seems to us a good object for art, nor can we recall a single first-rate work of fiction which shows that the difficulty may be got over. On the other hand, Miss Brown herself is a fine character, distinctly and temperately conceived, and firmly drawn throughout. Her mingled Scotch and Italian parentage is well represented in the truthfulness and simplicity of a noble and childlike character that has also a certain Southern richness and susceptibility, and the solidity with which she is painted seems to pervade the whole picture, though as we gaze at it we see that hardly any other figure has the same kind of force, and some are mere flat washes. We could almost fancy that one or two persons in actual life had strongly impressed the memory of the writer, and reproduced themselves in her imagination, rather than that there was any real creative power at work. But the question how far such an aim as she has set herself is legitimate from a moral point of view is even more important than that as to its artistic significance. It is impossible to look on such subjects as she has touched merely from the point of view of art; the very degradation of the world she paints is that it has ceased to look on any subject from any other point of view. The question how far it is permissible to paint the love of what is wrong as an element of mental stimulus, a pungent stimulant to imagination, is one which would receive very different answers from different persons. There are great dangers in such an attempt, yet it does not seem to us to be necessarily a desertion of all high literary aim, and the picture of the temptress might have been associated with such an aim, perhaps, if the story had ended differently. But the account of Anne's sacrifice when she claims her lover's promise to marry her, in order to save him from the solicitations of the temptress, at the time when he has begun to fill her with loathing, throws back a shadow of discredit on the earlier pages of the story, we feel as if there must have been something morally wanting in any dramatic development which has issued in so revolting a dénouement. Vernon Lee thinks, evidently, that in painting a marriage impressing the reader as a kind of prostitution she is describing the loftiest self-sacrifice. This is difficult ground; but, if the writer of fiction enters it, the critic has no choice but to follow. If marriage is ever regarded as an arrangement between two individual human beings, its sanctity is gone. When a man or a woman forgets that it is primarily a consent on his or her part to the Divine prerogative of parentage on the part of the other, he or she defies the claims of the unseen and the infinite in favour of the seen and the finite, and this in a twofold direction; the purity of a countless series of generations is sacrificed to the amelioration of one person for a few years, and in his or her favour it is conceded that the world may be so much the worse for ever. Surely it is hardly possible to describe a more presumptuous or idolatrous sin. Vernon Lee and Mr. Pater* are kindred spirits, and their works follow without any change of key-note, while some of our remarks on the first novel apply to both. We should have welcomed the amount of thought in either more gladly as an essay than as a novel. "Marius, the Epicurean," is more satisfactory as a literary work than "Miss Brown," although, on the other hand, the development of an æsthetic character in the age of the Antonines is a more arduous theme for the average novel-reader than any similar picture taken from contemporary life, and "Marius" has even less incident than "Miss Brown" has. The interest is, in our view, too purely intellectual for that of a novel. But there is, in the delicate, fastidious appropriateness of the style, in the easy flow of a set of descriptions (we can hardly call it a narrative), in which every page reveals learning and not a line demands effort, in the faint, soft, pure colouring of the whole, like a picture by Albert Moore, a peculiar charm, which will be felt, we should imagine, by a few readers in more than one generation, though we do not expect it will ever be felt by many. As a picture of thought under Marcus Aurelius, it strikes the present writer (conscious, however, of inadequacy in making the remark) as wanting in grasp; and surely to make the Epicurean a central figure in an age of Stoicism was to choose a position from which the more obvious characteristics of the time were cast into the shade, nor do all the references to Lucretius strike us as happy. What appears to have attracted Mr. Pater is a certain resemblance of that age to our own, which has struck others who have studied it. The faith of the past was fading, the faith of the future had not as yet reached a point where it strongly influenced the thought of the world, the allusions * "Marius, the Epicurean." By Walter Pater. 2 vols. Macmillan & Co. |