given him as a theme upon which he was to compose variations. As the 'Nozze di Figaro' was composed in the year 1786, this seems to fix approximately the date of these priceless lessons. Mozart must have found a pupil after his own heart, a passionate delicate-souled musician.

'Alas, it is very true' (Beckford writes to Lady Hamilton in that year), 'music destroys me; and what is worse, I love being destroyed. Rather had I die in this style than live in any other.' 'To-night I have been playing strange exotic tunes upon a harpsichord which your friend Mon1 de Lamberg will soon have the glory of possessing. Such a harpsichord I think I have never touched. I have bespoken its brother. I flatter myself that one day or other I may hear you awaken it. Did you ever read in some Lapland history of certain gnomes who lurk in the mines and chasms of tremendous mountains? The music I have just now been composing was exactly such, I imagine, as elves and pigmies dance to-brisk and humming, moody and subterranean.'

'Music is ever my principal delight and comfort' (he writes from Paris in April 1781), and I am cruelly abused for loving it so well. Lord Morton [the ambassador, a connexion of the Hamiltons] reads me many a severe lecture upon this subject, and, waxing wiser and wiser, increaseth in stiffness every day. I fear I shall never be half so sapient, nor good for anything in this world but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the moon.'

These prophetic words, written before he came of age, contain a curiously precise outline of his future life. It was spent exactly as he says, only he collected other things besides 'old Japan.' The towers and gardens all came true. We are conscious that we have done imperfect justice to the many and varied charms of Beckford's letters. We have dwelt on the poetic, dreamy side, to the neglect of the wit, the acute and humorous observation of men and manners, the appreciation of nature and of art, in which they abound. Our reason is that the visionary side of Beckford's nature really dominated all others, and forms the explanation of his half-century of almost complete seclusion in his successive houses at Fonthill and Bath. The fiery, eccentric old collector, who bullied Clark and Bohn about book-sales, was the same man we see in these youthful letters. His friends were Vol. 213.-No. 425.

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dead, and so we have not the same evidence as to his imaginings; but the man who played strange dreamy music to Rogers in 1818 was still the mystical enthusiast we have seen in Italy nigh forty years before, and remained the same till he died, still strangely young in face and alert in habits, a quarter of a century later. At seventy-eight he could boast of walking twenty or thirty miles a day without fatigue, and at 83 he still rode in the Park and to Hampstead Heath. Ten days before his death, which took place on May 2, 1844, he wrote, vehemently as always, to H. G. Bohn: The Nodier; the Nodier!-I must have that Cat. by any means-and at any cost.'

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6

Moralists have had their say about William Beckford. They talk of misspent opportunities, great possessions squandered, a total lack of the sense of responsibility towards the beings-black but human-who procured his fortune, and an entirely ineffectual life spent upon 'follies' and hobbies. We are not concerned to deny the impeachment. We shall not quote his charities in extenuation, or pretend that he was unselfish. Beckford was an egoist and a hedonist, like the majority of men; the difference was that he boldly professed his creed and did not pretend to be what he was not. We suppose there was never a man with less of the hypocrite about him. He stands serenely sincere in his calm resolve to live his life in his own way, in spite of sneers and calumnies. Thay haif said: Quhat say thay: Lat thame say': Beckford might have quoted the motto of the Earl Marischal. There is no denying the ineffectual character of the life, or the lack of a sense of responsibility to others, even to his two children. All we say is that he resolved never to be anything else, and kept his resolution. It was, in truth, the very perversion of high purpose. We see a young man, scarcely more than a boy, with the makings of a poet; with sensitiveness to impressions of nature, of history, of legend, of romance; with a rare command of the splendid resources of language; with quick intuitions and sympathies; with the secret of love in purest idealism; with the visions of the mystic:-and the poet remains, metrically, silent. The few verses he wrote were better left unprinted. We see the author of a famous tale of magic and of horror, who never wrote another-or none worth its paper. We see a traveller,

so observant and intuitive, and at the same time so cultivated if not learned, that his letters are brilliant pictures of a world of courts and fashions that was passing away; and these letters remain buried for half a century, and are never again attempted-the traveller stays at home. We see a musician, who left no music; a scholar, in his degree, who left no work of scholarship; a builder whose towers fell down; a lover in whom love was dead before he was thirty and never rose again; an ardent friend who had no friends after early manhood. It sounds a piteous story.

Did Beckford feel it so? Or did the mystic's vision pierce the silent darkness and bring his friends back? He had ordered his life after his own desire, and so he lived it; and if loss and misfortunes came, loss of friends still worse than loss of wealth, he bore them bravely, and never showed the white feather to Fate. If he was punished, he never winced. 'I have never known a moment's ennui,' he said when near his end. He seemed to look back upon the life he had made, and behold it was very good.' But was he satisfied? He did not confess what memories saddened his lonely life, the ashes of old friendships, the love of 'dear dead women,' the hopes that were no more. Truly, with Mr Whibley, we may admire a courteous gentleman, splendid in prosperity, brave in adversity, who hated the world's interruption as heartily as he despised its malice, and who, notwithstanding the load of wealth and sycophancy, yet carved his own life into a definite and a personal shape'; yet, as we look on this picture and on that, on the old collector in his silent tower, and on the brilliant youth of pulsing promise shown in these letters, which have now been disinterred from their resting-place of sixty years, we can only feel the pity of it.'

STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

Art. 5.-DANTE'S THEORY OF POETRY.

1. Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia. Ed. Pio Rajna, for the Italian Dante Society. Florence: Le Monnier, 1897. 2. Guiraut von Bornelh. By A. Kolsen. Berlin: Vogt, 1894.

By G.

3. Guido Guinizelli: l'origine dello stil novo. ('La Rassegna Nazionale,' July, 1892.)

Salvadori.

Florence, 1892.

4. La Vita giovenile di Guido Cavalcanti. By G. Salvadori. 5. Sulla Vita giovenile di Dante. By G. Salvadori. Rome: Società editrice Dante Alighieri.

6. Dante, Guido Guinizelli, and Arnaut Daniel. By W. P. Ker. (Modern Language Review,' 1909.) Cambridge University Press.

7. Dante, sein Leben und sein Werk. By F. X. Kraus. Berlin: Grote, 1897.

8. A History of Criticism. By G. Saintsbury. Three vols. London: Blackwood, 1903–4.

9. Die Kunstlehre Dante's. By H. Janitschek. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1892.

10. L' Archeologia dell' Arte in Dante. By Aluigi Cossio. (Il Giornale Dantesco,' vol. xvii.) Florence: Olschki, 1909.

11. Dante's Convivio. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by W. W. Jackson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.

AN original treatise upon the art of poetry, put forth in the early years of the fourteenth century, would in any case be of singular interest. Since Horace delivered his charter of golden mediocrity in the famous letter to the Pisos, an enormous body of verse had sprung up all over the old Western empire, and beyond it, which naïvely ignored the critical findings of his urbane good sense. The Germanic and Celtic worlds had not only fresh things to say in poetry; they had things to say which enlarged the horizons of poetry itself. Not that there was, anywhere, a formal or conscious revolt against ancient literature-a 'Romantic movement' pitting itself, like those of the early nineteenth century, against the 'classicism' of the old world. Conscious revolt often, as

in Bacon's hostility to Aristotle, disguises a deep-seated continuity. Medieval poetry had a good deal of the real originality which sometimes underlies devout discipleship. The tradition was profoundly honoured, but all its profiles were refracted in alien minds. Virgil had become the mightiest of wizards; and Benoit de San Maure believed he was telling the authentic story of Troy when he supplemented the State records of the anger of Achilles with the great love-romance of Troilus and Creseide. To poetry so new the critical theories of antiquity could not possibly be fully adequate.

*

But the medieval world was very slow to supplement them. Christianity, absorbed in its task of transforming life, had, as such, no place for the delights of literature, far less any resources for critically interpreting and justifying them. The more impetuous Fathers of the Church denounced all poetry as a sugared lie; and the net result, for centuries, of the intervention of Christian intellect in this field was to merge all the literary problems of poetry in the fundamental question of its right to exist at all. Ulysses, hurrying with stopped ears past the sirens' song, was not the man to analyse its curious felicities. Ancient authorities were called in, as expert witnesses, by counsel on both sides. The prosecution appealed to Plato's doctrine that all art is 'three removes from Reality.' The defence pointed to Horace's suggestion that it is rather a pill-the 'useful' artfully coated with the 'sweet'-and that the sweetness which 'removes' the patient from the reality it hides is the condition of his ultimately reaching it. Defence and attack were, so far, sorry enough. But by the thirteenth century the ground at least was laid for a conception of poetry as sublime as these were mean, and as pregnant and fruitful as it was sublime. When Dante (Inf. xi, 105) said thatArt is the grandchild of God,' he substituted for Plato's disdainful formula of the 'three removes from Reality' an idea historically derived from it. Art was still three removes' from the Supreme Reality. But the gulf of division was now become a bond of kinship, and the slur of spuriousness a pledge of authenticity. What other conception of Art could hold its ground in the age

* Rep. x, 602.