small offerings of rice, are decaying in front of the shrine. Outside, a kind of obelisk, studded with rows of nails, serves to support coloured glasses, which are filled with cocoa-nut oil on holidays, and over this spread the branches of a mango tree, planted by some superstitious villager with a view to a comfortable berth in the next world.

On the outskirts of the village tiny shrines of mortar and brick, in shape not unlike a dog's kennel, line either side of the way, each containing a rude stone, carved with the image of a god or goddess, and painted a bright red. At the lower end, numerous little white figures of elephants are ranged on an earthen platform. These are objects of worship to the rural population; but what is not an object of worship to them? Evidently the trees are, for several of the banyans are gay with streamers of coloured rag. Jungle spirits, river spirits, cannibal spirits, ghosts, and goblins-all have a place in their creed. They believe in witchcraft, magic, astrology, and the exorcism of devils from the

bodies of possessed persons. A blight is brought about by the killing of cows, or the eating of beef; and the irremediable sterility of the soil is still ascribed to the operations of the officers of the survey some three-score years ago!

The lean, slouching, ungainly village bullocks must be first cousins to Pharaoh's lean kine. Dull-eyed, feeble, compact only of skin and bone, brutally treated, they look, and surely must be, the very embodiment of animal misery. Superstition, which forbids their slaughter, makes no provision for kind treatment, and the peasantry maintain that it is cheaper to work them to death than to buy new bullocks in order to tend the old more carefully. Their beef is naturally quite tasteless. From the jungles these poor brutes procure just enough food to keep themselves alive. What a contrast they form to the fine lazy Brahminical ball with its large meek eyes, soft

dove-coloured skin, and lusty hump on the back; or to the prize cattle now and again paraded at local exhibitions.

Buffaloes are kept for milk, and for ploughing the marshy lands. The sheep are as hairy as the goats. The ponies are hardy, active, and vicious; and as often as not ridden barebacked. The community also possess a small breed of little donkeys-animals which a London costermonger would spurn, and gifted with a dislocating roughness of action which no language can describe to such as have never felt it.

No railway comes near the place, but there is a constant stream of roadtraffic. Bullock-cart after bullockcart goes by both day and night, each lumbering shapeless vehicle drawn by two oxen, for cart horses may be said to have no existence in India. These carts are sometimes covered in with a sort of hood of matting, and under this improvised shelter reposes the carter's wife and his children, a little knot of black faces and black arms. For the sake of society, and by way of mutual protection, the carters travel in bands averaging from a dozen to twenty, halting at nightfall and forming a regular encampment by the roadside. The draught-bullocks are white or dun in colour, with large dewlaps and big humps. Sometimes they are made gay with rude necklaces and tassels of scarlet wool, and nearly all are decorated with brass bobs and bells. If they happen to be docile Jehu speaks to them in the most endearing terms; but should they prove intractable he indulges in a flood of vituperation in which his native tongue is peculiarly rich. Every ungreased wheel seems to have its own peculiar squeak, and the poor beasts sway from side to side as they strive to make the hard yoke easier to their necks.

The agricultural implements might throw light on the primitive agriculture of the Aryans. The small native plough is carried afield by the peasant on his shoulders, and he uses the trees

to store up hay in untidy ricks. Irrigation by watercourse or well is unknown, and the villagers depend solely on the rainfall for the fertility of their fields. The lever and bucket so familiar to travellers in Egypt, the revolving water-wheel in shape like the paddles of a steamboat or the treadmill, are never seen, nor bullocks lifting water in leathern skins. The fields, irregular and capricious in shape, of black or deep brown earth, are sown with barley, jowaree, millet, and ragi. The cocoa-nut trees yield oil, their husks make serviceable ropes, their leaves are used as thatch, the wood serves for rafters of a small span, and the juice yields toddy. Bulks or raised ridges, irregular and hard as iron, divide field from field, and paths seldom traversable by wheels lead to and from the village to the irreclaimable jungle. The high road is the only metalled road in the district, and no where could one find a market or ornamental garden. Platforms raised in the centre of the fields are used as observatories, from whence cultivators armed with slings scare off the birds from the ripening grains.

The chief village functionary is probably the schoolmaster, who to his pedagogic duties adds those of priest and physician. After him comes the patel or headman, the mouthpiece and representative of the hereditary cultivators, of the tenants at will, and of the tenants by occupancy. To his kulkarni or clerk is committed the drawing up of the village deedsdocuments written on execrable paper, commencing with the name of the goddess of wealth, and terminating with the bangle marks, or other pictorial attestations of the illiterate villagers. He keeps the rural rent roll, the accounts of every estate, a classification of the different soils, and of the rights and interest in them of the peasants a record which effectually checks promiscuous squatting. The village smith, seated before his shanty,

his primitive bellows by his side, hammers away at bands of iron imported with piece goods. Justice is administered by the village panchayat or counsel, and its decrees are enforced by expulsion from caste. The mar warree, or native money-lender, officiates as the village capitalist. This worthy crouches on the floor of his hut like a beast of prey with the face of a hawk; and once in his debt, lucky is the cultivator who can ever call himself again a free man. To them he makes advances on grain which are often repaid in kind on the threshing floor of the village. He has his wife here, a buxom dame, who struts about in her petticoats of amber and crimson like a peacock-the only woman in the village who veils her face whenever she goes abroad, and gifted with a tongue shrill enough to make itself heard from one end of the village to the other. The barber is the wag of the community, his wife its midwife: and the schoolmaster casts horoscopes and tells fortunes.

At noon the village enjoys a siesta, and at night during the sultry season the majority of the villagers sleep outside their huts on each side of the road, on the native bed, or charpoy, a web of netting stretched on four short legs. Dogs mount guard over the cattle, and here and there figures clothed in white glide noiselessly by like sheeted ghosts. Through the interstices of each hut glimmers a tiny light. The cricket chants in the grass, and maybe a panther, or even a tiger, slinks down to drink at the tank, and carry off, if luck favour him, some unfortunate cow. Jackals are prowling up and down for stray fowls, and overhead the owls and flying foxes hooting in the trees. Meanwhile the rising moon is touching rock and valley with inexpressible tenderness, and the mystic voice of nature begins to whisper of things

unseen.

THE separation of literary criticism from politics appears to have been a gain both to politics and to literature. If Mr. Swinburne, for example, speaks unkindly about kings and priests in one volume, that offence is not remembered against him, even by the most Conservative critic, when he gives us a book like 'Atalanta,' or Erechtheus.' If Victor Hugo applauds the Commune, the Conservative M. Paul de Saint Victor freely forgives him. In the earlier part of the century, on the other hand, poems which had no tinge of politics were furiously assailed, for party reasons, by Tory critics, if the author was a Whig, or had friends in the ranks of Whiggery.1 Perhaps the Whiggish critics were not less one-sided,but their exploits (except a few of Jeffrey's) are forgotten. Either there were no Conservative poets to be attacked, or the Whig attack was so weak, and so unlike the fine fury of the Tory reviewers, that it has lapsed into oblivion. Assuredly no Tory Keats died of an article, no Tory Shelley revenged him in a Conservative Adonais,' and, if Lord Byron struck back at his Scotch reviewers, Lord Byron was no Tory.

on his literary merits, Mr. Courthope has raised a war-cry which will not, I hope, be widely echoed. He has called his reprinted essays "The Liberal Movement in English Literature,' 2 and has thus brought back the howls of partisans into a region where they had been long silent. One cannot but regret this intrusion of the factions which have "no language but a Cry" into the tranquil regions of verse. Mr. Courthope knows that the title of his essays will be objected to, and he tries to defend it. Cardinal Newman, he says, employs the term "Liberalism" to denote a movement in the region of thought. Would it not be as true to say that Cardinal Newman uses "Liberalism" as "short "" for most things that he dislikes? In any case the word "Liberal" is one of those question-begging, popular, political terms which had been expelled from the criticism of poetry. It seems an error to bring back the word with its passionate associations. Mr. Courthope will, perhaps, think that the reviewer who thus objects is himself a Liberal. It is not so; and though I would fain escape from even the thought of party bickerings, I probably agree with Mr. Courthope in not wishing to disestablish anything or anybody, not even the House of Lords. None the less it is distract2 John Murray, London, 1885.

G

ing, when we are occupied for once with thoughts about poetry, to meet sentences like this: "Life, in the Radical view, is simply change; and a Radical is ready to promote every caprice or whim of the numerical majority of the moment in the belief that the change which it effects in the constitution of society will bring him nearer to some ideal state existing in his own imagination." Or again: "How many leagues away do they" (certain remarks of Mr. Burke's) "carry us from the Liberal Radicalism now crying out for the abolition of the hereditary branch of the Legislature?" and so on. One expects, in every page, to encounter the deceased wife's sister, or 66 a cow and three acres." It is not in the mood provoked by our enthusiasm for the hereditary branch of the Legislature, it is not when the heart stands up in defence of the game laws, that we are fit to reason about poetry. Consequently, as it appears to me, Mr. Courthope, in his excitement against Radicalism, does not always reason correctly, nor, perhaps, feel correctly, about poetry.

As far as I understand the main thesis of Mr. Courthope's book, it is something like this. From a very early date, from the date certainly of Chaucer, there have been flowing two main streams in English literature. One stream is the Poetry of Romance, the other is the Poetry of Manners. The former had its source (I am inclined to go a great way further back for its source)" in the institutions of chivalry, and in medieval theology." The other poetical river, again, the poetry of manners, "has been fed by the life, actions, and manners of the nation." One might add to this that the "life and actions" of our people have often, between the days of the Black Prince and of General Gordon, been in the highest degree "romantic." This mixture, however, would confuse Mr. Courthope's system. Drayton's 'Agincourt,' Lord Tennyson's 'Revenge' may be regarded at will, perhaps, as

belonging to the poetry of romance, or the poetry of national action. Mr. Courthope does not touch on this fact, but the reader will do well to keep it in mind, for reasons which will appear later.

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The fortunes of the two streams of poetry have been different. The romantic stream was lost in the sands of Donne, Crashaw, Cowley, and the rest, but welled up again in the beginning of our own century, in Scott, Coleridge, and others. The poetry of manners, on the other hand, had its great time when men, revolting from the conceits of degenerate romanticism, took, with Pope, Dryden, Thomson, and Johnson, to correctness," to working under the "ethical impulse.' Now the "correctness" and the choice of moral topics which prevailed in the eighteenth century were "Conservative," and the new burst of romantic poetry was "Liberal," and was connected with the general revolutionary and Liberal movement in politics, speculation, and religion. Finally, Mr. Courthope thinks that "the Liberal movement in our literature, as well as in our politics, is beginning to languish." Perhaps Mr. Chamberlain and his friends are not aware that they are languishing. In the interests of our languishing poetry, at all events, Mr. Courthope briefly prescribes more "healthy objectivity (the words are mine, and are slang, but they put the idea briefly), and a "revival of the simple iambic movements of English in metres historically established in our literature."

In this sketch of Mr. Courthope's thesis, his main ideas show forth as. if not new, yet, perfectly true. There is, there has been, a poetry of romance of which the corruption is found in the wanton conceits of Donne and Crashaw. There is, there has been, a poetry of manners and morals, ci which the corruption is didactic prosiness. In the secular action and reaction, each of these tendencies has, at various times, been weak or strong. At the beginning of this century, too,

a party tinge was certainly given, chiefly by Conservative critics, to the reborn romantic poetry. Keats cared as little as any man for what Marcus Aurelius calls "the drivelling of politicians," but even Keats, as a friend of "kind Hunt's," was a sort of Liberal. But admitting this party colouring, one must add that it was of very slight moment indeed, and very casually distributed. Therefore, one must still regret, for reasons which will instantly appear, Mr. Courthope's introduction of party names and party prejudices into his interesting essays.

It is probably the author's preoccupation with politics which causes frequent contradictions, as they seem, and a general sense of confusion which often make it very hard to follow his argument, and to see what he is really driving at. For example, Scott, the Conservative Scott, whom Mr. Courthope so justly admires, has to appear as a Liberal, almost a revolutionary, in verse. Mr. Courthope quotes Coleridge's account of the origin of Lyrical Ballads as "the first note of the new departure,' which I have called the 'Liberal Movement in English Literature.'” Well, but the Tory Scott was an eager follower of Coleridge's; he played (if we are to be political) Mr. Jesse Collings to Coleridge's Mr. Chamberlain. This, by itself, proves how very little the Liberal movement in literature was a party movement, how little it had to do with Liberalism in politics.

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Again, when Mr. Courthope is censuring, and most justly censuring, Mr. Carlyle's grudging and Pharisaical article on Scott, he speaks of Carlyle as a "Radical," and finds that " Radical Diogenes" blamed Scott "because he was a Conservative, and amused the people." Now Carlyle, of all men, was no Radical; and Scott, sa Conservative, is a queer figure in a Liberal movement. Another odd tact is that the leaders of the Liberal Lovement steeped themselves" in the atmosphere of feudal romance. Whatever else feudal romance may

have been, it was eminently antiRadical, and, to poetic Radicals, should have been eminently uncongenial. Odder still (if the Liberal movement in literature was a party movement to any important extent) is Mr. Courthope's discovery that Macaulay was a Conservative critic. Yet a Conservative critic Macaulay must have been, because he was in the camp opposed to that of Coleridge and Keats. Macaulay was a very strong party man, and, had he been aware that his critical tastes were Tory, he would perhaps have changed his tastes. Yet again, Mr. Courthope finds that optimism is the note of Liberalism, while "the Conservative takes a far less sanguine view of the prospects of the art of poetry," and of things in general. But Byron and Shelley, in Mr. Courthope's argument, were Liberal poets. Yet Mr. Courthope says, speaking of Shelley, "like Byron, he shows himself a complete pessimist." For my own part (and Mr. Courthope elsewhere expresses the same opinion), Shelley seems to me an optimist, in his queer political dreams of a future where Prometheus and Asia shall twine beams and buds in a cave, unvexed by priests and kings—a future in which all men shall be peaceful, brotherly, affectionate sentimentalists. But Mr. Courthope must decide whether Byron and Shelley are to be Conservatives and pessimists, or Liberals and optimists. At present their position as Liberal pessimists seems, on his own showing, difficult and precarious. Macaulay, too, the Liberal Macaulay, is a pessimist, according to Mr. Courthope. All this confusion, as I venture to think it, appears to arise, then, from Mr. Courthope's political preoccupations. shows us a Radical Carlyle, a Conservative Macaulay; a Scott who is, perhaps, a kind of Whig; a Byron, who, being pessimistic, should be Conservative, but is Liberal; a Shelley, who is Liberal, though, being pessimistic, he ought to be Conservative. It is all very perplexing, and, like most mis

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