It is always pleasant to chronicle the appearance of a new essay in Arthurian verse, still more so when it is the work of a man born and bred and dwelling still in a college atmosphere. There is a growing belief that academicians can never become true men of letters. Professor Santayana has said-howbeit his statement is contradicted by the example of his own literary career--that real literature can be produced "only by a man moving in the world, but of sufficient power to hold the world and its concerns at arm's length." The academic litterateur does not move in the world; or rather he moves in a world of his own, peopled only by beings of a certain type, where he can never come into first contact with the multiform humanity whose common aspiration it is the function of literature to express. Such a man can write keen criticisms, scholarly essays, verse that shows the effect of much reading and profound reflection; but never by any chance an absorbing novel, a play that will act, or poetry of the kind that sings itself, that stirs the emotions and affections of many. His appeal is to a limited class, and his achievement is restricted by the limitations of that class. This being the case, the publication of a metrical romance* by a Professor of English in Yale University may well excite interest and the hope that, after all, imaginative literature is not wholly beyond the domain of an academic poet.

*"GAWAYNE And the Green Knight." A Fairy Tale. By Charlton Miner Lewis. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company.

Naturally, in judging any such production, one tends to compare it with another of similar kind, not by way of reducing it to a standard, but to get a point of departure for effective criticism. In this instance, the obvious poem for comparison is Richard Hovey's Launcelot and Guenevere.* Hovey was one of our Harvard academic poets whose verse, though left incomplete by his death, was in range and style typical of that produced by the younger generation of Cambridge writers. It may not be without profit to contrast the work of these two men, to see wherein their academic tendencies conditioned their failure or success, and whether the academic nature be after all incapable of producing true literature.

First of all, be it said that, judged by the simplest but perhaps most valuable of all tests, the pleasure of uncritical reading, Mr. Lewis has succeeded in creating a piece of real literature, and Richard Hovey has not. In other words, the former has written something which appeals to readers of widely different tastes and which has qualities to make it outlast its day; the latter has written what interests only a small audience. Launcelot and Guenevere is a poem of philosophic purpose, with so many literary merits that one cannot find space to praise them all; Gawayne and the Green Knight is a light-hearted romance without more serious intent than to tell a charming story simply and amusingly: yet the latter is a book one reads again, while the former grows dusty on the top shelf. Launcelot and Guenevere gives one much food for reflection and a vague sense of Aristotelian katharsis; Gawayne leaves one happier, more hopeful, readier to believe good things of one's fellow-men.

Perhaps part of the reason for this difference of effect lies in the choice of subject. Hovey took the old story of Arthur's guilty queen and her glori

*"LAUNCELOT and GuenevERE." A Poem in Dramas. By Richard Hovey.

I. The Quest of Merlin: A Masque.

II. The Marriage of Guenevere." A Tragedy. III. The Birth of Galahad: A Romantic Drama.

IV. Taliesin: A Masque.

Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.

ous lover, and his series of dramas is really an attempt to explain and justify their ways to a more censorious generation. Mr. Lewis, on the other hand, takes a less familiar tale,-originally only a version of the Potiphar's wife theme, and "turns it to favor and to prettiness," making the attempted seduction of Gawayne merely a fairy test of his integrity before his marriage to Elfinhart, the lady of his love.

Now, in these days of the problem play and the psychologic novel, no one can affirm that the philosophic temper is foreign to the artist, or that the darker passions of mankind are not legitimate subject of art. Yet, at the same time, philosophy is a pursuit of academicians, not of people at large; and surely no one can be blamed for preferring a simple poem that touches the purest and noblest sentiments to pages of glitteringly clever moral pathology. After all, is it not the lovely things of life that survive? There are those who believe that from the stage of today such plays as The Little Minister and Mice and Men will outlast The Gay Lord Quex and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; just as from the Elizabethan stage A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It have outlived The White Devil and The Maid in the Mill. By the same token has Gawayne and the Green Knight greater permanence and breadth of appeal than Launcelot and Guenevere, because in choosing a subject Richard Hovey followed his academic instincts, Mr. Lewis the human instincts which he shares with all his fellow-men.

More than in choice of subject, however, Mr. Lewis has been fortunate in his temper and method of treatment. When Hovey wrote his tetralogy, he aimed to produce, out of classic English material, imitations of two classic English forms of composition, the five-act blank verse drama and the masque, neither of which is in the literary fashion today. Mr. Lewis, on the other hand, though using classic material, casts it in the modern form of narrative and looks at it sc persistently from a modern point of view that the old story takes on an entirely new meaning. This result he has attained chiefly through the conception of his characters. Of these perhaps the best is the Green Knight, who is no longer the grim wizard giant, "terrible to behold," but a genial incarnation of the fairy magic