of conceit may be said to represent fairly adequately the real nature of Sidney's, in so far as any prose paraphrase can represent the nature of poetry, but that in the case of Shakespeare the outlines are grossly misrepresentative of the impression produced by the reading of his sonnets. This is partly because many of his best sonnets would not appear in the list of conceits at all, whereas almost all of Sidney's would; it is also because the structural unity of Sidney's is best fitted to representation in paraphrase, and the fugitive, penetrating beauty of Shakespeare's phrasing is of course lost altogether.

There remains a final question, which I have already raised momentarily, that concerning the lyrical values of the conceit. Our examination, I take it, will have shown that it is by no means wholly without use and charm,-unless, of course, we start out with a definition which assumes that a conceit is a piece of depravity. It is true that the poems we have examined are by two of the greatest lyrists of their age, but it is also true that the age of the sonneteers was not that most favorable to original and sincere uses of the conceit;for these, according to common opinion, we must go forward to Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw. But even the lowest and most artifical form of conceit, word-play, we have seen used with apparent sincerity by both Sidney and Shakespeare; and the highest forms have been compatible with some of the finest lyrical expression of the period. The fact is, the common assumption that lyrists have used the conceit even in the Petrarchan era-as a substitute for real feeling, is unwarranted. One need go no further than a tomb-stone or a newspaper obituary column to observe that conceits, exceedingly bad and exceedingly trite, may be used for the expression of feeling of the deepest kind. A prominent and able biographer of Shakespeare has distinguished himself by arguing from the conventional elements in Shakespeare's Sonnets that they represent no strong personal emotion, but Mr. Chambers-one of many attorneys for the defenDaniel and Sidney;-Daniel, that is, shows the same sense of continuous, progressive composition, and the same freedom in changing and mingling his images, that we have noticed in Shakespeare. When it comes to the nature of his conceits in themselves, there is not so much contrast; yet in the case of almost every type Shakespeare would still stand closer to Daniel than to Sidney. Both he and Daniel, for example, make a larger use of the metaphor-simile conceit than Sidney, and a slighter use of the myth and the paradox types. But this sort of comparison must not be pressed too far. It may be expected to have significance in connection with certain conventional kinds of conceit, likely to be borrowed or imitated; in other kinds one would say the matter is one of individual poetic psychology.

dant-replies that "any shy boy in love could have taught Mr. Lee that he secures a nearer and not a less near approach to his mistress by the choice of a conventional form for the overflowings of his romantic soul." The suspicion that the conventionality of a conceit nullifies its emotional reality may, therefore, be put aside. At the opposite extreme are those who find emotional values destroyed in a lyric when too great intellectual activity appears to be involved in its composition. This is the common attitude of the eighteenth century toward the lyrists of the seventeenth. It was argued-and still is that when the feelings are strongly moved the specifically intellectual processes are suspended, so that a lover or a sufferer must not be made to rea son too acutely.21 The simple answer to this is that, for a certain number of persons, it is not at all true. I find this nowhere so well stated as in Professor H. J. C. Grierson's fine introduction to his edition of the Poems of Donne: "To some natures love comes as above all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its pure intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive.' Of such were Donne and Browning." This collocation of names, which has often been made merely with reference to the ruggedness and obscurity of the two poets, is highly suggestive for our special subject; for the poetry of Browning is, in fact, an admirable field for the study of almost every type of conceit (except, of course, the type of triteness). In other words, he commonly exemplifies the almost abnormal activity of the intellectual forces working together with the imagination for the expression of deep feeling.

All this, of course, does not determine what constitutes a good conceit, or what the true values of the conceit for lyric poetry may be. Nor must it be understood as obscuring the fact that the conceit gives special opportunities of evil to inferior poets, whether their peculiar sin be triteness or eccentricity. One must admit that the intervention of an intellectual process (the essence of our definition), in threatening to suspend our imaginative sympathy with the poet's

21 Cf. The Guardian, (No. 15): "A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be believed by his mistress; he will therefore think simply; he will express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex her; he will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections are made by a head undisturbed; and points of wit and fancy are the work of a heart at ease; these two dangers then, into which poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the lover's way."

22 Vol. ii, p. xxxiii.

main course of feeling, imperils his success. Yet we have seen that there come moments when the two processes, the imaginative and the intellectual, are fused in the working out of an idea that has meaning for both of them, and coöperate so perfectly that the reader shares this unity with the poet. The lyrical feeling of Keats is stirred deeply by his sense of the immortalizing power of art, and his mind is awakened to argue paradoxically, "For ever wilt thou love and she be fair." Browning is profoundly moved by the sense that the lover always desires to offer to his beloved a side of himself not known. to the world, and his mind is set to work to query whether, if the moon should love a mortal, she would turn to him her hitherto unknown side. These are conceits which, whether because of familiarity or of consonance with our modern methods of poetic thinking, we do not call by the suspected name. But they represent methods which we have found in Shakespeare and Sidney, and which we might find in poets of a certain type in any age. On the other hand there are conceits in which the ingenious exercise of the intellect is very imperfectly fused with the poetic process, and of these we easily recognize the ill effects-at least in the poetry of the Renaissance, because its special kinds of ingenuity (particularly word-play and allegory) are so foreign to our taste. But in our time, as I might show if space and my subject permitted, we have plenty of examples still of the less justifiable conceit based on conspicuous cleverness. Doubtless the sins and the virtues of each age are only different phases of the same spiritual facts; certainly the lyric of the Elizabethan era found in the conceit, ill used or well, a notable means of characteristic self-expression. Especially it served to represent that age's curious conception of love as at once a high social convention and a vivid personal experience.

Leland Stanford Junior University.

THE PAINTER OF THE POETS

BY JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER

One of the curious things of the Renaissance in England is the almost entire lack of native art. Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands were swarming with painters and sculptors; in neither art from the sixteenth century comes there one memorable English name. The Tudor century, so sensitively alive to poetry and music, cared but little, it would seem, for the plastic arts, and in that little was satisfied mostly through the works of foreigners. Holbein painted the court of Henry VIII; Torrigiani, Benvenuto Cellini's enemy, worked for the same monarch. Of painters in the time of Elizabeth Francis Meres gives the following list: William and Francis Segar, Thomas and John Butes, Lockey, Syne, Peake, Peter Cole, Arnolde, Marcus, Jacques de Bray, Cornelius, Peter Golchis, Hieronimo and Peter van de Velde. The foreigners alone give Meres's list distinction.

It is also a curious thing that the poet most widely representative of this Elizabethan age, so inexpressive with brush or chisel, was Edmund Spenser, justly called the painter of the poets. "If he had not been a great poet, he would have been a great painter," wrote Leigh Hunt. "The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us," declared James Russell Lowell. Lowell's estimate may be inadequate. Personally, I think it is. But the implied definition of Spenser's special art may be conceded. His was to a great extent the temperament of a painter at work in the medium of a poet.

He actually became a great painter-in words, and as such powerfully influenced the taste of his own generation and after. He has also been called "the poets' poet." Doubtless by that phrase Charles Lamb meant that Spenser's delicate and somewhat artificial beauty is too fine for the popular appreciation; but it is true that Spenser has been "the poets' poet" in another sense. He has been one of the greatest masters for English poets in technic, especially in versification and in imagery. Nearly every English poet of importance has gone to school to him; even Dryden, alien though his own talent and the taste of his time, admitted a certain apprenticeship. Some accrued interest attaches to Spenser's technic, then, even for those who may not greatly value his power as a story-teller or as a

preacher through allegory. Conceding that he saw with the eye of a painter, we might sharpen our understanding of his art and its influence by some analysis of his pictorial and decorative technic.

Indeed it was his painter's eye that particularly qualified Spenser to be the representative poet of the Renaissance for England. Between painting and poetry Renaissance aesthetic theoristsespecially in Italy-established close relations. Thus, perverting the intention of Horace's "ut pictura poesis," the critic Varchi in his Lezzioni (1590) distinguished "painting as silent poetry, and poetry as painting in language." And "this distinction," remarks Dr. Spingarn, "may be considered almost the keynote of Renaissance criticism, continuing even up to the time of Lessing." The natural result of such a theory would be an emphasis on word-painting, on detailed cataloguing description, in poetry; and that emphasis is manifest in most Renaissance poetry, peculiarly so in the poetry of Spenser.

The reciprocity between painting and poetry did not stand upon equal footing. More especially in Italy poetry borrowed far more of the methods of painting than painting of those of poetry. Painters and sculptors set the visual images which the poets endeavored to evoke by words. The Quattrocento poet Poliziano in his Stanze per la Giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de' Medici set Giuliano and his ladylove, la Bella Simonetta, in an Arcadian landscape peopled with mythological and allegorical figures. Would we know what kind of picture was in Poliziano's imagination, we have but to look at Botticelli's so-called "Primavera" and his "Birth of Venus" in the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. Apparently, the painter has followed the very detail of the verbal instructions of the poet,2 but it certainly must have been Botticelli and his fellows who shaped their friend Poliziano's way of vizualizing. Raphael also drew from Poliziano's poem hints for his series of frescos in the Palazzo Chigi in Rome illustrating the story of Galatea; but a generation has intervened, and Raphael's gives a visual imagery vastly more sensuous, opulent, sophisticated than would have been native to the Florence of Poliziano and Botticelli.

Indeed, even generally speaking, one may assert that the visual image of a great or even popular artist is certain to impose itself more or less upon his admirers. "Dante drew one angel." If we

1A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. N. Y., 1908, p. 42. 2 Cf. E. Masi in La vita ital. nel rinascimento, Milano, 1899, pp. 22-3.