College of the Propaganda, revised by the author in every point to which exception was taken by the censor, and finally approved with the imprimatur of Padre Lepidi, the learned friar who holds the traditionally Dominican office of Master of the Sacred Palace' and, as such, acts as theological press-reader to the Vatican. Knowledge of the French language not being universal in dominant circles in Rome, the book became now for the first time accessible to some of those to whom it was least likely to be acceptable, while the successful prosecution of the campaign against Modernism seemed to make measures possible that had not been possible a few years before. If at the present moment the trumpet gives out in the Church of England a too uncertain sound, in the Roman Church it is braying hoarsely on a single sustained note. Although Modernism in Italy seems more of a social and less of a theological movement than elsewhere, yet the action of the Curia is more immediately effective in Italy; and the power behind the Curia went vigorously to work. That there was nothing to show that Duchesne was a Modernist in the theological sense, or indeed in any sense but that in which all intelligent men may be called Modernist, mattered not at all.

A Jesuit Father named Bottagisio opened fire with a series of articles in an ultramontane journal at Florence. Personages eminent at least in the technical sense congratulated him on the act of filial piety by which as a dutiful son of the Church he had hastened to the rescue of a Mother insulted and ill-treated. Thus encouraged, Bottagisio republished his articles in book-form and dedicated the book to the Pope. One Congregation of the Roman Curia forbade the reading of Duchesne's work in the Italian seminaries; another Congregation followed suit with a similar prohibition for the Italian religious houses. Mgr Duchesne answered by addressing privately a letter to the Roman Catholic episcopate throughout the world, in which he pleaded the sanction given to the 'History' alike by the Pope and the Pope's officials. In vain: the History' has been placed on the Index, Duchesne has given up the unequal contest, and has withdrawn from Rome.

It is a sorry spectacle.

We have tried above to

show what excuses may be found for criticism of the

book, and what handles its author has supplied to his adversaries. But of what history worth writing-at any rate of what history worth reading-would it not be possible to construct by careful selection and isolation from context a catena of things which one would rather have had expressed otherwise? Judges either generous or wise would have overlooked whatever blemishes there may be, in consideration of the unequalled and in the strictest sense immeasurable services which this illustrious writer has rendered in the 'Histoire ancienne de l'Église.' It is something to have made Church history at once so intelligible and so interesting-not necessarily less divine, because very much more human; one would wager that no generation of Italian seminarists ever studied the subject with so much zest as the single generation which was allowed access to the History' of Duchesne. It is something to have produced a work which appeals alike to the ordinary reader and to the student, and which earns the respect of adversaries without forfeiting, if a broad view be taken of it, the just confidence of friends. True, severe things are said from time to time of some to whom all ages of the Church have accorded ungrudgingly the name of Saint, but it does not follow that they are unjust things; the treasure, after all, is in earthen vessels. Nevertheless Duchesne rightly recognises that it was not without cause that St Jerome or St Cyril received the august title from posterity (iii, p. viii). Jerome not only vindicated for all ages of the Western Church the claims of learning, but was loved and venerated by saintly people who knew him intimately during life.' Cyril, a passionate party leader if ever there was one, made at the moment of his triumph a loyal sacrifice to the cause of Christian unity which both in its momentary effect and for its permanent example has rarely been surpassed. And if Duchesne the scientific historian knows when and how to judge, he knows also that moments come when judgment must lose itself in admiration and reverence. Two saints of the fifth century exercise over him this magic sway: Saint Augustine, the Christian teacher, and Saint Leo, the Christian statesman.

C. H. TURNER.

Art. 2.-MODERN FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE.

1. Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit. By Albert Soergel. Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1911.

2. Die deutsche Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. By Richard M. Meyer. Berlin: Bondi, 1905; Volksausgabe, 1912.

3. Literatur in Deutschland. By Kurt Martens. Berlin: Fleischel, 1910.

4. Führer durch die deutsche Literatur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. By Max Geissler. Weimar : Duncker,

1913.

5. Masks and Minstrels of New Germany. By Percival Pollard. London: Heinemann, 1911.

THE student of contemporary German literature is certainly at no loss for expert guidance and information. The contemplation of the German works named above gives rise to some comparisons by no means favourable to the enterprise of English publishers-or should we say to the energy of English men of letters? If a student wished. for some introduction to the study of English poets and novelists of what we may call our own generationbeginning with the period of Tennyson and Browning, then the period of Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne, and finally the period of Stevenson, Hardy, H. G. Wells, Conrad, Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett-where would he find it? Certainly in no one work known to the present writer. But turn to Germany, and consider such a book as that which we have placed at the head of our list. Soergel's 'Dichtung und Dichter' covers roughly the history of German literature from 1870 to the present day. It runs to 900 pages; it is full of illustrations taken mostly from the works of artists who have painted or sketched the writers dealt with, but including also covers or title-pages of first editions, caricatures, and artistic comment of every description. It gives a few biographical particulars, and an appreciation of each writer, of the tendencies he represents and of the influences which have shaped his literary career. And these appreciations are no perfunctory piece of bookmaking; they are critical studies, independent, thoughtful, and written with spirit and style-the notice o

Nietzsche, for example, is one of the best contributions we have met with to the study of that writer as a thinker and poet. R. M. Meyer's book is perhaps less original and entertaining than Soergel's, but it is an able and careful history of the development of German literature from the beginning of the 19th century onward. 'Literatur in Deutschland,' by a well-known novelist and dramatist, contains, in about 200 pages, references to some 300 contemporary names and a great deal of most acute and suggestive criticism. Finally, we have in Max Geissler's 'Führer' a kind of critical and bibliographical Who's Who,' relating almost entirely to living writers of imaginative literature. The criticisms are of course criticism in tabloid form, but they could hardly be better done; the book is in itself a remarkable piece of literature.

The appearance of such works as these-and it would not be difficult to name as many more of similar scope if not of equal merit—is certainly striking evidence of the serious interest taken by the German reading public in the literature of its own day and country. Our English writers of poetry and fiction are not less valuable, nor less valued than the Germans are by their own countrymen, but we seem content to enjoy them without any attempt at a comprehensive and philosophic estimate of the forces which have shaped them, or of those through which they are to-day shaping the life and thought of England.

A discussion of modern German literature obviously begins with 1870-the greatest recent political and spiritual watershed in the life of the nation. Nothing could be more natural than the expectation that, when a nation has been strung up to the achievement of great deeds, when its spirit has been freed and dilated and its sense of unity quickened by the consciousness of a common glory, we should see it seeking and finding the means of self-expression through a great literaturethrough literature more than through any other art, because it is, in its many forms, the most popular, the most comprehensive, the art in which the means of expression lie readiest to the eager hand. History to a great extent confirms this expectation. One thinks, for instance, of Athens after the Persian wars, of Elizabethan England,

of Germany after the Seven Years' War, of the American Civil War and Walt Whitman. But on two occasions in German history we are struck by the fact that victories in the material world have brought with them no victorious advance of the imagination into new territories of thought and beauty. One of these was after the wonderful popular uprising which ended the tyranny of Napoleon. That great national triumph was furthered quite as much by the poets and thinkers as by the statesmanship of Stein and the soldiership of Gneisenau and Blücher. But no sooner was the Frenchman driven from German soil than the German princes, with one accord, to escape being reminded of their broken pledges of reform, proceeded to put the German spirit into bonds; and any thinker or poet who had anything of real moment to say to his country was obliged to say it in exile. Under such conditions-and they prevailed more or less rigorously for some fifty years-a great creative literature capable of performing the functions of such literature, of fortifying, ennobling, illuminating, could not possibly arise. A literature of revolt and satire there was indeed-it was adorned by such names as those of Heine, Freiligrath and Herwegh--but not a literature fitted to nourish the expanding soul of Germany.

The second instance in our minds is that of the war of 1870, with its issue in the foundation of a united German Empire. Then indeed was the dream of ages realised, and in circumstances to which no invention could have added anything of splendour and dramatic impressiveness. The German spirit had at last been set free, in the sense at least in which Milton wrote 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter, to argue freely according to my conscience, above all liberties.' In the region of morals, of religion, of politics, a poet or publicist could, since 1870, and can now, speak his mind as freely in Germany as anywhere in the world. But although, as we shall see, the war of 1870 was by no means without effect on German literature, it is undeniably true that nothing happened in the spiritual history of Germany at all commensurate with the greatness of her achievement in war and statecraft.

In fact the first notable thing that happened after the triumph of 1870 was the revanche taken by the French