REVIEWS.

Studies of Uncompounded Personal Names in Old English. By MATS REDIN. Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift. 1919. 8vo. xlv +196 pp.

Students of Personal and Place-names must give a warm welcome to Dr Mats Redin's dissertation, not only for its own sake but also as an assurance that the good work begun by the late Professor Björkman is being carried on no less ably by his pupils. He deals only with names of native origin. Björkman himself dealt with those of Scandinavian provenance, and another pupil-Dr Forssner-has already dealt exhaustively with the names of Continental-Germanic origin which are found in Old English documents.

The main sources of these uncompounded names are (1) Shortened forms of compound names recorded in Old English which the AngloSaxons themselves could without difficulty associate with the corresponding full name, e.g. Eada- with Eadgar, -mund, -nod, -red, -weald, -wulf; (2) Original short forms to which no corresponding full names are recorded in Old English. Under (1) Redin has an interesting discussion of the frequent gemination of a medial consonant found in such names. Sometimes it is due to assimilation of the final consonant of the first member with the initial consonant of the second, e.g. Aelle as a pet form of Aelfwine, but this will explain only a very small number and attention is called to the important part played by 'lall-names' in this connexion. Pet-names of the lall-type, the invention of children, are found among all nations, and attention is called to the curious fact that identical names of this type have arisen for example in both Latin and Old English. Ab(b)a, Acca, An(n)a, Nunna, Lilla are good names in either language.

A good deal of attention is given to the question of the intelligibility of the names in Anglo-Saxon times, and out of 736 names, 338 are classified as intelligible (e.g. Cena, brave) and 398 as unintelligible (e.g. Dudda). This gives rise to the statement that the Anglo-Saxons had advanced half-way towards the present-day indifference to the signification of (uncompounded) names. Unless some attempt is made to show that the relative proportions changed in the course of the AngloSaxon period, this statement is meaningless. We use intelligible names, e.g. Faith, Hope, Clara, Ernest, Irene, but we are certainly entirely indifferent to their significance. At a later stage Dr Redin does attack the problem of chronological frequency and finds a curious development between 900 and 950 in favour of significant names. This he suggests is due to the influence of Scandinavian nomenclature with its wealth 21

M. L. R. XV.

of nicknames which often came of course to be used as surnames. Finally, he discusses the chronology of the relative frequency of compounded and uncompounded names, and points out the comparative rarity of uncompounded names in the signatures to English charters after about 935. This is attributed with a good deal of probability to a change of fashion which had led to the view that uncompounded names were too commonplace or trivial. They are still frequent as the names of serfs and moneyers and the like; they are no longer used, at least on dignified occasions, by great nobles and ecclesiastics.

Dr Redin's book will be of great value to students of place-names. The last resort for the explanation of a difficult place-name is to take the first element as a personal-name. Many ghost-names exist in Searle's Onomasticon and have been used hitherto in all good faith by writers on place-names. They will now know just where they are in this matter. They can find what uncompounded names are genuine and then, so far as they may wish, invent hypothetical forms to explain the rest. ALLEN MAWER.

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.

A Treasury of Seventeenth Century Verse, from the Death of Shakespeare to the Restoration (1616-1660). Chosen and edited by H. J. MASSINGHAM. (Golden Treasury Series.) London: Macmillan and Co. 1919. 8vo. xxiii + 399 pp. 3s. 6d.

This volume is an instructive record of the reawakened interest, especially among our younger writers and poets, in the poetry of Donne and of those later seventeenth century poets who acknowledged allegiance to the

King, that rul'd as he thought fit
The universall Monarchy of Wit.

There is indeed a not purely imaginary affinity between the metaphysicals-not Donne the Elizabethan who moves among the rest of Mr Massingham's group rather like Gulliver among the Lilliputians— and our young Georgians. Their relation to the Elizabethans, the splendid and flamboyant poetry of Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare and Drayton, is not unlike that of the Georgian anthologies to the last of the great romantics, the Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne group of the mid-century. Unwilling or unable to take up the tradition of elaborate harmonies and exotic beauties of diction and romantic themes in each of the periods in question, poets turned to other subjects, a simpler style, a more inward and spiritual treatment of love and religion and meditation upon life and death. I would emphasise the phrase simplicity of diction,' for it seems to me that Mr Massingham ignores one of the titles which the metaphysicals' made good to a peculiar place of their own in the history of English poetic style when he speaks of their extravagant adventures among words, 'their precious and inkhorn terms.' Their adventures among images and symbols

are palpable and notorious but their English style is far purer and simpler than that of the Elizabethans. This class of authors,' said Sir Walter Scott, used the same violence towards images and ideas which had formerly been applied to words,' but, as Coleridge insists, they did so in a style which, if often harsh and occasionally obscure, is generally pure and natural, colloquial but gentlemanly. Their characteristic fault, he insists, is the reverse of that which distinguishes too many of our recent versifiers' (i.e. Erasmus Darwin and the last of the eighteenth century poets); 'the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thought.' Donne and Jonsonwho declared that Spenser writ no language'-led the way in rejecting the poetic diction' of the Spenserians and the writers of Ovidian idylls, poems like A Lover's Complaint and even Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to say nothing of the sonneteers. Every poet will to some extent create his own vocabulary, but compared with the Elizabethans before them and the later poets who learned a new poetic diction from Milton, Donne and Herbert and Vaughan and Cowley and Herrick are the purest wells of English after Chaucer; and before Wordsworth and Shelley, our finest masters of the neutral style. Keats was the chief source of the poetic diction of the later, the Victorian Romantics, Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne. In the style of many of the young moderns we can trace another reaction from a poetic diction' to the language which men do use.' The beginning of such a reaction is perhaps traceable to the influence of Mr Kipling.

Of the other feature of mid-seventeenth century poetry, the fantastic wit which critics from Dryden and Addison to Johnson and Scott were unanimous in condemning, Mr Massingham says just the right thing, that it was the outer symbol of the greater complexity of their thought and feeling alike about love and about religion. He speaks indeed as if the term metaphysical' were applicable, and generally applied, to the religious poets only. Historically this is a mistake. It was of Donne's love-poems Dryden was speaking when he referred to his metaphysics; and, as Mr Massingham himself sees, the love-poetry is traversed by 'frissons métaphysiques' quite as much as the religious. That is if 'metaphysical' be the right word; psychological' would be more accurate. The interest of Donne and his genuine disciples is that they are the first moderns,' the first poets who are curious about their own reactions in love and religion. They are not metaphysical as Lucretius and Dante were, nor even as the great romantics, Wordsworth and Shelley and Browning. They have either no philosophy or a traditional one, Anglican or Catholic, about God and man, and even the religious poets, except Traherne and Henry More who are no great poets, are not curious students of the metaphysics of religion but of their own spiritual moods; the same is true of Donne and occasionally other of the love poets. But this metaphysical' or psychological strain is by no means universal in the poets whom Mr Massingham's anthology represents. In many of them the metaphysical wit is simply a fashion

in conceit; and others, as his favourite Wither, are quite simple singers of simple moods. In fact, the final impression one gathers from Mr Massingham's volume, intensified by the self-denying ordinance which excludes Milton, Herrick and many of the best pieces of poets otherwise represented, is of a period exceptionally rich in excellent minor poetry, charming poems, meditative, playful, fantastic. There are no love-poems here which have the vibration of Donne's; no lyrics with the honied perfection of Herrick's; nothing with a touch of the great style which is Milton's, but (and here again the period has affinities with our own) the general level of pure poetry is extraordinarily high. The Carolines. live and move in an atmosphere of poetry as the lesser poets, say of the Romantic Revival, do not. But Mr Massingham's selection is not representative of the very best poetry of the age, nor of its more passionate and tormented strains.

As an editor Mr Massingham, if he has abundant enthusiasm and critical insight, when the latter is not distorted by personal prejudices, lacks the high qualities of patient care and loyalty to the poets whose work he handles. His volume is dedicated to among others the shades of the Poets from whose work he has gathered. He must feel that he owes those shades at least a silent blush for the mutilation of their poems and the carelessness with which he has printed the text. For the practice of cutting and carving the poems at will, without even the erection of a warning-post in the form of asterisks to indicate where verses have been torn away, Mr Massingham may plead the precedent of Palgrave and Professor Quiller-Couch. Nevertheless it is an objectionable practice. The principle on which Mr Massingham has dealt with Fanshawe's Ode (No. c) needs but little extension to admit a re-writing of the poem. Verses are omitted and the others so rearranged as to obscure or destroy their original meaning. It is not sufficient justification to appeal to one's own sense of poetic merit and to disclaim "recondite or historical interest.' Our judgment of the poetry of a past age must allow itself to some extent to be guided by the taste of that age so far as we can recover it. We must try to be representative of the age, not only of what in its work appeals to us. The result of doing the last is that Palgrave gave us only those few poems which the taste of the age of Tennyson approved. Donne was allowed no place; Herbert and Crashaw and Vaughan the very smallest. It was Mr Bullen's and Professor Saintsbury's fine blend of poetic taste and historical imagination which reopened and reassessed these long neglected poets. But part of their quality is their inequality, the fluctuations of their passionate and imaginative rhapsodies; and we do them wrong to cut and carve in accordance with our own personal whims and modern prejudices. Mr Massingham omits from Cowley's fine poem on Crashaw what he calls in an airy note the few flattish lines genteelly demurring at Crashaw's creed.' They are historically the most interesting lines in the poemone of the first clear expressions of the slowly awakening spirit of toleration and personally the most passionate. Donne's splendid Anniversarie is just spreading its wings for a final soar and stoop when

Mr Massingham takes off its head, apparently because he does not appreciate the theological conceit in which the poet's feeling expresses itself. The great quality in the evolution of Donne's songs is a continuous onward movement of passionate thought which will not suffer such mutilation as Mr Massingham here and Professor Quiller-Couch in the Oxford Book are guilty of. One owes something to the old poets. Their poems should be printed as they wrote them or, if space does not permit, we should at least be warned by asterisks where omissions occur. Why give anything at all of Lovelace's Grasshopper if one is to disguise the true character of this interesting experiment in an Horatian ode of the lighter, Epicurean kind. The three opening verses taken by themselves have no significance, nor are they notably better than the other From Crashaw's Hymn to the Name and Honour of...Saint Teresa Mr Massingham in like manner drops the lines on love which strike the keynote of the whole poem, including such beautiful lines as:

verses.

'Tis Love, not Yeares or Limbs that can

Make the Martyr, or the Man.
Love touch'd her Heart, and lo it beates
High, and burnes with such brave heates;
Such thirsts to dy, as dares drink up
A thousand cold deaths in one cup.

A little further on he omits again (this time with an indication) some extravagant but splendid and characteristic lines on the same theme, lines such as:

His is the Dart must make the Death

Whose stroke shall tast thy hallow'd breath;

A Dart thrice dip't in that rich flame
Which writes thy spouse's radiant Name
Upon the roof of Heav'n; where ay

It shines, and with a soveraign ray

Beates bright upon the burning faces

Of soules which in that name's sweet graces
Find everlasting smiles.

The omission of such lines and the whole selection from Crashaw suggest that Mr Massingham is not quite in sympathy with the more passionate strain which to other readers is the chief justification of these writers' daring conceits. His preference for King, Vaughan and Wither is instructive of his taste for the more meditative, pensive, playful and peaceful strain, and the result is an anthology individual and interesting but not fully representative of what is best and most characteristic.

The text of his poems Mr Massingham seems to have left to the care of the printer or the chance of the edition used to set up from. The result is not a happy one. Carew's fine Elegy on the Death of Dr Donne has not been printed from the best text which is that affixed to Donne's poems. I revised it with some care in my edition. The same is true of Carew's lines to George Sandys which are admirably printed in the 1636 edition of the Paraphrase upon the Psalmes. Mr Massingham has added some fresh errors. In the Donne elegy (p. 19) 'kindled first by