The poem 57 is one of the simplest and shortest of the whole collection of Old English Riddles, a gem of a riddle, if correctly understood. In my opinion the last line should be interpreted as ending with the statement that the little creatures “name themselves.” As yet no satisfactory solution has been found.

In a study of the use of the verb haber as an impersonal expression of existence, it was found that the twelfth-century Spanish of the Poema de mío Cid tended not to use the locative adverb y in the present tense, contrary to present usage, and to retain it in other tenses. It was also found that the language tended to place the y before the verb.

In preparing my edition of the Middle English Epistle of Othea attributed to Stephen Scrope, I have chanced upon some details which apparently have not been previously noticed. The conclusions to be drawn in this paper must necessarily be tentative until exhaustive search in Italian and French libraries can once again be undertaken with the hope of providing the necessary evidence for the satisfactory solution of the present problem. The points which I propose to make, however, are of sufficient importance and interest to present them in their present form to students of comparative literature.

Le livre ii,—on l'a souvent remarqué,—manque d'unité. Des trois parties dont il se compose, la première se rapporte à l'enfance et à la jeunesse fabuleuses de Pantagruel, la seconde à son séjour à Paris, la troisième à son expédition en Utopie. Ce qui marque le début et la fin du roman, c'est le caractère extraordinaire des personnages et de leurs aventures, et le ton familier du récit. Ces deux parties, note M. Abel Lefranc, semblent avoir été rédigées avant la seconde. Dans celle-ci, il ne reste guère plus rien d'anormal, plus d'incidents surnaturels. On oublie presque que le héros est un géant. C'est dans cette seconde partie que Rabelais a exprimé des idées graves et nobles en des pages enthousiastes qui sont remarquables au point de vue littéraire. Ces contrastes ne se retrouvent pas dans les autres livres du roman rabelaisien. Gargantua, le Tiers et le Quart Livres sont mieux composés et mieux écrits. L‘élément mythique y tient moins de place. Pantagruel s'y présente sous d'autres traits: il se fait plus digne; sa bonhomie, de spontanée, devient réfléchie. Non seulement le livre II est moins harmonieux que les autres, mais ce qui le distingue, ce sont les scènes d'une vulgarité de fableau, dénuées souvent de portée, et simplement plaisantes. Par sa première et sa troisième parties, tout imprégnées d'esprit populaire, le livre n tient encore des récits traditionnistes dont les autres livres se dégagent plus nettement. C'est l‘étude des relations qui existent entre Pantagruel et les Chroniques gargantuines qui va nous occuper.

Alarconian criticism has been given direction largely by Pérez de Montalbán's remark about the dramatist's extrañeza; consequently, much attention has been addressed to the spirit of his work—his philosophy, his moral concepts, his characterizations, his mexicanismo—but relatively little to the structure of his comedias. Thus the mechanical elements of Alarcón's plays have been largely neglected, this neglect apparently arising from the belief that in the matter of structure Alarcón relied heavily upon his masters Tirso and Lope. I have made some preliminary studies of the structure of the Alarconian comedia, and my examination of this subject reveals that in at least one respect Alarcón was demonstrably independent of these masters. The letter which is read aloud on the stage clearly illustrates how the poet departed from the practices of his contemporaries; in point of fact, the letter proves significant since a comparative study of Alarcón, Tirso, and Lope shows special patterns to be distinctive of each of these poets.

Few Elizabethan scholars are unacquainted with The Arte of Rhetorique that Thomas Wilson published at London in 1553. A supposed connection with the plays of Shakespeare would alone have been sufficient to lend it importance even if intrinsically it did not merit attention; this work, however, is informed with a vigorous commonsense that has long since gained for itself the recognition it deserves.

In the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery there is a letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the sons of Joachim Camerarii, which has been published once, without comment, but I am now able to offer improved readings and to trace some of its background. As this letter was not printed with complete accuracy before, the text is now given in full:

Sir Francis Bacon's interest in the study of history was twofold. It was not only the broad interest of the philosopher but also the specific interest of the practical statesman. For the philosopher, history was important as the branch of human learning that has reference to man's memory. The true office of this knowledge, as he saw it, was “to represent the events themselves together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.” On the other hand, the observations properly belonged to the field of politics. Bacon, the statesman, bred as he was in the realistic tradition of Machiavelli, found a utilitarian value in history. From the events and the counsels he drew conclusions that served as valuable lessons for the politics of the present and the future.

The Induction to Every Man out of his Humour, which contains Jonson's most significant statement about humorous characterization, has been universally interpreted by critics as follows: Jonson rebelled against the “abuse of this word Humour,” which had come to be used popularly to denote whim, affectation, or eccentricity. That spectators and readers of his comedies might understand the basis of his own comic characterization, he carefully defined humour in the strictly psychological sense:

As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.

William Lisle Bowles said of the anecdotist Joseph Spence, “He seems to have opened his mouth and his ears to every thing Pope told him.” This sneer implied that Pope was a liar and Spence a gull, but the splenetic Bowles inadvertently implied something else that, if true, is of significance to English literary history: that Spence was an omnivorous snapper-up of trifles who did not judge or discriminate but merely recorded. For if Spence, gull or no gull, was an accurate and veracious recorder, his notes on the conversation of Pope and other literary figures possess great value; if he was not, they are nearly worthless. Without Spence's records our knowledge of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would be considerably less than it is, and the biographers of Pope in particular would cut a sorry figure. Only if Spence's manuscripts had lain unknown for a century and a half, if neither Warburton nor Johnson nor anyone else had been granted a look at them, if not one of the anecdotes had ever found its way to the light, and then if a modern discoverer had published his find—then only would the ensuing sensation have brought a realization of the importance of Spence's labors and the magnitude of the debt which the world has been none too ready to pay him.

To people interested in the history of English pronunciation, the names of John Walker and Thomas Sheridan are not unfamiliar. Of these two men, the more important from the point of view of modern pronunciation, in particular American pronunciation, is unquestionably Walker; for almost invariably, where these two men disagreed, it has been Walker's decisions which have prevailed—especially in America, until today many of our pronunciations of individual words, as well as our ideas about proper pronunciation are traceable to Walker, not Sheridan. Walker's influence was made possible by the constant republication of his works in the nineteenth century and—more indirectly, but perhaps more pervasively—by his tremendous effect on succeeding dictionary writers.

In the well-known passage from Rasselas Johnson made Imlac say that the poet must “neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may-have remarked, and another neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness”; but twenty-two years later in the Lives of the Poets, Johnson praised Thomson as a poet who “thinks always as a man of genius,” who looks on Nature and Life “with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute. The reader of the Seasons wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him.” The Seasons, then, was good poetry because Thomson did not neglect the minuter discriminations which one may have remarked and another neglected, and because he presented characteristics which had not been “alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” Whether these two critical remarks are inconsistent, and if they are, to what degree, are questions to be answered only when we are sure of the meaning of the famous passage in Rasselas. What, precisely, did Johnson mean by the rather unfortunate metaphor of the tulip? What is the background of the conflict in literary criticism between the grandeur of generality and the power of particularity? And where did Johnson stand in that conflict?

Bedürfte es eines Vorwandes, immer wieder sinnend und grübelnd zum Helena-Akt des II. Faust zurückzukehren, er ließe sich leicht in Goethes Aufforderung an seine Freunde finden, dem “Verdeckten” in dem lang und weit Bekannten forschend nachzuspüren. Ein Fühlender, so schreibt Goethe, “wird dasjenige durchdringen, was gemütlich hie und da verdeckt liegt: Eleusis servat quod ostendat revisentibus, und es soll mich freuen, wenn diesmal auch das Geheimnisvolle zu öfterer Rückkehr den Freunden Veranlassung gibt.” Wie oft er auch sich darauf berufen haben mag, daß an dem zweiten Teil der großen Dichtung “der Verstand mehr Recht habe” als am ersten, so hat er doch gern mit verschmitzten Anspielungen auf das Dunkle und Unergründliche hingedeutet, “was da hineingeheimnißet ist.” So mag es denn auch nicht ganz abwegig scheinen, aus der Masse des Helena-Zwischenspiels eine “Reflexion” herauszuheben, die von der Faust-Deutung bisher nie aufgegriffen wurde: der Erdenwandel Helenas als das Abbild der Ueberwindung des mythischgebundenen Menschen.

To attempt any definition of the novel has become an increasingly risky business. Yet many an otherwise cautious student finds license to treat that genre as though it were synonymous with the character sketch. This attitude reaches its extreme in the preparation of “repertories” or “ditionaries” of a novelist's characters. There are, for example, the May Rodgers and M. F. A. Husband dictionaries of the Waverley characters, and the Cerfberr and Christophe repertory of the Human Comedy; there are no less than three Dickens dictionaries—those of Philip and Gadd, A. L. Hay ward, and Pierce; and there are J. G. Patterson's and F. C. Ramond's repertories for the Rougon-Macquart series. These works are eloquent of industry, patience, and enthusiasm. They show that each of the four novelists has to his credit some 2,000 characters. They offer, too, an admirable list of names, titles, professions, and activities, all from the brain and pen of one creator. Although these dictionaries afford pleasant moments to their authors and readers, beyond that they do not offer much answer to a student's queries. They do not tell of the function of each character in a story which was also the creation of the novelist.

John Millington Synge's first play is in many respects one of his most important works. It embodies that “dialectical synthesis of the naturalistic tradition and the symbolistic reaction” which, as Mr. Harry Levin has recently pointed out, Synge stated as being the great problem to be solved by the artist of his time. Criticism of The Shadow of the Glen has been mostly concerned with proving that its Irishness is spurious. Very few critics have seen that the most interesting thing about the play is Synge's happy facility in combining the realistic with the symbolistic.

In meinem Beitrag zur Evans-Festschrift (“Um Grundsätzliches in der Märchenforschung”) handelte es sich vornehmlich um das Problem der Beziehungen von Märchen und Literatur zueinander, um die Frage nämlich, ob das Eingreifen eines ‘Märchenpflegers,’ dh. eines Schriftstellers, das Volksmärchen dauernd zu beeinflussen und zu ändern vermag oder ob die echte Volkstradition sich im Grunde doch nicht von literarischen Vorgängen in der intellektuellen Oberschicht stören läßt. Ich versuchte an Beispielen zu zeigen, daß durch eine im Wesen der vielfachen, parallelen mündlichen Überlieferung liegende Selbstkorrektur das Volksmärchen selbst nach ausgedehnten Wanderungen durch mehrere Sprachgebiete und durch lange Jahrhunderte seine ursprüngliche Struktur zu erhalten weiß und daß literarische Umformungen nur von beschränkter Wirkung sind. Immer vorausgesetzt bleibt bei diesem Ergebnis natürlich die grundsätzliche Annahme aller wissenschaftlichen Märchenforschung von heute, daß die meisten Märchen ‘Kunstmärchen im Volksmunde’ sind, daß am Anfange der Überlieferung eines bestimmten Märchens eine Urform anzunehmen ist, die eine kunstvolle, in sich geschlossene logische Motivfolge aufwies und deren Struktur ‘so und nicht anders’ aus der schöpferischen Phantasie eines anonymen Erzählers entsprang.

The central argument of this essay, concerning what for want of a better name I shall, adapting the terminology of Hegel, call the “concrete universal,” proceeds from the observation that literary theorists have from early times to the present persisted in making statements which in their contexts seem to mean that a work of literary art is in some peculiar sense a very individual thing or a very universal thing or both. What that paradox can mean, or what important fact behind the paradox has been discerned by such various critics as Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Whitehead and Ransom, it will be the purpose of the essay to inquire, and by the inquiry to discuss not only a significant feature of metaphysical poetics from Aristotle to the present day but the relation between metaphysical poetics and more practical and specific rhetorical analysis. In the brief historical survey which forms one part of this essay it will not be my purpose to suggest that any of these writers meant exactly what I shall mean in later parts where I describe the structure of poetry. Yet throughout the essay I shall proceed on the theory not only that men have at different times used the same terms and have meant differently, but that they have sometimes used different terms and have meant the same or somewhat the same. In other words, I assume that there is continuity in the problems of criticism, and that a person who studies poetry today has interest in what Plato said about poetry.