Perhaps no reproach is oftener addressed to those who call themselves philologists than that they are unconcerned with that beauty which has furnished a distinctive epithet for the word “literature” in the phrase belles lettres, that they lack imagination and insight, and that they are quite unfitted to impart to others a sense of the spiritual values which inhere in the productions that form the subject matter of their studies. An eloquent writer, who is himself a capable investigator, has recently presented this view in an essay which deserves the attention of every teacher of literature, and especially of every teacher of English literature.

In two passages of his recent book on Thomas Wolfe (1947), Herbert J. Muller has briefly, but incisively, dealt with the time concepts of Wolfe and Proust. He points out that while both writers depended upon sensory impressions to recall the past, Wolfe lacked the keen subjective analysis of Proust and stayed closer to the actual experience that produced his memories. Wolfe's interest was in fixity and change as they are in real life, while Proust “aspired to the realm of Essence or Being, where change is mere appearance” (p. 75). It is important, I believe, that these distinctions be made, for Wolfe, unlike Proust, was no philosopher and would without question have been confused by an array of Bergsonian metaphysics. While outwardly the time concepts of Wolfe and of Proust seem somewhat alike, a closer examination reveals that these concepts are in many respects different. But no distinctions were made, for instance, by Mary M. Colum in her article on “Literature of Today and Tomorrow” (Scribner's, Dec. 1936, p. 102), which stated that Wolfe's work might well be described as “Remembrance of Things Past”—that “like Proust he tells us of his struggles with Time elements.” And Joseph Warren Beach, in American Fiction 1920–1940 (1941), while acknowledging that Wolfe could not have accepted fully the implications of Proust's theories, found that Wolfe and Proust had had a common psychological experience. “It is found in the recall by means of present sensations or impressions of closely similar impressions received in extreme youth” (p. 192).

When Archibald Henderson once wrote that a fitting sub-title for Bernard Shaw's Candida would be “A Mystery”, he was not thinking so much of the famous but ambiguous “secret in the poet's heart” as he was of the motivation and interpretation of the characters as a whole. For of course the tantalizing “secret” is embedded only in the final stage direction and would therefore not challenge the spectator for solution; but the problem of the meaning of the characters and their relationships forms the backbone of the whole play, whether read or seen. Perhaps the fact that for years critic after critic, reader after reader, spectator after spectator have interpreted Candida, Morell, and Marchbanks according to their own temperaments and predilections may help to explain why the play, like the similarly enigmatic Hamlet of Shaw's self-selected arch-rival, has proved to be one of the most popular in the repertoire. To judge from most of the printed comments on Shaw's play, and particularly on its heroine, it still remains a mystery. At least, there is little agreement as to its interpretation.

The present study is a by-product of a much more extensive project in which I have been interested for a number of years, the collection and classification of all the available writings of Manuel Gutierrez Nájera. Because he was a precursor of Modernism, and also because his works have considerable intrinsic value, Nájera is one of the most important authors of Spanish America. It therefore seems obviously desirable that as much as possible of his production should be known. As a matter of fact most of his poetry now seems to have been identified and edited. This is far from true of his prose. Only four or five volumes (disregarding duplications) are available in book form, whereas perhaps forty or fifty equivalent volumes constitute his total prose production. I have approximately that amount of Nájera's prose on microfilm, as a result of a number of months of research in the libraries of Mexico City.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was born in 1797, when German Classicism was at its height and Romanticism just launched. She died in 1848, in the revolutionary year that marked the end of an era. Her principal literary production falls into the 1830's and 1840's, decades in which traditional values were challenged and often discarded, years of upheaval and reorientation in German politics and religion and philosophy as well as in poetry. She was not connected with any of these innovative movements; in fact, she was shielded from them by bulwarks of “Stand” and religion, by the ingrained conservatism of her race and family, by her sex, and by her lonely and visionary nature. One cannot suppose that she ever read such books as Gutzkow's Watty, die Zweiflerin, or David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, or Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorslellung, or the treatises of the new materialistic science that was threatening to reduce the divine soul of an earlier faith and poetry to a system of physiological reactions. Yet these things were in the air, and she could not wholly escape them, in the sense that no life, however solitary, can remain unaffected by the intellectual climate of its time. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was, without intent or plan on her part, a link in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. The problems of “Weltanschauung” she wrestled with, to victory or defeat, are to a large extent the problems her contemporaries confronted, though her formulations of them were conditioned by the circumstances of her own peculiar, not to say eccentric, existence.

Interesting light is thrown on the apprenticeship of William Wycherley as a dramatist by examination of his earliest play, Love in a Wood, against its Spanish source. For the intrigue involving Ranger, Lydia, Christina, and Vincent, Wycherley used Calderon's Mañanas de abril y mayo. The Spanish play runs as follows:

Returning to Madrid from refuge after killing a rival for the affections of Ana, Juan hides at the house of his friend Pedro, a near neighbor of Ana. Pedro tells Juan of how Ana has grieved in solitude during his absence. But Juan is not sure she had not favored his rival—indeed, it is to make certain of her attitude that he has risked the law and the slain man's relatives in returning.

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond fashion, with many facets answering to the many-planed aspects to the world about them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface. … People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and many often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.

—Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

The rose-diamond cut of Milton's thought often disconcerts his reader, but perhaps nowhere so completely as in his views on learning. After the high enthusiasm for unrestricted inquiry, after all the “intent study” which he took as his own “portion in life”, in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the ripe products of his learning, he gives to Raphael, Michael, and Jesus speeches that seem a wholesale repudiation of studies of all sorts. The three passages are too well known to quote. In the first (P.L., viii, 66–178)1 Raphael disparages Adam's inquiries about astronomy, but answers them, and then comments, “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid.” In the second (P.L., XII, 575–587) Michael commends Adam for the inference he has drawn from his preview of universal history (that “to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God”), and admonishes him, “This having learnt, thou hast attain'd the sum / Of wisdom; hope no higher.” In the third (P.R., iv, 286–364) Jesus spurns Satan's offer of Greek learning, with an analysis of the defects of Greek philosophy and literature and a thrust at learning in general: “Many books / Wise men have said are wearisome.”

When the Cid appeared on the boards of the Marais, it was a success both universal and instantaneous—a success beyond anything its author had dreamed of. Day after day the theater was crowded with the best people of the Court and the city. We are told that receipts of the play were greater than that of ten of the best plays of other leading dramatists. Pellisson in his Histoire de l'Académie Française published sixteen years later tells us:

Il est malaisé de s'imaginer avec quelle approbation cette pièce fut reçue de la Cour et du public. On ne se pouvoit lasser de la voir, on n'entendoit autre chose dans les compagnies, chacun en savoit quelque partie par cceur, on la faisoit apprendre aux enfants, et, en plusieurs endroits de la France, il étoit passé en proverbe de dire: Cela est beau comme le Cid.

Johann Khuen, der Unbekannte, der vergessenste der Barockdichter, ist Bayer durch und durch. Jakob Balde, sein Freund und Stadtgenosse, war geborener Elsäßer, und von dem derben und ein wenig unflätigen Humor der al ten südwestdeutschen Dichtung ist in ihm manches noch vorhanden, dem drastischen Witz, der tolldreisten Übertreibung der Sebastian Brandt, Thomas Murner und Johann Fischart. Nicht so Khuen. Sein Humor ist so bayrisch wie seine Herkunft aus der Nähe von München. Es ist etwas Naives und Ungeschlachtes in ihm, eine fröhliche Derbheit, eine Lust an saftigen Wendungen, bei tiefer und echter, durchaus katholischer Religiosität, wie sie noch heute den Bayern auszeichnet.

Though Shakespeare's liking for Stoic commonplaces of the sort that one finds in the prose works of Seneca, Plutarch, Cardano, and Justus Lipsius no longer needs to be pointed out and though interesting evidence has recently been assembled1 of Shakespeare's utilizing the forms and principles of traditional Renaissance rhetoric, there is one rhetorical pattern used by Shakespeare, itself a development from Stoic prose models, which seems not to have caught the eye of modern students. This is the consolatio or “Paramythia … a forme of speech which the Orator vseth to take away, or diminish a sorrow conceiued in the minde of his hearer”, as Henry Peacham defined it in 1593.

Practically every play of the period 1587–92 that cannot be definitely credited to somebody else has at one time or another been attributed to Robert Greene.1 The canon of Greene's dramatic work has now been fairly well established, however, by conservative modern critics and it includes only those dramas for which there is reasonably sound evidence, external or internal or both, of his authorship. The attribution of yet another play to the formerly all-too-convenient Greene would not ordinarily arouse interest. But the recovery in recent years of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589), the appearance in 1936 of an edition of this sequel in the Malone Society Reprints, and the tentative assignment of it to Greene by two such careful scholars as W. L. Renwick and W. W. Greg, its editors—these are developments which deserve more attention than they have yet received.2 There is no contemporary evidence concerning a second part of Friar Bacon,3 and now that a sequel is known to exist, there is no external evidence as to who wrote it. My purpose here is to analyze John of Bordeaux in relation to Greene and his work. This analysis, it may be said at once, supports at every point the assignment of the play to Greene.

Notice of King John has been concentrated on questions of date; revision; polemic purpose; treatment of history; influence of the Image of Hypocrisy, Kirchmayer's Pammachius, Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates, and Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man; and relation to the morality play and the chronicle play, between which it seems transitional, with its effect upon the latter, especially upon the Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John. Herbert Barke notices here and there the historical basis of its use of the Roman rite. Otherwise there has been almost no notice of a substance and technique that, beyond this basis, articulate structure, unite allegory and history, and must have made the propaganda emotional for a mid-sixteenth-century audience.

In no other part of his writings was Geoffrey Chaucer more original than in the series of sketches of the pilgrims in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Though the Sources and Analogues is able to provide the source or at least an analogue for every complete tale, it gives (no information of any similar series earlier than Chaucer's time. Clearly the plan was the result of “inspiration.” Much has been written, however, on the sources of particular elements in the prologue. It may be worth while to consider in one place these and other features which contributed to the success of Chaucer's design.

Domenico Cavalca's literary activity and his importance in Italian literary history have been questions discussed, at times even hotly, since the dawn of Italian literary historiography. However, it was only in 1905, when Guglielmo Volpi in his “Questione del Cavalca” outlined a program for future study of Cavalca's writings, that these may be said to have become a recognized field for scholarly research. The program then outlined by Volpi has in part been carried out. Alfonso Zacchi did pioneer work over a broad field, clearing the ground and opening up the question of the sources. Continuing Zacchi's work, Carmelina Naselli carried it further into the field of Cavalca's life and circumstances. Neither Zacchi nor Naselli, however, made a thorough study of Cavalca's sources, or of his manner of handling them—an aspect of the Cavalca question which calls for further elucidation, as Volpi did not fail to perceive. Nor did the afore-mentioned writers undertake to decide definitively, as Volpi (p. 318) suggests should be done, “se alcune opère attribuite al Cavalca per congettura possano esser sue.” These are the subjects I have chosen to investigate here.

Perhaps the most significant link between Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Saxo Grammaticus story about Amlethus is to be found in that part of the tale which describes the hero's feigned madness. Although the plot of the story follows a rather common pattern and even the characters, as presented by Saxo, are mostly well-known types that may be found in any number of legends, the picture of the suppressed youth who hides his superiority over his enemies behind double-talk and disguised meaning is certainly food for a poet's imagination. However, what gives the Danish story its strange attraction is precisely what makes it so difficult to understand its details. Puns and ambiguities in a foreign language are notoriously hard to understand, and even if we had the Danish original of Saxo's tale, we would probably find ourselves baffled by more than one of its word plays. Translated into flowery Latin by a man who can be shown to have misunderstood at least part of what his source offered, its real meaning has revealed itself to modern interpretation only gradually, and by no means completely.

The Irish tale recounting the fabulous adventures in “The Land of Promise” of King Cormac Mac Airt, who according to the Annals reigned in the third century A.D., survives in several recensions. The first recension forms part of the text called [Seél na Fír Flatha], Echtra Cormaic i Tir Tairngiri, ocus Ceart Claidib Cormaic, “The Tale of the Ordeals, Cormac's Adventure in the Land of Promise, and the Decision as to Cormac's Sword”, which has been published by Whitley Stokes on the basis of the extant copies in two late fourteenth century MSS, The Book of Ballymote and The Yellow Book of Lecan. As these two copies exhibit only minor, insignificant variations in their readings, they would seem to derive from a common exemplar or archetype. The age of this common exemplar or archetype remains, however, a matter for conjecture. The linguistic evidence at least suggests that the text as transmitted antedates the actual compilation of the MSS by some two hundred years, for linguistically it hardly can be much later in date than the version of Acallamh na Senórach, “The Colloquy of the Ancients”, which Whitley Stokes has edited. Now since Acallamh na Senórach was composed about the middle of the twelfth century, the text of the first recension in its present state of transmission probably was written sometime between A.D. 1150–1200, whereas the exemplar or archetype upon which it is based was, of course, made at an earlier period.

Three of the riddles in the Exeter Book, usually numbered 1, 2, and 3, are commonly known as the Storm Riddles because of their unusually vigorous and beautiful descriptions of disasters on sea and on land as caused by the uproar of the elements. We owe to Professor Charles W. Kennedy the complete interpretation of riddles 2 and 3. Kennedy, I think, has established two things conclusively: first, that riddles 2 and 3 are actually but one riddle—I shall subsequently refer to it by riddle 2–3—secondly, that the background of the storm riddles is Graeco-Roman cosmological thought. Riddle 2–3 dwells successively on four aspects of the turbulent atmosphere, the submarine storm (R.2, lines 1–12), the earthquake (R.3, lines 1-16), the storm at sea (R.3, lines 17–35), and the thunderstorm on land (R.3, lines 36-66). Lines 67–72 summarize the four themes.

None of the deadly weapons of mediaeval legend, not even the darts of Yspadaden Penkawr, is more sinister than Crocea Mors, the sword of Julius Caesar. This Yellow Death, a terrible instrument which inflicted incurable and inevitably fatal wounds, was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who says that Caesar lost it in his first battle with the British when it stuck in the cleft shield of the British prince Nennius and was carried off by him. The episode is symbolic of Caesar's entire association with the British as related by Geoffrey and his followers, for at their hands the great Roman's military reputation suffered even worse than his armory in his encounters with the descendants of Brut.