Reflective Englishmen of the seventh and eighth centuries, living under the transforming influence of classical and Christian ideas, must have satisfied a special need by revaluating their Germanic patrimony in terms of the new culture. In that process the Teutonic heritage naturally took on an added lustre wherever it lent itself to Christian interpretation. Beowulf more fully than any other English poem reflects that effort to assimilate and reappraise whereby the Germanic tradition from the Continent was ennobled by the new theology, as by a light flashed backward into the heroic past. Thus the career of the Danish king Heremod becomes an exemplum for a Christian homily on pride; Grendel, creature of northern fantasy, is placed in a Biblical lineage of evil reaching back to the first murder. The poet probably recognized, however, that his illumination of the past stopped short of perfect fusion of new and old, to say nothing of historical fidelity. Doubtless he was less disturbed than we are by vestiges of his pagan sources that lie awkwardly in the matrix of his Christian prepossessions. He had the advantage of knowing what he meant when, for example, he used terms of various and elastic connotation like wyrd. Also, if I am not mistaken, he saw his divergent materials in relation to a great central truth, an underlying principle which enabled him to recognize a larger unity in his fabulous tales than appears on the surface, and which made them in his eyes more worthy to survive in a reflective poem of epic magnitude.

Thackeray, Dickens, Disraeli, and others of the Victorian novelists frequently gave their imaginative faculties a temporary leave of absence, and proceeded for the time being with characters picked up ready made from their own acquaintance, or from other folk who happened to be prominent enough at the time to attract their attention. The Thackeray Dictionary lists 89 such originals, and a few others have been pointed out since that volume was issued. It is my purpose here to offer some evidence to show that to this list there may now be added the name of Sir Martin Archer Shee, sometime president of the Royal Academy, whom, I think, the author introduces in the forty-second chapter of Vanity Fair, as a Mr. Smee, a struggling young drawing master, who, engaged to give lessons to Miss Jane Osborne, falls in love with her, and is eventually driven from the house by her angry father, who threatens to “break every bone in his skin.”

That Jóhann Sigurjónsson's Fjalla-Eyvindur (“Eyvindur of the Mountains”) is “one of the most powerful of modern dramas” and a great classic of modern Icelandic literature is scarcely open to question. In the face of what appears to have been an inadequate performance, an anonymous American critic wrote nearly a quarter of a century ago that the play had “something akin to Synge in the poetry of its naturalism, and something akin to Wagner in the huge scale of its simplified plot.” It has enjoyed popular success on the stage of Iceland, continental Scandinavia, and Germany; it has served as the subject of what one is given to understand was an exceptionally beautiful and impressive Swedish silent film. The play has been relatively neglected in the English-speaking world; whether it is “too stark, relentless and cold to have a popular success in the commercial theater of Broadway” is an interesting matter of speculation. In any event, this heroic pastoral tragedy, cherished classic of Icelanders, ranks high among examples of twentieth-century dramatic art and is a work worthy of much study and reflection.

Among the Celtic tongues Cornish occupies a unique place. It is not a wholly dead language like Gaulish and Galatian, and neither is it an actively living one like Welsh and Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic. Even Manx, few as the speakers of it may be, has maintained a living tradition. But Cornish was practically dead when the revival began in 1904, and it was well on its way to becoming a living language again when the second world war broke out. Whether this revival can survive amid the dislocation of total war remains to be seen.

Old French, until the end of the Gallo-Roman period, was physiologically characterized by articulatory laxness to a high degree. This laxness of articulation chiefly manifested itself by intensifying certain syllables while weakening others, and by producing diphthongs and affricates out of strongly situated sounds while others tended to disappear or remained as they were. During the ninth century, physiological characteristics of precisely opposite nature started to appear, and French gradually gained in tenseness until it became about what it is today: the tensest of known languages. We reject here the theory proposed by W. von Wartburg concerning the effects of Germanic invasions on early Old French changes. “Le provençal s’étendait autrefois jusqu’à une ligne qui allait depuis l'embouchure de la Loire jusqu'aux Vosges méridionales. Cette ligne coïncide assez exactement avec une limite ethnique et politique qui s’était formée vers 500, grâce aux invasions germaniques.” And we accept the opposite views which attribute the early Old French laxness to the Celtic substratum and only the tenseness of a later period to the Germanic superstratum. They are well exposed by Dauzat:

The “lost poems” of Sir Arthur Gorges (c. 1557-1625) have been found. They are the “sweet layes of love” that Spenser praised in Colin Clout (384-391). When Colin calls upon Alcyon (Gorges) to abandon songs of mourning for his dead Daphne, he urges him to pursue the brave conceit of his sweet Eglantine of Meriflure. This Eglantine poem is in the new-found manuscript, but it is still incomplete: it is headed “Pastoral unfynyshed,” and an “etc.” is written where it breaks off after the sixth stanza. Even at Colin's bidding, the widowed Alcyon never finished his shepherd's song to Eglantine (“shee woonnes in plesaunte Meryfleur”). She is the Daphne whom he later lost, as other poems in this manuscript prove, where Daphne and the eglantine are significantly associated; thus she is the Douglas Howard who is the subject of Spenser's elegy Daphnaida.

In the forty-two years since its publication, there has grown up around Hudson's Green Mansions and its heroine, the forest-girl Rima, an aura of mystery which has been rather deepened than dispelled by Hudson's editors and biographers. “If there was any secret about Rima,” says one of them, “forty years of friendship never discovered it to me … Sometimes I have thought that there was a Rima, some woodland child whom the boy Hudson had loved, and then again I come back to the thought I now hold to, that she is the embodiment, but no more than that, of all his imaginations concerning the girl-woman who would have satisfied his body and soul.” Later the same writer elaborates on the concept of Rima as Hudson's spiritual mate. “His opposed contrasted figures grew out of the soil, and if Rima seems to come down from heaven, she was yet a being who sprang living from his memory of some white and lovely children, whom he had known on the pampa.” Such words as these merely add mist to mystery, and romancing to romance, an editorial tendency in which less ecstatic commentators than Mr. Roberts will hesitate to concur.

In his literary reputation, John Gay has been less fortunate than his neo-classic contemporaries; for, added to nineteenth century neglect, he received little support from Johnson himself, whose “Life of Gay” is harsh and unsympathetic. Today, except for the lyrics in “The Beggar's Opera” and the Fables, Gay's poetry is more talked about than read; and more has been written about his life and times than about any of his work. Even when he is occasionally judged as a poet, there is little genuinely critical agreement. At one extreme, for instance, Mr. F. R. Leavis brackets Gay with Parnell, and remarks that they “are representative period figures, of very minor interest.” This is the more common view. But at the other extreme, Mr. Yvor Winters places Gay among “the chief masters of the heroic couplet.” Since these are but passing estimates, a detailed examination of Gay's heroic couplet poems should perform for his reputation a service long over-due.

Die Frage nach dem Geburtsjahr Heinrich Heines, ob er 1797 oder 1799 geboren wurde, war schon zu des Dichters Lebzeiten viel umstritten. Man entschied sich damals für 1799, welches Jahr zuerst auch von Strodtmann angenommen wurde. Erst im Jahre 1891 veröffentlichte Elster die erste wissenschaftliche Untersuchung, worin er die Facta für 1797 und 1799 gegenüberstellte und zu dem Schluß gelangte, daß Heine nur im Jahre 1797 geboren sein könnte. Seine Ergebnisse wurden zuerst nicht angefochten, bis bei der hundertjährigen Geburtstagsfeier des Dichters die alte Frage wieder in den Vordergrund trat. Einige Verehrer entschlossen sich zur Feier im Jahre 1897, die meisten bestanden auf 1899. Zwischen 1897 und 1899 entstand nun eine Reihe meist belangloser Aufsätze über Heines Geburtsjahr; die Bekenner zum Jahre 1797 stützten sich auf Elsters Feststellungen, die zum Jahre 1799 auf die Angaben der Heineschen Familie. Aus der Unmenge von Beiträgen aus dieser Zeit —ich besitze 68 in meiner eigenen Bibliothek—müssen hier besonders die von Hüffer und Franzos berücksichtigt werden, welche ganz auf Elster fußen und ebenfalls das Jahr 1797 vertreten.

On trouve plus de rêves dans l'œuvre de
Dostoievsky que dans toute notre littérature classique.
E. M. De Vogüé, Le Roman russe, p. 257.

IL s'en faut, on le sait, que l'Occident ait dû être soudainement initié à des prestiges inconnus quand se révélèrent, plus ou moins indiscrètement, les attraits du subconscient comme un élément des lettres et des arts. Sans doute, avec Descartes, une philosophie d'idées “distinctes,” et bientôt une esthétique “raisonnable” l'emportaient sur ce que Gassendi et même Malebranche concédaient à la fantaisie ou à des résidus d'impressions, et l'Entendement humain de Locke n'admettait pas que l‘âme pût être vraiment active dans le sommeil; “un homme endormi, et pensant sans le savoir, est une autre personne que le même homme à l‘état de veille.”

In The Road to Tryermaine, an illuminating study of the origins of Christabel, A. H. Nethercot states that Coleridge was indebted to Hutchinson's History of the County of Cumberland . . . (Carlisle, 1794-97) for the name of Christabel's father, Sir Leoline. This statement is based on a sentence found on page 17 of the first volume of Hutchinson which was taken (with minor variations) from the 1695 edition of William Camden's Britannia: “King Edmund, with the assistance of Leoline, King of Wales, spoiled Cumberland of all its riches; and having put out the eyes of Dunmaile, king of that country, granted that kingdom to Malcolm, King of Scots… .”

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it analytically minded … is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.

The Perlesvaus, even the most casual reader perceives, is intended to have serious religious significance. Certain of its symbolical adventures have been carefully studied as expressions of Christian doctrine, but no one has yet demonstrated the completeness of its religious symbolism.

Zu den Personen, die Friedrich Hebbel in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens nahegestanden haben, gehört auch der Dichterkomponist Peter Cornelius. Da wir seinen Namen in den Tagebüchern Hebbels vergeblich suchen, wohl aber seinen großen Onkel, den Maler Peter Cornelius (1783-1867), erwähnt finden, ist anzunehmen, daß Cornelius keinen starken Eindruck auf Hebbel gemacht hat. Auch Emil Kuh, Hebbels Biograph, erwähnt den Dichterkomponisten nicht, obwohl beide befreundet waren und Cornelius Gedichte von Kuh vertont hat. Andere Darsteller von Hebbels Leben haben Cornelius ebenfalls übersehen. Nur Adolf Bartels nennt in seiner kleinen Lebensbeschreibung Hebbels Cornelius unter denen, die in Wien um den großen Dramatiker waren, und Paul Bornstein hat in seinem umfangreichen Werke “Friedrich Hebbels Persönlichkeit” Teile aus den Briefen von Peter Cornelius zum Abdruck gebracht. und doch gehörte Cornelius, dessen musikalische Werke, insbesondere seine Liedkompositionen, einen hohen Rang einnehmen, dessen Dichtungen und schriftstellerische Arbeiten in vier Bänden vorliegen und dessen Leben und Werk in etlichen biographischen Arbeiten behandelt worden ist, nicht nur zu dem engeren Kreise um Hebbel in Wien, sondern er hat in seinen Briefen auch des öfteren Hebbel und sein Verhältnis zu ihm erwähnt und damit Material zu dem Charakterbilde des norddeutschen Dramatikers geliefert, das bis heute unberücksichtigt geblieben ist.

It is a known fact that in Vegliotic Lat. ce (pronounced ke) is preserved, while ci (pronounced ki) becomes či: kaina < cēnam, kaira < cēram, plakár < placēre, takár < tacēre, akait < acētum, dekaja < dīcēbat, fakaja < ∗facēbat, kenúr < cēnāre, < cerebella, kris < ceres-, dik < decem, loik < lūcet, etc. etc.; but < cīmicem, kalčaina < calcīnam, radičaina < ∗rādīcīnam, vičain < uīcīnum, puarč < porcī, etc. etc. (cf. Bàrtoli, Dalm., ii, pp. 376 ff.). The same is true for ge with respect to gi: gelut < gelātum, Ragusean galatina < ∗gelatīnam, but Vegliotic spirač < asparagī.

Since the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 it has become a commonplace of criticism to remark that he failed to carry his theories of realism into an artistic practice adequate to all of the central facts in American life. He did not treat what William James called “the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded” and which formed much of the content of the novels of such Howells proteges as Crane, Garland, and Norris. There can hardly be room to challenge this. Howells never truly faced the violent and sordid facets of reality. Mention and object to them as evil he could; leave the abstract and deal with them intimately, personally, objectively, or even imaginatively he could not. I should like here to suggest that the primary source of that inability was simply that life-long psychological difficulties left Howells with a neurotic condition which literally made it impossible for him to know and understand as realities the portions of pain and filth and terror in human living with which a major writer must be at least vicariously intimate. How much the production of the mass of autobiographical material which he produced during the latter decades of his life might represent an attempt to purge himself of the neurotic influences which seem to have haunted his mind throughout the peak years of his fecund artistic career I am not competent to say. But it seems clear that he shrank neurotically from the imaginative absorption of painful reality which truly searching American novels would have necessitated.

Empathy, the involuntary projection of oneself into an object, received its first extended formulation in the Mikrokosmos of Hermann Lotze (1858). To Lotze Einfühlung, or empathy as it has been termed in English, was a phenomenon which accounts for our knowledge of the external world. “The world,” he said, “becomes alive to us through this power to see in forms the joy and sorrow of existence that they hide: there is no shape so coy that our fancy cannot sympathetically enter into it.” In this knowledge our consciousness of our own bodily sensations is a factor: “Unquestionably the vividness of these perceptions is added to by our abiding remembrance of the activity of our own body … every movement which we execute, every attitude in which we repose, has its meaning rendered plain to us by the feeling of exertion or of enjoyment.” Entering thus into our own sensations, by means of them we are also enabled to know the feelings of creatures and objects beyond their immediate range: