Publication continues to be one of the more important activities of the scholar-teacher. Through the years, the scholar gains experience as to what is publishable, where it should be placed, and how it can be presented to achieve maximum effect. The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association felt, however, that the advice of some senior scholars and experienced publishers might be of use to younger writers. The following document has passed through several revisions and incorporates the observations of thirty-three able consultants. It is hoped that it will save both scholars and their publishers from unnecessary disappointments.

The retirement to Rye, which occurred in 1897, when James was fifty-four, distinguished between his life of experience and his life from ‘past accumulations’ (as he once called it). His peregrinations over, he set himself, masterwise, to producing a world compact of all he had been able, coherently, to think and feel.“ Despite the fact that The Ambassadors is one of the most original of all James's productions, no novel is so much the result of all his ”past accumulations“ as this one.

Did Henry James or someone else invent the international novel? Did it originate naturally from his vantage point in observing the behavior of his countrymen abroad or did he take an existing type of narrative and from his favorable position bring it to a perfection of which his predecessors were incapable? Although it is widely recognized that “the international theme … was … peculiarly his,” there has been only one answer suggested to these questions, despite their obviously great critical importance. “Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel,” William Dean Howells observed many years ago in his introduction to Daisy Miller. He had previously ascribed the invention of this type of fiction to the Baroness Tautphoeus, “an English woman living in Bavaria,” whose first novel, The Initials, was published in 1850. “The Initials is first of all a love story,” Howells had written in his Heroines of Fiction, “and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modern sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated.”

In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James tells us that “the simplest account” of the origin of this novel is that it “proceeded quite directly … from the habit and interest of walking the streets.” He goes on to tell how his perambulations suggested to him the creation of “some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,” a product of those streets yet capable of profiting from all of the civilization that London afforded—all the “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, … but … with every door of approach shut in his face.” In sum, “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.”

The myth of the cultural “limitations” of Henry James appears to have been the creation of two British journalists, Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, who, while they rendered to James the service of publicity, were not sufficiently read in either James or the classics to generalize as freely as they did on both his riches and his deficiencies. Hueffer led off in 1913 in this fashion:

No literary quarrel in European annals surpasses for rancor the American one which involved the Peabodys, the Channings, the Hawthornes, and Margaret Fuller in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

It is remarkable that the one possibly contemporary statement in regard to the authorship of Piers Plowman has never been adequately examined. That is the note in the Trinity College Dublin MS. D, 4, I (Skeat's No. XLI, C-text), to the effect that the author was William Langland, the son of a gentleman, Stacy de Rokayle, who lived in Shipton-under-Wychwood as a tenant of Lord le Spenser in the County of Oxford:

Tyrwhitt's dating of the A-text of Piers Ploughman in the year 1362 from the allusions in the Second Vision (Passus v, 10–20) to the “pestilences” and “this south-Westerne wynt on a Saterday at even,” which seem to refer to the plague of 1361 and to the terrific gale which swept southern England on January 15, 1362, has long gone unchallenged. Skeat accepted it without question when he edited the poem for the Early English Text Society in 1877. Tyrwhitt found records of the storm in the chronicles of Thorn, Walsingham, and Murimuth; Skeat added Fabyan, Hardyng, John of Bridlington, the Eulogium Historiarum, and others to the list. That these two scholars have established the reference in the early lines of Passus v is clear enough, but it does not follow from this that the poem was written in 1362. It must have been written some time after 1362. I shall endeavor to show in this paper that the Prologue and First Vision (Passus i-iv) were written as late as May, 1376.

The modern reader of The Pearl, like the poet himself, would fain call the little maid of the vision by her own name, for this, he feels, wouId supply the key to the whole poem. The manifold allegory of The Pearl is designed, after all, to enhance its central figure, as are the multiple colors against which her little person is thrown into relief. We propose in this article, not only to call the maiden by her name, but also to suggest a name for the author of this masterly elegy and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

“It is good to love the unknown,” wrote Charles Lamb, and we should perhaps hesitate to try to pierce the obscurity which surrounds the bright genius who, in the Secunda Pastorum, gave to the English drama its first native characters and its first true plot. But such obscurity ill becomes genius, and this man was not only our first dramatist, but also—as I shall try to demonstrate—one of our first literary rebels, holding more definite theories of poetic art than many a free-verse poet of the present day.