In October 1992, the united nations security council requested the secretary-general to appoint an impartial commission to examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as “the worst attack on civilians during the siege” of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it

Many of the remarkable qualities of the Jeu d' Adam have long been recognized and warmly admired: the subtlety of its characterization and motivation, the vivacity and freshness of its dialogue, the skill with which its verse forms have been handled. Yet its author has never been given sufficient credit, it would seem, for the originality of his composition. Here is a play still attached to the church, through its use of the church itself and of church properties, through its incorporaton of liturgical lectiones and responsoria, and through its adaptation and translation of a liturgical Ordo Prophetarum; nevertheless its author has dramatized and visualized for himself, with more spirit and imagination than any of his successors (he had no known predecessors), the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Surely a man capable of such creative and untrammelled writing needed few “sources” and may be presumed, when proof to the contrary is lacking, to have drawn largely upon his own inspiration.

The visitor to Karl Marx's Grave in London's highgate cemetery is confronted by a large polished granite plinth, atop which squats an imposing bronze head and shoulders of Marx. Although the artist Laurence Bradshaw designed the rectangular plinth as a proxy for Marx's body, the effect is still to emphasize the head, the supposed locus of Geist, esprit, intellect. Marx was a headworker, it is true. Even in the depths of poverty, plagued by bodily ailments, he was never obliged to purvey körperliche Arbeit (“body work,” “manual labor”) in the restricted sense—that is, a körperliche Arbeit located in a social split that structurally denies the body worker access to the abstractions of a developed geistige Arbeit (“intellectual labor”).

The history of rime reveals an interesting coincidence. Rime was practically unknown to the ancients. It probably originated in the early mediaeval Latin of the age of Tertullian (155-222) in connection with the choral singing in the Christian churches, and came to prominence in the poetry of troubadours, precisely at the time when the modern European music came into existence. It is well known that the troubadours produced the first learned musicians in Europe. In the thirteenth century Adam de la Halle wrote his celebrated play, “Jeu de Robin et Marion,” which is considered as the first example of pastoral play and comic opera in France, and is—according to Suchier—the oldest musical play in Europe. At the same time it is one of the first dramatic experiments in which rime is extensively used. It was not before the fifteenth century, however, that rime was universally accepted throughout Northern Europe as a powerful device of literary expression. And at the same time, i.e., in the first half of the fifteenth century, John Dunsdale, an Englishman, invented counterpoint, and through his musical compositions acquired an international reputation. Thus our European sense for rime appears to have been trained in the great school of music. The origin of rime coincides with the origin of modern harmony.

Of all the commonplace antitheses of literary history none seems more solidly justified than that which opposes Descartes to Pascal. Critics, depending upon their prejudices, have taken sides with either Pascal or Descartes, with either religion or reason. Pascal, whose total view seems more comprehensive, has received the lion's share of favorable comment. To many, his wider awareness, allowing for reason and more-than-reason, makes Descartes appear insufficient and incomplete. The little religion in Descartes is seen chiefly as an excrescence, or a strategic back-tracking: Descartes, seeing the dangerous implications of his rationalism, attempts the always unhappy marriage of Faith and Reason, one he regards as at best a mariage de convenance. Pascal, on the other hand, with his divorce of Faith and Reason, is on “le véritable chemin.” In short, Descartes pays the lip-service to Religion which Pascal pays to Reason.

The Saga of Walther of Aquitaine, or of Walther and Hildegunde, is preserved in a variety of versions: Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Middle High German, Old Norse, Polish, all but one of which (Waltharius) are brief or fragmentary in their present form. The original texts of these various versons are reproduced in the following pages in chronological order, so as to present the Saga in its transmitted form which may serve as a basis for historical treatment.

One of the minor critical problems with regard to the early quartos and folios of Shakespeare relates to those textual irregularities in which the name of an actor appears in place of that of a character, suddenly transporting the reader from the land of make-believe to the Elizabethan tiring-room, and establishing a direct line of connection between the plays and the companies for which they were written.

The influence of the Orlando Furioso on Spenser's Faery Queen has long been recognized. Warton, in his excellent Observations, devoted a section to it, and others have here and there remarked upon the affinity of the two poems. I cannot find, however, that any writer has yet given the subject more than casual attention. The reasons for this neglect are, of course, not far to seek. Men read and study the Faery Queen, and men read and study the Orlando Furioso, but few care to read and study them side by side, with the obligation of going through the Morgante Maggiore, the Orlando Innamorato, Rinaldo, and the Oerusalemme Liberata, for casual reference and general illustration. The Faery Queen, as it stands, is nearly twice as long as the Odyssey, the Orlando Furioso is longer than the Faery Queen, and the others are of varying, but always substantial bulk—a rather formidable array. Moreover, despite vast differences of spirit and method, these poems deal with the same subject-matter, romantic chivalry; and too steady converse with romantic chivalry is, to say the least, not stimulating. In view of such conditions and of the work already done by Warton, critics may very probably have felt that further labor in this field would hardly be worth while.

The close relationship between the spirit and disease in the work of Thomas Mann is well known. Disease, far from being only a medical phenomenon, appears under certain conditions as a spiritual or, better, spiritualizing force which urges man, and above all the artist of genius, to overcome the limitations of common health and to raise himself to a new level of artistic experience and expression inaccessible to healthy-mediocrity. Mann never ignored the element of danger which is present in this adventurous contact with the ambiguity of life, hidden in disease. Following the romantic tradition, however, he shows such a high esteem for the productive impulse of illness that its perils are overshadowed by the positive value it has in the field of thought and art. In certain cases disease is supposed to serve the development of individual culture and literary genius. It may help to bring about another type of man, as superior to the average as the average man is to the animal, a type who represents a higher embodiment of the humanistic ideal.

The nairator in Chaucer's poetry, a pose which is neither completely separate from nor identical with the poet himself, develops stylistically as he declines intellectually from the dream vision poems to the Canterbury Tales (1369-87). In the early works he is neither naive nor sophisticated, but represents a type we know in legal terms as the “reasonable man” who personifies the social-moral norms of society in an unemotional, unintellectual, and unimaginative fashion. This character “Geffrey” seems dull-witted and absurd only in contrast to the unusual situations or irrational and autocratic individuals he confronts. His “reasonable” perception is on a lower, second, level to their sophisticated first, an ironic structure which foreshadows that of Jane Austen. In the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim “Chaucer” drops to the lowest, or third, level; he is an uncomprehending caricature who “agrees” with the first-level ironist, but who misunderstands his irony. Herry Bailly usually acts the part of the prosaic “reasonable man,” but the poet raises the reader-listener to his own highest (first) level of perception. Thus Chaucer's degradation of his own pose brings about a progressive and significant intensification of his humor.

The problem of ascertaining whether Diderot or Rousseau was responsible for the original inspiration of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts has been a vexing one to biographers and students of both men. Though the famous paradox belongs to Jean-Jacques by reason of his exploitation of it, the question is none the less one of exceeding interest. Rousseau's work, as Lemaître remarks, is but a reflection of his life, the incidents of which “sont à peu près toutes des oeuvres de circonstances. Et la grandeur de conséquence fait qu'il devient émouvant de les voir sortir de si petites causes et si accidentelles.” And it is to the accident of Diderot's intervention that the initial impulse, which was to have such momentous consequences, is frequently attributed. “Il y a tout lieu de croire que c'est lui qui suggère à Rousseau la fameuse réponse à la question posée par l'Académie de Dijon,” affirms the author of a recently published work.

George Gascoigne was more than “the first conscious purist in his art.” With wit and energy he sought to solve a wide range of urgent Elizabethan literary problems. To his credit stand the first English prose comedy, translation of the first tragedy from the Italian, the first mask and regular English satire, the first critical English treatment of prosody.

In 1943 Friedrich Beissner published the first volume of his critical edition of Hölderlin's works. This, together with the appearance of succeeding volumes, has reawakened interest in the problems that the poet's verse raises. Basic articles on text critical methodology and numerous reviews of the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe have taken positions with regard to Wilhelm Hoffmann's claim that Beissner's edition represents “einen gereinigten, endgültigen und vollständigen Hölderlin-Text ..., den es bisher nicht gibt.” In this critical literature, now distributed over a round two decades, three main positions may be distinguished:—

(1) Enthusiastic and largely uncritical approbation has come from writers who have eagerly awaited the appearance of further volumes of the edition. These writers are in basic agreement with Hoffmann's above-cited claim. Emil Staiger describes the edition as “das größte philologische Meisterwerk, das die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft bis zum heutigen Tag zu verzeichnen hat, epochemachend in dem neuartigen Aufbau des kritischen Apparates, ... ” It is, according to Ernst Müller, a document of Beissner's ability to decipher “arg verdorbene, oftmals überschriebene und in scheinbar willkürlich zerstreutem Zustand vorhandene Manuskripte mit dem geschulten Auge des Philologen auf ihren Wort- und Silbenbestand hin. ... ” Manfred Windfuhr classifies Beissner's work as “der erste gelungene Versuch, das Werden der Dichtung Stufe um Stufe fortschreitend aufzuhellen, den Linien der Entstehung anschaulich zu folgen.” Lothar Kempter sees the justification of Beissner's edition as against the editions of Hellingrath and Zinkernagel first of all in the relative completeness of Beissner's contribution: “Jede Auswahl, nicht nur des endgültigen Wortlautes, sondern auch der Vorstufen, bevormundet den Betrachter. Einzig die in jeder Hinsicht vollständige Ausgabe schenkt ihm die Freiheit der eigenen Entscheidung.”

1. In order to place our subject in a proper setting, let us note what moods were distinguished by representative grammarians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The table below reproduces their terminology:

The Marathon race was undoubtedly a happy thought on the part of the promoters of the first Olympic games of modern times—those held at Athens in 1896. A well-known member of the French Academy, M. Michel Bréal, gave the prize, and the Greeks set their hearts on winning it. A private correspondent wrote from Athens just before the race took place:—

This curious product of mediævalism, translated from some Latin treatise by an unknown hand in the latter half of the fifteenth century, carries symbolism to its last stage. It is interesting as showing how the preachers in the abbeys and cathedrals of England found, on occasion, “sermons in stones.” It would seem as if Longfellow must have read this poem; for a part of his Golden Legend, the close of Friar Cuthbert's sermon, is an accurate reproduction of the spirit of this piece.