BYRON'S Cain, to no one's surprise, is a Byronic hero—disaffected, self-pitying, self-hating, suicidal—but he can be distinguished from such Byronically heroic figures as Lara and Manfred because, for one thing, he is not directly presented to us agonizing over his guilty past. Cain is presented in fact with no past except divine history and he protests, again and again, that this belongs not at all to him but to his blundering parents and God. There is no crime, then, no wretchedly sinful experience, for which this hero can be held responsible, and he is thrust upon us, embittered and complaining, without any personal history to account for the difference between himself and his pious community. Ultimately, however, there is the murder of Abel and, to compare Cain with other Byronic heroes, it should be said the murder replaces the sin or crime in the hero's past which Byron ordinarily leaves obscure. More relevant to my present concern is the fact that the murder has the effect of identifying Cain to himself and his community as none other than Cain, the infamous Biblical murderer. “Am I then my brother's keeper?” he asks.1 The addition of “then” to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible; it also reveals the curious way in which Byron has conceived this particular hero—as reliving rather than living the Biblical myth. In effect, Byron's Cain is a dramatic creature who plays Cain until, voilà, he murders his brother and discovers he is Cain.

Soon after the death of Lope de Vega in 1635 Calderón was recognized as the foremost playwright of Spain and of the pleasure-loving court of Philip IV. It was not long before Philip decided to bestow upon his protégé the coveted order of Santiago. Pope Urban VIII signed the pontifical dispensation on April 28, 1637, and from that day on Calderón wore the insignia of his newly acquired honor.1 But the rise of Calderón as a court dramatist had begun several years earlier when some of his plays were being produced in the Salón de las Comedias of the old alcázar.

IN a recently-published volume, Anatole France: critique littéraire,1 Mlle. Annette Antoniu gives a very closely-documented and, in the main, trustworthy, account of the intellectual and critical development of the great novelist. This work, however, confines itself to the consideration of Anatole France's pronouncements in his works of criticism and is, by the very nature of its subject, somewhat diffuse in its treatment. It may, therefore, be of some interest to study France's attitude towards poetry and poets as expressed in his novels and short-stories, in his volumes of essays and in his reminiscences of childhood, as well as in his conversations with some of the numerous “literary reporters” who, during the past decade, have been basking in the glory of the deceased master. Such an examination is of importance in view of the many bitter attacks that have been leveled at France by critics who are not content with attempting to expose what they consider to be the dangers inherent in his skepticism, and have left no stone unturned in the effort to prove that, both as man and as thinker, he was totally devoid of the moral sense. Thus, for example, in his Historie du Parnasse,2 M. Maurice Souriau would have us believe that France dealt treacherously by his erstwhile comrades, the Parnassians, and, more especially, by their principal leader, Leconte de Lisle.

The hitherto unpublished English version of the Trojan war entitled The Sege of Troye exists in the unique Oxford ms., Rawlinson D 82. The Sege of Troye occupies second position in the manuscript, being preceded by a brief prose redaction of Statius’Thebaid and followed by an extract from Gower's Confessio Amantis. The version in question is an anonymous prose text of the fifteenth century, written in the Southern dialect. The story, which is told in simple, almost naive, language, and in a brisk, lively fashion, opens with the Argonautic Expedition and ends with the Destruction of Troy.

The documentary value of the Mercure galant, the review founded in 1672, which La Bruyère considered to be “directement au-dessous de rien,” has not ceased to increase with the passage of time. Interspersed among frivolous poems, conundrums, descriptions of festivals and of styles, one finds announcements of new books, of military campaigns, and (what interests us here particularly) accounts, often filled with picturesque detail, of the foundation and the sessions of literary bodies organized in the provinces in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the French Academy. Some of these still have vigorous existence. In most instances, the Mercure is the chief source of information on these early years, and, strangely enough, has been neglected by the historians of the provincial academies.

Professor Napier, discussing the Franks Casket a quarter of a century ago, concluded with these words:

German lexicographers are practically unanimous in deriving Kartaune, together with its variant Kartauwe, from an Italian word quartana, interpreted to mean either ‘a gun of the fourth magnitude’ or one ‘which shoots a ball of 25 pounds.‘ Kluge, for example, says:

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

This article reexamines the role of the folding fan in Mallarmé's poetics by placing the fan in the context of its history as an art form, its evolving significance in European and East Asian culture, and its practical materiality as a writing medium. The fan is uniquely important in Mallarmé's lifelong quest to challenge the standard written and print media and to transfigure the physical form of the book into a work of art fully implicated in its literary content. The fan is a flexible, hybrid medium that resolves Mallarmé's numerous and contradictory criteria for the ideal book. It is also a metaphor and an instrument of thought. The essay attempts, therefore, to think like and with Mallarmé: taking its cue from the fan, it unfolds the fan's material aspects and tropological incarnations until it reaches the butterfly, Mallarmé's choice symbol of poetic flight and evanescence.

The title of understudies, Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1901 short story collection, situates us in the realm of theater, of performance—the space where actors and their seconds together learn the grammars of verbal and visual representation.1 On the cover of Understudies, cameo portraits linked by garlands mimic the arrangement of actors' head shots on a playbill (fig. 1). But the profiles are those of a horse, a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a squirrel, and a cat. Freeman's book displays on its face the art of representing animals and humans—and animals as humans. And her title articulates a distinctly turn-of-the-century (if still unresolved) question: who are the understudies and who are the leads—animals or humans?

But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
“That portion of the river of my mind
Came from that fountain?“ (The Prelude, II, 203ff).

To what extent, it may profitably be asked, did German literature exert an influence, direct or indirect, upon the life and writings of Wordsworth?

For an admirer of Coleridge's literary criticism it is most unsettling and mortifying to observe that the scholars who have questioned his reputation, though they have been in the minority, are among the most distinguished students of literature in our time. Sometimes, it is true, this distinction has come in Wordsworth studies, which often produce not only the inevitable study of Wordsworth's friendly association with Coleridge but also an unconsciously partisan defence of Wordsworth against the criticism in Biographia Literaria. In other cases one assumes that these doubters of Coleridge's fame have been annoyed by the uncritical and sanctimonious chorus in his praise, and wish to work back toward a more balanced judgment. Yet when Mr. Lucas—to take the most explicit and severe critic for a first instance—ridicules a few selected absurdities of Coleridge without acknowledging his profundities, one does not get the impression of balanced literary criticism but of urbane and deadly satire. Such absurdities as he quotes are numerous enough in Coleridge, no doubt; one might even agree that many of them are not exceptional, but characteristic. But we do not judge Shakespeare by Titus Andronicus or Wordsworth by The Excursion or Keats by Endymion. Even if we consider the whole mind of a great man as the background of his genius, we judge him ultimately only by the genius itself, which can never be more than part of his mind. Surely this is more necessary with Coleridge than with almost any other writer whom one could name, for his ill-health, unhappiness, and slavery to opium, and the instability of his temperament, all clouded his genius so much that it is easier to see the clouds than the light. Students who have collected fragments never intended for publication have given only too ample a field of choice for those who wish to illustrate the dullness or the nonsense of Coleridge's prose, but these students have presumably worked for other students, who wish material for complete historical information. As a finished and sensitive historical student of English and classical literature, Mr. Lucas is surely as fully qualified to select for praise as for blame, though he limits himself to the latter. The illustrations which he so deftly and plausibly presents of “the art of sinking” in criticism might well be matched by similar bits from the poetry, which Mr. Lucas, like Mr. Garrod, praises at the expense of Coleridge's criticism. Yet neither he, nor any one else, has ever offered the poorer poems as a proof that The Ancient Mariner has no excellence.

Last September at an International Curriculum Conference at Oxford University, John Goodlad, Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the prime movers of American education, pronounced the requiem for what he called the “discipline-centered” curriculum movement which began in 1951. Just as Progressive Education and its late-blooming progeny, Life Adjustment Education, dominated American educational thinking from the Thirties to the early Fifties, so “discipline centered” curriculum reform, beginning with establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1951 and the MLA's FL program a year later, seems now to have run its course. Thus Dean Goodlad looks for new commitments and new values to shape our teaching efforts during the generation ahead.

This study is of the position of Thomas Dekker in a literary genre, prison literature, which comprises descriptions in prose works, poems, and plays, of one or more of London's fourteen prisons. The study seeks to establish the canon, chronology, and significance of Dekker's contributions to this literature, and, at the same time, it undertakes to overcome the absence, in literary and social history, of an examination of penal writings published during the reign of James I of England. The genre first flourished in the Jacobean period, and Thomas Dekker was its earliest principal writer. He wrote or collaborated upon about half of the entire output of Jacobean prison works; he composed all of his prison writings, with the possible exception of one, throughout the course of more than twenty years; and he cast the material into the four literary types of which this genre is composed: rogue exposures, dramatic settings, reformatory essays, and “characters.”

One of the most important literary manifestations of that direct interest in the Near East which travellers and travel books created, appears in English prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. The prose fiction thus supplements the Near East poetry of Byron, Moore, Southey, and numerous minor versifiers as well as the travel books themselves, which may be considered a kind of minor literature. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century English readers had shown considerable interest in the Near East, particularly in the oriental tale; yet this interest was almost wholly indirect—the product of French accounts or French translations of the Arabian Nights. It was not until the last quarter of the century that new developments brought “the Orient much nearer to England than ever before … In letters, this modern spirit was first expressed by the increased number of travelers' accounts.”

It is a well known fact that the ground-work of the story of Saint George as told by Richard Johnson in his Seven Champions of Christendom is represented by the Old French, or better the Early English, story of Sir Beves of Hamtoun. The object of this article is to determine the history of the fusion of the two traditions.

When Saint George had become the champion of the English knights during the third crusade, the official sanction being given at Oxford in 1222, it is not difficult to understand why the story of his life should have passed into a new phase of its development. Before the crusades only the legend of his martyrdom was known in Western Europe. There, however, he had always been represented as a warrior, ‘miles egregius,’ and now during these expeditions he became the battle saint, whose timely aid brings victory to the Christian armies.

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.

A solution to the mystery of Pearl must meet certain tests if it is to answer the questions: What is typified by the jewel and the jewel-maiden, and how are they related? What is the symbolic import of the story? Specifically, as J. P. Oakden has indicated, the gem must stand for something which the poet could represent as a pearl and at the same time as a maiden who had died in infancy and had been redeemed by Christ. Further, says Oakden, it must signify something that the poet (or his protagonist speaking in the first person) “lost, mourned, and could recover through the grace of God, strengthened by partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.”