We are accustomed to associate with the names of the great men of all times and in all lines of activity, certain dominant characteristics and traits of personality, which, though usually merely coincident and contributing factors, serve none the less as the tangible facts whereby the mind is enabled to grasp and gauge their power. It is a criterion whose insufficiency becomes evident only in the isolated instances wherein such natural indices of character are made conspicuous chiefly by their absence. There are characters in history upon which the test of time has set its seal of greatness, but which, considered abstractly and apart from their achievements, seem merely negative and colorless. Their work remains as the tangible evidence of their genius, yet any effort to establish the relation of cause and effect between that work and the intrinsic personality of its author is uniformly unsatisfactory in its results.

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.

—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters

“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?

—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)

ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

This paper has for object the study of the type avoir beau+infinitive in Old French and Modern French. While pursuing the research the author was led to the observation of several cognate types which will be treated later. These, however, may be occasionally referred to in the present paper by the following stock phrases: bel le salua, le blé leva bel, molt lor est bel. In all these types bel is used adverbially.

The troubled tone and unsettled mood of Drayton's The Shepheards Sirena at once calls to the reader's mind Drayton's statement that in his pastoral poems he wrote “of most weightie things.” Rarely ever does this statement seem to be applicable to Drayton's pastorals, for though in many of them there is some veiled allusion to contemporaries, it hardly seems to be “weightie,” even from Drayton's point of view. In The Shepheards Sirena, however, there is the atmosphere of a dark conceit; things of weight, at least to Drayton, seem to be dimly shadowed forth. Dorilus, a shepherd well past his younger days, is cast “in sorrowes deepe” by the necessity of deciding between two courses of action in his relations with a fair shepherdess, the “Bright Sirena”:

Hard the Choise I haue to chuse,
To my selfe if friend I be,
I must my Sirena loose,
If not so, shee looseth me.

The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin's first collection of essays, is even more “deformed by assumption” than his autobiography admits. Architecture is defined as poetic for genteel tourists, who forget that the buildings whose beauty they admire required human labor and embody distinctions of class. Indeed, architectural poetry expresses a myth of class harmony: buildings blending into the landscape, landowners welcomed by loving tenants. Yet this vision, though apparently sanctified by nature, is threatened—by industrial landscapes, cities, and less appealing aspects of nature itself. Without poetry, architecture might seem little more than the sort of instinctive shelter building we observe in the lower animals, hence suggestive of biological kinship between human beings and “brutes.” At the heart of Ruskin's architectural dreams is a feared disappearance of all distinctions, biological as well as social—a pre-Darwinian nightmare.

“Le 2 avril 1862 le grand bourdon du romantisme annonçait à toute volée l'importante nouvelle du jour; l'apparition d'une merveille. Les thuriféraires étaient à leur poste, brûlant l'encens sur l'autel du maître. De toutes parts s‘élevaient des exclamations, des adorations accompagnées de génuflexions et d'homélies louangeuses, sympathiques.” C'est ainsi qu'un pamphlétaire violent décrit la publicité tapageuse qui accompagne la publication des deux premiers volumes des Misérables, celui des romans de Victor Hugo le plus important par l‘étendue—dix volumes—par sa signification et par la réaction qu'il provoque dans la presse française, réaction rarement égalée dans l'histoire de la littérature. Cette publicité qui joue un rôle considérable dans le succès commercial de l'ouvrage, qui va avoir de l'influence sur l'attitude des critiques et donnera des armes supplémentaires à ses adversaires, fut utilisée au maximum par Victor Hugo, passé maître en son usage.

So reactionary was Lord Liverpool, whose Cabinet was formed in 1812 and lasted until 1827, that a French critic remarked that had Lord Liverpool been present on the first day of creation he would have cried out, “Mon Dieu, conservons le chaos.” Though this remark was aimed at one man, quite as appropriately it could have been directed at most of the gentlemen of the periodical press between 1798 and 1820; for this period, like many another era in time of national crisis, made literary criticism the handmaiden of politics, religion, and morality. During few periods have the review and literary departments of the magazines been so full of banal religious and political cant as during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The ink might scarcely have been dry on Lyrical Ballads and the Preface, but so disturbed was the national state that everything conspired to bring about a thoroughly uncritical outlook and to make the age a most unpropitious one for launching a new literary system. In this short study the fortunes of Wordsworth and the “new poets” cannot be examined, but some of the forces of reaction with which they had to contend, at least as reflected in the periodicals, can be made clear.

Luigi Capuana has experienced in his literary reputation what the philosopher-father of Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore experienced in his moral reputation: just as the Pirandellian character became “fixed” in the mind of his step-daughter as a highly immoral man because of one unfortunate contretemps, so Capuana has become “fixed” in the minds of most students of Italian literature as a verista because of a few years of ardent enthusiasm for Zola and his materialistic methods. In Italy, verismo (naturalism) appeared first in Sicilian dress in the works of Giovanni Verga and Capuana. This new type of local literature dealing with the peasant classes, and well-named campanilismo, then spread to many other Italian provinces and was developed by a large group of authors. It is true that Capuana was indeed the banditore del verismo, loudly proclaiming the excellence of Zola's theories and the brilliance of their exemplification in Verga's Nedda (1874) and succeeding stories. But what is too often forgotten is that Capuana is of equal importance in other literary movements, and that he himself rebelled at being too narrowly thought of as a verista.

That vast distance from the muscle-bound Samson in the Book of Judges to the tragic figure of Samson Agonistes is to be traversed, as we now know, by means of Biblical commentary and its metamorphosis of a solar myth into a parable of faith. Yet one of the important stepping-stones along the way from Bible to Milton seems not to exist. Samson is emphatic in its references to wisdom, but the Samson of Christian tradition, even when a typological symbol for Christ, was but rarely noted for his strength of mind. Milton's unparalleled concern for wisdom is nevertheless no startling innovation, I think, but rather the inevitable consequence of a second tradition, equally valid and quite as long, which is within the poem. For this tradition the brief formula is “wisdom and fortitude”—sapienlia etfortiludo—a phrase descriptive of the heroic ideal and conventional to relevant background materials of at least three kinds. The first, surveyed some years ago by Ernst Curtius, begins with the heroic poems of Homer and Virgil and continues into the Renaissance. The second, considered more recently by R. E. Kaske, includes the Germanic and Old English literature of heroism, the important example being Beowulf. And the third, upon which I think Milton primarily relied and with which I shall be concerned, is a philosophy of courage, classical in origin but Christian in development. These backgrounds differ among themselves in significant ways. While the loftiest heroes—Odysseus, Aeneas—seem always to have been simultaneously wise and brave, heroic literature sometimes allows these virtues to be separable from one another. The classic illustration is summarized by Macrobius: “Nestor … helped the army quite as much with his prudence as all the youth with their might.” So, in the Song of Roland (l. 1093), “Rollant est proz e Oliver est sages.” Philosophic discussion, however, insists that these virtues cannot be divorced, that an unwise courage cannot exist. “If,” wrote Henry More, an unwise man should “light upon the doing of some brave Action, 'tis not Virtue, but Fortune, that must be applauded for such happy chance.” The interesting result of such a position is that fortitude undergoes a radical change in meaning; it refers no longer to the brute strength of an Ajax nor to the prowess in arms of Achilles but to what Milton calls “heroic magnitude of mind.” The extent of this profound alteration is first perceived in Plato and Aristotle, but for the comprehensive and systematic account, one turns to the Summa theologica of Aquinas.

These words of Nietzsche say much about Gogol. They suggest his keg-like belly, the contradictions and evasions of his letters, his cunning and depth, and above all, those “ gaps and black holes in the texture of his style” which Nobokov describes in his study, in a chapter called, “Apotheosis of a Mask.” But he had other ways to hide his fragile gift—there is a certain dissimulation in the very generes he chose: his greatest comedy ends in “living statues” and he calls his novel a poema.

Despite several assertions to the contrary, Kleist had essentially an unphilosophic mind. He was penetrating and searching, of course, but childlike withal. Consider, for example, his fervent belief in the absolute validity of his rather naïve allegorical interpretations of nature, particularly the image of the vaulted arch which he describes in a letter to Wilhelmine. Or consider again the pedantic and amusing Fragen zu Denkübungen für Wilhelmine von Zenge. They might have been written by a precocious boy, and yet they were actually written in full seriousness by an extremely intelligent man, whose mind, in some respects, remained that of a child, poetic and unsophisticated. It remained absolute and exclusive in its judgments also, pursuing a premise to its last bitter conclusions. What the tension was in this uncompromising personality is generally recognized: in German its two poles are called Gefühl and Verstand. We may call them respectively, feeling and understanding, heart and head, intuitional knowledge and logical deduction, the spontaneous principle and the rational principle. These terms should be understood as simply and naively as Kleist explained the egocentric dilemma in his famous letter to Wilhelmine.

After the introduction of Christianity the use of runic characters diminished considerably in continental Europe. While in the times of King Chilperich and Venantius Fortunatus the runic script still played a rôle in public life, it fell into disuse in subsequent periods in central Europe, a fact which is deplored by Otfried in his introduction to the Gospels: Res mira, tam magnos viros, sapientia latos, sanctitate praeclaros, cuncta haec in alienae linguae gloriam transferre et usum scripturae in propria, lingua non habere. It will, therefore, be of interest to discover an unpublished runic inscription in CLM. 13067, a codex belonging to the eleventh or the twelfth centuries. It must be regarded as quite an unusual occurrence to see here the runic characters transcribing a Latin sentence and taking the place of a Hebrew inscription.

In Romania XXX (1901), p. 388, in his article Villoniana, M. Gaston Paris seeks to illumine some points suggested by M. Auguste Longnon's edition of the works of François Villon. M. Longnon in his note to l. 1783 Grand Testament marks “Aller à la moutarde” as an “expression proverbiale.” Of this summary treatment M. Paris ventures the opinion, “cela ne renseigne pas beaucoup le lecteur. Il était d'usage autrefois, au moment du repas, d'envoyer chercher de la moutarde fraîchement broyée; c'était généralement les enfants qui étaient chargés de cette commission, et il paraît qu'ils allaient d'habitude en bandes, et en chantant des chansons plaisantes sur les événements du jour. De là cette locution si fréquente au xvème et au xvième siècle: ‘Les petits enfants en vont à la moustarde’ pour dire un scandale dont tout le monde parle.”

Hawthorne attempted not only to change his readers' understanding of historical events but also to undermine their complacency about historical understanding. In The Marble Faun, he questions the positivistic assumptions and complacent moralism of nineteenth-century historiography by representing sympathy and estrangement as principles of knowledge. The story of Kenyon and Hilda, Miriam, Donatello, and the model, set amid the ruins of Rome, indicates that both the truths of history and the truths of the human heart are produced in narratives that reflect the affective links between the tellers of tales and the objects described. For Hawthorne history and romance are not morally or epistemologically distinct. Sympathy does not solve the problem of historical knowledge but reposes it in a form more proper to the ambiguities of romance as Hawthorne used the genre than to the certainties of history as traditionally conceived.

Since the appearance of Professor Berdan's edition of Cleveland's poems little has been added to our knowledge concerning the poet's biography. The purpose of this paper is to present certain biographical data which supplement those given by Professor Berdan.

Our knowledge of medieval and Renaissance theory of allegory is largely governed by two traditions, the rhetorical definition inherited from Quintilian and the exegetical method of reading on two or more levels of meaning, a method traceable to Augustine and usually illustrated by Dante's letter to Can Grande Della Scala. The rhetorical view of allegory as inversio and extended metaphor is mostly useful for examining the figure on a narrow scale, normally as part of a larger context. It describes an element of style but not a fictional structure. The exegetical tradition, though widely employed as a technique of reading, was, if one is to judge by Renaissance critical theory, seldom discussed or fully analyzed after Petrarch. When it was, as in Harington's Apology prefaced to his translation of Orlando Furioso, the result could be confusing. Generally critics were equipped with the handy assumption that all literature was susceptible to the figurative readings habitually given to Scripture, and the method was convenient to the allegorical interpretation of myth.

In 1684 William Winstanley summarized the Tudor reputation of Richard III:

But as Honour is always attended on by Envy, so hath this worthy Princes fame been blasted by malicious traducers, who like Shakespear in his Play of him, render him dreadfully black in his actions, a monster of nature, rather then a man of admirable parts; whose slanders having been examined by wise and moderate men, they have onely found malice and ignorance to have been his greatest accusers, persons who can onely lay suspition to his charge; and suspition in Law is no more guilt than imagination.

The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.