In the course of his insistence upon the necessity of a continued recognition of the popular ballad as a distinct literary type, Professor Gummere points out the value of a collection of Professor Child's critical remarks on the ballad and an attempt to determine their general drift. Such is the purpose of the present paper. Aside from the article in the Universal Cyclopædia, Professor Child's comments are mere obiter dicta, based upon no underlying principle and forming no part of a set purpose. They are, therefore, not easy to classify; the attempt to reduce them to order can be only partially successful, and any arrangement must appear more or less arbitrary. Yet some arrangement has seemed advisable and they have been roughly grouped under the following headings: (1) Authorship and Transmission; (2) Subject-Matter; (3) Technique; (4) A Comparison of the Ballads of 1857–1859 and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of 1882–1898; (5) A Collection of General Comments upon Specific Ballads; (6) Summary.

In 1796, Richter was living at Hof, in the house with his mother. He sat at his writing-desk in the same room where she was busy with household occupations and composed his humorous, pathetic, and grotesque sentences to the music of the broom, the dish-pan, and the spinning-wheel. Those harmonies were quite unlike the music to which Goethe listened, according to the story in his letters to Frau von Stein as he developed the ‘Iphigenie,’ quite unlike the music under whose inspiration Schiller essayed to rewrite the Fiesko at Oggersheim, of which Streicher tells us in the naïve narrative of Schiller's flight Richter was fully as sensitive to harmony as either Goethe or Schiller, and his improvisations on the piano became afterwards one source of his personal power over refined minds. But there was so great a capacity for higher music within him, that he was sometimes able to forget the discordant noises about him, and many of these higher notes which he struck are so pure and sweet that his critics are apt to overlook the disadvantages of his surroundings. That he himself in some moods keenly felt these limitations is plain enough from his writings. Even the household noises could not always be ignored, and were plainly now and then no inconsiderable disturbance to that serenity of mind necessary for the flight of his imagination. In ‘Siebenkäs,’ which is, as a whole, a pathetic account of his household relations, the fifth chapter containing the recital of Siebenkäs' efforts to adjust the domestic noises to his mental moods gives a clear insight into the difficulties under which Richter wrote the ‘Quintus Fixlein’ and the ‘Siebenkäs.‘

If philosophy is the love of wisdom unconditioned, Shelley was as truly a philosopher as Plato; but if, as the Greeks taught, it is the love also of order, his right to the title may be questioned. There is some justice in the allegation that he was not a systematic thinker. Being an enthusiast rather than a critic, he made little effort to reduce his multiform ideas and impressions to strict order; if a new opinion seemed good in itself he was inclined to acknowledge it without first ascertaining whether or not it was consistent with others previously avowed. With the diffusive imagination of the dreamer he erected vast and indistinct outlines of theory wherein the logical mind seeks in vain for substance and particulars, though they harmonize well enough with the idealist's habit of generalization. Avoiding the word philosophy on account of this lack of system, I prefer to use the word doctrine in refering to the body of Shelley's opinion concerning Love.

The restoration theatrical audience was dominantly skeptical and naturalistic in temper. Yet for over ten years this audience patronized the heroic plays of Dryden and contributed to their popularity. This anomaly has long puzzled scholars; and typically, Allardyce Nicoll remarks: “This heroic tragedy is obviously a thing entirely apart from the comedy of gay licentious manners. With its flaunting honour and its impossibly idealistic love passions it seems indeed so far away both from that comedy and from social life as we have seen it displayed in the theatre that it would appear impossible to find any link between them.” Like most other critics, Nicoll offers an unsatisfactory explanation of this anomaly:

The audiences were no longer noble in temper, and consequently the heroic tragedy, removed a further stage from the actual, may be regarded as the true child of the enervation that had come over England. The age was debilitated: it was distinctly unheroic: and yet it was not so cynical as to throw over entirely the inculcation of heroism. To present, however, heroism in real-life plays would have raised too sharp a distinction between what was and what might have been, and accordingly in the heroic tragedy heroism is cast out of the world altogether and carried to an Eastern or an antique realm of exaggerated emotions, mythical and hopelessly ideal. The heroic play is like a Tale of a Land of No-where. (p. 88)

Eilífs pôrsdrâpa gilt als das schwierigste der mythologischen Skaldengedichte. Weder im Hinblick auf den Gesamtinhalt noch in Bezug auf Einzelfragen der Interpretation ist Einigkeit erzielt worden. Verantwortlich dafur ist weniger unsere mangelnde Kenntnis der Skaldenkunst als die schlechte Ueberlieferung.

In the Revue Politique et Littéraire, M. G. Pailhès uncovers an early model for Fromentin's Dominique in the Edouard of Mme de Duras, published in 1825. His evidence for a relationship between these two novels seems rather conclusive, despite the futile efforts of M. Pierre Blanchon to refute it. His results, however, are not wholly conclusive because in his search for original sources he stops midway. The original source, common to both Edouard and Dominique, is to be found, I believe, in Mme de Krüdener's Valérie, published in 1803. Though Fromentin, undoubtedly, remembered Edouard in writing Dominique, he must have thought of Valérie even more, for his novel is in all respects more like the latter than like the former.

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:

Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.

The British Council conference on the teaching of English Literature overseas was held at King's College, Cambridge, England, 16–18 July 1962. As K. R. Johnstone, Deputy Director-General of the British Council, pointed out, this was the first conference on teaching English Literature overseas, though such teaching has been in progress for over a century. More than seventy-five participants came from twenty-five different countries, and had taught in many more. The discussions of the conference were taped and will be published in a 60,000 word book by the firm of Methuen.

The eighteenth century, which saw the development of the novel into definite form, saw also the beginnings of careful criticism of the novel. The amount and character of this criticism, however, and the extent of a critical attitude among eighteenth-century novel-readers, have received too little attention from students of fiction. Not to speak of the books of the time dealing with the novel and allied forms, which deserve perhaps more attention than they have received,—notably the bibliography, with comments, in Lenglet-Dufresnoy's L'Usage des Romans (1734), and the lectures of LaHarpe, which, though published much later, were delivered before 1800,—there is a mass of interesting material in eighteenth-century periodicals, French, English, and German. There is also a great amount of criticism in prefaces to novels, in memoirs, and in collections of letters, which if systematically examined would perhaps modify current notions regarding our ancestors' views of prose fiction.

Francesco Sansovino (1521-83), prolific translator, publisher, editor, and polygraph, deserves a place in the history of Renaissance culture, not because he can lay any real claim to originality but because he played a significant rôle in the dissemination of Italian literature. Of his many works one of the most popular and most important was without doubt his Concetti politici, a collection of maxims which first appeared in 1578, but which was subsequently republished in modified form in 1583, 1588, 1598, and 1608, together with Guicciardini's Av-vertimenti and Lottini's Avvedimenti civili. More important still, the original text of 1578 was translated into English in 1590 by Robert Hitchcock under the title of Quintessence of Wit, and as such was to make its contribution to the development of the English maxim and the English essay, as Elbert N. S. Thompson pointed out some years ago. In the preface to the 1578 edition, Sansovino states that he drew his 805 maxims from two histories and thirty-four authors, whom he lists by name. Among these authorities are Aristotle, Bembo, Cicero, Comines, Giovio, Guevara, Guicciardini, Livy, Plato, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Thucydides. The list, however, lacks one name, that of Machiavelli, the one writer that Sansovino consulted perhaps more than any other.

These Remarks are written on a hotel balcony overlooking the last of the plains of Lombardy and the beginning of the Alps. The first snowfall of the season covers the distant heights and outlines clearly the great barrier between Italy and the rest of Europe. Just here two thousand years ago was the edge of the ancient classical world. Beyond the Alps were the hordes that threatened that world, that were to conquer much of it, and that in turn were to absorb its culture and carry it to lands then undreamed of. Through all the changes of the millennia these mountains have looked down on this spot. The snows of early autumn with which they are powdered today are no doubt much the same as those surveyed by Hannibal with his elephants, by Caesar on his way to Helvetia and Gaul, by Napoleon, and in these latter days so tragically by Mussolini and Hitler.

In this paper, I am analyzing Strindberg's trilogy To Damascus with regard to two basic elements—situation and character. Through this study, as well as others in kind, I hope that eventually a literary æsthetic may be evolved. The final purpose, of course, is the attainment of æsthetic judgment in literature.

The Problem of Stephen Dedalus is one of the most curious and interesting in modern letters. One aspect of the problem has been brought to our attention recently in a very impressive book by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). Mr. Booth notes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, by its first readers, thought to be an ironic work. It was after the publication of Ulysses, with its presentation of Stephen as the fallen Icarus, that the reassessment of Stephen's character began; and it was the publication of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944 which really accelerated the movement toward a view of the novel as mainly ironic, with Stephen seen as a posturing esthete rather than an actual or even a potential artist. The most extreme version of this ironic view of Stephen has been proposed by Hugh Kenner, in his Dublin's Joyce (1955).

He who would enter upon anything like an adequate explanation of the remarkably complex and contradictory character of Chaucer's Wife of Bath must expect heavenly guidance and receive aid from the stars. Though one may not be quite prepared to accept entirely the pronouncement that she “is one of the most amazing characters … the brain of man has ever conceived,” still she is so vividly feminine and human, so coarse and shameless in her disclosures of the marital relations with five husbands, and yet so imaginative and delicate in her story-telling, that one is fascinated against his will and beset with an irresistible impulse to analyze her dual personality with the view of locating, if possible, definite causes for the coexistence of more incongruent elements than are ordinarily found in living human beings. Some time ago when I proposed casting the horoscope of the Wife of Bath, it was with the supposition that rules of natural astrology might be used exclusively in the interpretation of certain data, concerning planets and their influence, which Chaucer has furnished us; but it is not entirely so. In the full presentation of the Wife's “fortune”—her character, personal appearance, and the significance and location of mysterious “marks” about her body—constant reference must be made to what the mediæval mind believed to be truths found in the “science” of celestial physiognomy and perhaps of geomancy.

Nietzsche began as an admirer of Luther and the German Reformation. The age of Luther ranked as high in his early opinion as the age of Goethe and Beethoven. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on, this favorable attitude toward Luther underwent a strong transformation. In the five years from 1878 to 1883, Nietzsche's second creative period, Luther emerged as a highly questionable figure, even as a most regrettable event in the history of German and European thought and civilization. But all these severe pronouncements on Luther were only a prelude to the scathing denunciations to come in Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings.

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Wordsworth's intellectual and spiritual development terminates with the philosophy expressed in The Excursion. Here he accepts a Christian stoicism, colored strongly by ideas drawn from Kant. He even emphasizes the extreme dualism of Kant's ethics and tends to interpret morality as solely a matter of rational duty, sharply to be distinguished from a life of inclination. Indeed, he has grown very suspicious of human inclination and insists that man must transcend his natural disposition if he is to acquire any genuine dignity.

The Canterbury pilgrims, more fortunate than we, had heard to the end the Squire's Tale, and were busy exchanging with one another looks of approval and satisfaction. Now was the Franklin's opportunity. He determined to be the one to break the significant silence and become the spokesman of the praise of his companions, not only by reason of his very genuine enjoyment of the narrative just concluded, but also because of the chance he thus secured to bring himself into honorable association with the gentles on the pilgrimage.