Although Nicholas Grimald has been mentioned as a forerunner of English classicism, his use of the closed and balanced decasyllabic couplet has not been emphasized sufficiently to challenge the position commonly assigned to Beaumont, Sandys, Waller, or Jonson. I shall attempt to point out his neoclassic qualities, and to account for them in terms of his sources. In so doing I hope to throw light upon the early history of the heroic couplet, Grimald's position as a pioneer, and the relation of the Latin elegiac distich to English classical verse.

An interest in Whitman's sources is to be expected, partly because of Whitman's secretiveness. The extent of his indebtedness to Emerson continues to be a problem. That this influence was felt before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 is questioned, since Walt himself and his earliest biographers say that he had not read Emerson before publishing the first edition of the Leaves. Thus, in his Notes on Walt Whitman, John Burroughs writes: “Up to the time he published the quarto edition [the 1855 edition] he had never read the Essays or Poems of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following that publication he first became acquainted with the Essays.” Whitman's friend, W. D. O'Connor, says that Walt had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and that any fancied indebtedness to Emerson “is referable to the German source both had drunk from.” Though I believe that Whitman had read more of Emerson before 1855 than he would admit or would allow his friends to admit, I believe, too, that much of the resemblance between the writings of Emerson and Whitman, with reference especially to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, may be due to their “having drunk from the same source,” that source being Carlyle.

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.

In no other part of his writings was Geoffrey Chaucer more original than in the series of sketches of the pilgrims in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Though the Sources and Analogues is able to provide the source or at least an analogue for every complete tale, it gives (no information of any similar series earlier than Chaucer's time. Clearly the plan was the result of “inspiration.” Much has been written, however, on the sources of particular elements in the prologue. It may be worth while to consider in one place these and other features which contributed to the success of Chaucer's design.

Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”

Most students of Victorian literature know that John Henry Newman had a once prominent younger brother named Francis William, the erudite professor of Latin at University College, London, whose translation of Homer provoked an essay in protest by Matthew Arnold. Few, however, seem aware that there was a third Newman brother named Charles Robert, one year younger than John, the story of whose eccentric life has come to be known in any detail only since 1948, thanks to the researches of Maisie Ward and of Sean O'Faolain. Francis Newman passed it over on one page of his strange little “corrective” book on the Cardinal, calling it a wasted life, better left in silence. John Henry did his best to keep hidden from public curiosity what he called the “aimless, profitless, forlorn” life of his brother, even to the point of buying up from a virtual blackmailer a batch of Charles's letters, after his death in 1884, to prevent their coming to popular attention.

Detailed study attendant upon the preparation of a critical edition of the Woman Hater has led me to the conclusion that the play is not an unsuccessful juvenilium in the Jonsonian “humour” school, as it has often been described, but is rather indebted to the evil influence of the outlawed satirist, John Marston, and identifies its author as one of a group of daring young comedists who took for their common subject the crimes and follies of the Court of James I. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to discuss the evidence of this satirical cabal of which Marston was unquestionably the arch-conspirator, but to point out several topical allusions to the King and his court in Marston's Fawn and Beaumont's Woman Hater.

The recent expansion of literary theory and the invocation of politics in this theory contribute and respond to the tensions sustaining literature departments. Though created and nourished by specialization, the profession bases its legitimation on a generalist ideology that opposes or denies the reification on which the profession depends. This justification claims an important political function for literature departments, but theory's structures of self-presentation, as well as the exigencies of a bureaucratized academy, undermine these political ends. In literary theory, a misleading conflation of institutional and national politics is absolutely unavoidable. To maintain the allimportant fiction of the general utility of literary study, one must elide the difference between the politics of the university and those of the republic. Theory is essential to the institutions sustaining literary study and necessarily more and less political than it might claim.

Lazarillo de Tormes cannot be considered simply as a story of the moral degeneration of a potentially good boy who, under the influence of his pitiless masters, becomes a selfish and cynical cuckold, utterly blind to his moral degradation. The episode with the Squire reveals that the mature Lazaro (as he declares it himself) still has deep feelings of pity and charity for the Squire and those like him, just as he did when he was still a boy. Thus, this most important of Christian virtues has not been lost in the adult picaro. The capacity for human compassion and sympathy which is clearly revealed in the style of the autobiography must also be assigned to Lazaro and not merely to the anonymous author. And it is Lazaro, in his own moral judgments, who tends to condemn those who are selfish and without charity but is sympathetic to those who are generous and weak, regardless of their social sins; e.g., Zaide steals for love, the priest and friar for lust and for themselves (“para sus devotas y para ayuda de otro tanto”). Lazaro's final situation contributes to the ironic twist: From an external or social point of view, he is at the bottom of the moral scale, but his capacity for charity elevates him when compared with his selfish and lecherous masters. It is this subtle irony, of which the author was probably conscious, both as an artist and as a satirist, that lends moral ambiguity, as well as artistic complexity, to the main character and to the total conception of the work.

The Old Saxon (or Old High German) Hildebrandslied occupies a unique position among the remains of Germanic antiquity. It is the only specimen of the ancient German national epic preserved in the O.H.G. or the O.S. language. Interesting as this noble poem is, when considered by itself, it gains still more in interest when viewed as an older type of the epic poetry developed into perfection, at a later period, in works like the Nibelungenlied. Its orthography and dialect also offer most interesting problems. These considerations will explain why a renewed detailed examination of the manuscript, orthography, and dialect of the poem were deemed justifiable.

Modern readers are prone to find the tragedy of Brutus in his incorruptible devotion to high principle and fair play. Many members of the Globe audience, however, could see in him not only magnanimity but rich complications of misplaced sincerity and self-deception. For in sixteenth-century views of Roman history the conspiracy against Caesar often exemplified a flouting of unitary sovereignty, that prime point of Tudor policy, and thus was bound to end in the anarchy thought to accompany “democratic” or constitutional checks upon authority. Certain judgments of Elizabethan political writers who refer to Brutus are quite clear upon this point. Although naturally aware of the honor and liberality shown by Brutus, Shakespeare's contemporaries could thus perceive in him a conflict between questionable goals and honorable action, a contradiction lying in his attempt to redeem morally confused ends by moral clarity of means. As with Othello, the Elizabethan tragedy of Brutus is one of confusion, of integrity and plain dealing which not only accompany the protagonist into evil but continue to reassure him in his error.

In dem kleinen Aufsatz “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit des Kunstwerks” vom Jahr 1798 führt Goethe den Nachweis, daß “das Kunstwahre und das Naturwahre völlig verschieden” sind, und daß die Verschiedenheit so weit geht, daß der Künstler keineswegs danach streben dürfe, daß sein Werk sich wie ein “Naturwerk” darstelle und einem solchen zum Verwechseln ähnlich sei. Die Beweisführung geht von der Oper aus, dem Kunstwerk, das nach seinem Wesen von Naturwahrheit denkbar weit entfernt sei, dessen Kunstwahrheit, aber, wenn man die Wirkung als Maßstab nimmt, sich nicht bestreiten lasse. Was aber für die Oper gelte, treffe mutatis mutandis auf alle Künste zu, sie erstrebten keine Wahrheit, keine äußere Gleichheit mit der Wirklichkeit, sondern nur eine auf ihren eignen inneren Gesetzen beruhende Wahrscheinlichkeit. So treffend die Ausführungen sind, so sind sie doch nicht erschöpfend, und man muß in der eingeschlagenen Richtung einen Schritt über Goethe hinaustun. Das Kunstwerk ist nicht nur keine bloße Nachahmung der Natur, sondern wenn es das wäre, wenn es nur einen in der Wirklichkeit vorhandenen Vorgang oder Gegenstand kopierte, so würde es damit aufhören, ein Kunstwerk zu sein. Die Photographie oder die Wachsfigur im Raritätenkabinet sollen der Wirklichkeit so ähnlich als möglich sein, sie werden mit der ausdrücklichen Absicht geschaffen, den Beschauer über ihre Nichtwirklichkeit zu täuschen. Diese Absicht lässt sich jedoch nur bis zu einem gewissen Grad durchführen, die Täuschung wird niemals vollkommen sein, und daraus ergibt sich, daß die Nachbildung mit Notwendigkeit hinter dem Vorbild zurückbleibt und im Vergleich mit ihm als etwas Unvollkommenes erscheint. Bei ihrer Betrachtung drängt sich der Vergleich mit dem Original, mit der Wirklichkeit, auf, und da dieser zu ihren Ungunsten ausfallen muß, so erweckt die Nachahmung in dem Beschauer eine Empfindung der Unzulänglichkeit, also grade das Gegenteil von dem reinen Lustgefühl, das das Kunstwerk hervorrufen soll.

The treatment accorded by grammarians to the passive reflexive construction as applied to personal subjects in Old Spanish is either incomplete or inexplicit. Diez, for example, gives no indication as to the extent of its use in either early or modern Spanish. Cuervo asserts that the passive reflexive is “arraigado” in the language of the early period, but cites examples with only inanimate subjects. We infer from his remarks that with a personal subject this construction came into general use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Meyer-Lübke, its use with personal subjects was extensive only during these centuries. Hanssen is of the opinion that the passive reflexive was of little use in the early period and that with a personal subject its use was limited to the single verb uencerse. The present study will indicate the status of this construction in Old Spanish: the extent of its use as applied to persons insofar as may be demonstrated by an examination of a representative text of that period. As such a text the Primera crónica general has been chosen, because, with its plurality of authorship and great length, it represents an admirable cross-section of Old Spanish prose.

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

Le succès rapide de Julien Green n‘étonne pas: ce jeune Américain, né à Paris le 6 septembre 1900, s'est illustré dans les lettres francaises en publiant, entre 1925 et 1929, une série de romans et de nouvelles, toutes œuvres hallucinantes qui frappent par leur profonde originalité, par leur structure solide et par leur puissance. Il a reçu le prix Paul Flat de l'Académie Française pour son roman Adrienne Mesurat (1927), le prix Bookman pour la version anglaise de ce même roman sous le titre de The Closed Garden et le prix Harper pour The Dark Journey, traduction de l'original Lêviathan (1929). Si ses œuvres postérieures sont moins sensationnelles, elles n'en sont pas moins intéressantes, car elles jettent une lumière plus claire sur la personnalité et la philosophie de l‘écrivain.

Spanish poets of the seventeenth century were very fond of the contrast between the physical limitations of men, especially when prisoners,—“ ces eternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux” (Victor Hugo)—and the freedom of birds that fly at will, or of “ fishes that tipple in the deep.” But nowhere has the comparison been given such artistic form and signal appropriateness as in the mouth of Calderon's hero, Segismundo. This young Titan felt himself fettered by stone walls. They were a real prison to him and he rebelled against his lot. He was not in a mood to admit, had it even occurred to him to do so, the superior advantage of man's mental freedom over the physical freedom of fishes and birds and brutes, or running brooks. But the thought was not original with Calderon, nor, according to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, was it original with any of Calderon's immediate predecessors, but went back to the Greek philosopher, Philo. Lope de Vega was probably the first to transplant the conceit to Spanish soil,—and it bore abundant fruit. In one of his early plays, El Remedio en la desdicha, written before the close of the sixteenth century, occur the following verses:

Rendido estoy á tu nobleza, y veo
Que mi ignorancia fué mi propio engaño;
Aunque si amor á todos da disculpa,
¿ Porqué no la tendrán mi amor y celos ?
Si tú, si tus soldados, si los hombres
Si las aves, los peces, si las fieras,
Si todo sabe amor, si todo teme
Perder su bien, y con sus celos propios
Defiende casa, nido, mar y cueva,
Llora, lamenta, gime, y brama; advierte
Que celos y sospechas me obligaron
Al desatino que á tus pies me rinde.