L'evangéliste d'Alphonse Daudet est à beaucoup d'égards un bien étrange roman. Publié en 1883, au sommet de la carrière du romancier, entre Numa Roumestan et Sapho, il est loin de figurer au même rang que ces chefs-d'œuvre. Pourtant après un succès de scandale, l'Evangéliste n'a jamais cessé d'être lu, réédité et traduit. De plus, la publication du roman a constitué à l'époque un véritable événement littéraire : Parmi les critiques français qui ont publié sur l'Evangéliste des articles dans les quotidiens et les revues, nous relevons les noms d'Edouard Drumont, Paul Bourde, Henri Houssaye, Gustave Geoffroy, Anatole France, Francisque Sarcey, Jules Lemaître et surtout Ferdinand Brunetière. A l'étranger Henry James écrivit après avoir lu l'Evangéliste une étude très perspicace sur l'ensemble de l'œuvre de Daudet. Il ne s'en tint pas là: en 1886, il devait donner sous le titre de The Bostonians un roman qui reproduit la situation, sinon le sujet, de Y Evangêliste.

The Topic which I am undertaking to discuss—that of the relation between history and literary criticism—is one which today apparently invites the polemic style. I wish, however, to forego that style and at the same time to refrain from the special defence of, or attack upon, any critic or historian or any school of critics or historians. What I have in mind is the delineation of a certain issue which arises between literary criticism and historical scholarship. This issue I look upon as something unavoidably problematic, part of a troublesome opposition which runs through all our experience—between the particular and the universal, between the contingent and what is in any sense necessary, probable, or ideal, between what merely was and what in any way is. We may think Aristotle's statement that poetry is a more serious and a more philosophic thing than history only a rude beginning of theory (unhappily antithetical), but it is a beginning of something which can scarcely be left alone. The problematic relation between history and criticism has always existed. It may have been adjusted during one long epoch of our tradition, the classical, by a certain neglect of the claims of history. The modern advance of historical techniques and consequent sharpening of historical conscience have, however, sufficiently reasserted the problem and sufficiently increased its difficulty.

When the Browning collections were sold in 1913, the sale catalogue listed about 140 letters from Browning and “upwards of one hundred letters” from Mrs. Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, “perhaps the Brownings' most intimate friend in Florence.” According to the copy of the catalogue in the University of Tennessee Library, these letters were sold to Fairfax Murray for 360. The letters from Browning have been accounted for and published, but the greater part of those from Mrs. Browning are now missing. Sir Frederic Kenyon included twenty-five of these in his Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), although he omitted passages from these letters and indicated his omissions with ellipses. Sir Frederic has called my attention to the typescript which he prepared for his edition and later deposited in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 42229–31). The typescript contains the omitted passages and, in addition, nine unpublished letters from Mrs. Browning to Miss Blagden. The nine unpublished letters and two of the omitted passages are here presented.

Browsing from back to front through a Victorian anthology, I paused recently over two old favorites: first Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” and then Clough's “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” It occurred to me that there must be a direct relation between the two poems. Clough's lines, affirmative and challenging, sounded like a response to the melancholy poem by his friend. Examining the texts more closely, I found Clough's argument and imagery to be so relevant to Arnold's that I could hardly think of the parallel as fortuitous. On considering the probable dates of composition, I discovered no evidence against the theory that “Say not” may have been Clough's reply to “Dover Beach.”

It is undeniable that Valéry's works, both prose and poetry, have philosophical and metaphysical implications, albeit without such intentions. Students of Valéry have felt impelled to develop these implications and to describe the poet as everything from an anti-philosopher to a philosopher-in-spite-of-himself.1 It is also undeniable that Valéry, in his comments on philosophy, has damned it with faint praise indeed. He has pleaded ignorance of philosophy, expressed disdain for its objectives and methods, asserted that he has no philosophy worthy of the name, denied the possibility of philosophical poetry in our time (both in general and with respect to his own work), and refused for himself the name or the quality of philosopher.

Melville's Mardi is the account of an ostensible search for a lost, ideal maiden. But from beginning to end its true object seems to be rather an undiscovered, ideal man, such a man as Babbalanja described to King Abrazza: “Cerebrum must not overbalance cerebellum; our brains should be round as globes; and planted on capacious chests, inhaling mighty morning inspirations. We have had vast developments of parts of men; but none of manly wholes. Before a full-developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship.” For such a man Melville's whole literary life, in fact, was a search, which naturally discovered more halves than wholes, more Ababs and Pierres than Jack Chases—more Emersons, Hawthornes, and Goethes than Shakespeares. Without doubt Melville's sympathies between halves lay with the heart, yet he regarded neither as adequate, uncomplicated, or hostile to the other. As the earliest, longest, and most undisguised account of this search for the “full-developed man,” Mardi is the most important single work by Melville for the study of one of his most important themes.

When Herman Melville was twenty years old he started on a trip which was to give him a massive store of detail and imagery for books which he had not yet begun to write. This journey was not one of the sea voyages for which he is so well known; it was an inland trip into the new and exciting trans-Allegheny America, to the very edge of the frontier as it existed in 1840. This early western trip, however, was sandwiched in rather obscurely between two ocean voyages, one to Liverpool in 1839 and the other aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841; very little is really known about it at present. In writing a sketch about his uncle Thomas Melvill (sic) who moved in his latter years to Galena, Illinois, Melville said, “In 1841 [more probably 1840] I visited my now venerable kinsman in his western home.” This allusion, made known only in 1947, constitutes the core of the external evidence of the journey. It is my intention here to use the internal evidence from Melville's work to reconstruct his trip to and from Galena, and to indicate the extensive use of western imagery throughout his writing, imagery which very possibly was suggested from personal observation. It is well known, of course, that Melville made continuous and skillful use of other people's books, and no one can say with certainty whether or not any one of his western allusions was the result of first-hand experience. Yet it is common sense to assume that such a trip occurring at the time that it did in his life and in the life of America must have made a lasting impression on him, and that when he began to write he had little need to borrow what he already owned in abundance.

Sing Me a song of social significance.“ So went the refrain in one of the musical numbers of a revue produced during the 30's, by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. It has been a national theme song ever since. Only an intellectual ostrich refuses to face the social awareness which is demanded of the individual today. High school students are being educated more intensely than ever for citizenship; college graduates are soberly urged in all public addresses to assume their responsibilities as leaders in society. The international situation, so charged with serious trouble, is a constant reminder that no man is an island unto himself. He learns slowly and painfully that he must accept great obligations outside his town, his state, and his nation, or perish. Problems of crime, juvenile delinquency, public health, old age, mental hygiene, and underprivileged families are as old as the human race. During the last twenty years, people have attacked them with such scientific knowledge and training as they possess and with a determination never before manifested. The social sciences, as well as the biological and physical sciences, are daily making practical contributions to society's needs.

In the Cahiers de jeunesse, the unusually frank record of his thoughts kept by Renan shortly after he had left Saint-Sulpice and while he was preparing for advanced degrees at the Sorbonne, we find a curious series of reflections about the problem of style as he painfully experienced it. “Je ne suis pas encore,” he wrote, “à même de bien définir ma pensée. Elle n'a pas l'acumen nécessaire; je la vois se dessiner comme une pointe de poignard sous un voile, une statue sous un voile” (CV, p. 264). “Ah!” he cries, “que je trépigne de ne pouvoir transpirer tout l'acide de ma pensée” (CJ, p. 329); and then we discover surely one of the most startling prayers ever written by this man for whom prayer was later to become a minor literary genre, polished and somewhat affected: “Mon Dieu! que je souffre! exprime donc ma pensée avec le feu et le fiel qui rongent mon âme en la concevant, faute de pouvoir la jeter au dehors!” (CJ, p. 340). These utterances will serve to introduce us into a relatively little known but critically important period of Renan's formative years, when his prayer was somehow to be answered, the period from May 1848 until September 1850, during which he published, in the radically republican magazine known as the Liberté de penser, his first important essays.

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.

When Melville bought an English translation of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique early in 1849, he obviously anticipated—with mock alarm—an “influence.” He wrote Evert Duyck-inck, in whose library he may have come across it earlier: “I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York I intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other.” It was, of course, a moment for influences, the most receptive and most productive period of Melville's life. That year, he saw Mardi and Redburn into print, and made the memorable trip to England with the MS. of White Jacket. A few months later he moved to the Berkshires, where he met Hawthorne and began work on a new book about a whaling voyage. Though we hear no more of Bayle's Dictionary we can feel sure that the program of summer reading was carried out. I shall show how pervasive were its effects on Moby Dick.

It Happens occasionally that, inside or outside of my university, I am asked about possible replacements of emeriti in the humanities and when, as is quite frequently the case, I have to report that I have no suggestion to make, I meet with the surprised reaction: “How is that possible? There must exist among 150 million Americans at least one promising young man who one day may become what his predecessor was!” And often some promising young man on whose record achievements are still to be inscribed is indeed appointed by the faculties, with the result that after a few years his record is still pure and the faculty decides to accept him as a hope of the past. This question: why do we not find more easily today adequate successors to the world-renowned pleiad of American-born humanistic scholars we had in the previous generation, the group of Armstrong, Blondheim, Elliott Ford, Grandgent, Lang, Marden, Nitze, Northup, to mention only the medieval Romance field—this serious question I shall attempt to discuss, well aware that my audience may find answers different from my own, but confident also that I have carefully weighed the pros and cons of my opinions in the fourteen years of my American career.

A great deal has been said about the failure of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I should like here to add a note upon an aspect of The Bridge which, as far as I know, has not been more than mentioned, probably because the finality of the usual criticism of the poem tends to obscure it. Perhaps the shortest way to what I propose is through Ezra Pound's definition of the Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” As symbol providing a logical meaning for the poem, the Bridge has been examined and judgment delivered; but the pattern of language through which Crane hoped to make his symbol effective as intellectual and emotional complex, or, to use his terminology, a “new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate”, has been left almost untouched.

A little studied aspect of the prolific linguistic controversies in eighteenth-century England is the development of synonymy. Not only were books of synonyms late to appear and uncertain as to their function and methods, but synonymy was one of the last departments to be introduced into the English dictionary. This slow development is not surprising, since just discrimination between words of almost identical meaning requires not only an authoritative dictionary and grammar as tools but a relatively settled state of the language and a body of recognized opinion on questions of usage. The evolution of English synonymy not only stems immediately from the French, but the steps leading toward this goal may be paralleled in France from fifty to one hundred years earlier.

MASTERY of the mother tongue is properly regarded in all cultures as a primary object of education, probably the most important. During recent generations in which the opportunity for learning has been viewed increasingly as a right for all and not merely a privilege for the few, reading and writing have helped to define the purpose of the schools of America.

In the winter of 1843–44 Henry Norman Hudson, a Yankee schoolteacher in Alabama, began a series of Shakespearean lectures in Huntsville, Alabama. After repeating the lectures in Mobile and, in the spring, in Cincinnati, he moved on to Boston the following winter, “where the lectures were listened to by large and intelligent audiences, bringing the author both fame and profit.” From Boston he turned to other cities for single lectures or courses of lectures: Emerson pressed “Mr. Hudson's claims on the Curators” of the Concord Lyceum and Hudson lectured to Concord on Macbeth, 1 January 1845; the literati of New York were stirred into one of their innumerable controversies by his relatively unsuccessful course of lectures there in the winter and spring of 1845. Horace Howard Furness in later years remembered “the enthusiasm which attended his early course of lectures in Philadelphia and the unexampled crowds which attended them.” In short, according to his friend A. J. George, “Hudson soon became as popular as Emerson himself in lecture courses in all the great cities.”