Among the changes in the art of fiction between the eighteenth century, when that art began to assume its modern shape, and the present, when it has arrived at what may be the ultimate degree of sophistication, one of the most basic is, doubtless, the increasing degree of particularity in the characterization. The change is perhaps mainly a phenomenon of the novel, which by its conditions is extremely favorable to minute character-studies; nevertheless, the problem of particularity affects all kinds of writing in which character is portrayed at all. The theoretical treatment of the issue in the eighteenth century broadened out beyond the limits of any one art, and a modern treatment may justifiably do the same.

C'est une étrange destinée que celle de la renommée littéraire de Maurice Baring en France. Diplomate, voyageur, journaliste, poète, essayiste et, à ses heures, l'un des interprètes les plus pénétrants de l'âme et de la littérature russes dans les années qui précédèrent la Grande Guerre, c'est surtout par son œuvre tardive de romancier qu'il a conquis les suffrages du public cultivé en France. Des critiques aussi autorisés que Charles du Bos, Edmond Jaloux, Gabriel Marcel et André Maurois ont parlé de ses romans où apparemment rien ne se passe, et où la peinture d'une société mondaine et désœuvrée sert souvent de cadre à de délicates analyses de sentiment qui se résolvent presque toujours en crises religieuses, en des termes qui conviendraient plutôt à Henry James, à Tourgueniev, voire même à Tolstoï. Or, chose singulère, si les personnages de Baring sont presque toujours des Anglais fidèles aux traditions et aux Conventions de leur pays et de leur milieu, si, dans l'expression de leurs sentiments, ils ne se départent jamais de cette réserve, de cette pudeur, qui est un des traits de l'âme anglaise, ils semblent voués par leur destinee (qui n'est souvent que la fantaisie de l'auteur), à se mouvoir dans une ambiance saturée de culture européenne et, à certains égards, française. Les paysages familiers de la vie et de la culture françaises parmi lesquels l'auteur les fait évoluer, les réminiscences littéraires et artistiques qu'il met dans leur bouche, nous rappellent constamment que nous avons affaire à un esprit très averti des choses françaises, à un ami de la France et, osons le dire, à un écrivain dont le talent et même le style, pour s'être profondément trempés aux sources de la clarté et de la sagesse françaises, en ont tiré ce goût pour la limpidité de l'expression, qui n'en recèle pas moins les profondeurs, comme aussi cet indéfinissable partum de latinité qui se dégage de toute son ceuvre et lui donne un charme particulier. Etudier donc le rôle que la culture française a joué dans la formation de son talent, et son attitude envers les choses françaises en général, c'est éclairer un aspect peu connu de son œuvre abondante et variée, et c'est aussi montrer que ce fin lettré, ce voyageur infatigable qui a promené sa curiosité dans tous les pays et toutes les litteratures, ce “divin amateur,” comme l'a appelé un de ses amis, occupe, avec Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey, Hilaire Belloc et G. K. Chesterton, une place à part parmi les hommes de lettres anglais qui ont parlé avec le plus de pénétration et de Sympathie de certains aspects essentiels de la littérature et du génie français.

Pour se défendre des attaques dont il était l'objet, tantôt Baudelaire invoquait le témoignage de critiques comme Barbey d'Aurevilly et assurait que les Fleurs du mal étaient une æuvre morale, tantôt il affirmait qu'il avait fait “un livre d'art pur”: il avait voulu, disait-il, se divertir et exercer son “goût passionné de l'obstacle.” Barbey d'Aurevilly, pourtant, avait su discerner l'originalité de Baudelaire: Par “la langue et le faire,” Baudelaire se rattachait à l’école de Gautier; mais il s'en distinguait à d'autres égards: “par l'inspiration,” précisait Barbey, “il est bien plus profond que son école et il est descendu si avant dans la sensation dont cette école ne sort jamais, qu'il a fini par s'y trouver seul comme un lion d'originalité.” Quant à E. Reynaud, il voyait “un abîme entre la théorie de Gautier de l'Art pour l'Art et celle de Baudelaire.” Mais ce n'est pas Baudelaire seulement qu'on a classé parmi les précurseurs des Parnassiens; on a, en outre, considéré Poe comme un pionnier de l’école de l'art pour l'art. Nous proposons d'analyser les théories du poète américain. Nous chercherons ensuite à rendre compte de l'impression de déjà vu qu'avait Baudelaire au contact de l’æuvre de Poe, et nous serons ainsi à même de mieux comprendre ce que l'on appelle l'influence de ce dernier poète sur Baudelaire.

The large collection of Croker papers in The William L. Clements Library of American History includes six bound volumes of holograph letters written by John Gibson Lockhart to John Wilson Croker, and called the Lockhart-Croker Correspondence. These letters have been known to scholars, and a number of extracts have been published as a means of throwing light on specific persons and problems. They have not, however, been systematically consulted for the information which they provide on the authorship of articles in the Quarterly. Since perhaps their chief value lies in such information, we offer here a list of titles and authors upon which Lockhart's testimony serves as useful and often conclusive evidence.

In the account of his method of poetic (actually, dramatic) production entitled Mein Verfahren beim poetischen Schaffen, Otto Ludwig tells us that what he begins with is a mood, specifically a musical one; this changes to a color; then he sees figures, one or several, in some attitude or gesture singly or in relation to each other, like an engraving on paper of that color, or, more exactly, like sculpture seen in light of that color. He observes parenthetically that he has this color-sensation also when he is deeply moved by a work of literature: thus Goethe gives him a rich golden-yellow or golden-brown, Schiller, a radiant crimson; each of Shakespeare's plays has for him a color of its own, of which each scene is a nuance.

In two earlier papers I have analyzed Whitman and a number of German authors with regard to the form and function of enumerative style. It appeared that the latter tends to express a sense of ontological oneness—and the more so, the wider the range of assorted items. Even the most heterogeneous things can be brought together meaningfully in serial juxtaposition if they are viewed as manifestations, as emanations of a single all-pervading cosmic principle. This was expressed by the term “conjunctive enumeration.”

Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag ist Mörikes letzte Novelle und seine letzte vollgültige Dichtung überhaupt. Die künstlerische Eigenart des reifen Mörike hat sich hier zum Standbild verdichtet, zu seinem in jedem Sinn “vollendetsten” Prosawerk, bezaubernd durch die innere Ausgewogenheit von Heiterkeit und Ernst.

Charles Reade had the romancer's fondness for startling and rare, even unparalleled incidents, and heaped up thousands of such incidents in his thoroughly docomented notebooks. Yet throughout his fiction he utilized the same formulas and situations over and over again. Here is an anomaly which demands analysis and explanation.

James Joyce's debt to the past has been repeatedly and sometimes indiscriminately acknowledged. I wish to show that there is an undefined debt to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen which it is fruitful to recognize and to elucidate. It is a debt far more inclusive than that of a merely literary influence. It is rather that of a fiery and consuming ideal, adopted freely and with love in adolescence, and warmly invading James Joyce's conduct both as man and as artist. Indeed, the first three decades (roughly) of Joyce's life were subtly and pervasively, consciously and unconsciously, modeled along the central lines of Ibsen's own biography.

“Dichten heisst, hinter Worten das Urwort erklingen lassen.”

These words of Gerhardt Hauptmann are quoted by C. G. Jung in his essay “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art,” as illustration of the poet's sense of tapping a deeper level of the psyche than that which is called into play in everyday thought and action. This lower level of psychic activity (Jung explains), that of the collective or racial unconscious, contains the inherited potentiality of mental images that are the psychic counterpart of the instincts. “In itself the collective unconscious cannot be said to exist at all; that is to say, it is nothing but a possibility, that possibility in fact which from primordial time has been handed down to us in the definite form of mnemic images, or expressed in anatomical formations in the very structure of the brain. It does not yield innate ideas, but inborn possibilities of ideas, which also set definite bounds to the most daring phantasy. It provides categories of phantasy-activity, ideas a priori as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except by experience.” This theory is not peculiar to Jung, being in fact rather prevalent in our time. “I began certain studies and experiences,” says Yeats, describing his activities in the year 1887, “that were to convince me that images well up before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.” Jung, however, has given the idea its scientific formulation. For these ideas a priori of the collective unconscious, Jung employs the term “primordial image,” borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt, or “archetype” as used by St. Augustine. The peculiar gift of the poet, or of the artist in any field, is his ability to make contact with the deeper level of the psyche and to present in his work one of these primordial images. The particular image that is chosen will depend on the unconscious need of the poet and of the society for which he writes. “Therein lies the social importance of art; it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, since it brings to birth those forms in which the age is most lacking. Recoiling from the unsatisfying present the yearning of the artist reaches out to that primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the insufficiency and onesidedness of the spirit of the age. The artist seizes this image, and in the work of raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their powers.” In this view the artist is the cultural leader indispensable to any social change. “What was the significance of realism and naturalism to their age? What was the meaning of romanticism, or Hellenism? They were tendencies of art which brought to the surface that unconscious element of which the contemporary mental atmosphere had most need. The artist as educator of his time—much could be said about that today.”

Der Vorgang, wie in Deutschland die neue Richtung in unserer Disziplin und in den anderen Geisteswissenschaften sich gegen den Positivismus durchgesetzt hat, ist zu bekannt, um hier noch einmal erzählt werden zu müssen. Er ist ein Stück der Geschichte des modernen Geisteslebens … ein, wie ich glaube, im Ganzen abgeschlossenes Stück. Ich darf nur daran erinnern, wie es begann. Im Kampf gegen die Vorherrschaft der Naturwissenschaften und ihre Methoden wurde der Begriff der Geisteswissenschaft bestimmter als zuvor herausgebildet. Seit Wilhelm Dilthey versteht man unter Geisteswissenschaften das Ensemble der Disziplinen, welche “die geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit zu ihrem Gegenstand haben,” die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Man kann diese Entwicklung als Teil eines neuen Idealismus begreifen, wie er allgemein um die Jahrhundertwende in den Künsten und Wissenschaften hervortrat. Aber man muß betonen, daß der “Geist,” von dem hier die Rede war, keine metaphysischen Qualitäten besaß und nichts zu tun hatte mit der objektiven Weltvernunft, dem absoluten Geist Hegels. Die Denkweise, die jetzt herrschte, war eine Philosophie des Lebens. Der Begriff des Lebens war hier der oberste, der fundamentale Begriff. Der Geist schafft kein Leben, er gestaltet und reflektiert, versteht es nur. “Aus dem, was gelebt, geschaut wird, stammen alle Auslegungen” (Dilthey, Schriften, viii, 229). Dichtung, lehrte Dilthey, ist ein Organ des Lebensverständnisses … eines Verstehens, das tiefer, der Unergründlichkeit des Lebens angemessener ist als rationales Forschen und Erklären. Den einzelnen Akt, in dem das geschieht, nannte Dilthey “Erlebnis”—ein konzentrierter Akt, der von der “Totalität des Seelenlebens,” vom “ganzen Gemüt” (v, 172) getragen wird. Diltheys Lehre war ein Protest gegen die Versuche einer neuen Aufklärung, das individuelle Leben und seine geistigen Schöpfungen als gesetzmäßigen Ablauf aufzufassen. Das menschliche Individuum erscheint als zu komplex und zu geheimnisvoll in seiner Totalität. Hier handelt es sich nicht um Gleichförmigkeit und regelmäßige Wiederkehr, sondern um konkrete Besonderheit, um ein unerschöpflich Neues. Eben darin hat das Individuum seinen eigentümlichen Wert. “Individuum est ineffabile.” Die Geisteswissenschaften, welche die Werke und Aeußerungen des Menschen zum Gegenstand haben, müssen andere Kategorien der Interpretation anwenden, als die Naturwissenschaften. Seelisch-geistige Zusammenhänge und Einheiten kann man nur verstehen, nicht kausal erklären und analytisch auseinanderlegen. Das gilt auch für die Phaenomene der Kunst. Das Interesse verschiebt sich nun vom psychologischen Prozess der Entstehung auf den weltanschaulichen Gehalt des Werkes und auf seinen Charakter als Ausdruck einer individuellen Erfahrung. Die alte Wahrheit trat wieder hervor, daß ein Dichtwerk kein Kompositum ist. Man sah, daß es sich nicht ableiten ließ aus einzelnen Eindrücken und Erinnerungen, aus der Bekanntschaft mit Büchern und fremden Dichtungen. An die Stelle des kausalen Zusammenhangs setzte Dilthey den Begriff der Struktur. Darunter verstand er die innere “Gliederung eines Ganzen,” eine im Wechsel der Gehalte “permanente Form.” Dieser unter der Wirkung der Erfahrungen “erworbene Zusammenhang” des inneren Lebens gibt der individuellen Seele und ihren künstlerischen Aeußerungen ihre charakteristische Einheit.

While investigating the significance of Sordello in Browning's life, I recently traced certain resemblances between that poet's ideas and experiences as revealed in Sordello and Jung's psycho-therapeutic theories concerning the leaders of a culture. In one section of my article I detailed Jung's comments on the inarticulateness of “prophet poets,” such as Browning early aspired to be. Jung's explanations, however, are not entirely satisfactory, for their premises will not bear submitting to present-day laboratory and operational technique. I should like, therefore, to adopt another line of approach to the problem of Browning's inability to express himself clearly about what we may call metaphysical matters.

The use of curious languages, for the purpose of lending occasional relief from the commonplace idiom of the mother tongue, has been a familiar literary device since the Middle Ages. These linguistic oddities, meeting on the common ground of variety and novelty for the reader, have served diverse purposes: to speak in jargon, cant, or other special language (e.g. préciosité) to a limited group of the initiated, to provide humor, realism, local color or exotic flavor, and to display various kinds and degrees of linguistic virtuosity.

In a number of mediaeval texts we find the word paire in expressions where the precise meaning is uncertain. The editors or translators of these texts have, either through ignorance or through indifference, frequently treated the expression in an off-hand manner. Two previous articles have attempted explanations of the word paire. It is my intention to point out inadequacies in these articles, and to examine further material in support of a more precise conclusion.

The sturdiest of historians show Christina of Sweden to have been one of the most gifted and accomplished women of any age. They show, too, that she has been one of the most harshly dealt with among the great women of history. She was a political genius, ruler of Sweden at its heyday, and the equal of the most influential sovereigns of Europe at the middle of the seventeenth century. Her counsel was paramount in shaping the Peace of Westphalia. She attracted to her court many of the most learned men of the century, corresponded with those who could or would not come to her, and was recognized as a savant in her own right. For her times she was exceptionally enlightened, tolerant, and generous. Yet both outrageous columnies and extravagant panegyrics have run riot to her discredit. Clio has shared in these misprisions, to be sure, but her sister Muses of the lyric, the drama, and the romance have been far guiltier in their sadistic severity.

It is well known that Hone's Table Book of 1827 contains a number of contributions from Charles Lamb, including his Garrick Extracts. It is not so well known, however, that dates assigned by editors to these pieces do not conform to the general policy of dating Lamb's work according to the time of publication. Some of these articles are dated merely by the year; some have been dated by month—incorrectly in two cases; and one or two according to the time of composition. This unsatisfactory solution of a difficulty arises from the fact that the weekly numbers of the Table Book are not dated and are not easily distinguishable from each other. I have not seen any attempt to assign dates to them, but after a careful analysis I have found it possible to do so. As a result, dates previously assigned to Lamb's work in this publication can now be corrected and perfected.

The opinions in regard to certain problems of poetic diction expressed by sixteen English critics during the period extending from the time of the first writings of the Imagists to the start of World War II are the material of this survey. During this period a large number of problems were recognized. This study excludes those that must be solved through a consideration of meter, rime, and sound effects in general, and concentrates on those involving aspects of words that are peculiar to words. A “vertical” examination having been made of the discussions of these problems in the writings of each critic, a “horizontal” summary may now be offered.