The fact that Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were friends and colleagues in the realm of art needs no demonstration. Not only were they closely associated for many years as members of “the Bloomsbury Group,” but the Hogarth Press, established by the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, published some of Fry's essays. After Fry's death in 1934, it was Virginia Woolf who, at the request of Fry's sister, became his biographer. This portrait of the critic was undertaken, says Margery Fry in the “Foreword” addressed to Mrs. Woolf, as a result of “one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you.”

Late in 1945 appeared a book entitled The Shelley Legend. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and was written by Professor Robert M. Smith of Lehigh University in collaboration with Mr. Theodore G. Ehrsam, Miss Martha M. Schlegel, and Mr. Louis A. Waters. These authors began their labors in 1943 with apparently no previous experience in Shelley research and in less than two years claim to have discovered not only the real Shelley but also the fact that the patient biographical and critical labors of a long line of predecessors are in the main wrong. They even “venture the opinion that at least fifty per cent of the present attitude toward Shelley still stems from this cult [Lady Shelley's] of worshippers.” (p. 305) Their predecessors include Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Thomas Medwin, T. J. Hogg, T. L. Peacock, E. J. Trelawny, Lady Jane Shelley, Richard Garnett, D. F. MacCarthy, W. M Rossetti, H. Buxton Forman, J. Cordy Jeaffreson, Edward Dowden, Mrs. Julian Marshall, J. A. Symonds, William Sharpe, A. J. Koszul, Mrs. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Walter Peck, André Maurois, Newman I. White, and a host of lesser contributors, many of whom are of the highest intellectual and scholarly attainments. It is claimed that these intelligent people, who have accumulated, tested, and published the greatest quantity of materials on any modern writer, have lacked discernment sufficient to free themselves from a false interpretation of Shelley presented to the world by Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley and have been unable to base their conclusions on the facts in hand. This claim is made in spite of the fact, evident from the book itself, that no authors in question except Richard Garnett, Dowden, and Mrs. Marshall can in any way be shown as coming within the sphere of Lady Shelley's influence, and in spite of the fact that some were positive rebels against any possible influence of Lady Shelley; namely, Peacock, Trelawny, W. M. Rossetti, and J. Cordy Jeaffreson.

In the forty-two years since its publication, there has grown up around Hudson's Green Mansions and its heroine, the forest-girl Rima, an aura of mystery which has been rather deepened than dispelled by Hudson's editors and biographers. “If there was any secret about Rima,” says one of them, “forty years of friendship never discovered it to me … Sometimes I have thought that there was a Rima, some woodland child whom the boy Hudson had loved, and then again I come back to the thought I now hold to, that she is the embodiment, but no more than that, of all his imaginations concerning the girl-woman who would have satisfied his body and soul.” Later the same writer elaborates on the concept of Rima as Hudson's spiritual mate. “His opposed contrasted figures grew out of the soil, and if Rima seems to come down from heaven, she was yet a being who sprang living from his memory of some white and lovely children, whom he had known on the pampa.” Such words as these merely add mist to mystery, and romancing to romance, an editorial tendency in which less ecstatic commentators than Mr. Roberts will hesitate to concur.

Among the Celtic tongues Cornish occupies a unique place. It is not a wholly dead language like Gaulish and Galatian, and neither is it an actively living one like Welsh and Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic. Even Manx, few as the speakers of it may be, has maintained a living tradition. But Cornish was practically dead when the revival began in 1904, and it was well on its way to becoming a living language again when the second world war broke out. Whether this revival can survive amid the dislocation of total war remains to be seen.

That Jóhann Sigurjónsson's Fjalla-Eyvindur (“Eyvindur of the Mountains”) is “one of the most powerful of modern dramas” and a great classic of modern Icelandic literature is scarcely open to question. In the face of what appears to have been an inadequate performance, an anonymous American critic wrote nearly a quarter of a century ago that the play had “something akin to Synge in the poetry of its naturalism, and something akin to Wagner in the huge scale of its simplified plot.” It has enjoyed popular success on the stage of Iceland, continental Scandinavia, and Germany; it has served as the subject of what one is given to understand was an exceptionally beautiful and impressive Swedish silent film. The play has been relatively neglected in the English-speaking world; whether it is “too stark, relentless and cold to have a popular success in the commercial theater of Broadway” is an interesting matter of speculation. In any event, this heroic pastoral tragedy, cherished classic of Icelanders, ranks high among examples of twentieth-century dramatic art and is a work worthy of much study and reflection.

On trouve plus de rêves dans l'œuvre de
Dostoievsky que dans toute notre littérature classique.
E. M. De Vogüé, Le Roman russe, p. 257.

IL s'en faut, on le sait, que l'Occident ait dû être soudainement initié à des prestiges inconnus quand se révélèrent, plus ou moins indiscrètement, les attraits du subconscient comme un élément des lettres et des arts. Sans doute, avec Descartes, une philosophie d'idées “distinctes,” et bientôt une esthétique “raisonnable” l'emportaient sur ce que Gassendi et même Malebranche concédaient à la fantaisie ou à des résidus d'impressions, et l'Entendement humain de Locke n'admettait pas que l‘âme pût être vraiment active dans le sommeil; “un homme endormi, et pensant sans le savoir, est une autre personne que le même homme à l‘état de veille.”