On a convenu, par un noble euphémisme, d'appeler la parole versifiée “le langage des dieux.” Mais il n'y a guère que les poètes qui prennent parfois cette expression usée au sérieux. Pour bien ces gens elle reste un simple cliché: l'expérience qu'elle recouvre est absente, nul rapport ne s'établit entre la source invisible du monde et les formes créées de l'apparence. Mais le poète est conscient au plus haut point des relations qui unissent la vie spirituelle au langage chargé de la transposer dans l'univers sensible. Comme l'a chanté Rilke dans les Sonnets à Orphée:

Est-il bien d'ici? Non, des deux
royaumes surgit sa vaste nature.
Plus savamment pliera les ramures des saules
qui des saules apprit à sonder les racines.

When Archibald Henderson once wrote that a fitting sub-title for Bernard Shaw's Candida would be “A Mystery”, he was not thinking so much of the famous but ambiguous “secret in the poet's heart” as he was of the motivation and interpretation of the characters as a whole. For of course the tantalizing “secret” is embedded only in the final stage direction and would therefore not challenge the spectator for solution; but the problem of the meaning of the characters and their relationships forms the backbone of the whole play, whether read or seen. Perhaps the fact that for years critic after critic, reader after reader, spectator after spectator have interpreted Candida, Morell, and Marchbanks according to their own temperaments and predilections may help to explain why the play, like the similarly enigmatic Hamlet of Shaw's self-selected arch-rival, has proved to be one of the most popular in the repertoire. To judge from most of the printed comments on Shaw's play, and particularly on its heroine, it still remains a mystery. At least, there is little agreement as to its interpretation.

In the following article I shall describe the circumstances in which Meredith wrote Evan Harrington as a serial for Once a Week, and I shall-submit some suggestions about the effect of this mode of publication upon the novel.

Everyone has a different explanation for James Joyce. Thornton Wilder says he is a man divided between a violent love and a violent hate, “a love that cannot integrate its hate” and “a hate that cannot integrate its love”, a love and a hate for the land and the people he left but was unable ever to forget. Harry Levin, insofar as he attempts at all to explain, places great emphasis on Joyce's youthful theory of the development of the arts as a progress from the lyric, through the epic, to the dramatic. Barry Bymo agrees with the importance of this literary theory and suggests that Joyce's problem was the incompatibility between his artistic program and his own capabilities. Gorman, offering us his idol, does not explain Joyce at all except in terms of his high integrity, superb intellect, and remarkable fortitude—an explanation based for the most part on Joyce's own declarations to these effects. And Gogarty, antipathetic, seemingly resentful, attributes Joyce's development to the inherent arrogance which led him to reject his religion but never released him from fears of the consequences of this rejection. Gogarty therefore singles out as the crucial trauma from which Joyce never recovered and toward which he never ceased to react, the sermon on Damnation, Hell, and Eternity which he heard at Belvedere College when he was eleven years old.

The present study is a by-product of a much more extensive project in which I have been interested for a number of years, the collection and classification of all the available writings of Manuel Gutierrez Nájera. Because he was a precursor of Modernism, and also because his works have considerable intrinsic value, Nájera is one of the most important authors of Spanish America. It therefore seems obviously desirable that as much as possible of his production should be known. As a matter of fact most of his poetry now seems to have been identified and edited. This is far from true of his prose. Only four or five volumes (disregarding duplications) are available in book form, whereas perhaps forty or fifty equivalent volumes constitute his total prose production. I have approximately that amount of Nájera's prose on microfilm, as a result of a number of months of research in the libraries of Mexico City.

When Byron entered Ravenna for the first time on June 10, 1819, roiling up to the Porta Sisi in his heavy Napoleonic carriage, he was weary from the long journey across the flat Romagna plain and distraught by conflicting emotions concerning his liaison with the young Countess Teresa Guiccioli.1 Only a short while out of a convent and married to a man three times her age, she was highly impressionable and her emotions had been quickly engaged by the handsome and diffident English poet whom she had met at a conversazione in Venice in April. Indeed Byron and the Countess had arranged their affair so well that not only was the sixty-year-old husband cuckolded, but, much more surprising to Byron, he and Teresa had formed a sincere mutual attachment. Now that Count Guiccioli, reputed to be the wealthiest man in the Romagna, had carried his wife back to his palace in Ravenna, Byron, reflecting on this new love that had come so suddenly, found it a little disconcerting. Having had his emotions involved so often where his mind could not give full assent, he could not at first adjust himself to the idea—though he felt it deeply enough—that this affair was different. So that when Teresa wrote that she was ill and urgently requested him to come, he hesitated and delayed, not so much from fear of a stiletto in his back (though he dramatized that possibility in his letters to his friends—-and it was a real one so far as he knew) as from reluctance to subside into a regular cavalier servente. Writing to Hob-house on May 17, 1819, he said:

In discussing the important English dramatic critics during the first half of the nineteenth century (Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, John Forster, and George Henry Lewes), William Archer concluded that “Lewes alone has anything of note to say upon the principles of dramatic composition, as a living art”, that “Lewes was probably the most highly-trained thinker who ever applied himself to the study of theatrical art in England.” He pointed out that Lewes not only had a “special and personal interest in the art of the playwright which his predecessors lacked” but also had “much more attractive matter for discussion” because the “modern drama, the drama as we know it to-day, was just coming into existence, or rather was just making its existence felt in England.” Consequently it was

The Modern Language Association of America as a chartered and incorporated learned society, national in scope and partly international in membership, engaged primarily in scholarly interchange, is necessarily averse to war as being inimical to its primary concerns. The Utopia of the Association requires peace on earth, good will among men. Its membership, however, is made up almost wholly of patriotic American citizens, bound together by a special interest and proficiency in modern languages, and sharing with similar bodies in the techniques of research.

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was born in 1797, when German Classicism was at its height and Romanticism just launched. She died in 1848, in the revolutionary year that marked the end of an era. Her principal literary production falls into the 1830's and 1840's, decades in which traditional values were challenged and often discarded, years of upheaval and reorientation in German politics and religion and philosophy as well as in poetry. She was not connected with any of these innovative movements; in fact, she was shielded from them by bulwarks of “Stand” and religion, by the ingrained conservatism of her race and family, by her sex, and by her lonely and visionary nature. One cannot suppose that she ever read such books as Gutzkow's Watty, die Zweiflerin, or David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, or Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorslellung, or the treatises of the new materialistic science that was threatening to reduce the divine soul of an earlier faith and poetry to a system of physiological reactions. Yet these things were in the air, and she could not wholly escape them, in the sense that no life, however solitary, can remain unaffected by the intellectual climate of its time. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was, without intent or plan on her part, a link in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. The problems of “Weltanschauung” she wrestled with, to victory or defeat, are to a large extent the problems her contemporaries confronted, though her formulations of them were conditioned by the circumstances of her own peculiar, not to say eccentric, existence.

With a few exceptions, reviewers in 1851 found little formal unity in George Borrow's Lavengro, but rather thought it a series of slightly interrelated sketches coming to an abrupt, inconclusive end. As they read a work not yet completed, however, their estimate is understandable, for The Romany Rye, comprising about the last third of the entire story, did not appear till 1857. Later critics, even with the complete Lavengro-Romany Rye before them, have paid little or no attention to its form. Their tendency has been to characterize the work, along with Borrow's other books, as generally “episodic” and “picaresque.” Remarks such as these are typical: “[Borrow's] books are planless, as picaresque books are apt to be”; “Borrow … possessed no idea of construction”; and “Lavengro is no more than a collection of incidents and dialogues.” A recent and distinguished literary history describes Borrow's major works as “episodic, inchoate, and inconsequential” and “strange, untidy, racy.” Edd Winfield Parks is unusual among critics in that he recognizes the “creative” and “conscious artist” in Borrow, yet he says: “Here [in Borrow's works] is no structural art, no objectified form; it is not as an artist that Borrow must be judged.”

Lady Gregory recorded in her journal in 1925 that Yeats, scorning what he believed to be excessive praise of certain nineteenth and twentieth century poets, said, “These critics ought to think more of the writing. They have given up God, they shouldn't give up perfection.” “Well”, Lady Gregory added, “he practises what he preaches; is working over those old poems as if for a competition for eternity.”1 Various critics have noted the results of Yeats's competition for eternity in his repeated and elaborate revisions of his early poems; but it has not been demonstrated that he continued to the end of his life to revise almost all his work, new poems as well as old, for successive printings, nor has any study been made of the nature and purposes of Yeats's revisions of the great poems of his last thirty years.

You though most curious in other things, will hardly be perswaded to touch any thing that smells of the Coffin or of Embalming.“ ”The Haters of Funerals“ to whom John Dunton addressed these words in 16821 would seem to include scholars, for the beginnings of the modern trade of funeral undertaking have never been investigated. This paper attempts to fill in some measure this gap in social history, and as a corollary to explain the novelty, timeliness, justice, and development of Steele's satire on undertakers in The Funeral and The Taller.

Two recent studies have analyzed the manner in which Calderôn utilized proverbs. It is hoped that the following catchword list locating proverbs in his plays will throw additional light on the dramatist's extensive use of such material:

Interesting light is thrown on the apprenticeship of William Wycherley as a dramatist by examination of his earliest play, Love in a Wood, against its Spanish source. For the intrigue involving Ranger, Lydia, Christina, and Vincent, Wycherley used Calderon's Mañanas de abril y mayo. The Spanish play runs as follows:

Returning to Madrid from refuge after killing a rival for the affections of Ana, Juan hides at the house of his friend Pedro, a near neighbor of Ana. Pedro tells Juan of how Ana has grieved in solitude during his absence. But Juan is not sure she had not favored his rival—indeed, it is to make certain of her attitude that he has risked the law and the slain man's relatives in returning.