Although more than thirty years have passed since the publication of Nitze's fundamental study of Chrétien's Erec, Arthurian scholarship has still to make full use of the implications he has given toward a better understanding both of details and of the unifying principle of this first French Arthurian romance. Basing itself, then, upon Nitze's contribution, and drawing upon other more recent studies, the present article proposes as its end the presentation of the many episodes of this romance as concordant elements in a great psychological novel.

At the beginning of the Vita Nuova Dante tells us that he proposes to copy into the little book words which he finds written in the book of his memory under the rubric Incipit Vita Nova; thus he brought together lyrics that he had already written, and connected them by a narrative and analysis in prose. The Vita Nuova belongs, then, to the class of writings made up of alternating prose and verse. As in the case of the Convivio, this method of composition was perfectly natural under the circumstances; Dante doubtless intended to do for his own early poems what had been done for certain Troubadours by the compilers of some of the Provençal anthologies, in which a prose biography is interspersed with specimens of the poet's verse. This has been pointed out by Pio Rajna, who further suggests that the analytical divisioni may have been modeled on certain works of St. Thomas. The prose explanations in the Provençal anthologies are called razos, and Dante uses the word ragione with the same meaning. In at least one respect, however, the Vita Nuova differs in form from the other works of this type; for the poems do not simply follow one another chronologically or according to the exigencies of the narrative, but are arranged on a symmetrical plan. The credit for having made this plain belongs to Professor C. E. Norton, who pointed it out in 1859.

While the Germans have long recognized a Litteraturwissenschaft, we do not often speak in English of a ‘science of literature.’ Do we then lack something which the Germans have, or do they lack something which they think they have? Do we feel that the name is a misnomer? Or is it that we are satisfied to possess the thing without caring how it is called? If this last is so, it were as well perhaps to be a little less indifferent, since names gradually affect modes of thinking. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but a rose by the name of rose tempts people to smell of it, especially blind people. It is a fact of some import for the users of German, that they have the convenient word Wissenschaft, which they can apply freely to the serious and systematic study of any subject under the sun. On the other hand, we are not unaffected, and I think the effect is bad, by the drift of English usage toward a restricted application of the word ‘science.’ The tendency leads people to associate with that word not so much the grand ideals of carefulness and love of truth, as rather the particular methods employed, and the kind of accuracy aimed at, in the study of physics and biology. Many are also led to feel that there are spheres of thought in which science has nothing to say; and so, instead of enlarging their conception of science, they become suspicious of it. The result is that we are far from realizing that universal allegiance to the scientific spirit, which in our day we ought to have. Instead, there is a division of sentiment, many persons, intelligent persons too, feeling that for certain purposes science is a blind guide. As if there could be in the long run any better basis of life than the truth ! And as if there could be any more hopeful way of getting at the truth than to keep trying, with all our might, in the light of all the evidence!

Students of Goldsmith have long recognized that in the framing of Tony Lumpkin, hilarious problem-child of Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, he was in some sort indebted to older English comedy. A resemblance to Humphry Gubbin in Steele's The Tender Husband, acted 1705, seems to have been first noticed by John Forster. Following Forster, George A. Aitken, in his Life of Steele (1889) affirmed that Humphry “certainly furnished Goldsmith with suggestions toward the creation of Tony Lumpkin” and cited the point that both are averse to marrying their cousins. He noticed the resemblance again in his edition of Steele's plays for the Mermaid Series, and it has since been a commonplace in histories of the drama.

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).

Renaissance English casuistry, the branch of moral philosophy that applies general principles to particular cases, supplies a significant context for Milton’s Samson Agonistes. In subject matter, structure, and language, Milton’s tragedy resembles the prose cases of conscience in which casuists showed how to overcome doubt and despair and gain peaceful consciences by resolving difficult moral problems. Such casuistical concepts as the supremacy of the individual conscience, the relevance of circumstances to moral law, and the role of reason in resolving doubt illuminate the conflicting moral judgments that form the dramatic texture of Samson Agonistes. Samson learns how to judge his own actions in particular circumstances, and by doing so, learns to repent of his past sin, overcome his sense of powerlessness, and act with a clear conscience. The drama goes beyond conventional casuistry in its uncompromising assertion of the supremacy of the individual conscience and its unflinching recognition of the tragic limits of human power.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that Shaftesbury derived many, if not the most, of his philosophical ideas from his immediate and more remote predecessors. Nevertheless, the recognition of this fact does not detract from the originality and power of Shaftesbury himself. The ideas gleaned from a wide reading and companionship passed through the medium of his keen and generous mind and emerged a new intellectual compound.

The following edition of the De Ortu Waluuanii is based on an exact transcript of the Cottonian ms. (only with resolution of the usual contractions) which was made for me by Mr. D. T. B. Wood, of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum, during the months of August and September, 1897. I have endeavored to print the Latin text as it appears in this transcript with as little change as possible. It has occasionally been necessary, however, to supply words omitted in the ms., yet obviously required by the sense, and wherever this has been done the inserted words will be found enclosed in brackets. In the case of corrupt or simply misspelt forms I have placed the ms. readings at the bottom of the page and incorporated the emended forms (italicized) into the text. Only in the case of the words sublimis and pugna and their derivatives I have retained the consistent spellings of the ms.— sullimis, pungna, and the like.

Ces lignes de Valéry Larbaud proposent à la critique une tâche considérable, utile assurément, mais des plus délicates. Nulle question en effet n'a soulevé plus de controverses que la notion d'influence en littérature. Or, de tous les noms que cite Larbaud, celui de Baudelaire est l'un des plus fréquemment mentionnés par Proust, qui a également consacré un article à l'auteur des Fleurs du Mal. Il est donc légitime de penser qu'une étude de cette nature pourrait jeter un jour supplémentaire, non seulement sur la personnalité et sur l'œuvre de Proust, mais encore sur celles de Baudelaire lui-même. De nombreuses questions se présentent immédiatement à l'esprit: Proust a-t-il fait à Baudelaire des emprunts directs? A-t-il trouvé chez lui des vues sur le monde et sur l'art semblables à ses propres conceptions? Baudelaire est-il à l'origine de l'esthétique proustienne? L'auteur du Temps retrouvé n'a-t-il au contraire tiré de l'œuvre de son prédécesseur qu'un encouragement à la dépasser et à affirmer son originalité propre? S'est-il borné notamment à juger que certaines audaces de Baudelaire justifiaient les siennes? Sans prétendre apporter une solution à tous ces problèmes, l'on peut examiner les analogies existant entre la vie et le caractère des deux hommes et étudier, d'après les textes, ce qui, dans l'œuvre de Baudelaire, semble avoir plus particulièrement attiré l'attention de Proust. Peut-être alors sera-t-on mieux en mesure de préciser la nature de l'influence du poète sur le romancier.

Smollett's use of life and scenes in the British navy in the early 1740's in his first novel has long been recognized as an original and important contribution to the materials of English fiction. Chapters 24–38 of Roderick Random with their abundant detail, revealing so graphically the brutalities, disease, and official incompetence involved in the conduct of naval affairs in the expedition to Carthagena 1740–41, have not only impressed Smollett's critics but have offered a firm point of departure for the conjectures of his biographers. Yet although these chapters are successful as realistic art, and suggestive in their biographical implications, there always arises the difficult question of how much of this vivid writing is historical fact and how much is fiction. This question must be the concern of critics in determining Smollett's method in the selection of his materials, and it is central to his biography.

Several recent articles have called attention once more to the problems presented by Spenser's Mutabilitie. Two of them, by Ronald B. Levinson and Evelyn May Albright, deal with certain portions of a series of three essays which I published several years ago, and concern Spenser's use of materials drawn from various sources on the general subject of what Mr. Grierson has called metaphysical poetry. Three others, by Miss Albright, H. M. Belden, and by Miss Albright in reply to Mr. Belden, raise questions concerning the dating of the poem and its relation to Harvey's criticism of the first draft of the Faerie Queene. Since with the single exception of the problem of historical allegory, no topic in Spenser criticism is of comparable interest just now, it is important to review the present state of the inquiry and to consider what remains to be done.

IN commenting on Chapman's tragic heroes, Robert Ornstein observes that “Dangerous as it would be to identify Chapman with his Stoic heroes, I cannot but feel that he shared their spiritual isolation and their sense of alienation from an unworthy society.”1 However dangerous (and unfashionable) it may be to look for the author himself in dramatic works, I think a case can be made that Chapman does reveal himself not only in his Stoic heroes but also in many of his poems, plays, and translations, and that he deliberately sought subject matter which best expressed his own outlook and personal feelings. Critics have had a way of not looking into Chapman's works as a whole,2 but to do so is to see a relatively constant pattern, and when the usual pattern does not occur (as sometimes it does not in his comedies and tragedies), even then we have but a variation on it. The good man's confrontation with a corrupt, harsh, hostile, and often destructive world is the image of reality Chapman favors writing about, but a quest for consolations for numerous adversities is not infrequently a concomitant part of that experience. Many characters, fictional and actual, past and present, in the essentials of their experiences, can be read as guises for Chapman's own struggles with the world.

The object of this paper is to show that Lessing's knowledge of Shakespeare and his influence in introducing and popularizing the great English poet in Germany have been generally overestimated. To forestall any preconceived opinions it may be stated that the position advocated has not been suggested by such works as Franz Mehring's Die Lessing-Legende or Paul Albrecht's Lessings Plagiate, in which the sole purpose of the authors seems to be to pluck the laurel wreath from the head of one whom Herder regarded as the greatest critic of Germany and Macaulay as the first of Europe.

Of Della Casa's life (1503-1556), little need here be said. Brought up in Florence and educated at Bologna, at first he showed, though a keen student, more interest in the amusements than in the serious things of life. In his middle twenties he went to Rome, where he continued his study of the classics and developed still further his aptitude for gaiety. A taste for high life and for classic study led inevitably to the church: at the age of thirty-one he definitely embarked on an ecclesiastical career, held various offices and commissions under different popes, and divided his time between Venice, Florence, and Rome. Towards the end of his life he became secretary of state to Paul IV, but was never made a cardinal. He was always interested in letters, was a member of various academies both gay and learned, and wrote much both in Latin and Italian, prose and verse.

L'ange du Méridien“ is the first in the group of six Chartres-poems in Rilke's Neue Gedichte. It thus occupies a place of honor among the poems which make up the Chartres-cycle. Rilke always devoted much thought and care to the technical questions of the order and arrangement of the poems within his printed works. He must have felt that ”L'Ange du Méridien“ deserved to be first for specific reasons. He must have intended to give particular emphasis to it. We may assume that he meant it to serve as a kind of musical signature or prelude for the other poems of the group, to ”set the tone“ for them. A thematic analysis of the Chartres-cycle might show that, in fact, many of the basic motifs which occur in the other poems are introduced in ”L'Ange du Méridien.“

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the early sixteenth century compelled a radical change in its language and literature. reflecting the country's global expansion, Spanish culture moved beyond its medieval belatedness to compete with Renaissance Italian culture, whose superiority was based on the humanist rebirth of ancient values. The cultural rivalry between Spain and Italy is documented in the prefaces that follow, written by the Catalan poet Juan Boscán (1490?–1542) and the Toledan noble Garcilaso de la Vega (1499?–1536). Through these poets' efforts, Spain became the first European nation-state not only to appropriate Italian versification and prose style but also to displace Italy from the political and literary spheres of power (King 240–41). The political and cultural significance of Boscán's and Garcilaso's revisionary poetics makes their prefaces the first literary manifestos of early modern Spain.

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.

In his masterly study of le Sentiment de l'Amour dans I'CEuvre de Pierre Corneille, M. Octave Nadal makes one reservation regarding Polyeucte. After rooting the spiritual adventure of the martyr in the climate of conjugal love where both blood and spirit stir, M. Nadal acknowledges nonetheless a certain ambiguity in the psychology of the hero. He goes so far as to say that in Polyeucte's speeches one could easily find “des formules” which deny the heroism and grandeur of human love at the same time that “l'action même du martyr ne tend jamais qu'à les prouver et à les consacrer.” M. R. Chauviré and M. Raymond Lebègue have made similar observations.