Most of the critical writing on L'Etranger has been focused on the world view or philosophy that it expresses. This is certainly legitimate, especially since Camus himself sees the novel as an incarnation of “a drama of the intelligence.” As a result, however, some of the formal and imaginative aspects of L'Etranger have been neglected, with the further result that the full meaning of the novel has remained hidden. On the surface, L'Etranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form, and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Etranger. My purpose here is less ambitious. I should like first to take up aspects of the novel that have not yet been studied sufficiently, principal among them (and in this order), the use of time and structure as thematic devices, myth, names, patterns of character and situation, and symbols, and then, in conclusion, to use the knowledge gained as the basis for an explication of the meaning of the novel as a whole. Frequent and fairly lengthy references will be made to others of Camus' books, simply because the novel is incomprehensible except in the context of all his works; it is hoped that what may appear to be digressions will be justified by the light they throw on the novel.

When Shaw was alive the public had little opportunity to come to any conclusions about his attitude toward tragedy—and especially toward Shakespearean tragedy—because the septuagenarian, then octogenarian, then nonagenarian was always willing to publish yet another play, another pamphlet, or another letter reminding his readers that he was inordinately fond of Shakespeare's verbal music, quarreled not with Shakespeare but with Irving, and had included a question mark after the words “Better than Shakespear?” His pronouncements have often embarrassed his admirers, and a number of friendly critics have sought to clarify and make tolerable his opinions by demonstrating that he admired much in Shakespeare, that his fundamental conflict was only with bad Shakespeare or badly adapted Shakespeare.

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

It seems to be the fate of the preliminary drafts of Anatole France's novel to survive in the hands of unidentified persons. Something over half of what was apparently the original manuscript was sold in New York in the 1920's to a person who has preferred to remain anonymous. In 1948 a seventy-two-page fragment of manuscript was sold in Paris to an unidentified purchaser. The latter has now permitted this manuscript

The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.

In the first edition of Leaves of Grass occur these puzzling lines, kept in the third edition, but later eliminated:

In Dickens' novels, characters are cast in detailed and purposeful social situations, and an evaluated social world is created. Yet even those critics who agree roughly that this is so, and agree further on the stature of these novels, disagree markedly as to Dickens' own politics or view of society—disagree in fundamental respects, that is, on what disposition of mind lies behind and shapes these novels. Sometimes the disagreement has in part to do with personal conviction. G. K. Chesterton, a Catholic with mixed politics of his own, bolsters as he can Dickens' orthodoxy. T. A. Jackson, a naive Marxist with insufficient respect for brute fact, attempts to show that Dickens was a Communist in all but name, and “that the really fundamental incompatibility between Dickens and his wife lay in the complete antithesis of their convictions about contemporary society as a whole.”

Any survey of Hawthorne's life makes it apparent that he was not a churchgoing man. On the other hand, a study of Hawthorne's works discloses that he was a religious man in whose outlook the Christian heritage was cardinal. With respect to its traditional theology he was more orthodox than not: With the basic spirit of Christianity, as it informed values and viewpoints, he was thoroughly imbued. With its institutionalized forms, however, he had no direct affiliation after his youth. It is true that his environment was still Christian externally and that he could draw upon the reserves of Christian culture accumulated by centuries of tradition in America and Europe. But the burden of his faith rested heavily upon himself.

At intervals, various unpublished articles written by Thomas De Quincey have been unearthed and published. One group which seems never to have received the attention of scholars consists of four articles in manuscript that were part of the collection presented in 1942 to the National Library of Scotland by William Blackwood and Sons. The articles were docketed together with the inscription “four manuscripts of De Quincey, n.d.” and were thus catalogued under that heading.

In the recurrent derogation of Cooper's Indian characters as unrealistic and idealized, their figurative language has been the chief specific ground of attack. In most cases, it has been the only concrete issue raised. Thus General Lewis Cass—whose condemnation inflicted lasting damage because of his eminence as Indian fighter and Indian agent—delivered his major broadside against Cooper incidentally, in the course of an article of almost fifty pages devoted to consideration of the current status (in 1828) of study of the Indian languages. After quoting from The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie some twenty figurative expressions, he declared: “This is not the manner in which Indians talk, nor is it the manner in which any people talk.” Further consideration of the language which Cooper had put into the mouths of his Indian characters brought Cass to his damning and often quoted conclusion: “His Uncas, and his Pawnee Hardheart … have no living prototype in our forests. They may wear leggins and moccasins, and be wrapped in a blanket or a buffalo skin, but they are civilized men, and not Indians.” Another critic who knew Indians at firsthand, William Josiah Snelling, in reviewing the autobiography of Chief Black Hawk in 1835, found the authenticity of the work “unquestionable” except for the figurative language employed in it—blame for which he proceeded to lay on Cooper. “The only drawback upon our credence is the intermixture of courtly phrases, and the figures of speech, which our novelists are so fond of putting into the mouths of Indians. … The term pale faces, often applied to the whites in this book, was, we think, never in the mouth of any American savage, excepting in the fanciful pages of Mr. Cooper. There are many more phrases and epithets of the like nature, and we only mention them, because we think it time that authors should cease to make Indians talk sentiment.” Even more formidable authority was ranged against the authenticity of Cooper's Indian characters, and on the same grounds, by Francis Parkman's dictum in his survey of Cooper's work shortly after the novelist's death: “his Indian characters … it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn.” The only concrete reason given by Parkman for this condemnation was that “the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome. Such as they are, however, they have been eagerly copied by a legion of the smaller poets and novel writers; so that, jointly with Thomas Campbell, Cooper is responsible For the fathering of those aboriginal heroes, lovers and sages, who have long formed a petty nuisance in our literature.“ Some ninety years later, John T. Flanagan emphasized the attacks of Cass and Snelling on the figurative language of Cooper's Indians, with special reference to The Prairie, adding as his own conclusion: ”Admitting … literary convention … one can yet reject as unnatural the tropes of the Indians.“ James Grossman, who in his James Fenimore Cooper (1949) accepts in general the view that Cooper's Indians are idealized, observes of two major characters in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, the chief Conanchet and the Puritan Heathcote: ”Unfortunately the two derive their speech, if in different degree and with different authenticity, from the same model, the King James Bible“ (pp. 69–70). It remained for a European scholar to report ”the discovery … that the language of Cooper's Indians was modelled … on the style of Ossian.“ He concludes that Cooper's Indians ”are idealized; they are related to Scott's clan chieftains, Byron's pirates, and Ossian's Celtic heroes; all these figures are but phases of the same romantic movement. Cooper saw his Indians in the light of romantic idealism. … Cooper's Indian rhetoric is a poetic creation and not the speech of living men.“

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the adjective romantisch was a vague and fashionable word denoting the qualities of the unusual, exotic, adventurous, incredible and fantastic. In the last few years of the century, Friedrich Schlegel made it one of his favorite critical terms, used it to denote the specific character of postclassical literature, and thus raised it to the position of primary importance which it has occupied in literary criticism ever since. Why Schlegel selected this term to describe the kind of poetry he wished to foster, and what he meant by it, are therefore questions of considerable consequence. The two most prominent attempts at answering these questions, those of Rudolf Haym and of Arthur O. Lovejoy, though incompatible with each other and made as long ago as 1870 and 1916, have not been superseded by any later investigation. In the meantime, important new sources of information about Schlegel have become available, and a re-examination seems to be called for.

Tragedy has generally been considered a greater literary achievement than comedy. Aristotle, with his emphasis on seriousness, purgation, and characters better than actual people, has lent authority to this preference, although he does not clearly award tragedy the higher place. More explicit in their choice of tragedy over comedy are Sidney, Milton, Addison, Johnson, and Arnold. A modern critic, Joseph Wood Krutch, has called tragedy “the greatest and the most difficult of arts”; and a modern philosopher, Bertrand Russell, has called it “of all the arts … the proudest, the most triumphant … ”

All his life William Blake was a poor man, earning his living as a professional engraver, transcribing the genius and feeding the avarice of other men. Those who recognized his own genius were rare and unfashionable; their scarcity made Blake at times a bitter man, but their existence kept him alive. The man who most faithfully and consistently nourished Blake with cash and commendation was Thomas Butts.

A few years ago, when Professor Frederick A. Pottle's exciting edition of Boswell's London Journal was published, many people, stimulated to an unusual reading experience by the intimate glimpses of eighteenth-century life and manners, had their first taste of eighteenth-century English. Other readers refreshed old college memories as they encountered Boswell's “quaint” constructions. Still others—English scholars, subscribers to PMLA —must have been struck once more with the differences between eighteenth-century English and modern English, particularly with the many grammatical constructions which would be unacceptable now even in the most informal language of the educated. No one reading the book could have failed to be interested in Boswell's English.

One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.

In 1613 Quevedo left Spain to join his friend, Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna and at that time Viceroy of Sicily. Two years later Quevedo was chosen by the Sicilian Parliament to present in person the triennial contribution of 300,000 ducats to the King of Spain. During the eight months he spent in Madrid, the satirist gained a wealth of experience in intrigue and practical politics. The purpose of this article is to edit with brief comment letters recently uncovered in Spain which bear on this sojourn in Madrid. These documents clarify the nature of Quevedo's relationship with the Duke of Osuna, facilitate the analysis of his experiences at the Court and reactions to current political practices, and make possible the rectification of various misconceptions. No attempt will be made below to restate what is already known about these years of Quevedo's life.

“Voici,” wrote Corneille in his dedication of L'Illusion comique 1636) to the unidentified M. F. D. R., “un étrange monstre que je vous dédie. Le premier acte n'est qu'un prologue, les trois suivants font une comédie imparfaite, le dernier est une tragédie: et tout cela, cousu ensemble, fait une comédie.” Most critics of the play have not looked beyond the first part of this indulgent characterization by its author: with varying degrees of indulgence on their own part, they have regarded L'Illusion comique primarily as “un étrange monstre.” It has been dismissed as a youthful whim; taxed with superficiality and inconsistency; seen primarily as an étude dramatique; believed interesting only as a document of theatrical life in the period, a backstage curio; viewed as a dramatization of Corneille's relations with the actor Mondory. Whatever the critical point of view (biographical, esthetic, historical or moral), the views of the play have all been partial. Yet many of these views are right, but right only when taken altogether: this early play is an élude dramatique; a document of the stage controversy of the period; a backstage drama; a dramatization of Corneille's relations with actors; a whim. It is, in short, a play about the theater.