La préface de Paul Valéry au Lucien Leuwen des Œuvres complètes de Stendhal est trop riche pour qu'une première lecture suffise à l'épuiser. Elle en exige au moins trois. La première révèle un Stendhal que les confidences de Henri Brulard nous laissaient à peine soupçonner. A la seconde, on retrouve le Valéry de toujours et son cortège de thèmes favoris. Derrière l'apparence de sérénité et de détachement, on croit déceler un autre ton, âpre, et intense, bien fait pour réveiller une curiosité qui se croyait satisfaite. Une troisième lecture est donc requise si l'on veut poser le problème des rapports entre Stendhal et Valéry. Les réflexions qu'elle nous a suggérées sont réunies dans le présent article.

This paper is in the nature of a caveat entered against one mode of interpretation to which Joyce's work has been subjected. Many literary works in our time have been hitched onto mythopoeic horses, but Ulysses has been rather worse handled than most, in this regard. My comments are directed against the uses to which have been put, by certain critics, mythopoeic references and allusions in Joyce's novel. The problem has not to do with whether Ulysses employs symbols, for it obviously does, but rather with the character of their employment.

With ten volumes of prose fiction behind him, Herman Melville (1819-91) turned to writing poetry at the age of forty. When inability to market his first volume of verse set him to studying poets and poetry it was natural that he include Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Arnold had emerged as an important though not popular young poet in the mid-fifties. Whether or not Melville watched his rise in the British periodicals, which were reviewing his own books, he must have noted it in the pages of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, to which he was a regular contributor and subscriber. By the time Melville passed through England on his way to the Mediterranean late in 1856, Arnold was a figure of some repute. On the way back Melville dropped in at Longmans (27 April 1857), publishers that month of The Confidence-Man; they were Arnold's publishers too and were currently bringing out a third edition of the Poems. Later in the week Melville spent a memorable Sunday at Oxford University. “Most interesting spot I have seen in England,” he wrote in his journal. “Made tour of all colleges. It was here I first confessed with gratitude my mother land, & hailed her with pride… . Amity of art & nature. Accord… . Learning lodged like a faun… . Sacred to beauty & tranquility… . Soul & body equally cared for… . I know nothing more fitted by mild & beautiful rebuke to chastise the (presumptuous) ranting of Yankees… .” Melville's temporary yearning for the peace and tranquility of Oxford life, as he imagined it, where “learning lodged like a faun,” coincided almost exactly with Arnold's moment of consummation. Three days later (5 May) Arnold was elected by convocation to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Melville's words had not been those of an innocent abroad; they sheltered the value judgments of one who anticipated difficult years of wide-open readjustment. Melville's destiny lay elsewhere, but the Oxford incident marks symbolically the dawning community of interests between the later Melville and Arnold. For a moment the American scholar-gipsy looked down on the lights of Oxford, turned, and was gone. Five years later he began to read the Professor's poetry with a sense of coming upon a major contemporary.

To one who would explore the range and variety of fictional technique, the Victorian novel presents an infinite resource. It shows us novelists in the exciting awareness of a new literary genre shaping under their hands, aware of a vast new audience to whom they could appeal. They write often uninhibited by conscious theories of technique; they write with gusto and with what Edith Wharton once called the true mark of vocation in any art—abundance.

Notwithstanding the existence of innumerable and scattered bits of information and comment on the reception of nineteenth-century French realism in Germany, the general history of the subject has been curiously neglected. Only one comprehensive study, that of Flaubert's fortunes in Germany, has been published; German criticism of Stendhal prior to 1918 has been examined in an unpublished dissertation; the reputation of Zola has not been traced beyond 1893. Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Huysmans have virtually been ignored. Even the longer studies are almost exclusively concerned with the vicissitudes of one single author; few or no comparisons are drawn with German echoes of other French realists, and therefore no conclusions of wider significance could be secured, no total picture emerges.

For critics in the Age of Pope the classical epic was the only genuine epic. It was regarded as a principal, if not always the supreme, form of literature; as an unsurpassable vehicle of moral instruction, of ageless wisdom lightly cloaked by an exterior of violence and adventure, of sentiments “whose truth convinced at sight We find.” Stressing the permanently valuable as they did, these critics spoke of Homer and Virgil as the greatest of geniuses in poetry but rarely treated them as human beings who had actually lived in specific times and places: both were visualized as “conscious” craftsmen skilled in adapting plots to enforce basic “lessons” and equally skilled in blending into ideal harmony such elements of the epic as action and episode, description and dialogue, the supernatural and the human. To be sure, historical backgrounds were not entirely ignored: Pope wrote at considerable length of Homer's “religion, country, genius of his age”; and men of wit like Swift and Dennis compared the excellences of ancient and of modern literature in general. With its emphasis upon matters of form and universality, an essentially Aristotelian approach was, nevertheless, the dominant approach of Augustan England.

Dans la nuit du 14 au 15 juillet 1844, vers la fin de sa 72e année, mourait à Paris Claude-Charles Fauriel, membre de l'Institut. Cet événement est rappelé dans un post-scriptum de 26 lignes (en petit texte) ajouté à la “Chronique de la quinzaine” de la Revue des deux mondes, en date du 31 juillet et signé V. de Mars: “La perte si regrettable et subite de l'auteur du recueil des Chants Populaires de la Grèce a fait une impression profonde auprès des hommes éminens dont M. Fauriel avait été l'ami et sur lesquels son esprit … avait exercé une influence d'autant plus digne de remarque, que le public n'avait guère été à même de l'apprécier.” L'auteur y loue “l‘écrivain à qui Cabanis adressait ses fameuses lettres des Causes premières, l'ami dont Manzoni écoutait l'inspiration et à qui il se faisait honneur de dédier sa première pièce, l'homme que Mme de Staël consultait sur la littérature allemande, qui donnait à M. Cousin le goût de la philosophie ancienne, à M. Raynouard celui des troubadours, à M. Augustin Thierry celui des races du moyen âge, à M. Ampère celui des littératures comparées … ” Si élogieuses que puissent paraître ces observations, elles ne rendent pas complètement compte du rôle de Fauriel dans l'histoire littéraire de son temps. Elles ne disent rien, par exemple, de son rôle d'initiateur de la critique dantesque en France, tel que l'a montré Frédéric Ozanam dans un article du Correspondant en date du 10 mai 1845 et intitulé “M. Fauriel et son enseignement.” Ce n'est qu'après la publication, due aux soins de son amie et exécutrice littéraire Mary Clarke Mohl, des deux volumes sur Dante et les originesde la poésie italienne (Paris: Durand, 1854), qu'on put pleinement apprécier ce rôle. Au cours de cette même année 1854, à l'occasion d'une traduction de l‘Enfer par le président Mesnard, Sainte-Beuve parle de la “fortune” en France de Dante, qui trouvait la faveur après de longs siècles d'oubli. “Il est des révolutions dans le goût et dans les manières de voir qui ne peuvent réussir qu'en s'appelant de leur nom et en se dessinant hardiment … Fauriel était destiné à opérer ce changement profond dans le goût, je ne dirai pas du public, mais de tous les littérateurs instruits et de la portion la plus éclairée de la jeunesse française.”

A fruitful but unfrequented approach to the Lyrical Ballads is through the poetry of the magazines. The volume unquestionably belongs to 1798, and seen in relation to the popular verse of that day, its contemporaneous features are very striking. We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads. Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a “complete change” as some writers would have us believe. Even their eccentricity has been exaggerated. Actually, there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked. It is by way of the general taste for poetry in the 1790's that this essay will approach the poems, and it will attempt to show that they not only conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves.

Daniel defoe's True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal must be restudied in the light of a somewhat longer and more detailed account which has escaped attention from students of literature. This neglected version adds considerable information concerning the apparition; when compared with Defoe's less complete report this account makes feasible an analysis of Defoe's treatment of the affair; and it gives so much information concerning the dramatis personae that it is now possible to identify almost all of them.

Of all the commonplace antitheses of literary history none seems more solidly justified than that which opposes Descartes to Pascal. Critics, depending upon their prejudices, have taken sides with either Pascal or Descartes, with either religion or reason. Pascal, whose total view seems more comprehensive, has received the lion's share of favorable comment. To many, his wider awareness, allowing for reason and more-than-reason, makes Descartes appear insufficient and incomplete. The little religion in Descartes is seen chiefly as an excrescence, or a strategic back-tracking: Descartes, seeing the dangerous implications of his rationalism, attempts the always unhappy marriage of Faith and Reason, one he regards as at best a mariage de convenance. Pascal, on the other hand, with his divorce of Faith and Reason, is on “le véritable chemin.” In short, Descartes pays the lip-service to Religion which Pascal pays to Reason.

Der aufstieg zum hohen Stil in deutscher Sprache war die Aufgabe, vor die das 17. Jahrhundert sich gestellt sah. Opitz war der erste, der einen klaren Begriff davon besass. Er trat auf als der grosse Ordner, und in dieser Hinsicht vielleicht kann man ihm vorklassischen Rang zugestehen. Wo vor ihm Tasten und Ungefähr herrschte, schuf er klare Regeln. Mit dem ihm eigenen Sinn für das Richtige und Durchführbare beschränkte er sich auf Weniges, auf das was sauber unterschied und trennte. Er gestaltete ein Sprachbild, dem der Naturlaut fehlte, aber dem verständiger Ausdruck möglich war. Seine Aufgabe war der der Plejade in Frankreich ähnlich, aber insofern verschieden, als er strenger sich gegen die Dialekte absondern musste. Alle Lieblichkeit, Innigkeit und Süsse des Volkslieds schwand dahin, die neuen Formen haben etwas Ausgesägtes, aber die Zacken passen ineinander, und die Geschichte hat Opitz bestätigt: nach ihm entstand eine der höchsten, reichsten und wendigsten Dichtersprachen.

The english history play belongs distinctly to the sixteenth century. Although it has its roots deep in the medieval drama, it reached its full development only in the last decades of the reign of Elizabeth, and when John Ford wrote his Perkin Warbeck in 1634, it was already with the awareness that he was reviving a dramatic type which had been dead for some decades. It is significant that later attempts to revive the history play have always been with an eye towards the Elizabethan era. Nicholas Rowe turned to his Jane Shore fresh from his edition of Shakespeare and full of the inspiration of Shakespeare's histories. In our own time Maxwell Anderson, in such plays as Elizabeth the Queen and Anne of the Thousand Days, has been clearly anachronistic in his attempts to recreate Elizabethan verse drama, and it is significant that he has chosen his subjects from the very age he has sought to emulate.

Major manuscript anthologies of Middle English secular lyrics are rare; apart from the very early Harley MS. 2253 and the Charles d'Orleans translations, there are not more than three large collections: the early-sixteenth-century Bodleian MS. Rawlinson C. 813 (S. C. 12653), the Newton holograph, and the present manuscript, Ff. 1. 6 of the Cambridge University Library, which contains many well-known longer secular poems as well as a large group of short lyric poems.

Manuscript Arundel xxii in the College of Arms, London, contains two Middle English texts, The Seege or Batayle of Troye (fols. 1r-8r col. 2) and what has been described as a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (fols. 8r col. 2-80v col. 2). This text, which I call “History of the Kings of Britain” (HKofB), is in reality a translation of HRB from the Description of Britain to the wrestling match between Corineus and Gogmagog, and of Wace's Brut from that point on. Although it has been known since the late sixteenth century, it seems never to have been examined completely and in detail.

Three leaves of the Skeireins (III, IV, VIII) are in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where they have been incorporated into Cod. 5750. Like the Ambrosian fragments of the Skeireins document, they have been badly damaged in the course of the last fourteen centuries, all extant leaves having been torn from the codex binding, erased with pumice, written over with Latin, and stained with tincture of nut-gall. The remaining edges of some inner margins are badly tattered, and the Gothic text is frequently obscured by heavy smudges as well as by the superscribed Latin. On the whole, however, the leaves have suffered more from bleaching than from any other single factor. The effects of bleaching are most noticeable along page margins, where a steady penetration of light has nearly obliterated some parts of the text; the torn, extremely narrow inner margins have been especially vulnerable. Some marginal additions are no longer visible under ordinary lighting, and although interlinear corrections have been less subject to bleaching, they are often hidden by smudges or by superscribed Latin characters. Outlines of letters showing through the parchment, holes, blots, and flaking along inner margins also offer some difficulty but are generally less troublesome than bleaching and smudging. In the prefecture of Msgr. Achille Ratti (later Pius XI) the Vatican leaves were coated with gelatin in order to prevent their further deterioration, but the marks of age and prior damage are of course ineradicable.