We have recently been growing more aware of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. The effects on modes of thought inherent in the successive media of expression—oral speech, analphabetic writing, alphabetic writing, letterpress printing, the electronic media, wired and wireless—have been studied in some detail, and we know something of the effect of (alphabetic) writing on the ability to perform abstract analysis and to exercise individually controlled thinking as against communally controlled thinking.

To the uninitiated the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may arouse amusement or disbelief. Why so long and mouth-filling a name? Before her marriage she was Lady Mary Pierrepont; she owed her title to her father, who was a peer with the successive ranks of Earl, Marquess, and Duke. Her husband was Edward Wortley Montagu, Esquire; and while she remained Lady, he remained untitled. In her own day there were other peers' daughters named Lady Mary, but her intellectual brilliance and her connection with Alexander Pope and his circle gave her the dubious honor of being recognized in print as the Lady Mary.

No wonder students of Middle English literature are concentrating on systems of exegesis, symbolism, spiritual and liturgical exercise. These traditional lores convey ideas, and it is the ideas in medieval poetic works that often seem most valuable. Everywhere abound explicit propositions and exhortations: society is corrupt, man is fate's victim, bend your will to God's. Implicit notions about destiny, justice, and will seem to move behind veils of narrative and description, even to stir within the verbal devices adorning these veils. When routed out of poetic works, such ideas seem fully comprehensible; in fact, they do not differ essentially from those to be found in works of theology, philosophy, and homily, and they seem shaped by the same tools of rhetoric and dialectic. No wonder people are more intrigued by these pearls than by the oysters in which they live.

The reputation of Bartholomew Fair has undergone some curious revolutions over the years. In its own day, and during the Restoration period, it seems to have been one of the most widely admired of Jonson's plays, but later generations came to judge it more harshly, tending to dismiss it as another example of the generally acknowledged decline in Jonson's artistic powers that was traced from the high point he had attained in the three preceding comedies, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, down to the final works that Dryden called his “dotages.” More recently, however, the critical pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, and by now we have seen a number of students of Jonson who are prepared to discuss this play with the same respect accorded to the three “major comedies,” and even a few who claim to find in it “the culmination of the dramatist's comic art.”

In the gently melancholic meditation on solitude which forms the second part of “Le Songe d'un habitant du Mogol” (xi, 4), La Fontaine wonders if he will ever be able to escape the hubbub of life in Paris and retire to some peaceful rural retreat. At least he can anticipate how he might there spend his time, upon a subject well fitted to solitary contemplation:

Quand pourront les neuf Sœurs, loin des cours et des villes
M'occuper tout entier, et m'apprendre des cieux
Les divers mouvements inconnus à nos yeux,
Les noms et les vertus de ces clartés errantes,
Par qui sont nos destins et nos mœurs différentes?

For more than a quarter of a century now Professor Louis I. Bredvold's Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden has remained the virtually unquestioned authority on the subject. Only recently have a few dissenting voices been raised against Bredvold's thesis that Dryden's religious development, particularly as that is revealed in Religio Laici, was tainted with skepticism and fideism, and that his conversion, first to Anglicanism, and later to Catholicism, was motivated by irrational considerations. The few voices I refer to are those of Thomas H. Fujimara, whose article “Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem,” appeared in PMLA in June 1961, and Elias Chiasson, whose essay “Dryden's Apparent Skepticism in Religio Laici” came out in another journal about the same time. Both of these scholars, working independently, demonstrated the orthodoxy of Dryden's Anglicanism with convincing evidence from texts of Anglican writers extending from Hooker to Jeremy Taylor. But can we go along with such a judgment as that which Mr. Fujimara makes in the conclusion of his study—“that Dryden became a Catholic cannot be explained by anything in Religio Laici”? I think not, for reasons which, I trust, will appear in this article.

On 8 December 1824 Robert Southey sent to the editor of the Courier a long letter containing a final, post-mortem installment in his feud with Lord Byron. Reacting to some allusions to himself in Medwin's recently published Conversations of Lord Byron, Southey characteristically joined truculent self-defense with bitter and abusive attack:

Count mosca has received sharply differing interpretations from two distinguished French novelists of the nineteenth century. In 1840, one year after the publication of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, Balzac wrote: “M. Beyle a tant exalté le sublime caractère du premier ministre de Parme, qu'il est douteux que le Prince de Metternich soit aussi grand que Mosca. … Tout ce que Metternich a fait dans sa longue carrière, n'est pas plus extraordinaire que ce que vous voyez faire à Mosca. … L'étonnante et fine supériorité de Mosca n'est jamais en défaut, ni en action, ni en paroles.”

In recent years we have come to accept less and less begrudgingly the idea of Sainte-Beuve as a poet. Yet the discovery of this idea may not have produced all the fruit of which it is capable. We have recognized his poetic originality and influence, but still tend to think of him as above all a failed poet or as a poet, at best, of very minor excellence. One important kind of continuity between his poetry and his prose has been noted, but we are still prone to believe that he resorted to criticism as a second-best pursuit, a pis aller; and such a view, to some extent supported, it must be admitted, by Sainte-Beuve himself in his more self-disparaging moods, tends to mark his entire work with a certain stigma.

Les juifs sont fréquemment présents dans l‘œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny. Il ne semble pas, cependant, que le poète se soit expressément intéressé à eux. Ce serait plutôt à la suite d'influences plus ou moins précises et d'observations personnelles qu'il fut amené à représenter des personnages juifs dans ses œuvres. C'est ce qui explique sans doute le manque de consistance dans son attitude. Au début de sa carrière littéraire, Vigny fait preuve du mépris habituel à leur égard. Plus tard, notamment dans les ébauches de la Deuxième Consultation du Docteur Noir, il les peint de manière plus favorable. Certaines notes de Vigny sur les Juifs font même croire qu'il éprouva pour eux une certaine sympathie. Par ailleurs, certaines remarques éparses dans l‘œuvre montrent que Vigny, étant donné la fécondité de sa pensée religieuse, a réfléchi sur plusieurs points de l'histoire et de la philosophie du judaïsme.

Almost everything would seem to have been said that can be said about sprung rhythm—not that authorities agree. On the contrary, there is every sort of disparity in the accounts of its nature and origin. That Gerard Manley Hopkins invented its name is certain and that he himself first used it in The Wreck of the Deutschland, but agreement ends there. His rhythm has been traced to, and sometimes identified with, the old strong-stress Anglo-Saxon alliterative measure or, alternatively, to the choruses in Samson Agonistes. It has been called rigidly isochronous; it has also been described as free verse, next door to prose, and quite lawless in spite of his insistence that it was written by strict laws. It has been said to be entirely new and entirely old. When pushed to defend it, Hopkins himself found numerous precedents: brief instances or hints in Shakespeare, Milton, and Campbell, in nursery rhymes and weather saws, in Anglo-Saxon verse and its “degraded and doggrel” survival in Piers Plowman (though he did not know the last two, except at second hand and in the briefest of extracts, till some years after he had developed his own system). These predecessors, however, he named merely as precedents; he never called them sources. The only specific statement he made concerning the actual origin of the measure reveals nothing: “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.” He hastened to add, as he did also in discussing the meter with Robert Bridges, that he did not claim it as “altogether new”; he did profess to be the first who had avowedly “used it and made it the principle throughout” a poem, to the best of his knowledge.

The idyllic harmony that suffuses Stifter's Nachsommer has been widely discussed and analyzed by scholars in the field, but less attention has been given to the undercurrent of sadness, which, in the words of Walter Rehm, is “hidden between the lines.” A new dimension to our understanding of Nachsommer—described by one writer as “inexhaustible in its mystery”—can indeed be added by further probing into the disturbances that lie beneath the smooth exterior of the novel.

More than most novelists, Proust uses speech as a means of characterization. To his readers Bloch, whatever else he is, means a sophomoric use of pseudo-Homeric epithets, Mme Verdurin a series of recurring tics, and the Duc de Guermantes a pompous indulgence in genealogical ramblings. Even such a major figure as Odette is recognized by her sprinkling of fashionable Anglicisms; and Françoise, by her linguistic deformations. In some cases—so sensitive was Proust to the human voice—the manner of speaking is the character. We have only to listen to a Brichot, a Norpois, or a Cottard to know his class, his profession, his attitude toward life, even his virtues and vices. As life does, Proust frequently tells us all we need to know about an individual by letting us hear him discourse.

In a letter to Harry de Forest Smith of 3 June 1894, E. A. Robinson says of his poem “The Night Before”:

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.

Because Robert Musil's own training and inclinations were scientific, he was particularly qualified to describe the problems of the modern intellectual. Musil believed that although modern man's reason and logic have been acutely developed, his emotional life has been stunted and his social adjustment has been rendered precarious. Intellectual man finds himself isolated and a victim of introspection. Musil contended that the tension between the intellect and the emotions must be resolved, that solutions must somehow be provided which will lead to a richer and higher level of human existence. In Musil's work the intellectual hero strives to heal the fatal split in his psyche and to achieve a more balanced character and a better integration with other human beings.