Le formalisme platonicien a survécu tant bien que mal jusqu'au XIXe siècle. L'échafaudage des Idées, dominé par le bouquet flétri du Beau, du Bien et du Vrai, s'écroula alors sous les coups des philosophes qui l'avaient miné depuis deux siècles. La cangue du platonisme cesse de peser sur les épaules du spiritualisme occidental. Du relativisme à l'existentialisme, en passant par Bergson, la tentation d'un absolu et d'un éternel stériles s'efface et le temps n'apparaît plus, selon le mot de Bergson, comme la petite monnaie de l'éternité. Le temps n'est plus la faiblesse de l'homme par rapport à Dieu. Dieu étant mort, le temps représente la dignité de l'homme par rapport aux choses. L'existentialisme chrétien lui-même considère Dieu moins comme éternel que comme présent.

During the period in which Theodore Dreiser wrote his first five novels, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius,” the novelist indicated a particularly strong interest in those American painters who interpreted the city scene. And it was the so-called New York Realists—Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—who made the greatest appeal to him from approximately 1899 to 1915. Several reasons may be suggested for Dreiser's sympathy for this particular group of painters. First, the newspaper and magazine careers of the artists, with the exception of Henri, closely paralleled Dreiser's own career; and both Dreiser and the graphic artists eventually utilized this common background for their more ambitious work as novelist and as painter. Second, with Henri leading the attack, the group of painters emerged as the most aggressive force in the artistic revolt against the domination of the tradition-bound National Academy when they became known as the notorious “Ash-Can school” and “apostles of ugliness” soon after the turn of the century. Dreiser, of course, served a similar function in his challenge to the Genteel Tradition, the literary equivalent of the Academy in the United States. Third, the Ash-Can painters not only believed, as Dreiser did, that an artist must be an honest and truthful recorder and interpreter of the life he saw and knew, but it was in their depiction of these “truths” of city life, its violence and brutality and its beauty, that their relationship to Dreiser is most clearly seen.

Much of the modern disappointment with William Dean Howells' work grows from a failure to understand his aims. This misunderstanding arises partly because his literary rationale was far from being as systematic and uncompromising as has often been assumed; close study of the entire body of his critical essays and reviews shows that he did not reject all fiction which departed from a circumstantial fidelity to life. In essence, Howells felt that authenticity concerning human character was the touchstone of great art and that problems of method were secondary. Although he condemned most non-realistic fiction as untrue and therefore finally vicious morally, he was willing to allow imaginative play in that writing which did no harm or which, better still, aimed at faithfulness to the inner verity of existence. Howells, like Hawthorne and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, distinguished between the realistic novel and the prose “romance,” and he of course generally preferred to write the realistic novel. But, instead of being “unsympathetic to books of romance” or harboring a “suspicion of all romantic tendencies including his own,” he also accepted the romance as an estimable genre of fiction.

In my opinion Robert (“Fleshly School”) Buchanan's The Drama of Kings (1871) exerted so strong an influence on Hardy's Dynasts that it deserves to be regarded as the immediate source of that work. The contention would appear to be virginal. The biographies and critical studies of Abercrombie, Blunden, Brennecke, Chakravarty, Chew, Duffin, Florence Emily Hardy, Hedgcock, Holland, McDowall, Rutland, South-worth, Symons, Weber, and Webster provide, in their greatly varying degree, suggestions as to the philosophical and literary background of Hardy's trilogy. None of them, however, suggests any relation between The Dynasts and The Drama of Kings. In fact none of them even mentions the name of Robert Williams Buchanan with the exception of Edmund Blunden, who notes the interesting fact that Buchanan dedicated to Hardy his novel, Come Live with Me and Be My Love. He might also have observed that Buchanan elsewhere devotes a laudatory poem to Hardy and warmly praises “Tom Hardy” in another poem.

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.

In the 1830's and 1840's members of the editorial staffs of certain American periodicals, not satisfied with the common practice of pirating the works of foreign authors, undertook the brazen expedient of writing their own selections and attaching thereto the name of some eminent foreign author. For example, when the Spirit of the Times had reprinted all of Thackeray's Yellowplush Correspondence available in Fraser's Magazine and had found it popular among the subscribers, the editors stated that they had forged for some time thereafter a continuation of the Correspondence that was as good as the original. “Our Yellowplush succeeded him of London,” confessed the journal, “and his letters were considered, in all respects, equal to those of his ‘illustrious predecessor’.” Moreover, this pseudo-continuation was pirated by at least one American periodical in Tennessee which obviously did not know that it was being gulled. The Spirit of the Times regarded the incident with amused indifference rather than indignation, not being in a position to claim copyright protection for a work which it had not called its own.

The student of Coleridge's thought is likely to turn with a sense of relief from the apparent confusion of his metaphysical and epistemological speculations to the relative calm of his semantics. Here, at least, one can operate within a well-defined area, presenting in an orderly fashion Coleridge's great respect for words, his insistence that they be used carefully, his concern with paradox and contradiction, his famous distinctions such as that between reason and understanding, and the background of such coinages as esemplastic. This area provides the clue to Coleridge's whole system and is full of implications which stretch far out beyond the realm of words.

No one has hitherto undertaken an investigation of Shelley's relation to Robert Malthus. Previous Shelley scholarship contains no adequate examination of the remarks on Malthus in Shelley's prose. No attempt, furthermore, has ever been made to relate these remarks in the prose to any of the poems; and, therefore, some probable and significant allusions to Malthus in the poetry have gone entirely unnoticed. Various scholars, to be sure, have called attention to the main allusions discoverable in the burlesque Oedipus Tyrannus; but past interpretations of these references are in need of some modification. More important, however, than what pertains to Shelley's burlesque is the probable occurrence of hitherto quite unsuspected allusions to Malthus in a number of the major serious poems—including Prometheus Unbound.

Seit mehr als hundert Jahren haben sich Literarhistoriker, Amateure und—leider audi—Philosophen um die Erhellung der Faustenste-hungsgeschichte gemüht. Trotz unendlichen Fleißes, glücklicher Funde und archivalischer Mitteilungen ist das Ende des Rätselratens auch heute noch nicht in Sicht.

Studies of influence in English dramatic writing have emphasized almost exclusively the creative tradition, giving scant attention to the influence of contemporary acting traditions as significant factors in the creative process. My intent in this paper is, by means of reversing the emphasis, to throw into sharper focus the impact of the actor on the creation of dramatic literature.

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.

During a short life of great activity, in emulation of his friend and master, Lope de Vega Carpio, Juan Pérez de Montalván (1602-38) wrote a considerable number of plays, wide in their variety of subject matter and diverse in verse structure. The study of the latter phenomenon, in imitation of distinguished treatises for other dramatists of the Golden Age, will form the chief criterion in this presentation of chronology. That a serious consideration of Montalván's versification is long overdue is evident. As early as 1919, S. G. Morley, in referring to the authorship of La lindona de Galicia, remarked: “Then, one important factor, Montalván's formula [of versification], is practically an unknown quantity . . . ” More recently, Irving A. Leonard in his article, “Montalbán's El valor perseguido and the Mexican Inquisition, 1682,” spoke of the problem of authorship in the case of a play attributed to both Lope de Vega and Montalván. It is hoped that future studies of the authorship and chronology of plays associated in any way with the name of Juan Pérez de Montalván will be facilitated by the facts presented here.

One way to describe the passage from Richard II to Henry V is to say that the first play is a picture of a sick state in which appearance and reality are at odds and that the last play is a picture of a healthy state in which political appearance and reality are unified in terms of the Elizabethan ideal of monarchy. This essay suggests that one sign of the political sickness in Richard II is the presence, explicit or implied, of the Renaissance comparison between the state and the theater. As the suggestion is developed, the reader will be asked to grant that political problems are also philosophical problems, and that plot and character may be controlled expressions of a general moral theme as well as dramatic accounts of typical personalities or recurrent historical situations. Examples of the state-theater comparison from More and Machiavelli will be reviewed, not to prove direct indebtedness by Shakespeare, but to show how the comparison was available in two pertinent contexts, Christian humanism and Renaissance Realpolitic.

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

Attempts to establish just grounds for war are as old as civilization itself. The seriousness of the attempts, however, and the nature of the difficulties which men encountered in making their formulations have varied from age to age, in accordance with prevailing assumptions and values. The problem of rationalizing war or integrating it into the social-intellectual structure undoubtedly became most acute with the triumph of Christianity, which was committed to peace but lacked the means of abolishing war. Early Christian thinkers were much occupied with the problem of determining under what conditions good Christians might engage in war and, notwithstanding the paucity of the results, there has hardly been any relaxation of the effort in medieval or modern times.

The exact dates for the majority of the writings of John Lydgate have not been ascertained. Occasionally Lydgate tells specifically when he composed a poem by inserting into it a statement concerning the time of composition which makes the dating somewhat obvious; other poems have been dated according to style and versification, age of manuscripts, and topical allusions to historical events. The present paper discusses the dating of four of Lydgate's works—Temple of Glas, Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI—by means of the astronomical allusions in these poems.

Despite its deceptively simple theme—a farmer's son wants to become a knight but comes to a grievous end and is hanged—the Middle High German poem known to us as the Meier Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener is not easily integrated as to its literary genre among the literature contemporary with it—probably the sixth or seventh decade of the thirteenth century.