This privilege of speaking my mind to you tonight was earned, not by distinguished scholarship, but by my serving you as Executive Secretary and Editor for nine busy years. Milton, therefore, will not be with us at this hour. Instead I invite you to ponder with me one of the most urgent problems that our profession faces: let us call it the problem of George. I am not, of course, referring to my able successor, George Winchester Stone. Our George, as you must have guessed, is the not so able fellow we let do the necessary jobs that we consider unworthy of our own attention.

Although “I Syng of a Myden” has always been regarded as a superlative lyric, and although it has received detailed discussion by George Kane, John Speirs, and especially Leo Spitzer, there are many features of this extremely complex poem which need to be pointed out: the richness of the imagery, the significance of the puns, and the number symbolism, for example. Nor has anyone singled out the remarkable achievement of our poet in combining the tone of wonder and exultation in Mary's dual role as maiden and mother with an amazing wealth of the natural and theological implications surrounding the event.

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.

Milton's incorporation as Master of Arts at Oxford is a perennial problem. Resting as it does on the word of Anthony Wood, with no corroboration from either Milton himself or any of his early biographers, it has never been satisfyingly clear. Wood's statement (Fasti Oxonienses, 1721 edition, I, 262) is curious: “1635. … This Year was incorporated Master of Arts John Milton, not that it appears so in the Register, for the Reason I have told you in the Incorporations 1629, but from his own mouth to my friend, who was well acquainted with, and had from him, and from his Relations after his death, most of this account of his life and writings following.” The note under the incorporations for 1629 (I, 247) to which Wood refers is the following: “This Year John French M.A. and Fellow of Merton College was elected public Scribe or Registrary of the University, who being a careless Man (tho' a good Scholar) and more fit for another, than that, employment, hath omitted throughout all his time the Incorporations of the Cantabrigians at the conclusion of the Act, having had sometimes 40, at other times 50 and more incorporated at that time, in several degrees and faculties. Those therefore that I find, you shall have as they follow.” It is perhaps worth while to add, however, that Wood had remarked under incorporations for 1613 (i, 195): “The Incorporations of the Cantabrigians are this Year omitted by the public Scribe.” Evidently John French was not the only lazy scribe.

Although L'Avare is by no means lacking in originality, borrowings from literary sources are particularly heavy. Nearly every important scene, from the farcical intrigues of Frosine to Harpagon's famous monologue, has been traced back to Plautus, Ariosto, Larivey, Boisrobert or even to the commedia dell'arte. Moreover, Molière remains faithful to one of the oldest traditions in comedy: the eternal triumph of youth over age.

The restoration theatrical audience was dominantly skeptical and naturalistic in temper. Yet for over ten years this audience patronized the heroic plays of Dryden and contributed to their popularity. This anomaly has long puzzled scholars; and typically, Allardyce Nicoll remarks: “This heroic tragedy is obviously a thing entirely apart from the comedy of gay licentious manners. With its flaunting honour and its impossibly idealistic love passions it seems indeed so far away both from that comedy and from social life as we have seen it displayed in the theatre that it would appear impossible to find any link between them.” Like most other critics, Nicoll offers an unsatisfactory explanation of this anomaly:

The audiences were no longer noble in temper, and consequently the heroic tragedy, removed a further stage from the actual, may be regarded as the true child of the enervation that had come over England. The age was debilitated: it was distinctly unheroic: and yet it was not so cynical as to throw over entirely the inculcation of heroism. To present, however, heroism in real-life plays would have raised too sharp a distinction between what was and what might have been, and accordingly in the heroic tragedy heroism is cast out of the world altogether and carried to an Eastern or an antique realm of exaggerated emotions, mythical and hopelessly ideal. The heroic play is like a Tale of a Land of No-where. (p. 88)

Although several studies exist dealing with specific disagreements between Rousseau and d'Alembert, particularly in regard to the Lettre à M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles and the Rousseau-Hume quarrel, they are concerned primarily with Rousseau, leaving a sketchy and rather stereotyped image of d'Alembert as his hypocritical enemy pretending friendship but secretly working against him. Max Förster, in his Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Characters und der Philosophie d'Alemberts (Hamburg, 1892, pp. 10–36), reacts against this picture, going to the other extreme, but he does not attempt a full coverage of the relations between these two great figures of the eighteenth century: his chief aim is the defense of d'Alembert against specific accusations by Musset-Pathay. As a result, his presentation is incomplete and his conclusions sometimes questionable. There remains a need for a more complete and detached treatment of the subject, particularly as concerns the events preceding and following the above quarrels—a phase overlooked thus far but which is essential to an understanding of the reactions of the disputants during their disagreements. The present study seeks to offer this more balanced, over-all picture.

Gray's Sonnet on the Death of Richard West has never recovered from the judgment visited upon it by Wordsworth, for whom it neatly demonstrated how Gray “was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.” Scholars in recent times have been harsh: “Characteristically Gray wrote in English a stilted sonnet on West's death and put his genuine feelings into the Latin verses that he appended to his philosophical fragment, De principiis cogitandi. Not enough of a romantic to wear his heart on his sleeve, he concealed his emotions in classical Latin.” The following essay may show to what degree, if any, the work is “stilted” and the emotions are “concealed”; more directly, however, it is intended to show what kind of poem Gray was writing, and to consider whether he sought again to accomplish the sonnet's intentions in the Elegy.

Coleridge considered Resolution and Independence a flawed masterpiece. He says of it (Biographia Literaria, Chap, xxii): “Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen.” It is singular that Coleridge, who did so much to undermine the eighteenth century school of “faults and beauties” in Shakespeare criticism, should have dealt with Wordsworth in this fashion. When Wordsworth talked of the old man, as he became to the poetic imagination, “motionless as a cloud” or “wandering about alone and silently,” Coleridge was content; but when he tried to fix the old man in the here and now of 1802, Coleridge took offence and accused him of inconstancy of style. It is true that many of the corrections Wordsworth made in the poem were prompted by Coleridge's critique; but what is useful criticism to a craftsman is not necessarily so to his patrons.

In an age when symbols are being discovered in literary works where critics of an earlier period would never have dreamed of looking for them there is probably little need to defend a study of symbolism in Grillparzer's work. Indeed Grillparzer himself recognized that there is a symbolic element in all art and reproached his own time for its refusal to acknowledge the symbolic aspect of poetic truth. Das goldene Vließ, moreover, is not the only drama in which Grillparzer uses symbols. In Sappho, for instance, the lyre, the laurel wreath, the rose, the statue of Aphrodite, and the dagger all have symbolic significance. Even the title of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen reflects symbolic motifs. In that drama subtle variations on the water imagery predominate but are reinforced by symbols such as the dove, the tower, the Leda song, and the lamp. In Libussa, to cite one more example, there is a highly developed circle symbolism as well as symbolism involving flowers, vegetation, and metals.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer has sometimes been called the Lessing of the nineteenth century. In certain aspects of their lives the parallel is striking. They were the sons of clergymen and were expected to follow in their fathers' footsteps, but each turned to other pursuits. Liberal thinking, particularly in theology, though differing fundamentally in texture, brought them into conflict with traditional orthodoxy. They were both critics in the field of aesthetics and both were men of letters in the narrower sense; Lessing alone, however, gained a position of distinction in literature.

Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.

In 1828 Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem “Ančar,” usually rendered in English as “The Upas Tree.” Because of the obviously derivative theme of the lyric, scholars have been searching for the exact place where the poet learned of this tree and its terrible powers. At first the searchings were random. Professor Sumcov, writing around the turn of the century, claimed that Pushkin had read of the tree in some of the popular “travels to the east.” Not convinced by Sumcov's argument, P. O. Morozov proposed a stanza (iv, 126) from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Valerij Brjusov, the scholarly Symbolist poet who edited a collection of Pushkin's works (1919), thought that a poem by Millevoye, apparently “Le Mancenillier,” was the real source. In the collection of essays entitled Pushkin in World Literature (1926), N. Jakovlev showed that a proposed epigraph for the poem was from Coleridge; ten years later the Academy edition of Pushkin's works had this note: “the poem is thematically related to Coleridge's work Remorse.” In an interesting short study Professor Jakubovič has shown a certain parallel with Pushkin in a passage from Colman's play The Law of Java; the passage, however, could hardly be the only direct source.

Yeats's interest in Byzantine art and civilization began in the Nineties and continued through his life. The first issue of “Rosa Alchemica” (1896) refers to the mosaic work at Ravenna (“mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty”), work which Yeats probably saw when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gregory. Unfortunately, Yeats has left us no account of his visit to Ravenna. A revision of “The Holy Places,” final section of Discoveries, made for the 1912 edition of The Culling of an Agate, shows that between 1906 and 1912 Yeats's knowledge of Byzantine history had increased. In 1906 he wrote of “an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of better stone;” in 1912 this became “had John Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look … a hearty disposition to fight the Turk.” In preparation for the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, which Yeats wrote at Capri in February 1925, and left virtually unchanged in the revised Vision of 1937, Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and studied Byzantine mosaics in Rome and Sicily. He did not return to Ravenna, being fearful of its miasmal air. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Wisdom” (1926-27); then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium” (1930).

Howards End can be termed a metaphysical novel for the good reason that it is concerned with metaphysical problems. These are implicit in the clash of motive and purpose that directs the novel's action; they present themselves in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the action's meaning. The principles at variance here are in themselves metaphysical opposites—the real and the ideal, the tangible and the intangible, the body and the soul, the many and the one—and they all have reference to a single overwhelming question: wherein lies the reality of experience? Does it consist in the inner life of personal relations, as Helen Schlegel declares? Or is it to be sought in the outer world of practical affairs, as her sister Margaret comes to maintain? How, in any case, is it to be known: through the agency of the flesh or of the spirit? And once known, how is knowledge of it to be preserved in a world where permanence and stability are conditioned by time and change? The answer, a single one, is implied in the words “only connect” that stand on the novel's title page. What must be connected, to state the matter in so many words, is the inner life of intellect and spirit, and the outer life of the physical and the sensory. These, the conflicting halves of experience, must be reconciled, for—and this is the burden of all Forster's work—because they are halves they are mutually dependent, and one without the other cannot adequately endure. The intellect and the spirit are dependent for their very embodiment on the physical and the sensory, faculties which they in turn altogether transfigure when the halves are fused. The contradictory elements that are inherent in the duality of body and soul are reconciled when the duality itself is resolved. The result is the comprehensive and harmonious vision of experience wherein the earthly partakes of the eternal, the particular testifies to the universal, and multiplicity becomes but another attribute of the one. The partial view gives way before a vision of the whole, and the paradoxical quality of experience takes on another dimension as one comes to discern the reality behind the appearance, the substance beneath the accidents.

In a recent article, Claude Mauriac remarks pertinently, “On a voulu expliquer En Attendant Godot par un improbable jeu de mots: God ne signifie-t-il pas Dieu en anglais? Façon de rendre moins inquiétante cette pièce aussi peu rassurante que les autres oeuvres de Beckett.” Although M. Mauriac may be brushing aside rather too quickly a play on words that is perhaps not so improbable after all, he points perceptively in these lines to an inadequacy that mars a number of otherwise illuminating discussions of Beckett's controversial play. Critics, professional and amateur, have, in fact, often been overly concerned with the “message” of the drama, treating it, unconsciously perhaps, as a kind of thesis play and thereby, one might argue, casting implicit aspersions on its excellence as art. The reviewer for the London Times writes, for example, “… the message of Mr. Beckett as a novelist is perhaps a message of blank despair. The message of Waiting for Godot is perhaps something nearer a message of religious consolation … Waiting for Godot—one might sum up these remarks—is thus a modern morality play on permanent Christian themes.”