Le poème courtois intitulé Gautier d'Aupais est assez singulier. Il ressemble à Jehan et Blonde par le thème, au Lai de l'Ombre par les procédés, à Cligés par les monologues, à Amadas et Ydoine par les allusions et à Brun de la Montaigne par la forme métrique. Il est écrit en 48 laisses monorimes qui se composent de 876 vers dodécasyllabiques. L'objet de cette étude est d'expliquer un vers difficile qui se trouve dans la laisse xxxi du poème et par là de résoudre un problème tant littéraire que linguistique.

Chaucer's poetry is generally felt to be distinguished by “an irony so quiet, so delicate, that many readers never notice it is there at all or mistake it for naïveté.”1 Granting, of course, the danger that “naïveté” may in turn be mistaken for irony, we may still suspect, with G. K. Chesterton, that Chaucer “made a good many more jokes than his critics have ever seen.”2 Whatever disputes continue about certain passages, no one is likely to deny today that the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is rich in subtle and satiric ambiguities. A more debatable and more neglected question, and one which I wish to pose here, is: How early did the ironic spirit manifest itself in Chaucer's works?

In his book entitled Malory Professor Vinaver propounds a plausible hypothesis that certain features of the romance of Gareth in the seventh book of the Morte d'Arthur were inventions of the author.

The hero—Beaumains—is Malory's own hero, and his name, impossible in any French romance, strangely resembles that of Malory's patron [Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick]. His successive battles with the Black, Green, and Red Knights, and particularly his behaviour at the tournament at the castle of Lady Lioness, at once call to mind the romantic adventure of Richard Beauchamp. At that tournament the King of Ireland wondered who Beaumains might be, “that one tyme semed grene, and another tyme at his ageyne comyng he semed blewe. And thus at every cours that he rode to and fro he chaunged his colour so that ther myght neyther kynge nor knyghte have redy congnyssaunce of hym.” The parallel is so close as to lead me to believe that some parts of the book of Beaumains were written in remembrance of Beauchamp's gallant deeds.

In Tottel's Miscellany there are 310 poems, including the thirty-nine added in the second edition of 1557. Of these 310, ninety-six are noted as by Wyatt, forty by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and 134 by “Vncertain auctours.” There are fifty-four sonnets in Tottel. Wyatt contributed twenty-seven, or exactly half. Surrey contributed fifteen; Grimald, three; the uncertain authors, nine. Rather more than one out of every six poems in the book is a sonnet. It is interesting that, among these fifty-four sonnets, fourteen different rime patterns are to be found. These constitute eloquent evidence of the mood of experimentation in which the English sonnet was conceived. It is a mistake to assume that Tottel contains only two types of sonnets, the Italian (or Petrarchian) and the English (or Shakespearian). Even if we define the first type loosely (and we must, when dealing with its early manifestation), there remain fifteen sonnets in the Miscellany which more or less defy classification. It is instructive to consider the various rime patterns in some detail. From them we may get, not only a suggestion of how the English sonnet evolved, but also a clue to the authorship of at least two sonnets by uncertain authors. A study of rime patterns is a narrow approach to the whole problem of sonnet technique, but, when applied to the English sonnet in its infancy, it has an unusual usefulness.

Much has been written for and against or concerning the use of agudos, or oxytones, and esdrújulos, or proparoxytones, in rime in Italianate verse (seven and eleven syllable lines) by the poets of the Spanish Golden Age. The names of Buceta and Zerolo on the esdrújulo, and Menéndez y Pelayo and Rodríguez Marín on the agudo, are outstanding. Nothing has been done, however, so far as I know, to correlate the use of the two chronologically. A short résumé of the history of opinion and criticism of their use may shed some light on the matter.

THE Elizabethan style of acting is discussed nowhere in the four volumes of The Elizabethan Stage, and the word acting itself is missing from the subject-index. It is as if Sir Edmund Chambers would crown his generosities by leaving us a playground—one precinct free for untrammeled guessing. The sport is active, and two teams are discernible on the field, but the teams are not playing with each other: they are not defending their own inferences or attacking those of their opponents. The purpose of the present essay is not to end the game but to organize it—at least so far as that can be done by one who enters a game not as a referee but as a player. The most conspicuous Shakespearian criticism of recent years is based largely upon assumptions about the style in which the plays were originally acted, so that even a partisan discussion of these assumptions may prove useful. What follows is an attempt to define two alternate styles of acting—formal acting and natural acting; to attack the case for natural acting on the Elizabethan stage and to defend the case for formal acting; and, finally, to suggest the manner in which the issue bears upon contemporary criticism.)

Some twenty years ago, in an analysis of the Play-Scene, I remarked that it was extraordinary that so important a part of Hamlet had received so little attention. Oddly enough, interest in this scene was just beginning in good earnest, and much important criticism and lively controversy have followed in the intervening years. We might hope, then, that at the present day we should be clearer in our minds, and that the scholar, the actor, the stage-manager, and the “general reader” would now be happily in accord.

In a well-known passage in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden, pursuing his critical “examen” of The Silent Woman, tempers his extravagant praise of Ben Jonson's dramatic skill with serious criticism of his language.

If there is any fault in his language, ‘twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously in his comedies especially; perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours.

The discovery of Henry Lawes' musical setting for Lovelace's poem A loose Saraband not only brings to light some interesting variants of the text of the lyric and an old dance tune, but dispels a slight doubt which Mr. C. H. Wilkinson in his recent edition of Lovelace's poems, cast upon the first editor of Lucasta. As Mr. Wilkinson could not locate the music, he suggested that perhaps the words Set by Mr. Henry Lawes which appear beneath the title A loose Saraband on page 26 of the 1649 volume should have been placed below To Ellinda. The existence of the Lawes' score, however, exonerates the original editor.

Dans la ière scène du iiiême acte de l'Etourdi, le rusé valet Mascarille se demande s'il doit continuer à intriguer pour son maître Lélie, qui, par ses “étourderies,” fait échouer à chaque fois ses ingénieuses combinaisons, et il prononce le monologue suivant:

Dr. Bernard Mandeville in reissuing in 1714 the doggerel verses which he had first published in 1705 under the title, The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn'd Honest, added extensive prose remarks and a provocative title, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, but he failed to stir a ripple of protest in English complacency, or even to attract attention by his bold thinking. In 1723, publishing his materials once more with extensive additions, by which he had industriously doubled the bulk of his book, Mandeville at last received his reward in the storm of abuse which burst about his head. He was recognized as the disturber of every acceptable idea which good men then took for granted. The Fable of the Bees became notorious. It was read widely in English and translated into French and German. Throughout the century it was thought to merit discussion, and if possible, vigorous refutation by the men in Europe distinguished for either piety or intelligence. By many readers Mandeville was held to be a monster of impiety, a low rogue too vile to be counted human.

Students of Shelley's highly complex and puzzling personality have always found it necessary to be concerned with the “sisters of his soul.” No great amount of attention has, however, thus far been paid to Claire (Clara Mary Jane) Clairmont, daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin by a previous marriage, companion of Shelley and Mary on the elopement, and thereafter for long intervals a member of the Shelley household. Gossip involving the poet with her was current during his lifetime; veiled charges of misconduct with her were sometimes brought against him, even in print. Partly as a result of a reaction against the virulence and obvious prejudice of these attacks, partly because Claire's liaison with Byron distracted attention from Shelley, but chiefly because it was the settled policy of Shelley's family that in all biographies written with their co-operation the poet's union with Mary should be represented as an ideal one, the Victorian tendency was to deny Claire any real importance for Shelley. Such was Dowden's doctrine, as will hereafter be made abundantly clear; and Dowden has determined the course for subsequent biographers. W. E. Peck either intentionally avoids developing a theory of Shelley-Claire relationships, or fails to do so. In that part of his biography in which he comes closest to committing himself, he shows the Dowden influence.

Nowhere, perhaps, are the Carlyle marginal annotations more suggestive and diverting than on his copies of Essays and Tales by John Sterling, in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Collection at the Harvard College Library.

This Sterling is, of course, Carlyle's John Sterling, subject of the Carlyle Life to be issued three years later. Commonly known only as a young man for whom two unnecessary biographies were written, Sterling appears on further acquaintance to be delightfully representative of his time. Though the chronicle of his years is largely a record of vain Sittings in search of health, ending in slow death by tuberculosis, he managed throughout to keep his soul singularly alive and sensitive. A brilliant leader of the famous “Apostles” at Cambridge, he shared the undergraduate idealism there of the 1820's. As part owner of the young Athenaeum in 1828 and 18295 he did his bit at “uplift” in journalism.

When G. P. Lathrop wrote his A Study of Hawthorne (1876) he found it necessary, in discussing the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter, to protest against the identification of Hawthorne's own beliefs with those given to Hester. Lathrop's protest—which has not much affected subsequent criticism—was directed against a violent review by Arthur Cleveland Coxe, one of three early reviews which mark the beginning of a persistent misapprehension (as it seems to me) in the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter. It has almost become a convention to insist that Hawthorne means to advocate a new standard of sex morality in passages like Hester's words: “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so ! We said so to each other!” Austin Warren has found sufficient reason to point out again that Hawthorne is careful to characterize the rebellion of Hester as the rebellion of one who “had wandered without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness,” and that Hawthorne careful to say that “Her intellect and heart had their home ... in desert places.... Shame, Despair, Solitude ! These had been her teachers ... and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

For many years critics have been finding fault with Mrs. Browning's rhymes. Asserting that she “richly deserves the place generally accorded her as the foremost poetess of England,” that her Sonnets from' the Portuguese take “rank with Shakespeare's Sonnets and Rossetti's House of Life as one of the three great English sonnet cycles,” that “some of her social poems seem written in blood,” that she is at times “not only original but an equal of the greatest,” and that “her poem ‘The Great God Pan’ is almost perfect,” yet critics repeat the Victorian criticism of her rhymes. Saintsbury considers her “proficient in all the qualities which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer with the exception of ear for rhyme”; and this is what he says of these rhymes: “The dullness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly education, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to the lower class of cockneys.” Other critics have said her rhymes are “inadmissible,” “eccentric,” “illegitimate,” “slovenly false,” “vicious,” “feeble and commonplace,” “careless and perverse,” “painful,” “really shocking,” and that “few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously or frequently against the laws of metre and rhyme.”

No period in the history of Mexican journalistic literature is more brilliant than that extending from 1894, the date of the establishment of the Revista Azul, to 1911, which witnessed the demise of the Revista Moderna—the two best literary periodicals Mexico has known. During these years the entire country, under the iron rule of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, was at peace; and a new aristocracy with means and leisure to devote itself to the fine arts was developing. When civil strife began late in 1910, it made small impress, for a time, on the intellectual life of the nation. The discontinuance of the Revista moderna in the following year was occasioned not by the revolution, as one might surmise, but by the death of the editor, Jesús E. Valenzuela, who had personally financed the publication. Except for the coup that made Victoriano Huerta provisional president in February, 1913, Mexico City was largely undisturbed until the latter part of the next year, when the hordes of Villa and of Zapata invaded the capital and paralyzed, for a time, almost all activity of a journalistic nature.

Wenige Jahre vor seinem Tode suchte Hugo von Hofmannsthal in seinem Aufsatz Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (1927) Rechenschaft abzulegen über die innersten Kräfte, die dem deutschen Geist jener Epoche Richtung gaben. Indem er sich nun hier gegen Schluss zu weitester Sicht erhebt, heisst es (S. 442):

Ich spreche von einem Prozess, in dem wir mitten inne stehen, einer Synthese, so langsam und grossartig—wenn man sie von aussen zu sehen vermöchte—als finster und priifend, wenn man in ihr steht. Langsam und grossartig dürfen wir den Vorgang wohl nennen, wenn wir bedenken, dass auch der lange Zeitraum der Entwicklung von den Zuckungen des Aufklärungszeitalters bis zu uns nur eine Spanne in ihm ist, dass er eigentlich anhebt als eine innere Gegenbewegung gegen jene Geistesumwälzung des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, die wir in ihren zwei Aspekten Renaissance und Reformation zu nennen pflegen. Der Prozess, von dem ich rede, ist nichts anderes als eine konservative Revolution von einem Umfange, wie die europäische Geschichte ihn nicht kennt....

That the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen played an important rôle in the life and thought of Rainer Maria Rilke is a fact well documented in Rilke's letters, and critical investigations have long begun to recognize the relationship by brief or lengthier references. Many of the letters, which spread over a period ranging from 1897 to 1924, have appeared in print, but a number containing references to Jacobsen still remain unpublished. Supplementing the letters, Rilke sometimes talked about Jacobsen, as he had occasion to do in 1925 while he was supervising the French translation of Malte Laurids Brigge or when the topic of conversation concerned matters so closely connected with both Jacobsen and Rilke as the behavior of words.