In this article I consider the possibility of using vocabulary to determine the original dialect of Old English poems later than Cynewulf and choose two poems on the same theme, Judgment Day I, reputedly Anglian, in the Exeter Book, and Judgment Day II, reputedly West Saxon, in order to illustrate the application of this method and test its validity.

The influence of Italian writers on Chaucer has been described by the use of such general terms as “renaissance,” “humanism,” or “Italian atmosphere,” and also by the enumeration of borrowed passages and the recognition of similarities of plot. Some critics believe that the Italian journeys opened new vistas for Chaucer in literature and life, while others hold that from Italy he derived only certain lines and stories. Consideration of this problem in terms of just one poem, Boccaccio's Teseida, is narrow and inconclusive, but has the advantages of being specific and of permitting an evolutionary—as opposed to a static—point of view; for of all Italian writings except Dante's Commedia, the Teseida served Chaucer the most widely. It formed the basic material out of which he created the Knight's Tale, and was the source of passages in Anelida and Arcite, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Franklin's Tale, and possibly the House of Fame.

In Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, and taken over from it into Malory, is a story of how Sir Lancelot by craft is brought to lie with Elayne, thinking she is Queen Guinevere. The Queen, discovering it, thinks her lover has been false to her and with violent words banishes him from her presence. Lancelot swoons, then departs from court and runs about “wylde wood as euer was man” (Book xi, Chap. 3). At last he is bound when asleep and taken to a castle where he is cured.

Edward Fairfax, Elizabethan poet and translator, is most famous for his version of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Opinions of this book have varied so greatly that Fairfax critics alone afford an interesting cross-section of English taste. We may see the author admired by his contemporaries for his Italianate richness of description, praised by the seventeenth century for his smoothness and heroics, neglected by the eighteenth for his lack of elegance and rime (i.e., of couplets), revived by the romantics for his touching passages of emotion, and left on the shelf today because, perhaps, we have other things to think about.

Parallels with Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso support the theory that Shakespeare in 1592-93 may have composed some preliminary sketches for a play which he later wrote up as The Taming of the Shrew and which another wrote up as The Taming of a Shrew.

The complexity of human nature has always made difficult the task of the literary critic who would attempt to explain the nature of the pleasure that we derive from tragedy. The question has so many connections with speculations outside its own sphere—moral, psychological, political, economic, religious speculations—in short, the entire philosophy of an age—that some simplification, some focal point, is requisite for the historian of ideas who would attempt to record the changes in it through a given age. Since in the eighteenth century the question of tragic pleasure was a live one, in the very forefront of aesthetic speculation, the need for some kind of simplification, some kind of constant against which the evolution of doctrines can be seen, is particularly great. A convenient counter of this kind can be found in the Lucretian “return upon ourselves.”

An error has been committed at the expense of René Le Bossu, the noted seventeenth-century critic of the epic; and its elimination is important not only in justice to “the learned Bossu” but in correcting a widely accepted misinterpretation of one of our foremost English writers. Furthermore, in addition to affording belated personal justice, the correction will reveal a notable example of the unconscious influence of party spirit in criticism and scholarship, as a result of which cool and informed appraisal is sacrificed to the pleasure of ridicule.

Es ist hier der Ort zu einer Erwägung allgemeiner Art. Man mag Helena naïv als absolute Vertreterin des griechischen, rein formalen Schönheitsideals, oder, wie wir, als eine durch romantische Ironie gebrochene und daher relativierte Spiegelung dieses Ideals betrachten. In der Schlußfolgerung, daß Faust dieser erneuten Versuchung zum Verweilen im schönen Augenblick nicht unterliegt, wird man zusammenkommen müssen. Das Reich der Schönheit hat für den hemmungslosen Willen keine haltende Kraft. Auch es ist nur ein Durchgangspunkt zu einer höheren Stufe. Wenn es also nur darum geht, dann ist alles in Ordnung. Faust wird nicht faul; er hat seine strebende Seele gerettet und äußerlich dem Teufel obgesiegt. Aber es handelt sich ja nicht allein darum, daß Fausts Tätigkeit höher wird. Sie muß—und das scheint uns das Entscheidende—auch “reiner” werden. Eine Erhöhung des Orts und selbst eine Beschränkung des Wirkungsfelds allein tun das nicht. Diese verändern wohl das Ziel, aber nicht die Immanenz des Willens. Wenn dieser die Idee, anstatt sie zu vergewaltigen, nicht in sich aufnimmt, dann hat alle Orts- und Zielveränderung geringen Wert. So lange Goethe seinen Faust nur durch die materielle Welt (Auerbachs Keller, Osterspaziergang, Gretchenerlebnis, Kaiserhof) führte, brauchte er sich um diese esoterische Seite des Problems nicht zu kümmern. Mit der Helenatragödie aber tritt Faust in das Reich des reinen Geistes ein, der sich ihm im Abglanz der Helena als Kunst objektiviert. Da dieser Geist “ewigen Wesens” und “den Göttern ebenbürtig” ist, erhebt sich die Frage, ob er in dieser Form sittlich-erzieherische Wirkung ausübt, d.h., ob die Kunst die Aufgabe der Ethik und Religion übernehmen kann.

Studies on romanticism are numerous and exhaustive, and yet one problem of this literary upheaval has scarcely been touched by scholars—the conflicting aesthetic theories of the period from 1800-1815. Marsan has given us the history of romanticism's battle; other historians have treated problems of style, rules, and foreign influences; but, as Souriau has pointed out, an important question has been neglected: the classic versus the new liberal theory of imitation in art, a question which strikes at the very core of the classic-romantic dispute.

In the Advertisement to the volume of his collected sonnets, published in 1838, Wordsworth wrote:

Byron wrote of Manfred that he is “… a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained.” It will perhaps be agreed that after much scholarship the cause remains in fact somewhat more than half unexplained, unless all is referred to Byron's anguish over the relationship with Augusta Leigh.

With characteristic impatience the poet repudiated the guesses of his contemporaries as to the sources of Manfred, which, he said, he wrote “for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description.” To Wilson's suggestion in the Edinburgh Magazine that “the origin of this dreadful story” might be found in Marlowe's Faustus, Byron replied that “the conjecturer is out, and knows nothing of the matter.” When Goethe, reviewing the play, stated that “this singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself,” Byron retorted that he had never read Faust, “for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it, viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it.” Earlier he had written, “An American who came the other day from Germany told Mr. Hobhouse that Manfred was taken from Goethe's Faust. The devil may take both the Faustuses, German and English,—I have taken neither.” He was receptive only to Jeffrey's suggestion of an Aeschylean influence. Prometheus, he confessed, “has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written.”

The fragmentary essay On Life is so significant a piece of writing, and its connection with Shelley's mental development and with some of his poems so obvious, that its comparative neglect by commentators and biographers is rather remarkable. This essay (1) is the prose basis for the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, (2) is saturated with the influence of Wordsworth, whose Ode: Intimations of Immortality served as a model for Shelley's Hymn, and (3) not only contains Shelley's first definite announcement of his rejection of a materialistic philosophy and adoption of a spiritual “intellectual system,” but also marks an important point in his mental growth.

In his preface to Homeward Bound Cooper tells the reader that this book

The character of Caliban continues to be a source of speculation to readers of The Tempest, but gradually we are learning those elements of sixteenth-century thought which suggested him to Shakespeare. Some years ago Mr. Morton Luce pointed out that Caliban can be viewed in three separate ways: 1) as a hag-born monstrosity, 2) as a slave, and 3) as a savage, or dispossessed Indian. The second of these ways may be explained by the third, since the English could read many accounts of the manner in which the Spaniards had reduced the Indians to slavery. But, while Caliban worships a Patagonian god, he is the child of an African witch from Argier (Algiers). This would seem to indicate that Shakespeare is not trying to represent primarily a red Indian from the New World but has broadened the conception to represent primitive man as a type. The name Caliban, a metathesis of canibal, supports this view, for contemporary voyagers, as well as early travelers from Homer and Herodotus to Mandeville, had found cannibals in many different quarters of the world.

Reading Mes Cahiers, one is struck by the large share accorded to Pascal in the meditations of Maurice Barrès, a share which does not always appear reflected in Barrès's finished work. Barres tells us that, at twenty, his favorite writers included Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Goethe, Cervantes, and Pascal. But is was not until some time later that Pascal came to be the lode-star of the middle decades of his life. There were readers who linked his Culte du Moi with Pascal's analysis of the self, but such readers did not come until after this Culte du Moi could be retrospectively interpreted in relation to his nationalism and to his increasing impulsion toward Catholicism. It was inevitable that the skeptic and individualist should have been impressed by Pascal as a hero of independent thought. Added to this was the interest naturally felt by the artist and patriot for one of the unchallenged glories of French literature. And when the Lorrainer began to delve among the roots of the Auvergne side of his family, he would not have been the exponent of “la Terre et les Morts,” if his imagination had not been stirred by the fact that Pascal too, was from Auvergne.

The Tinker's Wedding is the most unattractive of the plays of J. M. Synge. This unruly little farce, the only two-act play Synge attempted, has been generally labelled an ugly duckling. But the manuscript drafts of the play tell an interesting story which, if it does not cause us to revise our estimate of the play, assigns it a proper place in the Synge canon and partly explains its deficiencies. The manuscripts show, for instance, that The Tinker's Wedding was the dramatist's first attempt to break away from the one-act form and that possibly Synge's only mistake was in publishing the results of his experiment. They afford an interesting insight into Synge's method; and they include, in an earlier version of the preface to the play an apology to the Irish clergy. They also throw light on Synge's development toward the mastery of the full, three-act play.

Emerson's and Thoreau's individualistic, anti-government writings, it is said, developed out of an American background. Our land of liberty, out of fear that government might come to concern itself too familiarly with matters pertaining to the personal thinking and behavior of individuals, has nurtured from its beginning a lively suspicion for concentrations of political power. This suspicion is everywhere in American letters, which have been ever eager to slap government's fingers when it became over-forward. Each individual, as our thinkers and writers repeatedly tell us, should insist on solving his own problems without dictation from external forces, whether from the laws of a too aggressive legislature or from a next-door neighbor who considers himself an arbiter of behavior and taste. Of seekers for political office, Emerson predicted: “Wake them, and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true and leave government to clerks and desks.” A recent article on the American individualist maintained, “His political ideal will, of course, be Jefferson, his prophets will be Emerson and Thoreau; his poet, Whitman.”

When, in 1879, W. S. Gilbert had his Pirate King of Penzance advise the unhappy hero, “Frederic, if you conscientiously feel that it is your duty to destroy us, we cannot blame you for acting on that conviction. Always act in accordance with the dictates of your conscience, my boy, and chance the consequences,” the Pirate Apprentice who expected soon to be out of his indentures found himself in a world as generally obsessed with the sense of duty as he was himself. It is true that only with considerable difficulty did he find “one maiden breast” which felt the moral beauty “Of making worldly interest/Subordinate to sense of duty,” but the Pirate King had plenty of other support for his conscientious philosophy. Not only was he joined by the somewhat weathered Ruth, but even the Sergeant of Police, remembering his own obligations when constabulary duty's to be done, forgave Frederic his tergiversation when reminded that the undependable young man, however queerly he behaved, had always been actuated by his sense of duty. And even Mabel, faced with the loss of her lover, announced proudly to the police force, “Dearly as I loved him before, his heroic sacrifice to his sense of duty has endeared him to me tenfold. He has done his duty. I will do mine. Go ye and do yours.” Nevertheless, poor Frederic remained the victim rather than the master of his convictions; he suffered ceaseless spiritual tortures under the admonitions of the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, and at one critical point exclaimed:

Oh joy unbounded !
Oh sweet relief ! oh rapture unexampled !
At last I may atone, in some slight measure,
For the repeated acts of theft and pillage
Of which, at a sense of duty's stern dictation,
I, circumstances' victim, have been guilty.