Some of the most fruitful modern Hawthorne criticism is that which endeavors to correct and supplement the older, somewhat distorted picture of a solitary Puritan anachronism living in an “owl's nest” by recognizing Hawthorne's immediate connection with the fundamental issues of his own day. What Hawthorne owed to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries cannot be adequately evaluated in terms of “influence” or parallel passages. A more rewarding approach to the problem would be to examine part of the climate of opinion in Hawthorne's time in connection with a detailed study of his work. The present paper, intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, is an attempt to reveal some of the possibilities of this approach.

A spirit of self-mockery and light, ironical humor is best suited to satire on literary forms and fashions. One feels that Peele's OldWives Tale would have been immeasurably improved as parody had there been a motley fool lurking in the shadow of a great oak, waiting to guide us through the enchanted forest. One of the virtues of Shakespeare's As You Like It is that it has just such a wise fool. Jaques, in commending Touchstone to the Duke, gloats over his discovery, “He's as good at anything, and yet a fool” (v.iv.109). This is as far as Jaques may go in magnanimity. Earlier in the play, Rosalind hails the jester as “Nature's natural the cutter-off of Nature's wit” (I.ii.52). And Celia welcomes him with even less grace, for, says she, “always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits” (I.ii.58). Except for the Duke, whose penetrating comments on the witty fool are well known, the noble characters in the play seem to regard Touchstone as a natural or dull fool who sometimes serves to sharpen the wits of his betters.

That the direct source of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale was a passage in the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet was first pointed out by the Swedish scholar Bäckström in 1845. Since then, important studies by Edmund Brock, Emil Lücke, and John S. P. Tatlock have compared these two versions of the tale of Constance and drawn attention to some of the changes made by Chaucer. Thus it is now generally agreed that while he closely followed the French original for the main outlines of his plot, he skillfully condensed on the one hand, and on the other hand added many philosophical, humanizing, and imaginative passages to Trivet's conventional and lifeless story.

Students, critics, and just plain readers of Chaucer are unanimously agreed that he is one of the great masters of narrative. But in spite of this agreement—or perhaps because of it—there has been surprisingly little attempt to discover what was Chaucer's own attitude toward the technique of storytelling. His skill in character-portrayal, his humor, his irony, his detachment, his sharp eye, his descriptive powers— all these qualities and others have been the subject of extensive comment. But about his narrative technique in the narrow sense—that is, the particular way In which he selects, arranges, and proportions the detailed events which go to make up a story—there remains much to be said. The aim of this paper is to open up one corner of this large subject by exploring the implications of a characteristic Chaucerian habit which, for lack of a better term, we can call “self-conscious abbreviation.” By this I mean the trick of calling to the reader's attention the fact that details are to be omitted, the pace of the story accelerated, unimportant or obvious events summarized or taken for granted, or any one of a number of other devices employed to shorten the narrative.

We have long since rejected the idea that Madame de Staël brought romanticism to France from Germany. We are also quite aware, in spite of Lasserre and Irving Babbitt, that there is a great deal in romanticism that is not in Rousseau, and a great deal in Rousseau that is not in romanticism. It now remains for us to look for some truth between these extremes. Categorical answers to questions regarding Rousseau's influence on this period in literary history will probably never be found, but esthetic insights into the matter may be gained by a study of the relationships between Jean-Jacques and the outstanding poets of the movement.

My chief-purpose in this article is to show that, during the period in which Chaucer, in consequence of his newly conceived plan for a Marriage Group, produced some of his most independent and brilliant creative work, some of his time and thought was also devoted to the task of establishing a relation between the Marriage Group and several previously written tales, and also, one thing leading to another, to the ordering and the linking of tales, several of which never had any direct bearing on the debate on maniage. In the first section of this article I shall try to show that the Melibeus, the Nun's Priest's Tale, and the Clerk's Tale antedate the conception of a Marriage Group; that the idea of relating these tales to the debate on marriage was an afterthought on Chauser's part. In Section II we shall see that a fairly extensive ordering and linking operation, resulting in the construction of Blocks B2 and C and in the addition of new features to the character of Harry Bailly; seems to have been carried out at the same period as the work described in Section I. In Section III the bearing of my conclusions and conjectures on various problems of chronology, order of the tale blocks, etc., will be briefly considered.

Among the best liked and most widely known sections of The Canterbury Tales is the Nun's Priest's story of the regal Chanticleer and the lovely Dame Pertelote. For a long time critics have realized that this tale skilfully reflects facets of its teller's character, but only recently have detailed attempts been made to suggest just what sort of person Chaucer intended his audience to visualize as the Nun's Priest. Since Chaucer did not include in the General Prologue a portrait of this Pilgrim, whatever view one takes of the Nun's Priest must be based on the comments to and about him by the Host (VII.2810-15, 3447-60), on his own short comment to the Host (VII.2816-17), on the Narrator's brief remark about him (VI.2818-20), and on the superb tale which he relates to the company. This is to say that any acceptable portrait of Chaucer's Nun's Priest must of necessity derive primarily from the personal interplay during the Canterbury pilgrimage.

After Otto Heller published the results of his investigations into the question of Charles Sealsfield's claimed editorship of the Courrier des Etats-Unis in the Euphorion in 1907 (xiv, 718-724), he was convinced that he had disproved “the biographical fable that makes Sealsfield editor of the Courrier des États-Unis.” This assertion was repeated in 1939 in the important Heller-Leon Sealsfield Bibliography and more recently in an article published by the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, to which Professor Eduard Castle of the University of Vienna then made an enlightening but inconclusive reply because he did not have access to copies of the Courrier. In view of the fact that to date Otto Heller's study remains the only one based on an actual examination of the Courrier itself, the weight of evidence must remain in favor of his published conclusions unless these are disproved by more valid evidence from the same source. On the basis of a more complete study of the record it is believed that the following pages will bring such evidence and thus reestablish and confirm Sealsfield's original claim made in his biographical letter to Brockhaus asserting that from 1829-30 he was editor of the Courrier and that he resigned several weeks after news of the French Revolution of 1830 reached America. This will not only correct an unfortunate error in Sealsfield scholarship, but also clear Sealsfield against a charge of untruthfulness.

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.

For the student of fiction, the most noteworthy accomplishment of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman de la Rose is his invention of large-scale psychological allegory. C. S. Lewis, who has taught us how to haead the poem, suggests that it is an offspring of Old French romance and the moral allegory of the Prudentius tradition: the Roman deals with the erotic content of the romances in a form made newly potent by the moral allegorists of the school of Chartres. Lewis sees an adaptation or borrowing of allegory by romance before Guillaume in Chrétien de Troyes. There, it is suggested, we can see narrative poetry taking over allegory as a tool whenever psychology is in question. The purpose of this paper is to amplify the history of psychological allegory at this point, and thereby to modify Lewis' admittedly general account. Thus, while there are excellent reasons for using Chrétien as the exemplar of courtly romance writing, it can be shown that the tendency toward allegory in the romances is considerably more extensive than his practice would indicate. The romances constitute a virtual encyclopedia of psychological personifications, including illustrations and discussions of most of the “characters” in the Roman de la Rose. More important, this tendency does not represent simply a borrowing of the forms and procedures of moral allegory. Indeed, the allegory developing within the romances is not even so much a modification of the pre-established species as an independent invention. Specifically designed for psychological analysis, it points to the unique structural achievement of Guillaume de Lorris.