In the course of his essay on Paul Verlaine, Anatole France, in speaking of the early Parnassians, makes the very shrewd observation:

In 1838 Lytton published in the Monthly Chronicle an essay entitled “On Art in Fiction.” This essay is ignored by those who have written on Lytton's narrative art; yet, as it is reprinted in the volume, Pamphlets and Sketches, it takes up thirty-five closely printed pages and deals explicitly with the various parts of the novelist's craft. In it Lytton defines, in terms that apply to prose fiction, the aims of art and the means by which the aims may be achieved. By 1838 he had written twelve novels. The essay represents an experienced novelist's conclusions about the potentialities of his chosen form; and, moreover, it provides us with a measuring stick to set up against his later if not his earlier novels.

Mrs. Shelley in her preface to her husband's collected poems remarked:

There are others, such as the “Ode to the Sky Lark,” and “The Cloud,” which, in the opinion of many critics, bear a purer poetical stamp than any other of his productions. They were written as his mind prompted, listening to the carolling of the bird, aloft in the azure sky of Italy; or marking the cloud as it sped across the heavens, while he floated in his boat on the Thames.

Das Gebiet der Sprachforschung des letzten Jahrhunderts hat, allgemein gesprochen, sein Bestes darin geleistet, Spracherscheinungen in ihrem Zusammenhange zu erkennen und in ihrer Regelmässigkeit darzustellen. Parallel dazu lief allerdings eine vorsichtiger gehaltene Bewegung, welche die gefundenen Erscheinungen auf die Frage des “Warum” hin zu prüfen und auf Grund ihrer inneren Notwendigkeit darzustellen sich bemühte. So kam es, dass schon seit den Zeiten eines Zeuss, Bopp und Grimm ernste Versuche von Deutungen wichtiger Lautgesetze gemacht wurden, die sich allerdings über den Radius eines “wohl” und “vielleicht” selten hinausbewegen konnten. Zu Ende des vergangenen Jahrhunderts mehrten sich auch jene Theorien, die wohlbekannte Lautgesetze, wie Umlaut, Ablaut und Lautverschiebung nach ihrer inneren Notwendigkeit zu erklären versuchten. Bei dem Emporkommen so vieler neuer Hilfswissenschaften ist es nur natürlich, dass wir bald ein “Sich Jagen” von Theorien beobachten können, was manchen Gelehrten vorsichtig, vielleicht auch skeptisch stimmte und damit von der Lösung der schönsten und schwierigsten Frage “Warum ändern sich Laute?” ferne hielt. Um so mehr muss man es dem Mut, vielleicht Opfermut einzelner Männer danken, trotzdem Lösungsmöglichkeiten angedeutet zu haben, die doch wenigstens die Forschung wach und rege erhielten.

The centenary of the death of Arthur Hallam, noted in England by a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement (September 14, 1933) and in America by an exhibition of Hallam's works in the Yale University Library (January, 1934), served as a reminder not so much of what we know of the youth who was so important an influence on Tennyson as of what we do not know fully, a partial ignorance which results from the difficulty with which the study of Hallam is attended. The “lost” poem here reprinted after more than a century is lost only in the sense in which nearly half the printed poems of Hallam are unknown because they are missing from the editions commonly available. When Hallam died in 1833 in his twenty-third year, he left behind him one small and now very scarce volume, privately printed in 1830, and other poems and essays, some of which were collected by his father, Henry Hallam the historian, and privately issued as the Remains of 1834. Most of this material, also edited by Henry Hallam, was privately printed in 1853, and this volume is the basis of such subsequent collections of Arthur Hallam's work as have appeared.

When the liberal journalist Fernández de Lizardi found himself barred from further discussion of political conditions, at the close of the first brief term of freedom of the press in Mexico in 1812, he turned to descriptions of manners and customs as a means of reaching his public, not with the intention of furnishing entertainment but, like Larra two decades later, with the hope of effecting reforms. Under cover of this type of material, which seemed perfectly harmless to the censors, he portrayed in his El Pensador mexicano, during 1813 and 1814, social and educational conditions as they then existed in the capital of the viceroyalty. When this avenue of expression was gradually closed to him after 1814 by the absolutist régime, Lizardi resorted to fiction; in his three realistic novels, picaresque in form but replete with costumbrista material, he accomplished for Mexico City what Mesonero Romanos futilely planned some years later to do for Madrid through the picaresque novel. Under the free press in 1820 Lizardi turned from fiction to a defense of the constitution; in El Conductor eléctrico he published many articles similar in tone and purpose to Miñano's Cartas, which appeared in Madrid in the same year; but he contributed nothing further toward the development of the satirical sketch on manners. When the more finished costumbrista article made its appearance in Mexico almost twenty years later, the revival of the form was due, not to native initiative, but to Spanish models. The Mexican literary periodicals in which these were published coincided both in content and in point of time with their Spanish prototypes; those in which fully developed costumbrista essays appear date, in the mother country from the opening, in Mexico from the close, of the third decade.

Yesterday Margaret Fuller returned home after making us a visit of three weeks,“ Emerson noted in his Journal on August 12, 1836. To this brief statement of fact he added these few words of characterization: ”A very accomplished and very intelligent person.“ She had sought for two years to make Emerson's acquaintance. On October 6, 1834, she had written that the Rev. Frederick Henry Hedge

Critics have analyzed at length the philosophy of ironic determinism held by Thomas Hardy, and they have been almost equally voluble in treating the irony that lies like a spinal column in the body of Joseph Conrad's writing. But although the critics have successfully summed up the philosophies of these writers, they have abstained from any satisfactory discussion of the methods of irony which Hardy and Conrad use to illustrate their concepts of irony. The two novelists use differing methods to bring out somewhat differing ideas on life, and I propose here to contrast their methods so as to bring out the distinctive qualities in the method of each.

It has long been suspected that melody plays a more important part in the structure of a poem than the broken and irregular contours of verbal pitch-patterns would seem to indicate. The fact that the voice almost never settles for more than one-twentieth of a second on one pitch, the constant and rapid movements of the melody of speech, the impossibility of representing a verbal melody in musical notation—all have tended to obscure the relation of melody to rhythmical structure. It has been observed, however, that poetic melodies tend to arrange themselves roughly in patterns which coincide with the line or the phrase, and that these patterns are often repetitive. It has also been noticed that the comma-rise and period-fall tend to emphasize the rhythm and to prepare a sort of cadence for the end of a poetic passage. To these functions of melody in verse form may now be added a third: riming words tend to be pronounced on the same pitch.

While Francis James Child was preparing the manuscript for the publication of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Svend Grundtvig sent to him, in the form of enclosures with letters dated August 25, 1877 and January 29, 1880, a numbered list of English and Scottish ballads arranged in the order which Grundtvig, at Child's earlier request, meant to propose as a proper sequence for publication. This list is printed in full in my Ballad Books and Ballad Men under the designation of the “Grundtvig-Child Index.” This index was prepared by Grundtvig mainly from two other manuscript indexes which he had drawn up many years before for convenient reference in his work with the Danish ballads. The first of the two, named Index A by Grundtvig himself, contained what he regarded at the time as a standard list of English and Scottish ballads. The second, named by him Index B, comprised ballads which he regarded for various reasons as questionable. Index A began in 1850; Index B appears to belong to approximately the same period. Between twenty and thirty years afterward, when Grundtvig prepared for Child's guidance the Grundtvig-Child Index, he admitted into it many ballads from Index B. In the interval he had obviously changed his mind or resolved his doubts as to the merits of a group of ballads originally regarded by him as distinctly secondary in value. It is to be observed, however, that, in his classifications for Child in the Grundtvig-Child Index, Grundtvig admits no ballad from Index B into his First Class, in his opinion the most ancient poems; on the other hand, he places a large number of pieces from Index B in his Fourth Class, “consisting of imitations of the old ballad style.” Whether, then, we take into account Grundtvig's earlier or his later judgment, Index B represents a secondary order of merit. Careful attention should be paid, meanwhile, to the variety of reasons which led Grundtvig, according to his own introductory note, to the formation of Index B. This index was to him in effect a sort of ballad purgatory, from which in the course of time he released such of the numbers as appeared to him worthy of liberation.

In dem kleinen Aufsatz “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit des Kunstwerks” vom Jahr 1798 führt Goethe den Nachweis, daß “das Kunstwahre und das Naturwahre völlig verschieden” sind, und daß die Verschiedenheit so weit geht, daß der Künstler keineswegs danach streben dürfe, daß sein Werk sich wie ein “Naturwerk” darstelle und einem solchen zum Verwechseln ähnlich sei. Die Beweisführung geht von der Oper aus, dem Kunstwerk, das nach seinem Wesen von Naturwahrheit denkbar weit entfernt sei, dessen Kunstwahrheit, aber, wenn man die Wirkung als Maßstab nimmt, sich nicht bestreiten lasse. Was aber für die Oper gelte, treffe mutatis mutandis auf alle Künste zu, sie erstrebten keine Wahrheit, keine äußere Gleichheit mit der Wirklichkeit, sondern nur eine auf ihren eignen inneren Gesetzen beruhende Wahrscheinlichkeit. So treffend die Ausführungen sind, so sind sie doch nicht erschöpfend, und man muß in der eingeschlagenen Richtung einen Schritt über Goethe hinaustun. Das Kunstwerk ist nicht nur keine bloße Nachahmung der Natur, sondern wenn es das wäre, wenn es nur einen in der Wirklichkeit vorhandenen Vorgang oder Gegenstand kopierte, so würde es damit aufhören, ein Kunstwerk zu sein. Die Photographie oder die Wachsfigur im Raritätenkabinet sollen der Wirklichkeit so ähnlich als möglich sein, sie werden mit der ausdrücklichen Absicht geschaffen, den Beschauer über ihre Nichtwirklichkeit zu täuschen. Diese Absicht lässt sich jedoch nur bis zu einem gewissen Grad durchführen, die Täuschung wird niemals vollkommen sein, und daraus ergibt sich, daß die Nachbildung mit Notwendigkeit hinter dem Vorbild zurückbleibt und im Vergleich mit ihm als etwas Unvollkommenes erscheint. Bei ihrer Betrachtung drängt sich der Vergleich mit dem Original, mit der Wirklichkeit, auf, und da dieser zu ihren Ungunsten ausfallen muß, so erweckt die Nachahmung in dem Beschauer eine Empfindung der Unzulänglichkeit, also grade das Gegenteil von dem reinen Lustgefühl, das das Kunstwerk hervorrufen soll.