In his What Happens in Hamlet, J. D. Wilson studies Hamlet's melancholy in the light of Renaissance beliefs, and especially those indicated in Bright's Treatise of Melancholie, to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as well as turns of phrase. Significantly, as Wilson shows, the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously.” We can reasonably agree with this author that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is important for an understanding of Hamlet's character and motivation, in which the thread of melancholy evidently connects several important elements. In the Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare's play, Wilson mentions another source for a melancholy Hamlet: the Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest, which is recognized as the most immediate extant source of the play. Belleferest does, says Wilson, make a “definite reference to Amleth's [Hamlet's] over-great melancholy,” following a hint already to be found in the version of Saxo Grammaticus (Belleforest's source); but Wilson does no more than call attention to the reference, without noting Belleforest's additional remarks on the subject, and specifically denying to either source any other contributions to Hamlet's character. It will be the purpose of this article to show that not only the melancholy complex, but also other important facets of Hamlet's character have a probable basis in Saxo and Belleferest, and especially in the latter.

Although the Oxford-educated Thomas Traherne is indeed “thoroughly representative” of the “salient ideas” of the Cambridge Platonists, and without a doubt should be classed with them philosophically, he is most akin emotionally to that maverick among the Cambridge men, Peter Sterry. Yet ideological differences separate him from Sterry, and even the emotional intensity which seems to link them takes radically variant forms. The case is the same with Henry More, whose work we know Traherne read, and whose spiritual autobiography resembles Traherne's: their responses to the new ideas of space were remarkably alike in feeling, yet Traherne took issue vigorously with More's theories of space and deity, and in general lacked More's intellectual extravagance in other theological matters. We may, then, speak best of affinities with, rather than debts to, the Cambridge Platonists: the portrait of Traherne's mind shows an eclectic intellect and—more important in shaping Traherne's persistent individuality—original, highly personal feelings.

C'est en 1664 que les amateurs de théâtre pénétrèrent pour la première fois dans le monde de Jean Racine. Ils avaient vu l'année précédente la Sophonisbe de Corneille, et devaient, cette même année, applaudir (ou bouder) son Othon. Le succès de la pièce du nouveau dramaturge fut honorable; on joua douze fois, du 20 juin au 18 juillet, sa Thébaïde. Le public avait paru apprécier ce que Corneille appelait, non sans hauteur, “une docte et sublime complaisance au goût des délicats, qui veulent de l'amour partout. Les critiques, dès cette confrontation, sentirent qu'une crise se préparait: public et lettrés allaient avoir à prendre parti dans une lutte entre deux conceptions opposées du conflit tragique. Les adversaires ne tardent pas, en effet, à faire appel à leurs admirateurs. La déclaration de Corneille, c'est Sophonisbe qui s'en est chargée, dans une de ses premières répliques:

Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.

Un Critique a récemment mis en relief ce qu'il y avait chez Saint-Simon du comportement d'un voyeur, qui observe clandestinement les hommes afin de démasquer leurs mobiles les plus secrets. Il nous semble que la remarque est également valable pour La Bruyère qui, de sa loge privilégiée chez les Condés, considère les hommes subrepticement (on ne savait pas que ce modeste précepteur préparait un ouvrage sur les mœurs du siècle). Prenant sa revanche des mortifications qu'il a subies dans un monde où il demeure un étranger, La Bruyère savoure le spectacle pitoyable et risible de ces hommes qui défilent devant lui. Notons par ailleurs que ces misanthropes ne s'en tiennent pas à une contemplation passive des vices de leurs prochains: se décidant à sortir de sa solitude et de son silence, le voyeur peut se transformer en historien ou en moraliste. Sans pour autant songer à revenir à la méthode critique de Sainte-Beuve ou de Taine, il nous paraît essentiel de souligner dès l'abord l'influence qu'a dÛ avoir sur La Bruyère cette optique particulière sous laquelle le monde de Versailles et de Chantilly se présenta à, lui (et cela, dès sa jeunesse, c'est-à-dire bien avant qu'il eût la possibilité de l'observer de près).

Ever since 1869, when William Lee inserted them in his bibliography of Defoe, in Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (i, xxxii), two imaginary voyages to the moon and a letter from the Man in the Moon have been incorporated in the canon of Defoe's writings as separate and distinct from his main lunar voyage, The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). These three are A Journey to the World in the Moon; A Second, and more Strange Voyage to the World in the Moon, both noted in the head title as “By the Author of the true Born English-man”; and A Letter from the Man in the Moon to the Author of the True Born English-man. All three were dated 1705, and all were printed first in London; then at least the first was reprinted at Edinburgh by James Watson in Craig's-closs. Each is a single sheet, a quarto of four pages, in double columns. In including these three publications as independent items in the Defoe canon, Lee has been followed by all the British and American bibliographers of Defoe: by Thomas Wright, William P. Trent, Henry C. Hutchins, and John Robert Moore.

God is now conceived of as something outside man and man's handiwork, and it follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made … Night will fall upon man's wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing. He had discovered, or half-discovered, that the world is round and one of many like it, but now he must believe that the sky is but a tent spread above a level floor, and that he may be stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation, blot out the knowledge or half-knowledge that he has lived many times, and think that all eternity depends upon a moment's decision.—Yeats, A Vision

Lionel Trilling has observed that Little Dorrit is “about the will and society” and that “the whole energy of the imagination in the novel is directed toward finding the non-personal will in which shall be our peace.” Little Dorrit is “not only the Child of the Marshalsea ... but also the Child of the Parable, the negation of the social will.” Professor Trilling's comment, enlightening over a large area of Dickens' work, seems to me especially applicable to the first and most germinal of Dickens' “dark novels,” Bleak House; and I want here to approach Bleak House through Dickens' analysis of will and society.

For a long time, the luxuriance of baroque imagery so conspicuous in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins has tended to obscure one of its fundamental characteristics. His is a poetry of statement, intellectually formulated even when at emotional white heat, and scarcely at all, in any usual sense, poetry of suggestion or atmosphere. He could not have permitted himself to write otherwise even if he had wished, and he did not wish. Though obviously the poetry does not lie in the statement—he himself was explicit about this—still, when he found that even Robert Bridges had continual difficulty in making out his literal meaning, he resolved, he said, “to prefix short prose arguments” to some of his work. “These too,” he added, “will expose me to carping, but I do not mind.”

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:
Let it cry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Henry V in.i.3-14

Gellert beendet den ersten Teil seines Romans mit der Rückkehr des totgeglaubten Grafen von G. aus sibirischer Gefangenschaft. Das zufällige und glückliche Wiedersehen des Grafen mit seiner Gemahlin ruft jedoch einige “Bestürzung” hervor, denn die Gräfin hatte sich inzwischen mit dem Herrn R., dem besten Freund des Grafen, vermählt. Herr R. fühlt sich deshalb genötigt, dem zurückgekehrten Freund folgendes Bekenntnis zu machen: “Ich habe Sie durch die unschuldigste Liebe so sehr beleidigt, als ob ich Ihr Feind gewesen wäre. Ich habe Ihnen Ihre Gemahlin entzogen … Ihre Gegenwart aber verdammt nunmehr das sonst so tugendhafte Band.” Die Gräfin von G., nicht weniger bekümmert und verstört, eröffnet den zweiten Teil ihrer Lebensgeschichte mit einer ähnlich selbstquälerischen Reflexion: “und eben zu der Zeit, da er mich so brünstig geliebt und alles für mich gefühlt hat, was nur sein Elend hat vergrößern können, habe ich in den Armen eines andern Gemahls der Freuden der Liebe und des Lebens genossen. Wie viel tausend Thränen hat mich dieser Gedanke schon gekostet, und wie oft bin ich vor meiner unschuldigen Liebe zu dem Herrn R. als vor einem Verbrechen erröthet” (iv, 256 f.).

Rather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.