In recent decades the Comic Spirit, after a century of sleeping-sickness, has been struggling with imperfect success to reassert herself in literature. And to her renewed vitality, it seems, is due something of the fresh interest in Byron—her recreant son. His poetry has not yet had its full and clear day. It was mistily worshipped by his contemporaries. The Victorians partly mispraised it and partly reacted from it. The poetic spirit of our own time, rejecting Victorianism and casting back for inspiration to the early writers of the century, has loved the Shelleyan dream and the “colorful” imagery of Keats. But Byron could offer neither. Moreover, though recent writers have re-created a cult and a cant of free individualism that is often reminiscent of Byron, they have patently desired not to be Byronic—so strongly has this poet inoculated his posterity against Byronism! Critics and interpreters of Byron have recently done him some good service. But they have allowed his poetry and his personality to remain too closely intertwined; and sometimes they have continued, in one guise or another, the legend of his Titanism. Matthew Arnold, while professing a balanced and disillusioned view of Byron, did much to strengthen the illusion that he was essentially, or potentially, a Titan. In 1881 Arnold still felt so strongly the pull of his boyhood's hero that, adopting for once a Swinburnian hyperbole, he insisted on Byron's “splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.” How ironic that word “imperishable” appears when Arnold goes on, in maturer vein, to state that Byron “has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future”; and that he “shattered himself to pieces” in attacking the bourgeois cant of the earlier nineteenth century! For sincerity and strength are “imperishable” in proportion as they cut through the passing forms to the perennial forces of human cant. Olympus itself is antagonist of the true Titan. He makes no compromise with its minions and, when he falls, falls deep. Byron made the compromise called “Byronism,” and fell—into the arms of fairly congenial Guiccioli, “with her sleek tresses” (as Leigh Hunt pictures her) and “none of her graces entirely free from art.”

There has been a great deal of discussion as to whether or not the three novels which Wilhelm Raabe composed during his period of residence in Stuttgart (Der Hunger pastor, 1864; Abu Telfan, 1868; Der Schüdderump, 1870) constitute a genuine trilogy. One may cavil at this transference of a specialized term from the drama to three novels to which it is not wholly applicable. On the other hand, one may defend this term as a convenient, though not entirely accurate designation of the essential unity of these three novels.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London, 1796) is a passage connecting two other interesting people, and not hitherto noticed so far as I find. It reads:

That the discussion of the problem of divorce in The Beaux' Stratagem, is unique in Restoration Drama, both in its tone and in the arguments employed, has long been recognized by students of Farquhar. Strauss finds in the play a growing thoughtfulness regarding manners and institutions, and a perceptible alteration of moral tone. He is inclined to question, however, whether we are to conclude from the single instance presented, that Farquhar actually meant to countenance divorce by mutual consent. William Archer, in a considerable discussion of the divorce phenomenon, is inclined to treat the matter more seriously. He finds in the comedy Farquhar's firm belief that a breach of the marriage vow is by no means the only immorality possible in the marital relationship. “The scenes are,” he says, “in fact, a plea for what Farquhar regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a more rational law of divorce … He admitted a moral standard, and subjected social conventions, not to mere cynical persiflage, but to the criticism of reason.”

To Professor Ward the divorce motive is equally puzzling. “Some of the incidents are dubious, including one at the close—a separation by mutual consent, which throws a glaring light on the view taken by the author and his age on the sanctity of the marriage tie.”

The period following the French Revolution was deeply interested in “the people” as a mass conception, in all that belonged to them and all that they created. It was in this period that theorists on the origin of law, customs, religion, language, literature—particularly the folk-song and the folktale—liked to advocate the doctrine of spontaneous, unconscious growth “from the heart of the people,” as the phrase went. Such conceptions of origin had their critics from the first; but they remained more or less orthodox throughout the nineteenth century, and they still have foothold in both England and America. They have, however, receded in the wake of more reserved second-thoughts about human nature, along with the recession of the “romantic” vehemence, and of the Hegelian philosophy of the “over-soul,” and of our own demagogic admiration of the undifferentiated demos.

A comparison of the mob in Zola's novel Germinal, 1885, and in Hauptmann's drama, The Weavers, 1892, reveals many points of resemblance. Some of these grow essentially out of the general similarity of theme, others represent more incidental details; yet the outward resemblance is greatly offset by the fact that the miners and weavers as such are fundamentally different. Nevertheless, both authors portray the abject poverty of a class of laborers—poverty due essentially to merciless exploitation on the part of unscrupulous employers who have degraded and virtually enslaved their employes. In both cases these miserable starvelings revolt against a tyranny which would suck the very blood from their veins and the marrow from their bones; under the momentary leadership of virtual outsiders they resort to violence in their protest against starvation wages. In varying degree, as determined by the greater epic breadth of the novel on the one hand and by the narrower scope of the drama on the other hand, details are given of individual and general misery, decrepitude, degeneracy, despair, long-continued suffering and of a subsequent flaring up into violent rebellion against the unendurable.

It is so much easier to understand a simple character, one that runs true to form, than to comprehend a peculiarly complex one, that I have always had a good deal of sympathy for poor old Timothy Shelley, weeping on the neck of his son's friend, Hogg, at Miller's Hotel in London, just after the Oxford expulsion. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, his poetic talent aside, was no ordinary scion to issue from the sedate portals of an English country home. Bred a Tory, he aligned himself with the Radical Reformers; reared in the Church of England, he published a tract on The Necessity of Atheism before he was twenty. Nor does the paradox end here. As the author of Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion he seems to us a “spirit that walked in a flaming robe of verse;” but the always-worldly Byron turned over to this spirit of fire and dew his financial negotiations with the wholly substantial John Murray; and this citizen of worlds of unimaginable beauty could turn in a moment from the composition of Alastor to discuss with the impecunious Godwin the least expensive means of borrowing on collateral.

William Hazlitt is read to-day as an essayist and a critic of literature. His art-criticism, except for a few papers preserved in his best known books, is familiar to few readers, and to them it will probably remain a matter of curious interest rather than of serious concern. Before Hazlitt's day even, the foundations had been laid, in the works of Wincklemann and Lessing, of a more precise study of aesthetic principles, which was destined to make obsolete most of the eighteenth-century treatises on art; with their works Hazlitt was, like most other English writers of his day, unacquainted. He was thus so far removed from the best thought of his time that his opinions on art have, for the student of aesthetic theory, little historical importance. The archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the rise of impressionism in painting, the spread in all quarters of art and criticism of what may be somewhat roughly termed the naturalistic movement, and especially the development of a more strict and comprehensive study of aesthetic principles, have combined to make large sections of Hazlitt's theoretic discussions unacceptable to-day.

Henry James tells us in his preface to the revised edition of his novels, with what interest and emotion he renewed acquaintance with his book, Roderick Hudson, after a quarter of a century had elapsed since its first appearance, in 1875. He takes up its failings and its defects, of which he is fully conscious and which he sees with very keen perspicacity. He writes:

Among the articles in Fraser's Magazine during its early years are a number which contain parallelisms to the acknowledged work of Carlyle. Many of these treat more or less fully Carlyle's favorite theme of the Vates, the Poet, the Man. Most of them show strong German influence, with a regard both for transcendental philosophy and aesthetic criticism.

In an age of questioning like ours, literary definitions can as little as anything else escape being called to the bar to give an account of themselves, and of their right to exist; and some, no doubt, would say that the case has already been decided against them. Personally, after having engaged in framing a few of my own, I do not share that view; and what I wish to do here is to consider briefly what gives literary definitions their validity, and what considerations ought to guide us in framing them. The task will involve some attention to the general speculative background against which purely literary problems are relieved, and may bring together some aspects which will derive at least relative novelty from their juxtaposition.

In collecting stories and songs from the Jamaica negroes during the summer“ of 1919 and the winter of 1921, I was constantly on the lookout for traditional English ballads, some of which I hoped to find handed down in their older forms as a result of two hundred and fifty years of English occupation of the island. A fair number of secondary ballads were easily accessible, some of them preserved with an English intonation which proved them to have been memorized from cultivated English singers. Among these were the Wurlean Woman, and the ballad of Adinah sung to the same tune as the New England ballad of Springfield Mountain. But of traditional ballads of the better class, both words and music, I secured only the widespread song of Little Musgrove. Naturally I asked myself what had become of old ballad forms in Jamaica.

In one form or another, the issue of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is forever recurring in French literature. Whether the various forms of literature, and in particular poetry and the drama, shall follow the models offered by classical antiquity or shall resolutely draw their inspiration from contemporary civilization, is a question that has more than once caused passionate argument and unloosed floods of eloquence. The problem rose again toward the middle of the last century. It has been customary to say that there was at that time a reaction against the romanticists (i. e. the moderns) resulting in the establishment of the Parnassian school whose spirit was largely classical. That, however, is not the whole truth. At the time when Leconte de Lisle, Ménard, and others were struggling for recognition as poets, there existed also a group which, far from condemning the romanticists as too modern, considered them not sufficiently modern, and called for a reform in French poetry through a utilization of modern industry as a source of inspiration. The contrast between this group and the Parnassians is even more striking than that between either of them and the romanticists. The chief object of this article is to show how the suggestion of a rapprochement between poetry and modern industry came to be made, and to relate the controversy which followed. The latter centered in a book little known today: Les Chants Modernes by Maxime Du Camp. The secondary object of this paper is, therefore, to place Les Chants Modernes in their true historical light.

Nearly everyone knows that behind Browning's Childe Roland lies a vast contributory reservoir of chivalric romance. The hero of the poem is obviously engaged in a quest, drawn out through a number of years and attended by continual disappointments, a quest which he shares with a band of other adventurers who have been lost in their attempts to achieve. Roland's coming to the Tower, under these circumstances, while it may not be duplicated in any one romance, is patently a chivalric enterprise of a familiar type. Our recognition of this fact makes the poem much less the mystery that early commentators found it. And yet many puzzling details still remain to be explained.