Hope this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp.

The Pun, Addison notes, is “a Sound, and nothing but a Sound.” Lamb elaborates: a pun “is a pistol let off at the ear”; it has, he says, “an ear-kissing smack with it.” But the position is not entirely sound; like “The Echo,” a poem which Hood rejected, it “will not answer.” Any hearing on the pun must first admit the pun effect, which precedes analysis and shows that we distinguish the pun semantically, not aurally. The sound is only echo to the sense, and through reflection we conclude that the pun effect is a function of multiple meaning. But even the best pun, whatever that may be, when it must be explained fails to elicit those unusual noises which are the punster's usual reward; the pun effect, it seems, results from some kind of greatly accelerated or simultaneous perception of multiple meanings. Psychology is here deeply involved—for any kind of meaning perception is singularly difficult to analyze—and such tangled affairs are most wisely avoided. A more reasonable approach lies in study of the conditions permitting and the significance attending this curious and characteristic phenomenon; for the pun effect hints at larger matters.

Since the second world war, journalistic critics and generalizing cultural pundits have been pointing out to us that serious French literature is headed, on the one hand, toward an eventually sterile period of realistic despair, and, on the other, toward an intensification of difficult writing characterized by a kind of supreme indifference to audience on the part of the creator. Examples to prove their point are not lacking. There would seem to be, however, at least one other trend in recent French writing which, although owing something, perhaps, in the way of formation or occasion for reaction to the two types mentioned, falls not at all into such categories. For lack of a better name, and in order to avoid painful jargon, this literature might best be called a literature of Things.

Quizá porque las ideas estéticas de Abel Martín han ofrecido mejor oportunidad al crítico y al estudioso o quizà por las dificultades inherentes a toda poesía, el hecho es que los poemas publicados en De un cancionero apócrifo no han recibido todavía la debida atención. Pero precisamente porque sabía Machado con exactitud consciente el derrotero de la poesía, la de sus últimos años es màs certera y acertada. Y nunca màs que en “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela,” un poema de extraña complejidad que se había publicado por separado en la Revista de Occidente del mes de noviembre de 1931. Las preocupaciones estéticas de la prosa de Machado afloran en sus últimos versos que desarrollan a veces los conceptos filosóficos de Abel Martín y Juan de Mairena, quienes habían asimilado a su vez no pocas de las intuiciones del juvenil Antonio Machado. Pero “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela” no trata de definir lo poético, sino de senalar y dibujar los contomos de la poesía del autor.

No Writer ever revised more carefully or used his rough notes and sketches more economically than Joyce. Each work grows out of its predecessor and prepares the way for a succeeding work already contemplated. Ulysses was first conceived as a short story for Dubliners, the Portrait is a prologue to Ulysses, and many of the themes and characters of Finnegans Wake are adumbrated in the earlier works. Even Chamber Music, which appears to be unrelated to Joyce's great achievements, can be shown to foreshadow the action of A Portrait and to hold the key to many passages in Ulysses and the Wake. There is a sense in which one can say that James Joyce wrote only one book, a continuous effort to endow his own life and the Dublin of his youth with a universal significance. T. S. Eliot has emphasized this continuity in his foreword to the catalogue of the 1949 Joyce exhibition in Paris: “Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.”

Major Barbara can be considered the epitome of Shaw's total dramatic output. It embodies most of the social ideas and stage techniques of his earlier plays, and it distinctly foreshadows the ideology of the remaining four decades of his literary life. Moreover, Major Barbara is probably Shaw's most religious work; certainly it is the play of his which deals most explicitly with the threefold theme of sin, repentance, and salvation. (Back to Methuselah is less explicit, more diluted, as a play about religion.) Hence to label Major Barbara as Shaw's “Divine Comedy” is meant to be neither facetious nor hyperbolic, but to indicate a new point of departure from which to view the play. At the same time, to use the lens of the Divine Comedy to re-examine Major Barbara is not to imply that the two works are necessarily equal in artistic merit or that they are even fully comparable. Yet the Dantean perspective can, I think, help us to see Shaw's play in a new and brighter light, and by so doing clarify its central position in the Shavian canon as well as its possible stature as one of the great works of the twentieth century.

Nietzsche began as an admirer of Luther and the German Reformation. The age of Luther ranked as high in his early opinion as the age of Goethe and Beethoven. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on, this favorable attitude toward Luther underwent a strong transformation. In the five years from 1878 to 1883, Nietzsche's second creative period, Luther emerged as a highly questionable figure, even as a most regrettable event in the history of German and European thought and civilization. But all these severe pronouncements on Luther were only a prelude to the scathing denunciations to come in Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings.

Zola's relation to music has been discussed by various critics and biographers, all of whom readily admit that he was not in any way a technically competent musician. Beyond this obvious fact, they split into two sharply opposed camps, one of which states that, in spite of a transfer of his theatrical ambitions to the lyric theater late in his life, he actually knew little and cared less about the art of music, while the other insists that he did have a genuine interest in music and an innate though untrained sensitivity to it. Both camps are largely biographical in their approach, and in spite of their differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree on the obvious facts—that as a schoolboy at Aixen-Provence, Zola played a clarinet in the band (in order to make himself eligible for certain special privileges enjoyed by its members), but gave it up after he went to Paris; that when collaborating with the composer Alfred Bruneau on an operatic version of L'AUaque du moulin, in 1893, he bought a piano (or a harmonium); that at about the same time he began to attend concerts, which he had previously ignored; that he questioned his friends Henry Ceard and Bruneau about the mysteries of music and got a good deal of information from them; that his sense of pitch was poor; that his interest, whether great or small, was largely confined to vocal music; and that he was influenced in some way by the ideas and works of Wagner, though opinions as to the date and extent of this influence vary widely.

In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James tells us that “the simplest account” of the origin of this novel is that it “proceeded quite directly … from the habit and interest of walking the streets.” He goes on to tell how his perambulations suggested to him the creation of “some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,” a product of those streets yet capable of profiting from all of the civilization that London afforded—all the “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, … but … with every door of approach shut in his face.” In sum, “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.”

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.

In the same sense that Dante's great poem can be said to derive its meaning from a Catholic, and Milton's from a Protestant, ethos—so Browning's The Ring and the Book derives its meaning from the relativist ethos predominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. The first sign of the poem's relativism is in Browning's use of dramatic monologues to tell his story. For though he does not entirely succeed, his aim at least in telling the same story eleven times over through ten dramatic monologues and his own account in Book i, was to replace the objective view of events of traditional drama and narrative with points of view. Such a method can be justified only on the relativist assumption that truth cannot be apprehended in itself but must be “induced” from particular points of view, and that there can be sufficient difference among the points of view to make each repetition interesting and important as a psychological fact.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

No reader of John Forster's Life would suspect that Dickens was a good friend of George Henry Lewes for thirty-two years, almost as long as he knew Forster himself. In the first two volumes of the book Lewes' name is mentioned only twice, once in the cast of a play, and once in a page-long list of “other acquaintances”: “Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby.… ” J. W. T. Ley, the editor of Forster's Life of Dickens, thought that this shabby allusion was inserted to placate Lewes,

Faust's Pact with the devil surely presents the most baffling of all the problems raised by Goethe's poem. We are here at the very heart of the myth which the action of the drama illustrates. Goethe has used the wager between God and Mephistopheles and the pact between Faust and the Devil to symbolize the issues which are at stake in Faust's career on earth. In the background we see God waiting patiently for the moment when His trust in Faust will be vindicated. On this vital theme of wager and pact, if anywhere, we have a right to expect unequivocal clarity: on the terms of the pact, on the positions taken by the contracting parties, and on the outcome of the conflict between them. Yet, if we are to believe the critics and commentators, Goethe has hung a veil of confusion over this whole area, so that we are prevented from catching even a glimpse of his intentions. For the last fifty years critical opinion has been sharply divided on the fundamental question as to which of the two protagonists emerges victorious.1 Some hold with Faust; others either side with Mephistopheles or believe that the duel ends in a draw, and that Faust is saved only by an act of grace, which is bestowed on him as by a deus ex machina.

Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners, though clear enough on the surface, has raised various questions as to its subtler meaning and its purpose. In the eighteenth century Thomas Sheridan asserted that this essay was in fact “a very strong, though covert attack, upon the power of the Whigs,” written to encourage Queen Anne to dispense with their services and to form a Tory ministry. That Swift had any such highly contrived political intent seems doubtful. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he later cited the Project among other works as evidence that, even while associated with the Whigs, he had publicly expressed opposition to their lowchurch position. Another question raised is: to what extent, if at all, was Swift being satiric in the Project? Most contemporary scholars, like Herbert Davis and Ricardo Quintana, have viewed it as an entirely serious production in which little if any irony appears, but William B. Ewald feels that, to some degree, the author composed it with his tongue in his cheek. Finally, did Swift have a personal motive in publishing this work? We know that for some time before its appearance he had been endeavoring to obtain preferment. It also seems pretty clear that one obstacle to his advancement was the fact that he was known as the author of A Tale of a Tub. One may strongly suspect, therefore, that he hoped the Project would help to counteract the damaging effect on his reputation of the earlier work and prove that, besides being a wit who had dared to satirize religious institutions and practices, he was also a clergyman genuinely devoted to the welfare of church and state. If this was his motive, however, did he have any further reason for believing that his anonymously printed pamphlet might serve to advance his fortunes? Some light may be shed upon this point and upon others raised by the Project if we consider 1) certain influences that led Swift to write it, 2) the emphasis in the essay, and 3) his position at the time he composed it.

Epicene, or The Silent Woman, which Jonson's own century admired perhaps more than any other of his plays, has suffered the fate of becoming more instead of less enigmatic as time passes. Recent critics, more bothered than Jonson's contemporaries over the question of what, finally, the play is all about, have drifted into debates over whether it is a comedy or a farce, whether it is moral or immoral (or amoral), whether its prevailing tone is one of gaiety or harshness. One can lump many of these questions together and rephrase them in terms of Jonson's own dramatic development by asking to what extent Epicene preserves the stern morality of the earlier plays and to what extent it shares the geniality and relaxed moral temper of the later plays as typified by Bartholomew Fair. Probably the answer is that as a transitional play it combines both, and not always in the happiest fashion. The gaiety skates uncomfortably close to sadism; the judicial sternness, rejected in the person of Morose, is rejected with such supererogatory fierceness that it attracts a strong countercurrent of sympathy to it. The victory of Truewit over Morose represents Jonson's attempt to assert the values of the world and the flesh over the consolations of philosophy. But Jonson is still too committed to the philosopher's study to abandon it casually, and still too repelled by the vanity of courts to embrace it without a shudder. The result is that what he attempts to affirm on one level he denies on another. The effort to substitute an indulgent, “realistic” account of the world in place of his more habitual and more deeply felt satirical view produces ambiguities of tone which trouble the whole structure of the play.

Forty years ago Tatlock published a short paper on “Puns in Chaucer,” but since then very little has been said on the subject, until just recently appeared Helge Kokeritz' article on “Rhetorical Word Play in Chaucer.” Tatlock pointed out a dozen puns, together with a few “coarse” ones not directly specified. In 1892 Lounsbury had said that Chaucer was “free from these verbal quibbles”; he saw only one, Calkas-calculynge. Before Tatlock, also, Skeat had noted a few, and apropos of style (F 105 f.) commented: “such puns are not common in Chaucer.” Similarly Robinson, apropos of philosophre (A 297) said: “Puns are unusual in Chaucer and it is not always easy to determine whether they are intentional”; but he added as “more or less clear” six of Tatlock's and one of his own, the Latin play on eructavit (D 1934). Preston mentioned six or seven in passing (Chaucer, 1952). Kokeritz conceded that real “double entendres” (significatio, or pun in the modern sense) appear in Chaucer, “though not very often.” He instanced a baker's dozen, along with a few more already noted by others, which he found unacceptable.

The starting point of this paper is the following passage from the troubadour Guilhem Ademar's poem “De ben gran joia chantera” (P.-C. 202,5) recently published by Kurt Almqvist: