As though from a sudden awareness of the ethical void in which we have been living since the first World War, a growing number of scholars, several among them Americans, have lately been turning their attention eagerly and fruitfully to the doctrine of the gentleman. They have studied its varied aspects in different national environments and have examined painstakingly its effects upon human conduct as this is reflected in the various literatures of Western Europe. A large segment of that vast aggregation of dust-laden volumes bearing the forbidding name “didactic literature” has been taken from library shelves and scanned anew in this effort to lay bare the minutest details of the doctrine. The initiator of this contemporary revival of interest in the ideals which nourished the gentleman appears to have been Maurice Magendie, whose study of the doctrine in seventeenth-century France gave rise to a healthy polemic regarding the appropriate scope and methods of literary history. This work was followed by Ruth Kelso's Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, a model of erudite scholarship especially rich in bibliographical lore. Fittingly enough in a German work of the totalitarian period, August Hoyler's Gentleman Ideal and Gentleman Erziehung, dealing with the doctrine in England, sets up the Führerprinzip as the nucleus of the ideal. J. E. Mason's Gentlefolk in the Making continues Kelso's investigations down into the eighteenth century. The Italian contribution to the doctrine has been summarily discussed by F. R. Bryson. Written in semi-popular vein, In Praise of Gentlemen expresses the nostalgic longing of H. E. Sedgwick for a return to the social ideals of our forefathers. Perhaps the most complete analysis of the workings of the doctrine is found in E. Wingfield-Stratford's Making of a Gentleman. The number of these investigations is alone sufficient to show the interest which the subject holds for the literary and social historian, in spite of the doubt cast in some quarters on the present vitality of the ideal of the gentleman as an active social force. There is good reason to believe that we shall presently witness attempts, based upon these studies, to reinterpret the literature of the Renaissance as a reflection, in part, of the workings of the doctrine upon the minds of authors as disparate as Rabelais and Shakespeare or Spenser and Cervantes. Recalling the fruitful results obtained during the past half-century from the application of the investigations of Renaissance Platonism to literary interpretation, who can doubt that a similar success awaits the scholar who will launch forth upon a similar quest concerning the literary influence exerted by the concept of the “perfect gentleman,” of which concept Platonic love was but a part, however important?

Many Italian dramatists of the sixteenth century were thoroughly convinced that ancient playwrights had attained the highest degree of excellence and felt, therefore, that the only thing remaining to do was to imitate their works and endeavor to come as near as possible to their perfection. Others, notwithstanding their equally sincere and profound admiration for the classics, either suggested or introduced into their plays certain innovations which they deemed necessary in the light of the new social order. When doing so, however, they sometimes used a great deal of caution and prudence, so as not to be too severely criticized by those who would not tolerate any departure from classical traditions.

Despite the intensive study of Thomas More during the last decade, a study stimulated by his canonization, by the fourth centenary of his martyrdom, and by the enthusiastic and scholarly work of A. W. Reed, R. W. Chambers, and other writers, there remain significant aspects of his life that have received comparatively little attention. In a stimulating paper published eight years ago, Marie Delcourt demonstrated that the “English” tradition of More biography, the tradition created by More's kinsfolk and devoted followers, represented a conscious attempt to emphasize his saintly qualities and those of his works which supported his claim to canonization. For this reason, these biographers gave little weight to More's humanist activities, his secular Latin writings, and his association with Erasmus, a dubious character from the point of view of the Counter-reformation. Aside from questions of bias, moreover, the period about which the “English” biographical tradition is least informative is that during which More was most interested in the humanities, since Roper, the primary source of the school of hagiographers, became More's son-in-law only after More had left academic study for the business of the royal court. The distortion created either by the ignorance or by the prejudice of More's early biographers, says Delcourt, has been repaired only partly by modern scholarship, and Chambers' account of Thomas More, though by far the best of recent studies, is nevertheless of the pattern laid down by Rastell, Roper, Harpsfield, and their followers. In the following pages, therefore, I have set down a few bits of information, some little known, others quite overlooked, which, in connection with the established circumstances of More's life, serve to emphasize the typically humanist character of his early career.

The war waged by the propagandists of Puritan extremism against the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline stages and the dramatists' counter-strategy of satiric portraiture that was often nothing more than gratuitous misrepresentation of the Puritan as a type are by now a familiar story to students of the Renaissance. How the case for comedy was restated in Caroline theatrical apologetics has not, however, been adequately set forth.

The story of the Troglodytes in “Letters 11—14” of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes is an allegory which deals with the problem of man's nature and its bearing on the origin and development of morality and society. The problem emerges from Montesquieu's treatment of the question whether society resulted from the natural benevolence, justice, and social instincts of man, or whether, on the contrary, it was the result of a compact of men devoid of a natural sense of justice. Montesquieu shows that the basis of the social instinct is natural equity; but his demonstration involves also—explicitly or implicitly—questions concerning man's state of nature, his primitive goodness, his knowledge of moral distinctions and obligations, his capability to act in a disinterested manner, the nature of virtue, and the relation of morality and religion.

Two recent studies, which ascribe to Rochester's Satyr against Mankind an originality which has long been in dispute, differ as to the nature and degree of that originality. V. de Sola Pinto is convinced that the Satyr “is a thoroughly original poem,” but he supports his opinion only with the observation that Rochester's poem has “a passionate vehemence which makes the carefully meditated art of Boileau's satire seem frigid.” Kenneth Murdock, in his recent biographical study of Rochester, treats the ideas of the poem as clues to Rochester's mind and thought, but he nevertheless refers to the Satyr as a “skilful adaptation of Boileau's verses.”

A panoramic view of hell's in training,
After the style of Virgil, and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

The extraordinary voyage and the journey to the moon, types of voyages imaginaires popular in French and English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are now recognized literary types, and their interesting connections with the development of science and of poetry have been studied. Another kind of imaginary voyage merits attention, one that goes back not only to Lucian, the grand parent of most of these fantasies, but still farther to that remote time when man, having evolved the idea of a world of life after death, first thought with an archaic grin of the discomfort his enemies might feel when they were sent by Death to his realm of shades and skeletons.

Literary studies seem frequently to convey the impression that the conte philosophique, as such, became practically a closed book after Voltaire, and that it is to be taken for granted as an eighteenth-century literary form. True, the conte had grown into prominence during a revolutionary era, when caustic impertinence of style had served to enhance its force. True also, sentiment was growing apace with the latter years of the eighteenth century, and this very quality might necessarily tend to preclude further development of such a formula. However, with full cognizance of this fact that sentiment was gaining favor, and that it would of itself tend to disintegrate a literary form essentially devoid of sympathy, one may still venture to present evidence that the conte was a living form long after the French Revolution, and in fact that it would appear to have continued a rather vigorous existence even into the first years of the nineteenth. A point made by M. Mornet seems pertinent. With reference to Voltairian and Rousseauistic influences which progressed simultaneously throughout an entire period, M. Mornet aptly asserts:

One of the earliest discoveries of the pioneer students of “pre-romanticism” was Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Phelps and Beers, who discussed only the Letters and the Moral and Political Dialogues, considered Hurd to have been in whole-hearted revolt against neo-classical ideas. Later scholars, taking into account his earlier writings, found both in these works and the Letters themselves certain opinions which seemed conventionally neo-classic; he therefore came to be represented either as a classicist converted to romanticism or as a writer who always wavered between the two positions. In general, his criticism was considered to have been mixed and fluctuating. He was thought to have had no consistent position, but to be important insofar as he anticipated romantic views.

In no other field of writing save poetry did Johnson spend so much of his career as in biography—from the Life of Sarpi in 1738 to the Lives of the Poets in 1781. And in few of his undertakings was he so successful. Most of his biographical writing was done to order, and it frequently suffers from haste, but from first to last it shows his characteristic excellences, his eagerness and facility in generalization, his piercing analysis of character.

The dating of Shelley's prose essays and fragments is at present very uncertain. Mary Shelley's dates in the preface to Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments, 1840, are, for the most part, conjectures. W. M. Rossetti in A Memoir of Shelley gives briefly, without systematic evidence, the dates of some of the fragments. Forman and the Julian editors follow, with some exceptions, Rossetti's dating in their editions of Shelley's prose. Koszul laid a more secure foundation for the dating of some of Shelley's prose. His study of the external evidence of the MSS in the Bodleian notebook has resulted in considerable progress. The present writer has approached the problem of dating Shelley's prose from a study of the internal evidence which consists, in a large measure, of the study of the relation of Shelley's prose to his reading as found in the Journal of Shelley and Mary, Shelley's letters, and other biographical sources. Shelley's quotations, references, and allusions to his reading supply valuable information for dating. Some of the prose fragments, hitherto undated, are assigned a date, while the date of others is changed, confirmed, or given more precise limits. It should be acknowledged, however, that Shelley's wide variety of reading, and the extraordinary tenacity of his memory make for caution in dating works too confidently on the basis of internal evidence. Until such time as Shelley's prose MSS are studied as minutely, thoroughly, and systematically as the MSS of the Bodleian notebook, the dates of the fragments given in the following notes may serve as tentative points d'appui for a study of the development of Shflley's thought.

Die “Französischen Zustände” gehören zu den weniger gelesenen Werken Heines. Sie sind hauptsächlich bekannt durch die “Vorrede,” die freilich nichts mit dem, worauf der Titel des Buches hinweist, zu tun hat, sondern sich ausschlieβlich mit Deutschland beschäftigt. Die “Vorrede” wurde zuletzt geschrieben und erst im Oktober 1832 an den Verleger gesandt. Da fast die ganze Korrespondenz Heines mit Campe aus dieser Zeit fehlte, bestanden über die sehr verworrenen Umstände der Entstehung und Veröffentlichung der “Vorrede” bisher groβe Miβverständnisse. Erst durch die Verwertung der noch unveröffentlichten Briefe Campes an Heine, welche mir durch die Güte des Bankiers Albert Strauβ zur Verfügung stehen und welche diese Angelegenheit eingehend behandeln, ist es möglich, im Folgenden eine abschlieβende Aufklärung zu geben.

Despite several assertions to the contrary, Kleist had essentially an unphilosophic mind. He was penetrating and searching, of course, but childlike withal. Consider, for example, his fervent belief in the absolute validity of his rather naïve allegorical interpretations of nature, particularly the image of the vaulted arch which he describes in a letter to Wilhelmine. Or consider again the pedantic and amusing Fragen zu Denkübungen für Wilhelmine von Zenge. They might have been written by a precocious boy, and yet they were actually written in full seriousness by an extremely intelligent man, whose mind, in some respects, remained that of a child, poetic and unsophisticated. It remained absolute and exclusive in its judgments also, pursuing a premise to its last bitter conclusions. What the tension was in this uncompromising personality is generally recognized: in German its two poles are called Gefühl and Verstand. We may call them respectively, feeling and understanding, heart and head, intuitional knowledge and logical deduction, the spontaneous principle and the rational principle. These terms should be understood as simply and naively as Kleist explained the egocentric dilemma in his famous letter to Wilhelmine.

During the four years preceding Carlyle's commencement of The French Revolution his ideas on history and historiography underwent a gradual but complete change. In 1830–32 the doctrine of natural supernaturalism convinced him that history was not what the Eighteenth Century had thought it: “Philosophy teaching by Examples,” but “the true Poetry,” “the sole Poetry possible,” —that history and poetry were the same thing. By 1833, in spite of certain ethical and aesthetic doublings, he managed to see with considerable clarity that these two were divine and that Poetry, History, and Religion were really fused into one, and wrote “The Diamond Necklace” as an historical experiment which should reflect this fusion.

On April 6, 1878, Lady Saxelbye of Croome Castle made her debut in literary society. On February 7, 1884, Lady Emmeline of Stroome Castle was similarly introduced to the public. And early in 1891, the Duchess of Hamptonshire, of Batton Castle, was presented to the literary world. The lady's sponsor in each case was Thomas Hardy. Half a century has now gone by since the Duchess made her bow, but not until the week in which I begin this report (April 1942) was the surprising fact discovered that the Duchess and the Lady Emmeline were none other than Lady Saxelbye in disguise. After all these years, evidence has come to hand that Croome and Stroome and Batton are Hardy's names for the same castle, and that he told his story three times, disguising the repetitions by a change of names. The bibliographical facts may be briefly stated.