In a volume of miscellaneous manuscripts at the British Museum, placed at random and inconspicuously among larger folio leaves, is a set of notes headed “Sterne.” The notes were written by Joseph Hunter, the nineteenth-century antiquary and literary historian, and they came to the British Museum with Hunter's other papers shortly after his death in 1861. In view of the abundant information about Sterne's private life which the notes contain, it is surprising that this item has remained unindexed and that it is not mentioned in the catalogue description of the volume. In the absence of such references, very likely only an occasional reader who has happened upon them has seen these notes, and, since the major biographies of Laurence Sterne make no use of distinct details which Hunter provides, it is quite possible that none of Sterne's biographers have encountered Hunter's information during the past century. At present, our familiarity with the early years of Sterne's marriage and his residence at Sutton-on-the-Forest is rather limited, based as it is upon isolated public records, some letters, fugitive anecdotes, and the unflattering and sometimes vicious account written by John Croft. No impartial memoirs with any claim to authenticity or wealth of details have until now seemed available. Thus, the intimate account of Sterne which Hunter has given presents to modern scholars an unexpected and promising opportunity to gain new insight into the life and, perhaps, into the work of one of England's most unusual writers. A transcript of Hunter's notes appears below, followed by a brief evaluation of them according to our present knowledge of Laurence Sterne.

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”

Almost everything would seem to have been said that can be said about sprung rhythm—not that authorities agree. On the contrary, there is every sort of disparity in the accounts of its nature and origin. That Gerard Manley Hopkins invented its name is certain and that he himself first used it in The Wreck of the Deutschland, but agreement ends there. His rhythm has been traced to, and sometimes identified with, the old strong-stress Anglo-Saxon alliterative measure or, alternatively, to the choruses in Samson Agonistes. It has been called rigidly isochronous; it has also been described as free verse, next door to prose, and quite lawless in spite of his insistence that it was written by strict laws. It has been said to be entirely new and entirely old. When pushed to defend it, Hopkins himself found numerous precedents: brief instances or hints in Shakespeare, Milton, and Campbell, in nursery rhymes and weather saws, in Anglo-Saxon verse and its “degraded and doggrel” survival in Piers Plowman (though he did not know the last two, except at second hand and in the briefest of extracts, till some years after he had developed his own system). These predecessors, however, he named merely as precedents; he never called them sources. The only specific statement he made concerning the actual origin of the measure reveals nothing: “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.” He hastened to add, as he did also in discussing the meter with Robert Bridges, that he did not claim it as “altogether new”; he did profess to be the first who had avowedly “used it and made it the principle throughout” a poem, to the best of his knowledge.

Ever since the first appearance of Madame Bovary, Flaubert's concept of the novel has occasioned so many and such persistent misunderstandings that it seems well, now that a century or more has elapsed, to seek once again to understand what he did conceive the novel to be. Flaubert made numerous, isolated statements on the subject throughout his life, but these are scattered and in a sense always random, related only to the particular aspect of general theory which happened at the moment to be attracting his attention. It has even been urged that these should not and cannot be used to establish his concept of the novel. Moreover he did state that he execrated what was called realism; and he had no greater use for any of the other schools of his day, naturalism or impressionism or even those which baptized him their “chef d'école.”

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.

“Arnould wrote the cleverest, gratefullest verse-thanks to me, the other day, for these lyrics of mine,” Robert Browning told Alfred Domett in a letter of 1842, “and brought you in so happily.” Joseph Arnould himself, writing Domett some months later, spoke disparagingly of his epistle as “very schoolboy verses.” Though they had said exactly what he had felt at the time and still felt about the beauty and power of Browning's recent poetry, Arnould could not help fancying that his lines had given Browning “a bad opinion of my sincerity.” Arnould does less than justice to his verse critique. He is sincere to the point of much tactful admonishment, and though his tone is ingenuous and his style colorful rather than polished, he is selective and informed in many of his judgments. The epistle tells us much about this cultivated friend, and it suggests still more about the intellectual environment in which Browning worked during the early 1840's while he was trying to write dramas for the stage and at the same time feeling his way toward his special subject and manner. That Browning himself valued Arnould's epistle is shown by his giving it (perhaps along with other poems) to Elizabeth Barrett; for on 1 May 1846 Elizabeth wrote: “I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould's, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really, there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses.” F. G. Kenyon, when he was collecting Browning's letters to Domett for Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906), a book that also contains letters and excerpts from letters of Arnould to Domett, seems to have had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the verse epistle. Fortunately the manuscript of this piece, together with the accompanying letter and six additional letters of Arnould's to Browning written in the years 1846–50, has recently come into the possession of Gordon N. Ray, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mr. Ray has kindly made them available for reproduction here.

In 1835 Robert Browning, in search of a publisher for Paracelsus, wrote to the Reverend William Johnson Fox, “I have another affair on hand rather of a more popular nature, I conceive; but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two, so I decide on trying the question with this.” Since the “affair on hand” was Sordello, whose reputation for tortured syntax and obscure allusions still persists, one may well wonder what Browning meant by “popular.” The public found nothing difficult or strange in Paracelsus; although it did not appeal to the taste of the times, the praise of a few perceptive critics and readers showed that it was not totally ignored. Sordello, in contrast, struck a new note in the literature of the forties, a harsh dissonance which cut through the turgid harmonies of a decadent romanticism. Browning's poem, like Richard Wagner's music, sent the critics scurrying for shelter with their hands clapped over their ears. The notoriety of Sordello, which he conceived to be of “a more popular nature” than Paracelsus, haunted Browning for the rest of his life like that pungent, musky “after-gust” which he promised his readers in its concluding lines.

The idyllic harmony that suffuses Stifter's Nachsommer has been widely discussed and analyzed by scholars in the field, but less attention has been given to the undercurrent of sadness, which, in the words of Walter Rehm, is “hidden between the lines.” A new dimension to our understanding of Nachsommer—described by one writer as “inexhaustible in its mystery”—can indeed be added by further probing into the disturbances that lie beneath the smooth exterior of the novel.

Despite Mark Twain's prefatory disclaimer of any pretense to historical accuracy, a number of early reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee saw it as fundamentally historical and consequently “a very irrational proceeding.” William Thomas Stead, who read the Yankee with sympathetic insight and thought it a highly significant novel, conceded that it contained “much strange misreading of history.” And Andrew Lang, in a spirited defense of Mark Twain against his English detractors, admitted that he had not read the Yankee because its author did not have “the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the Middle Ages.”

Walt Whitman's interest in epic poetry bespoke his intention to become the bard of the masses. Whereas Shakespeare and Goethe had been epic poets of the aristocracy, Whitman envisaged himself as the poet of democracy. His work was to be the epic of the common man, and its style must be determinedly subjective. In 1856 Whitman wrote, “Leaves of Grass must be called not objective, but altogether subjective—‘I know’ runs through them as a perpetual refrain. Yet the great Greek poems, also the Teutonic poems, also Shakespeare and all the great masters have been objective, epic—they have all described characters, wars, heroes, etc.”

More than most novelists, Proust uses speech as a means of characterization. To his readers Bloch, whatever else he is, means a sophomoric use of pseudo-Homeric epithets, Mme Verdurin a series of recurring tics, and the Duc de Guermantes a pompous indulgence in genealogical ramblings. Even such a major figure as Odette is recognized by her sprinkling of fashionable Anglicisms; and Françoise, by her linguistic deformations. In some cases—so sensitive was Proust to the human voice—the manner of speaking is the character. We have only to listen to a Brichot, a Norpois, or a Cottard to know his class, his profession, his attitude toward life, even his virtues and vices. As life does, Proust frequently tells us all we need to know about an individual by letting us hear him discourse.

There is no larger horror than that which Bartleby represents in the world Melville creates through his first person narrator. Bartleby calls into question all that the narrator is. The peculiar power of the story arises from the effect of the absolute solidity of the lawyer-narrator: his impeccable respectability, the growing pleasure he takes in his comforts and accomplishments. This man who insists on telling us of Bartleby, “the strangest” scrivener he has ever encountered, is a man for whom all things ought to have their place; he attempts to discover where Bartleby belongs and what things belong to Bartleby. The unique effect of the story lies in the reader's recognition that though the narrator feels, no matter how inconclusively, that he has placed him in some way, he has, in fact, not placed him at all.

For those interested in exploring the mysteries of artistic creation, the long section of Zola's manuscript notes for Germinal entitled the Ebauche can be an illuminating, yet, at the same time, tantalizing document. As we turn its pages, written in Zola's firm hand, it is tempting to succumb to the illusion that we are following the genesis of this great novel much as it actually took shape in Zola's mind. And, as we shall see, no other part of the notes can, in fact, tell so much about his method of composition, his objectives, his way of reasoning with himself on paper. Yet in the final analysis we shall also see that the Ebauche, instructive as it may be in these respects, reveals only a fraction of his thoughts during the period of creation. We shall be struck by the contrast between what the Ebauche shows about the novelist's methodical planning and what it fails to show of his creative genius.