May I as one who has had occasion both as a publisher and an editor to read a very considerable number of books and articles embodying the results of research into English literary history plead for more attention to form in the presentation of such work?

In the autumn of 1940 Ernest Hemingway published his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The book had been eagerly awaited. We knew well in advance that the setting of the story was the civil war in Spain, that event so rich in meaning for the recent history of the world. We knew also that Mr. Hemingway was writing, perhaps more than ever before, out of passionate concern over the apathy of mankind towards a growing menace to all western civilization. Few, however, had any clue to the enigmatic title. Then came publication day.

Despite the fact that the stream of consciousness technique occupies an important position in twentieth-century fiction, there is no general agreement as to where the method originated or what it really is. As Frederick J. Hoffman observes, “Writers and critics are both confused by the idea of ‘interior monologue,’ or the ‘stream of consciousness,’ as it is more familiarly known.”1 Elizabeth Drew says that the stream of consciousness technique was “invented by Dorothy Richardson.”2 Katharine F. Gerould remarks that Henry James “introduced the method into English fiction.”3 In an editorial note appended to the English edition of Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés, James Laughlin holds that Dujardin invented interior monologue.4 In making this statement, he is following the position taken by Dujardin in Le Monologue intérieur, in which he attempts to describe and define the method first used by him, he says, in Les Lauriers.

The following article, written at the suggestion of the editor of PMLA∗ confines itself almost wholly to the mechanics of manuscript preparation and to the handling of proofs. It is addressed to those scholars who, from time to time, submit their writings to learned journals. It has been read by, and corrected by, editors both of other journals and of university presses.

Scholarly editors seem not infrequently to be harassed by the very people who should be their pride and joy, the apples of their editorial eyes—their contributors. And this is strange, because, much as the editor needs his contributors, the more do the contributors need him.

A Survey of Western art in relation to its audience would suggest to an empirical æsesthetician that a degree of structural raggedness usually accompanies, if it does not actually constitute, artistic superiority. The trouble comes not, as often presumed, from difficulty in defining form, but from difficulty in experiencing it. Just as one art-lover may have a finer sense of line than another, with perhaps a weaker sense of color, so we may safely conclude from ubiquitous evidence that the perception of artistic form is a similarly variable factor. Disputes continually arise between those who derive a strong aesthetic experience from organic form in art and those who simply do not know what the others are talking about, and mistake genre, or type, or mechanical division for form. Either group may nourish the fallacy that an artist preoccupied with form is indifferent to almost everything else.

WE venture to affirm that PMLA should reflect the most distinguished American scholarship in modern languages and literatures. In our opinion it should not be a place for beginners to try their wings, unless those wings are used for sure and significant flight; and it should not be a place for established scholars to publish their incidental efforts, unless those efforts compare in excellence and value with the efforts of younger men. As the official Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, PMLA should publish to the learned world the most important work of members of the Association—that, and nothing less.

That the works of William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott, and to some degree James Fenimore Cooper contributed significantly to the patterns, structures, and plots of William Gilmore Simms' novels has been generally accepted. It has not been pointed out, however, that one of the shaping influences on his handling of character and situation within the framework these writers contributed was the drama of the English Renaissance and Restoration. Its influence on his diction and on the uninhibited gusto of his writing has been noted,1 and the assumption that his greatest comic character, Porgy, was a direct imitation of Shakespeare's Falstaff has been made frequently.2 However, an examination of Simms' methods of characterization in his seven connected Revolutionary romances3—his most serious and ambitious novelistic project—reveals that the British dramatists were his tutors in more than diction and that Porgy, rather than being an exception to Simms' usual practice in characterization, is actually in keeping with his method and has but superficial similarities to Falstaff.

Lamennais a rendu actuel le Pascal romantique lancé par Chateau briand, et La Chênaie fut en sorte le Port-Royal du Romantisme. Pascal et Lamennais, comme le rapprochement était facile, émouvant et séduisant! Aussi, l'époque romantique a chaleureusement lié deux noms que les circonstances dramatiques de l'évolution spirituelle de Lamennais ont finalement déliés. Le désir de cette identité était tellement général que, malgré l'évidence, on a longtemps persévéré à les considérer comme solidaires l'un de l'autre.

In 1923, the Parisian Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale invited Miguel de Unamuno to contribute to a special issue then being prepared in commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Pascal. Accordingly Unamuno wrote a short essay, “La Foi pascalienne”, seventh and last of the commemorative Etudes sur Pascal, as the volume was entitled. The following year, Unamuno, exiled in Paris, doubled the length of the essay and incorporated it as Chapter ix of his Agonie du christianisme, a book which, like the absorbed essay, had been composed for a French-reading public; for it was a cahier requested by P. L. Couchoud for inclusion in a series of monographs on Christianity. Both the essay and the book were translated into French by Unamuno's close friend, the hispanist Jean Cassou.

The word verbal as it appears in the title of this essay looks in two directions or has two antitheses. In combination with the word style it designates a level of meaning distinct from the substantial, and especially from the stated part of substantial meaning. At the same time, verbal implies that the level of stylistic meaning is something different from what is expressed by the medium of any other art, and that the discussion will avoid such metaphors as “verbal painting” and “verbal music”—or if it employs them briefly, will do so in full overtness.

Whether scholars and anthologists have assigned a precise date of composition to Terminus or not, the general impression has been that Emerson wrote the poem upon approaching old age. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson implied that it was written in the 'sixties:

In the month of December, 1866, I, returning from six months on a Western railroad, met my father in New York just setting out for his winter's journey to the West, and we spent the night together at the St. Denis Hotel. He read me some poems that he was soon to publish in his new volume, May Day, and among them Terminus. I was startled, for he, looking so healthy, so full of life and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting and serene acquiescence.

Among the Blackwood Papers left by the late George William Black-wood to the National Library of Scotland are some eighty pages entitled “Original manuscript of the Chaldee MS. by James Hogg, The Ettrick Shepherd, with his Letters relating to it; also Mr. Blackwood's notes thereon, and other Letters....” The National Library of Scotland has most generously sent me microfilms of this material.

1 A book of engravings published by Blackwood. Patrick Fraser Tytler discusses the work in Blackwood's Magazine (Nov., 1817), ii, 205.