It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.

Although the thinkers of the Middle Ages il did not develop any theories about the function of the artist which can be compared with those of Plato or the Romantics, they had definite views on art and its relation to society. Art in its broadest sense had for them an ethical and social function which inevitably became part of the grand design of the universe. None of the great writers of romance is without consciousness of this function. In the creation of the Arthurian romance in particular they were fully aware of their responsibilities, but they interpreted them in differing ways. It seems to me that Gottfried von Strassburg realizes most fully the intellectual aspects of his responsibility and takes most note of the esthetic theories which justified the arts, and in particular music, as beneficial for Christian men and women and as leading towards that harmony of the spirit with the eternal which was regarded as the highest good.

In the last twenty years or so the rehabilitation of Criseyde has proceeded triumphantly until she seems nearly reinstated as the figure she was before her denigration at the hands of Henryson and the Elizabethans. The contrast, for example, between the treatments given her by A. S. Cook in the early years of the century and by her most recent appraisor, John Bayley, shows how far this reinstatement has gone. But despite the apparent victory, here and there remain strong points, untaken pockets of resistance left behind by the victorious forces in their onward sweep, where the views of the old orthodoxy still prevail and from which a counterattack could be mounted. The most important of these is, I believe, the still prevailing misconception of the central episode leading to Criseyde's surrender. Baldly stated, the orthodox belief is this: that Criseyde went to Pandarus' house expecting to surrender herself then and there to Troilus. The process of arriving at this belief is usually simple. Examining the episode at Deiphebus' house, the critic argues, first, that Criseyde knows surrender to be the ultimate outcome of her acceptance of Troilus as a lover; second, that she must understand surrender as the purpose of the meeting which Pandarus promises to arrange. Next, the critic notes that Criseyde did expect to find her lover at her uncle's house when Pandarus finally invited her for the evening; he then hurdles over some six hundred of the most minutely subtle lines Chaucer ever wrote and arrives at the surrender itself; and he clinches his belief by quoting his favorite and eagerly anticipated passage:

The Poetomachia, no matter how explained, embarrasses nearly everyone now working with Elizabethan drama. The term itself sounds like a coinage which a nineteenth-century crank lifted from some minor essayist who copied Bacon or Burton—“World, I was once resolu'd to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with euery bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn'd: yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters … I care not much if I make description (before thy Vniuersality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd” et cetera—and out of it coaxed a provincial philosophy. Disturbing to some eyes and naïve to others, this Victorian heirloom, like a former source of innocent merriment which any amateur psychoanalyst can tell screens a neurosis or like great-grandfather's waste tract which never yielded its ore, serves chiefly as an ornate tribute to misapplied ingenuity. Contriving chimeras in a fantastic realm between the Globe stage and the Mermaid hearth or searching for the key to release beleaguered playwrights from dramatis personae bothers equally scholars who attempt to reconstruct and critics who seek to renovate. Literary historians alone cannot drop the romantic fiction with impunity, but no one blames them for relegating it to a footnote. Reviewers of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida dutifully listed the aspect among the many surveyed or begrudged the three pages out of six hundred which the volume allocated it. Shortly after one group established the neutrality of Shakespeare's supposed foray, another, through several monographs, dismissed Jonson's and Marston's (and Dekker's and everyone else's) hostility beyond the sniping in Poetaster and Satiromastix. To a backward glance peace or, rather, the absence of war may reign.

In 1763 when Edmund Burke had not yet given up his plan to make his way in the world by literary efforts, he wrote a letter to William Gerard (“Single Speech”) Hamilton who had just procured for him a pension on the Irish Establishment. His purpose was to make it clear that in accepting the pension he would not be giving up all his time, some of which he wanted to devote to writing:

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.

El Arabista EspañOL Emilio García Gomez, en su libro Silla del moro y nuevas escenas andaluzas (Madrid, 1948), recrea la visión que Estébanez Calderón tenía de Andalucía. Pero pasa por alto completamente la cuestión de la influencia que la atracción que Estébanez sentía por el período de la dominación árabe en España pudiera tener en tal visión. Y sin embargo creo sin duda que su afición a la cultura y la literatura árabes puso un sello en su producción literaria. Por otra parte, su afán de proselitismo hizo tantos adeptos a este campo como las enseñanzas de más reputados maestros de su generación.

The story of Tennyson's reaction to Arthur Hallam's death is so familiar that we need to remind ourselves how very little connected, factual knowledge we have of his life at that crucial time. Our vivid impressions of him, sunk for long months in dark grief, isolated and immobile at Somersby, derive, if the truth be told, from little more than In Memoriam as reinforced, until recently, only by two blanket statements and a few contemporary letters set in the loose and chronologically vague narrative of Hallam Tennyson's Memoir. Sir Charles Tennyson's lucid biography, of course, has now greatly integrated and sharpened the Memoir account, and expanded it with new material from the papers of the Tennyson d'Eyncourt family. But since the d'Eyncourts had little direct contact with their Somersby cousins during the period in question, and make no mention at all of Alfred, we are still left with less specific knowledge than we might wish. Fortunately, a welcome quirk of literary fate has preserved an unused contemporary source of information: the diary for the years 1833–35 of Tennyson's friend, the Rev. John Rashdall, M.A., now accessible in the Bodleian Library. In what follows I propose to use this diary together with other contemporary material, published and unpublished, to construct a fuller, more detailed account than has yet been available of Tennyson in the year of Hallam's death.

The scarlet letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners for so long that this perspective has hardened into a convention. In Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl the sin of adultery and its consequences are seen; to Dimmesdale is added the further, less sympathetic sin of hypocrisy; and beyond the pale stands Chillingworth in his isolating sin of pride and self-consuming revenge. Once this standard point of view is assumed, it can be supported by what is incontrovertibly in the text, but if the angle of attention is shifted so that the novel is seen as a love story, that is, as a tragedy of the grand passion rather than as a tale of sinful passion, then certain features in our picture of the novel, obscure before, will leap into prominence and some of the previously more emphatic features will change their value in relation to the whole composition. Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book, but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of erotic passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixed reality throughout the novel and that it is “sin” which is the shifting, ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the passion of the lovers is entering its most interesting phase when the story opens instead of being over and done with, except for its consequences, as is tacitly assumed in the conventional approach.

Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote in her most productive year, 1862, are two which gain particular interest from the fact that she returned to them at a considerably later date. Comparison of the early and late versions offers revealing insights into her development. To her poem about a hummingbird, “Within my Garden rides a Bird / Upon a single Wheel—”, she returned, probably early in 1879, to produce a much better poem on the same subject: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel. …” Condensing twenty lines to eight, she transformed a slack little narrative about the bird, her dog and herself, into a brilliant image of the bird's visual impact. Cutting out the personal pronoun, the dog and the philosophic debate, she managed to convey directly her sense of domestic miracle. The two poems appear separately, as numbers 500 and 1463, in Johnson's three-volume edition of The Poems (1955) and thus are taken over into his recent one-volume edition of The Complete Poems (1960).

Germinal is an almost perfect example of what Zola occasionally called his “lie”—his paradoxical manner of achieving at one and the same time both a convincing documentary realism and a strongly symbolic and subjective presentation of reality. Nowhere can this be more plainly seen than in his brilliant, often surprising, use of color. Obviously he owes much in this as in other respects to such predecessors as Flaubert, but he also, more than has generally been realized, shares in the spirit of his own period. While his color terms and images always have a naturalistic basis, the art with which he distributes them throughout the narrative is quite as stylized and patterned in its own way as a canvas by Cézanne. His symbolic treatment of color, on the other hand, suggests affinities with the symbolists, who were rising to a certain prominence in Paris in 1884, the year Germinal was written. Not only does he simplify and organize his colors into a scheme consistent with his dramatic subject, a great strike; he also invests them like leitmotifs with associations expressive of all three levels of meaning of the novel—the dramatic cadre of the miners' strike, the prophetic historical étude of the struggle between capital and labor, and, finally, the underlying philosophical vision of man and nature. Often he gives a single color or group of colors at least three separate meanings which are interwoven and interrelated within the powerful unity of the whole. And, in the process, he transforms, in this and other ways, the colors of ordinary reality into the often far more intense, significant, and emotive colors of dreams, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions.

Mrs. Bathurst“ may not be the most puzzling of Rudyard Kipling's ‘obscure’ stories, but it has surely become the one most puzzled over by admirers and critics alike. A number of articles have been printed about it in the pages of the Kipling Journal, and many of the important Kipling critics have alluded, a bit tentatively perhaps, to this fine story—Edmund Wilson calls it a ”remarkable story“ and then hurries on—but so far no one has ever really accounted for what happens in ”Mrs. Bathurst“ or has suggested fully what the story is about. There has been much interest in characters and incidents, of course, but almost no consideration of theme. A good deal has been made of Kipling's fondness for cryptic utterance, the implication being that ”Mrs. Bathurst“ is an elaborate puzzle game in which the reader must try to determine, from artfully concealed clues, what the characters in the story are really up to. Other commentators have dealt with Kipling's method of composition, his habit of repeatedly and drastically cutting his manuscripts in general, and the manuscript of this story in particular. C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the momentum of cutting ”Mrs. Bathhurst“ may have carried Kipling, all unaware, past the point of intelligibility and that the obscurity of the story may therefore be accidental. What no critic has reasoned, however, is that Kipling's struggle for compression and his pruning away of representational elements in ”Mrs. Bathurst,“ to permit concentration on other values, justifies the closest possible reading of the text and makes the critic responsible not only for clarifying the surface action of the story but also for discovering the significance of that action. Such a detailed study of ”Mrs. Bathurst“ reveals a powerful tale embodying one of Kipling's profoundest visions of life and composed in a style far enough ahead of its time to account for the story's reputation as a perennial puzzler.

DespuéS de cuidadosas y repetidas lecturas de la Antolojía Poética, me he detenido en uno de sus poemas por parecerme que, sometiéndolo a ceñido análisis, podría contribuir a un mejor entendimiento del espíritu poético de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Me refiero al poema n 50, colocado en el grupo IV de la Antolojía con el título general de “Pastorales,” de los años 1903–05:

Anatole France was so exclusively French that one hardly expects to find a foreigner in his intimate circle. His address books list very few aliens. Carlos Blacker is the only one of these who is listed four times. We have some forty letters from France to Blacker and an equal number from Blacker to France between 1915 and 1921. There were undoubtedly more. Their acquaintance dated back a number of years before these letters begin. The correspondence shows that France was capable of unexpected warmth at a time of life when friendships are not easily formed. France was seventy and Blacker fifty-five when associations of the war period deepened their relationship. By 1917 France was ending his letters with such expressions as: “A vous tendrement,” “Je vous embrasse tendrement.”

Human experience, according to Santayana, may be described as a conflict between the spirit and the imperfections which distract it from the pure and ideal toward which it aspires. And yet, to complete the paradox, there is no spirit without these imperfections, the matrix of flesh and world, space and time, which contains it. This is as much as anything a poet's dramatic vision: it is Yeats's with his passion to preserve the senses in an eternity of time, and it is Wallace Stevens' with his more realistic search for a balance between the antinomies of self and world. For Stevens, the imagination is the single power that can effect the vital unity, in life or in poetry: it alone can provide the aesthetic economy of experience so urgent for the modern romantic sensibility. Stevens is a romantic, or better, a neo-romantic poet who has gone to school to the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists only to conclude that the ends available to the artist are not metaphysical but aesthetic, and thus human. The romantic poet necessarily lives in two worlds: that of his sensual experience and that of his imaginative vision. In those moments when he manages to blend the two, he achieves not only a poem but that singular experience of “truth” from which he draws his spiritual sanctions. And if God is absent from his universe, as he is from Stevens', the moments of reconciliation become increasingly problematical but no less pressing.

During an interview with Jacques Brenner, published in Arts (March 1953), Robbe-Grillet asserted that Les Gommes is a descriptive and scientific novel. In January 1959, in an interview with Denise Bourdet, Robbe-Grillet stated that “l'observation scientifique consiste à décrire sans interpréter, à ne jamais donner une signification aux choses.” His novels are noteworthy indeed for their absence of analysis, and readers familiar with his descriptive method will have no difficulty concluding that if Les Gommes is a “scientific novel,” so also are Le Voyeur, La Jalousie, and Dans le labyrinthe. But in what way are these novels “scientific”? Is Robbe-Grillet initiating a “new realism” as has been suggested, or is it more accurately a new naturalism? If we may be permitted to define naturalism as a realism with scientific pretensions, and if we apply the rigorous pattern of Freudian determinism—provided we accept Freud's method as “scientific”—to the psychic and mental operations of Mathias in Le Voyeur, and of the jealous husband in La Jalousie, then these novels would seem to qualify as naturalistic.

The standard editions of the Canterbury Tales differ in their pointing of G 1236–39. Curiously enough it is the most influential of these editions (those of Skeat and Robinson) that, to my mind, point the passage inappropriately by mistakenly giving a speech that belongs to one character to another. As a result, one of the characters involved seems to be guilty of an inexplicable and unmotivated impropriety, and the dramatic quality of the passage is blurred.

Many of us will be in sympathy with some of the views of Thomas P. Roche, Jr., in “Britomart at the House of Busyrane” (PMLA, lxxvi, Sept. 1961, 340–344). On one important point, however, he is almost certainly wrong. It is not a shortcoming of Amoret, “lessoned/ In all the lore of love and goodly woman-head,” that she must view her relation to Scudamour in terms of the abusive Masque of Cupid, and that she must confuse her marriage with “adulterous” or “courtly” love. It is Scudamour who forces her into this position by his own practice of an aggressive mastery in the Chaucerian sense. He does not understand the love which depends on mutual freedom of choice and on concord, as in The Franklin's Tale; what he does understand is the imperious force of the love-deity who is imaged, for instance, in The Knight's Tale, in the Masque itself, and on his shield.

Mr. G. B. Johnston's note, “Camden, Shakespeare, and Young Henry Percy” (PMLA, lxxvi, June 1961, 298), while citing Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars as one warrant for Shakespeare's making the forty-year-old Hotspur a contemporary of Prince Henry, finds that Camden's Britannia was behind them both, and was the most likely source; and that the “revised” and translated version of Britannia in 1610 “seems to be recalling the popular play” in adding “an extra flourish on Henry Percy.” This system of priorities is doubtless valid in general; but the further implication—that Shakespeare and Camden were closely linked in the matter, taking their cues for the delineation of Hotspur directly from each other—does not seem as likely. An examination of Mr. Johnston's evidence indicates, rather, Daniel's continued function as middleman in the complex.