OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA EDITED BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD SECRETARY OF THE ASSOCIATION VOL. XXVII, NO. 1 NEW SERIES, VOL. XX, NO. 1 MARCH, 1912 PUBLISHT QUARTERLY BY THE ASSOCIATION AT 383 HARVARD STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE $3.00 A YEAR; SINGLE NUMBERS $1.00 BALTIMORE Enterd November 7, 1902, at Boston, Mass., as second-class matter I.-Modern Thought in Meredith's Poems. By J. W. CUNLIFFE, II.-The Letters of Charlotte-An Antidote to Die Leiden des jungen III.—The Triumphe of Death translated out of Italian by the Countesse of Pembrooke. By FRANCES BERKELEY YOUNG, IV. Teofilo Folengo's Moschaea and José de Villaviciosa's La Mosquea. V.-A New Source for Mankind. By W. Roy MACKENZIE, VI. The Clerk of Oxenford. By H. S. V. JONES, APPENDIX-Procedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, Second Union Meeting, held under the auspices of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago at Chicago, Ill., December 27, 28, 29, 1911, - i-xlvi The annual volume of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of The complete sets of the first seven volumes of these Publications are all sold. Copies of the Report of the Committee of Twelv on Admission Requirements may be obtaind of the Secretary. The price is ten cents a copy. 46 Ware Hall, Cambridge, Mass. The next meeting of the Association wil be held at the University of Penn- I. MODERN THOUGHT IN MEREDITH'S POEMS "Victorian" is now commonly used as a depreciatory epithet, and yet we shall search the history of the last thousand years in vain for a period of more important social, political, and industrial changes than those carried on in the Victorian Era. The changes in the spiritual sphere were no less significant. Professor Henry Sidgwick, a singularly acute and subtle observer, writing to Tennyson's son for the Biography published in 1897, said of the sixties : During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion and perhaps what we sympathize with most in "In Memoriam" at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of "honest doubt," the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year- Ring out the thousand wars of old, and generally the forward movement of the thought. Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call "Hebrew old clothes" is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science: the faith in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from super stition, suddenly seems to be in the air: and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the "fight with Death" which "In Memoriam" so powerfully presents.1 The main influences which brought about these changes were (1) the conception of evolution, applied first to geology, and then to zoology, with the support of an array of evidence which proved ultimately overpowering; (2) the application of modern methods of historical and literary investigation to the documents on which English Protestantism had based its conception of Evangelical Christianity. There resulted the passing, in the minds of a considerable portion of the community, and those the most intelligent and influential, of religious beliefs which had held sway in England for centuries, and the predominance, among the intellectual leaders of the nation, of a new order of ideas-a change as remarkable as that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system of astronomy. The earlier revolution of ideas, slowly effected as the outcome of the theories of Copernicus, placed the earth in a new relation to the rest of the universe; the later revolution placed man in a new relation to the other animals, and greatly modified current conceptions as to his past history and future destiny. It was a painful process to adjust to the new conception beliefs deeply implanted by early training, and supported by all the force of established tradition; indeed, the process of adjustment is not yet fully accomplished. The varied emotions which accompanied the earlier stages of reconstruction are expressed by different poets in different ways: Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Swinburne, Meredith, Francis Thomson, and James Thompson give voice, each in his own fashion, to the prevailing sense of spiritual unrest, and each of them offers a different solution to the problem of adjustment. It would 'Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, v. 1, pp. 301-2. |