Second-rateness

Abstract

It has been observed that György Lukácz, in The Historical Novel, refers to Balzac forty-two times, Mérimée six times, de Vigny four times, and Dumas, the most successful and influential historical novelist of that or any other period, not once.¹ The refusal to think about certain authors because they are allegedly worthless as literature is almost a house-rule in literary studies. For example, H. T. Swedenberg’s The Theory of Epic in England 1650–1800 (1944), B. Wilkie’s Romantic Poets and the Epic Tradition (1965), and the two articles on romantic epic by D. M. Foerster in PMLA 1954 and 1955 do not even mention the dozens of epic poems published in the period covered. It will be remembered that William of Occam, the medieval academic who established the principle of cutting through the tiresomely irrelevant parts of a subject in order to get to the central issue, was an Englishman. Nowadays he probably would have been a Professor of English Literature with strong views on legitimate and illegitimate fields of interest.

No twilight within the courts of the Sun.