Can We Hope for a theory of romanticism? The answer, I believe, is, Yes. But before proceeding further, I must make quite clear what it is that I propose to discuss.

Perhaps only one who has long been interested in the phrase organic unity is wholly aware of how commonplace it has become in twentieth-century criticism. The journalist reviewing last night's symphony, the undergraduate finishing the term paper due on the morrow, critics one and all have found the phrase an impressive one. At times the word organic seems to be no more than a mere intensive:, to say that a painting has organic form is to say that it has “lots of form”; a poem with organic unity is a poem with “lots of unity.”

It is undeniable that Valéry's works, both prose and poetry, have philosophical and metaphysical implications, albeit without such intentions. Students of Valéry have felt impelled to develop these implications and to describe the poet as everything from an anti-philosopher to a philosopher-in-spite-of-himself.1 It is also undeniable that Valéry, in his comments on philosophy, has damned it with faint praise indeed. He has pleaded ignorance of philosophy, expressed disdain for its objectives and methods, asserted that he has no philosophy worthy of the name, denied the possibility of philosophical poetry in our time (both in general and with respect to his own work), and refused for himself the name or the quality of philosopher.

A great deal has been said about the failure of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I should like here to add a note upon an aspect of The Bridge which, as far as I know, has not been more than mentioned, probably because the finality of the usual criticism of the poem tends to obscure it. Perhaps the shortest way to what I propose is through Ezra Pound's definition of the Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” As symbol providing a logical meaning for the poem, the Bridge has been examined and judgment delivered; but the pattern of language through which Crane hoped to make his symbol effective as intellectual and emotional complex, or, to use his terminology, a “new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate”, has been left almost untouched.

Joyce was born in a musical city, Dublin. His childhood was filled with music. As a young man he entered a competition in the Irish festival of music, and if he had not refused to sing at sight would probably have won it. Had he done so, his future career would have been more likely that of a concert tenor than a writer. Throughout his life vocal music was his great pleasure and consolation.1 No sensitive reader of Ulysses has failed to appreciate the way Joyce not only uses the sound of words for musical effects, but also employs musical devices in constructing his novel.2 Snatches from songs are woven into the text. Richard M. Kain writes:

Although Stefan George's unyielding protest against the contemporary theatre lasted from the time of his graduation from the Ludwig-Georg Gymnasium in Darmstadt (1888) until his death, his hopes for its reform and his gradual disillusionment are generally little known, since his sphere of influence was restricted to the realm of lyrical poetry. This limitation was apparently both natural and logical for George, whose peculiar genius was that of the lyricist. But it was not entirely voluntary at first, for in his formative years he had been fascinated by the world of the theatre.

It is often detrimental to the proper understanding of a poet when his most strenuous years of intellectual exploration happen to be the least well documented, and particularly so when that poet, in despair over the lack of recognition accorded him by his contemporaries, makes his appeal over their heads directly to the judgement of posterity; and yet even if Paul Ernst, “like Sir Candy Rackrent in the tale”, had survived his own wake and overheard the judgement of posterity, or even if he had suspected that the succeeding generation of critics, trained in the arts of psychological dissection, would take exaggerated interest in his mental processes rather than in his ultimate poetic assertions, it is doubtful whether he would have willed it otherwise. For indeed one of the more conspicuous results of the greatest crisis in his own life and thought —between, let us say, 1897 and 1900—was a strong aversion to the application of any kind of psychological analysis to matters of literature.

Criticism of Henry James in our time is verging into metaphysics. The late works have recently been analyzed in terms of “dialectic” and “myth”,1 as products of Swedenborgianism,2 and as an artistic objectification of William James' philosophical pragmatism.3 Despite great individual differences these three approaches hold in common the basic assumption that James' inner and final meaning has not yet been as-certained and the corollary assumption that this final meaning is perhaps expressed symbolically, by technique, rather than overtly by subject matter.4 In this climate of opinion James is conceived of as a kind of nineteenth-century Dante, the architect of a secular Divine Comedy for some later-day equivalent of scholasticism, and the legendary “late manner”, once considered merely idiosyncratic, is thought to be an elaborate structure which metaphorically expresses a coherent system of values. The critical problems are, first, to find James' Aquinas, or the rationale for the body of ideas on which the late works constitute a metaphor, and, second, to define the relationship between this logical statement and James' symbolic one.

Galdós' sympathetic resignation to the shortcomings of Spain, already manifested in El Amigo Manso (1882), is artistically expressed in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). No longer preoccupied with censuring social customs or rationalizing contemporary conditions as he had been in his early novels, published from 1870 to 1882, the author imparts his positive view of Spain through the creation of characters who belong to all strata of society. Spain is not envisaged as a divided nation where classes are pitted against each other, but rather as one which embraces heterogeneous groups and individuals. The lives of the characters are not interwoven as a result of superimposed conditions, but because of their intimate problems. Love is the driving force which causes the juxtaposition of their destinies.

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

As an aftermath of a popularity which, in addition to being immediate and widespread, has proved to be enduring, there now exists a rather formidable mass of controversial writing having to do with the genesis of The Raven and consequently with the sources that Poe may have used in creating the poem. The late Killis Campbell, in his scholarly notes to The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, has left us a concise critical estimate of most of this controversial matter.1 Some accounts of the origin of The Raven are quite fantastic, and Campbell dismisses them with little comment as apocryphal. Others he considers not wholly convincing although he does not deny that they may contain at least a modicum of truth.

When a literary critic's judgments are never dull, it is inevitable that they will often be surprising. A more striking example is hardly to be found among the great critics than Dr. Johnson's remarkable comparisons of Fielding and Richardson. Many later judges, unwilling to do justice to Richardson, and contenting themselves with a cool recognition of his historical importance, have nonetheless been willing that Johnson should admire him extravagantly. That his evaluation of the novelist would be less impartial than theirs is easily understood, both because of the two men's friendship and because of eighteenth-century literary tastes, so different from our own. But Johnson's utter obtuseness towards Fielding is annoying to the modern critic, not merely because Fielding's reputation has far outstripped that of his rival, but also because he was immensely admired in Johnson's own lifetime. The Age of Reason gloried in the author of Tom Jones, yet here is the supreme critic of the century delivering himself of the most inflexibly contrary opinion. What are we to think of this?

Any discussion of Voltaire's attitude toward Homer, a figure admired L and condemned for a great variety of reasons during the neoclassic period, must touch ultimately on several different questions. Voltaire's reaction to primitive manners and customs as represented in the Homeric poems, his understanding of history and chronology, the method of his mind in approaching, again and again between 1727 and 1772, a traditional admiration of the first importance—all these subjects and more are involved in a study whose immediate purpose is to show that Voltaire held a consistent view of Homer. And they all prepare a still more com-prehensive question: whether Voltaire defended or neglected the cause of poetry at a time when an opinion of Homer was not far from being equivalent to an opinion of the essential literary art.

Of the Rewards -which Richard Steele received from the victorious Whig party soon after the accession of George I, doubtless the most important were a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Royal Company of Comedians acting in Drury Lane. These two rewards provided Steele's principal employments for the rest of his life: he became an active Parliament man, participating in debates in Commons and serving on Parliamentary committees; and at times he shared with the actor-managers the responsibility for running Drury Lane. It is understandable that politics and the theatre should provide the most frequently recurring themes in his writing during his later years. The years 1715 to 1718 are not exceptions. To these years belong a periodical, The Town Talk, which according to Steele himself was “designed to be helpful to the stage.”1 Chit-Chat, the brief sequel to The Town Talk, is on the other hand almost exclusively political. So also are several other essays—some which Steele published and others which he evidently did not publish—on controversial measures under debate in Parliament. Steele's writing during these years—as indeed during most of his life—had the immediacy of purpose which we associate with journalism; he wrote on subjects of current concern to himself.

Defoe's name is indissolubly linked with Stoke Newington. There he lived when he wrote Robinson Crusoe and other important works. There on a Saturday morning in 1713 the agents of Lord Chief Justice Parker ostentatiously seized him and carried him off to a London prison.1 The Stoke Newington Library now displays his statue, and a plaque at No. 95 Church Street, by Defoe Road, marks where his house stood. One may even see the wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which tradition says was his. But all accounts are inaccurate and fragmentary. Among them only two are aware that Defoe lived in two Stoke Newington houses, and none at all that he did not own the “Defoe” house or that, a decade after his death, his poet-naturalist son-in-law, Henry Baker, F.R.S., purchased and held it for twenty-three years. The Official Guide to Stoke Newington (seventh edition, p. 23) tells us that descendants of Defoe lie in Abney Park Cemetery, which (p. 27) dates from 1840.2 The Cemetery officials say they know nothing of such descendants.

In a recent note on The Double Marriage I suggested that the plot of this tragedy was derived from two declamations (Numbers 48 and 64) in The Orator (1596), Lazarus Pyott's translation of the Epitomes De Cent Histoires Tragicques (Paris, 1581) by Alexandre van den Busche, called Le Sylvain.11 was even tempted by the notion that the form of this collection of speeches influenced Fletcher's dramatic methods. Each “declamation” begins with a brief summary of the circumstances leading up to some extraordinary situation; then follow the speeches of two characters who present exactly opposite views in a formal debate. The emphasis of the book falls, as the title itself indicates, on these speeches. In a foreword to the reader (Sig. A4) Pyott says of them: “In these thou maiest learne Rhethoricke to inforce a good cause, and art to impugne an ill.” The dazzling improbability of The Orator's situations, the irreconcilable oppositions of the chief characters, and the concern with oratorical eloquence correspond so closely with the dramatic technique of the “Beaumont and Fletcher” plays that it would have been easy to imagine Fletcher and his collaborators discovering here the formula which was to be the basis of their success. There was only one inconvenience—a fatal one—to this theory: I had no evidence that Fletcher was familiar with The Orator when he was working with Beaumont on Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No King, in which the “Beaumont and Fletcher” genre takes its characteristic shape.

As Though defining the issues for future discussions of progress, Seneca says in one of his epistles: “I differ from Posidonius when he holds that mechanical tools were the invention of wise men .... It was man's ingenuity, not his wisdom, that discovered all these devices. And I also differ from him when he says that wise men discovered our mines of iron and copper .... Nay, the sort of men who discover such things are the sort of men who are busied with them, men whose minds are nimble and keen, but not great or exalted; and the same holds true of any other discovery which can only be made by means of a bent body and of a mind whose gaze is upon the ground.”

It was at the request of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo, that Pulci undertook the writing of the Morgante, the first of the four great Italian epics. For Cantos i–xxiii he followed closely, in general, the plot of the fourteenth-century cantastorie epic Orlando; but in the portion of the poem beginning with Stanza 112 of Canto xviii and ending with Stanza 155 of Canto xix he introduced a famous episode of his own invention, the episode of the picaresque demi-giant Margutte. Lucrezia died on 25 March, 1482. The poem was first published, before her death, in a form consisting of Cantos i–xxiii only. The editions published after her death have five additional cantos.