André Suarès, following in the tradition of the great French moralists of the past, is an acute and profound contemporary observer of the universe and of himself. Yet, except for an occasional passing remark by a critic identifying him as a moralist, he is generally not given such recognition, a failure partly due, no doubt, to the fact that his observations and intellectual reflections are not conveniently and systematically placed at the disposal of his reader. Instead of offering in one or two handy volumes the fruits of his survey of the universe, as do such moralistic ancestors as Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, Suarès keeps adding to or amplifying his repertoire of observations from volume to volume. Everywhere, even in his studies or portraits, whether they be of Baudelaire or Pascal, Ibsen or Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Goethe, he intersperses his reflections on life and human behavior. Nor are these observations always put in an epigrammatic or sententious form. Despite discouragement, however, the reader upon closer study soon sees that Suarès has the gift and capacity for extracting even from the most insignificant matter “tout le suc humain.” This he is able to do because he probes deeply into human behavior and because in every one of man's relationships he glimpses the stream of life.

Few poems have ever been priced as high as William Carlos Williams' Paterson, if one may borrow the central metaphor of Book III in order to suggest the enormous cost in concentration which must be met before any adequate evaluation can be made. If this work were built around a consistently presented hero—the Paterson of the title—that cost might not be so prohibitive as many readers will find it; but when Williams asserts in the introduction to Book III (“The Library”) that Paterson is not only the hero but also the heroine, not only a city but also cliffs and waterfall, one cries out for a critic to assist him, as the sea-god did Peleus, in conquering the metamorphic problem. Before judging the total merit of Paterson, however, one must weather a preliminary season of understanding, of looking hard and often at aim and structure—in brief, of giving the poem the creative reading that such an undertaking deserves. The poet, realizing the difficulty of meeting this high cost, has given some measure of help in the headnote to the entire poem, and also in the list of topics which he places immediately after the words Book One, as if in apposition; the latter consists of eighteen phrases separated by semicolons, each phrase a possible definition of Paterson. The last of these phrases, and one which may well supply a key-quotation for this essay, is “a dispersal and a metamorphosis.”

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”

In Democratic Vistas Whitman defined a poem as an “image-making work.” If we are to judge by what he says in the prefaces about the function of poetry, the image to which he referred would be, in very general terms, the Ideal by which a nation is enabled to realize itself (as individuals and en masse), or, more particularly, the self of the individual poet, which is presented as archetype. The drift of the interpretation, in either case, is away from the esthetic; it moves instead toward areas that may be variously described as psychological, religious, or metaphysical. The tendency toward the esthetic is there, however; present in such a definition is a basis for speculating upon the kinds of imagery Whitman uses and the extent to which he relies upon the expressive possibilities of this traditional device of the poet—the relation between images and the final, single image.

Students of Spanish literature of the first half of the 19th century still stand indebted to Georges Le Gentil for his partial analysis of and index to thirty-one literary journals published in Madrid between 1803 and 1849. More recently additional light has been thrown on this period through the publication of complete indices for a number of reviews not covered by Le Gentil as well as for several included in his survey. Thus far, however, there has been no planned approach to duplicate the above efforts for the critical transition years, roughly 1850–70, from the decline of romanticism to the triumph of realism. The CSIC series to date includes only two reviews that afford but partial coverage for these years: the above-cited Semanario pintoresco espan̄ol (1836–57) and Educación pintoresca (1857–59). The latter, moreover, is of scant literary significance.

Thomas de quincey, who professed a hearty dislike for “the assumption of judicial functions and authority over … brother authors,” published only one review of a novel. But he yielded to the digressive spirit and frequently discussed throughout his writings both the genre and the novelists he read during his long life (1785–1859). These included Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Le Sage, Marivaux, Rousseau, Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Maturin, Godwin, Captain Marryat, Scott, Galt, Miss Ferrier, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. His favorites were Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Hawthorne. Years after De Quincey's death his daughter Emily wrote: “No one will ever make much out of my father that does not take in [to account] the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs. Radcliffe order full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. … He never got beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel. He could make nothing of the modern novel with its pictures of real life.”

On a monday morning in February 1843, Eduard Mörike enjoyed a unique musical experience, significant alike for its evocation of past memories and its foreshadowing of subsequent literary creation. He was at the home of David Friedrich Strauß in Sontheim, on the edge of Heilbronn. Strauß and another of Mörike's boyhood friends, the composer Friedrich Kauffmann, had surprised Mörike in Cleversulzbach the preceding Saturday and taken him to meet Strauß's bride, the former operatic mezzo-soprano Agnes Schebest. The sensational career which Agnes had sacrificed for marriage to Mörike's friend, reports of her beauty and “demonic charm,” rumors concerning her personal life in the past, and indications of Strauß's restlessness in marriage had made Mörike look forward to this introduction for some months with tense anticipation. But the first twenty-four hours of the visit had now passed happily, rich in the spontaneous sociability and informal musical enjoyment that Mörike so passionately loved. Just a few minutes earlier the unexpected arrival of Klärchen Mörike in a peasant costume had completely mystified all of the company but her brother.

A few scholars have long puzzled over the fact that some of the unauthorized editions of Shelley's poems which were published after Posthumous Poems (London, 1824, edited by Mrs. Shelley) contain better readings at certain points than that volume, readings which do not appear in an authorized text until Mrs. Shelley published The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1839 (London, four vols.). Robert Browning noticed this in a letter addressed to H. Buxton Forman, dated 2 July 1877, in which he says of the fifth line of “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples,” omitted in the body of the text of 1824, “The line was first restored in a strange edition of Shelley published by Benbow in 1826; and Leigh Hunt, in 1828, quotes the poem without it, remarking on its loss: and it was myself who told him of its existence, to his surprise and pleasure.” Frederick A. Pottle, who quotes from Browning's letter in his Shelley and Browning (Chicago, 1923, p. 14), wonders how it was that Benbow obtained the missing line (p. 83). My investigation of this problem, instigated by Pottle, has led to two surprising discoveries: first, that all the modern editors of Shelley's text have failed to notice an errata leaf to Posthumous Poems which is present in some copies still extant, and, secondly, that there are important relationships between certain of the unauthorized editions which followed Posthumous Poems and Mrs. Shelley's text of 1839. These relationships, in fact, call into question the textual value of a large number of readings hitherto believed to be original to the first edition of 1839.

Among the reviews of poetry in the early nineteenth century few have been more celebrated, or more notorious, than the review of Coleridge's Christabel which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816. The Quarterly on Keats, Mr. Blackwood's young men on the Cockney School, Jeffrey's “This will never do” of the Excursion, and the Edinburgh Review's indirect and unwitting gift to the world of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—perhaps only these have had greater fame, of sorts. The destroyers of new poets may have had an inkling of the vengeance of posterity, for the authorship of some of these reviews was a mystery exceptionally well preserved even for that age of anonymous criticism. Time, however, and amateur detectives have succeeded in fixing the responsibility for most of them; the review of Christabel is the chief remaining puzzle.

“Apollo's Edict” has long been cited as a typical example of Swift's attitude towards poetic cant and outworn cliché. Set down as coming from Apollo himself, the poem illustrates a number of empty conventions and extravagant similes and forbids their use by any who would be of the true school of the god; and to aid his would-be followers in their poetic efforts, Apollo has appointed Swift as his Vicegerent on earth.

The Suicides of Racine, and of the seventeenth-century French theatre in general, have been studied in terms of the technical requirements pertaining to staging which developed from Greco-Roman theory and practice. This is a logical approach which cannot be dismissed, especially since in the seventeenth century the theory of bienséance was expanded to include the ethical proprieties. Nevertheless such a technical approach cannot provide full insight into Racine's intent. An adequate understanding of Racine's use of suicides is possible only when we analyze the particular suicides of the various plays in terms of the inner construction of Racine's tragedies and in terms of the interaction in Racine's thought of Greco-Roman and Christian factors.

Die bemühungen des jungen Opitz um die metrische und sprachliche Erneuerung der deutschen Dichtung aus dem Geist der Renaissance sind zu wohl bekannt, um dariiber viel Worte zu verlieren. Mit dem Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey und den beiden Poemata-Sammlungen waren allerdings nur die zwei ersten, wenn auch wichtigsten Schritte auf dem Wege dichterischer Reform getan. Opitz hatte seine Theorien, die natürlich weder ganz original waren, noch es sein konnten, zuerst 1617 im Aristarchus ausgesprochen, sie dann im Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey 1624 ausgebaut. Die wichtige erste Anwendung auf die Lyrik legte er in Buchform schon 1624, bzw. 1625, dem Publikum vor. Zum allergrößten Teil enthielten dièse Sammlungen Übersetzungen aus dem Holländischen, Französischen, Italienischen, aus dem Lateinischen und Griechischen. Trotzdem war genug Eigenes vorhanden, um den in dieser Hinsicht nicht verwöhnten Zeitgenossen zu beweisen, daß ursprüngliche Lyrik in deutscher Sprache und in den neuern Versmaßen sehr wohl möglich sei.

It is not hard to see Alexander Pope's attitude toward the life of his times—and indirectly therefore toward the totality of life in general—couched in the neatly clipped, antithetically framed structure of his couplets, or Coleridge's sense of the harmony of the whole conveyed in the smooth flow of the Ancient Mariner. Critics have always sought in the framework of poetry some harmony with its theme and with the author's philosophy of life central to the theme. But belief in the relationship between views of life and prose style has had a more interrupted life history.

It is generally known that despite Petrarch's widespread reputation in his own day as a man of letters and scholar, his opinion of Dante as a poet was at variance with the literary fortune enjoyed by Dante in subsequent centuries. Many attempts have been made, especially around the turn of the century, to explain why Petrarch failed to perceive Dante's true genius as it appears in the Divine Comedy. For the most part, these explanations fall into one of three categories. Some ascribe Petrarch's attitude toward Dante to his aversion for the vernacular; others to envy; while still others to an inattentive reading or misunderstanding of the Divine Comedy.

There is no doubt that the Middle English romance Sir Degaré (hereafter abbreviated SD) enjoyed an early success; four manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two later manuscripts, and three sixteenth-century prints survive.1 Modern criticism of it, however, shows striking contrast. Introducing the version in Bishop Percy's Folio MS., Hales wrote: “The romance is, in our opinion, of more than ordinary merit. It possesses the singular charm of brevity and conciseness; does not impair or destroy its power by the endless diffuseness and prolixity which are the besetting disfigurements of that branch of literature to which it belongs.”2 J. E. Wells agrees: “The materials are wrought into a coherent whole without digression or unnecessary explanation… . All in all, the poem deserves the popularity that its repeated reprinting in the sixteenth century indicates it to have enjoyed” (p. 135).