William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.

It Is a paradox that James Joyce, exemplar of the artist-as-exile, was one of the most domestic of modern writers—“very much a family man, a devoted husband, a good father, and a loyal son.” For Stephen Dedalus, the artist as young man, the artist as family man would have seemed a contradiction in terms. The true artist, Stephen insisted, must free himself from allegiance to home and family as well as country and church. The paradox is no problem for those critics who, dissociating Joyce from his fictional counterpart, consider Stephen less a portrait than a parody of the artist and his theory of art one that Joyce either never took seriously or eventually rejected. If, however, the testimony of Joyce's brother and others who knew him in Dublin may be accepted, the young Joyce was a good deal like Stephen in situation, manners, and temperament; and the ideas on art and artist which appear in Joyce's early essays and notebooks are virtually the same as those expounded by Stephen. This is not to say that the Joyce who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses is identical with the Joyce-Stephen presented in the novels. Between the time depicted and the time of writing occurred several events, including his elopement with Nora Barnacle in October 1904, which changed the artist's outlook. Yet, if Joyce looked back on the foibles of his youth with amused detachment and described them with irony, he was ready to admit the relationship between author and hero. “Many writers have written about themselves,” he said to Frank Budgen, “I wonder if any of them has been as candid as I have.”

The importance of music in James Joyce's life and art has always been evident. A volume of his poems he called Chamber Music; the title of his last book is that of an Irish-American ballad. Almost the first recollections of young Stephen Dedalus were musical; and one of the most moving passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes Stephen's hungry young brothers and sisters singing “Oft in the Stilly Night,” in which Stephen joins. Music plays an essential part in several stories in Dubliners, notably in “The Dead.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to music and musicians.

Zola's literary career opened in 1864 with the publication of the Contes à Ninon. Between then and 1881 he produced fourteen out of the thirty-one novels he was to write. Concurrently, he was writing almost continuously for the press; it was only after 1881 that, for reasons which I have suggested elsewhere, he gave up this activity, and for a long while desisted from all regular newspaper work. In this considerable journalistic output, attention is usually accorded only to those portions that Zola himself thought worthy to be preserved, and which he accordingly published in what are by custom referred to as his Œuvres critiques. Of the nine volumes grouped under this heading, one only, Mes Haines, contains a selection from his pre-1870 critical writing: it consists almost entirely of essays published originally in the Lyons newspaper Le Salut public in 1865 and 1866; they are interesting enough, one would think, to arouse curiosity concerning the rest of Zola's newspaper contributions during the years when he was making his name as a novelist and before he had emerged as the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?

Most students of Victorian literature know that John Henry Newman had a once prominent younger brother named Francis William, the erudite professor of Latin at University College, London, whose translation of Homer provoked an essay in protest by Matthew Arnold. Few, however, seem aware that there was a third Newman brother named Charles Robert, one year younger than John, the story of whose eccentric life has come to be known in any detail only since 1948, thanks to the researches of Maisie Ward and of Sean O'Faolain. Francis Newman passed it over on one page of his strange little “corrective” book on the Cardinal, calling it a wasted life, better left in silence. John Henry did his best to keep hidden from public curiosity what he called the “aimless, profitless, forlorn” life of his brother, even to the point of buying up from a virtual blackmailer a batch of Charles's letters, after his death in 1884, to prevent their coming to popular attention.

Mörike's only novel, Maler Nolten, was published in August 1832; the conception of the story dates from 1827; some writing was done in 1828, and the manuscript was finished in 1831. By 1850, probably earlier though not recorded, Mörike began to entertain the idea of revising his novel; and from that time till his death in 1875 he worked on the revision intermittently and in desultory fashion, though, as his correspondence shows, at times he regarded it as his main literary concern. Thus for a quarter of a century the revision of Maler Nolten was on the author's mind. His frequent illnesses and in the latter part of the period the domestic infelicities which eventually resulted in separation from his wife were contributory causes of delay. Doubtless in the main, however, he was hindered by the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. At his death he left the task still unfinished.

The Promulgation, in 1812, of the Constitution of Cadiz provoked throughout Spain and her domains a bitter controversy between the opponents and the partisans of that liberal and innovative body of legislation. Among the supporters in Mexico City was José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827), who, as soon as the Constitution went into effect there, established a sheet, El Pensador Mexicano (1812–14), with the avowed purpose of defending the new form of government and of praising its liberal provisions, particularly those granting freedom of the press and abolishing the Inquisition. His first article began with an exlamation: “¡Gracias a Dios y la nueva Constitutión que ya nos vamos desimpresionando de algunos errores que nos tenían enterrados nuestros antepasados!” But, in spite of the freedom of the press, the Viceroy ordered his arrest, and some months in jail dampened his enthusiasm; he continued, however, his periodical as well as its successor, the Alacena de Frioleras (1815), with articles of a less controversial nature, until the end of that year. Continually in difficulty with the censors after 1814, when the Constitution was abrogated by Ferdinand VII, he finally limited himself to the writing of fiction until the reestablishment of the Constitution in 1820. During this period he produced four novels, one of which, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), is his masterpiece. While the characters and setting of this novel are definitely Mexican, with certain autobiographical elements, the mold in which it is cast is that of the Spanish picaresque. Like its prototype in general, the Periquillo is concerned with matters of a purely ethical nature; but this aspect of the novel is less impressive—in contrast, for example, with Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache or the novels of Francisco Santos—than the wealth of ideas in regard to definite reforms that the author believes would contribute to the general welfare. These ideas, interwoven with incidents in the life of a picaro, did not originate with the author but reflect wide reading in many fields. To point out the sources of these ideas, and thereby fathom the intellectual background of Lizardi, is the object of this article.

Few critics have ever been very happy with the Excursion. Even those who support or justify Wordworth's turn to traditional attitudes have read it with no apparent enthusiasm or care. And for most modern readers who come to it after reading the Prelude, the Excursion can be no more than a painful anticlimax. It is hard for them not to suffer a sense of shock as they read its pious platitudes and realize that the poem was originally intended to embody and develop the fresh perceptions of the opening books of the Prelude. No wonder modern critics have been almost obsessed by the question: what happened to cause the narrowing and hardening of Wordsworth's attitudes? Why this timid compromise with orthodoxy rather than a bolder exploration of naturalism? And there have been nearly as many suggestions as critics. Perhaps because they have too readily accepted the Fenwick notes and taken the poem for granted as reflecting only the results of a change in the poet's attitudes, they have tended to neglect or to misinterpret the record in the poem itself of the state of mind which helped cause the change.

The Purpose of this paper is to analyze one particular aspect of Goethe's creative process which manifests itself throughout his artistic career, a strange and as yet unexplained motivation which prompted him at times to incorporate in his works enigmatic elements which puzzled his contemporaries and continue to confound scholars. Toward the end of Werther, for example, we find several pages of a translation from Ossian. The sixth book of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is purportedly a manuscript entrusted to a doctor by a mysterious aunt and which bears a title of its own: “Die Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele.” Obviously this chapter made a singular impression on the public at that time, because in 1806 an otherwise unknown author by the name of Friedrich Buchholz wrote a novel with this same title and it was reviewed by Goethe. Goethe's chapter has even been issued in a separate edition by the theologian Hermann Dechent. Not many novels contain chapters which can exist independent of their matrix.

“Essays on the Court Wits as individuals, however well done,” John Harold Wilson observed a few years ago, “have always been somewhat unsatisfactory because of a natural tendency to treat the subject of the essay as a phenomenon taken bodily from his cultural environment.” Sir George Etherege has suffered as much as any other important Restoration writer from this critical failing of examining a literary figure outside the context of his own age. The result has been a totally attenuated picture of Etherege as a rather superficial rake; and this has been paralleled by an equally attenuated understanding of his plays. This critical failing is due in large part, I think, to the lack of information about his life.

A fascinating and too often neglected area of literature is the medieval visions of the Afterworld, the detailed conceptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which were to reach a culmination in Dante's Divina Commedia. Several of these visions became widely popular, both in Latin and in vernacular versions. They have been carefully studied for their possible influence on Dante's writing. I propose to explore one aspect of them, the threefold pains of punishment, and to show how this material was used by Milton and Shakespeare.

Eugene vinaver, in his 1947 edition of the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte Darthur, has this to say generally about Malory's handling of the source for his sixth section, the French Vulgate Cycle La Queste del Saint Graal: “Malory's Tale of the Sankgreall is the least original of his works. Apart from omissions and minor alterations, it is to all intents and purposes a translation of the French. … His attitude [toward the source] may be described without much risk of over-simplification as that of a man to whom the quest of the Grail was primarily an Arthurian adventure and who regarded the intrusion of the Grail upon Arthur's kingdom not as a means of contrasting earthly and divine chivalry and condemning the former, but as an opportunity offered to the Knights of the Round Table to achieve still greater glory in this world.” Thus Vinaver proceeds in his introduction and notes to this “sixth romance” of Malory's to show in detail how Malory “secularizes” the Grail. In spite of these claims, I think it possible to show 1) that Malory's Tale of the Sankgreall is not simply a redaction of the French material, 2) that Malory's changes are far from mere “omissions and minor alterations,” and 3) that Malory's attitude toward his source is not as Vinaver describes it.

The Recovery of Professor Child's letters to William Macmath (1844–1921) makes it possible to answer an important question which has not been much investigated: what was the relationship between Child and Macmath with respect to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads?

The earliest authenticated printed version of the Amadís de Gaula, a prose romance of chivalry reworked and expanded into four books (and a subsequently published sequel) by the Spaniard Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo, appeared at Saragossa in 1508. Between this date and 1492 an earlier edition of Montalvo's work was undoubtedly published, probably in Castile. As we shall see, this may or may not have been partly or wholly identical in content with a MS. Amadis embodying certain changes in the Briolanja episode made at the instigation of a Prince Alfonso of Portugal. Before 1379 there was an Amadis in three books circulating in Castile, and about this same time a version, perhaps the same, by one Vasco Lobeira of Portugal was extant. Moreover, there was an Amadis of unknown proportions, but presumably of one or two books only, as early as 1345–50. I shall show that this version may have been written in 1331. But no version, I repeat, survives except Montalvo's.

The Parlement of foules is a poem in three parts: the prelude before the dream, the scene in the garden of love, and the debate among the birds. Each part differs from the others in its sources, content, mode of treatment, and tone. Because of these differences many-critics have argued that the poem lacks unity. Such arguments would be more convincing if Chaucer seemed unaware of the differences and if the three parts of the poem did not, in some way, serve a common purpose. It is probable, however, that Chaucer created these differences deliberately, for he appears to have worked to heighten and exploit them. A conscious artistic purpose is behind the poem's variety. Moreover, this variety is the agent of the poem's unity; it both contains and creates the poem's ultimate meaning. To make this clear, we shall look first at some of the ways in which Chaucer sharpened the distinctions between the three parts. And then we shall consider the ways in which the parts are unified and the purpose which is served by the tripartite organization.