Absalom! Absalom! is a unique fictional experiment—unique in relation to Faulkner's other novels and to modern fiction generally. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that in point of technique it constitutes the last radical innovation in fictional method since Joyce. A “difficult” work, its difficulties do not inhere in verbal subtleties or in excessive refinement of perception, but in the strain imposed upon attention and sensibility in comprehending its monumental design.

A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.

For the thirty years since its publication, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India has enjoyed the somewhat paradoxical status of being valued without being understood. It is generally recognized as one of the finest literary productions of this century; it is also commonly thought to be one of the most puzzling. No doubt, part of the reason for our difficulty in interpreting it is that the literary problems it raises are continuous with its philosophical problems, or, to put it another way, that the obscurities of the novel duplicate or disappear into the obscurities of life itself. We cannot, of course, expect to explain the latter mystery before attempting to explain the former, nor need it be necessary; yet, if we are to succeed in interpretation, we must guard against that most common critical error of assuming that our own philosophical predilections must apply universally. As Earl R. Wasserman recently observed, “Our failure to grasp as total and integrated experiences such works as … E. M. Forster's A Passage to India results from our not having succeeded as yet in bringing to these works the proper controlling cosmos, for each cosmos is the creation of the author.” Discovering the nature of this “cosmos” and relating it to structure, symbol, and theme of the novel will be the concern of the following pages.

Coinciding roughly with the establishment of the Third Republic, there developed in France a wave of anti-Semitism that was to lead ultimately to the Dreyfus affair. Thousands of Jews had moved to Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons after Germany took Alsace and Lorraine, bringing with them competition in finance, as well as a thick accent and coarse manners. It was also at this time (1882) that the great Catholic bank, the Union Générale, failed, ruining thousands of small investors. The action of the government in suddenly arresting for fraud the President and the Director of the firm just as they were attempting to rebuild their bank, and the subsequent accusation by the President, Eugène Bontoux, that the Jews, in league with the “Freemason” government, were responsible for having ruined him because he was a Christian, gave rise to one of the great anti-Semitic myths of the age. It was fully exploited by Edouard Drumont in La France juive (1886), a book that was widely sold and passionately discussed.

The task I have set myself is not the discovery of new meanings in Hopkins' poem—it has been so widely studied that we rather suffer from a plethora than a paucity of interpretations. I shall try instead to work out some principles which will enable me to choose between alternatives in a fashion which will be systematic. My interest is double: first, in such principles of method as may emerge; and, second, in their contribution to the elucidation of the poem by presenting a unified and logical whole.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that critics have not sufficiently concerned themselves with Dostoevsky's attack against rationalism in Crime and Punishment; yet this aspect of the novel has frequently failed to receive adequate attention, not because it has been overlooked, but because often it has been immediately noticed, perfunctorily mentioned, and then put out of mind as something obvious. Few writers have examined the consequence of the anti-rationalistic tenor of the novel: the extent to which it is paralleled by the structural devices incorporated in the work.

George Eliot's biographers and critics are generally aware of the important role George Henry Lewes played as her literary adviser. They describe how he helped her to develop her literary powers by means of his affection and sympathy. But the real extent of Lewes' influence in this connection has not been determined.

What has made john henry newman so much more interesting to students of literature than most of his religious contemporaries is the rare blend in him of the artist, the intellectual, and the gentleman with the profoundly religious temper which judges the ultimate value of all activity in its movement towards or away from God. Whether it be called Christian humanism or some other name, it was a difficult balance that he sought to keep; and he has left us in his private papers a frank record of his struggles. The rich integration he eventually did achieve was the great source of his attraction for so different a contemporary in some respects as Matthew Arnold, for example, who ranked Newman with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Sainte-Beuve among the principal influences on his own development. At the outset of his career, however, Newman was being torn and pulled in opposite directions; and it is more than doubtful that he could ever have gained his equilibrium if he had not been elected a Fellow of Oriel College on 12 April 1822: “the turning point of his life,” as he would one day rightly call it, “and of all days most memorable.”

Wordsworth's love of freedom and independence is an ingredient in nearly all his best poetry. In his passages of highest elevation, when the language becomes richly connotative and evocative, the individual at the center stands untrammeled in the open air. Merely to take the subject of liberty was not, of course, to eliminate the chance of mediocre verse—Wordsworth forced undistinguished rimes on liberty as on other subjects—but on this subject, inevitably frequent, and with this impulse, present in all the happiest moments of his life, he achieved his furthest creative reaches. Without any effort to review or to discuss the chronological development of his ideas on political liberty, or to examine his political or social views at all, the following pages attempt to cast some light on the way ideas and feelings of personal liberty operate in Wordsworth's poems. The first section treats these ideas and feelings necessarily with some reference to chronological changes and to inter-weavings with love of political liberty; but the emphasis, as in Section ri on the range and variety of Wordsworth's libertarian imagery, is on his continuing interest in individual freedom.

The lines above, where Herder refers to the chief figures in the play Sakuntala, by the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa, identify India as a holy land for which he yearns. These lines might serve as a motto to characterize his attitude toward India, an attitude of extreme reverence and adulation which resulted finally in the formulation of a mythical image. The term “mythical image” implies an imaginative conception of India, and one can trace the development of such an image in the fancy of Herder.

There is a measure of incongruity in seeing the translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo at the head of the lists of the works of Samuel Johnson, who seems of all writers the one least likely to be swept away by the glamor of the orient. His casting his own philosophical reflections in the form of an oriental tale in Rasselas is less remarkable since in doing so he was following a convention of which the actual representation of oriental life formed no part. He could very well have written Rasselas without having any particular interest in the East, for in spite of Boswell's enthusiastic claim that “this Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life,” it is a commonplace of criticism that the scenes of human life displayed are not really linked to the scene of Abyssinia and that the Cairo of Rasselas is as actually London as the sage of the story is Johnson himself. The reader who goes to Rasselas seeking “the charms of oriental imagery” is doomed to disappointment. Yet the feeling persists that the spell which was cast on the mind of the youthful Johnson by the Abyssinia of Lobo must have reasserted itself when the mature man came to set down his somber reflections on human life at the time of his mother's death. W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, discussing the composition of Rasselas, comment that “very little of the Oriental life of Lobo is reproduced in Rasselas, though that narrative, as his first labour in literature, must have been embedded in the author's mind.” The mystery of Johnson's being attracted to the work of Lobo in the first place and of its relation, tentatively suggested by Courtney and Smith, to his own oriental tale is resolved by an examination of A Voyage to Abyssinia and its accompanying dissertations.

Since Bacon was the first Englishman to mention “real characters” and among the first to insist on the need for a truly precise means of expression, scholarship has come to regard the outcropping of linguistic schemes in the seventeenth century as a direct result of his writings. The influence of his “semantic sense” on later thinkers has been traced with some care; Richard F. Jones and others have shown us how to connect the language projects with specific passages in his works; evidence of his influence has been seen in the support given in scientific circles to projects like John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, which the Royal Society published in 1668.

After the initial intoxication, the Fall of Man is delineated in Paradise Lost largely in terms of the charges and counter-charges, the fear and hatred, the self-aggrandizement and the isolation of Adam and Eve. Only after Adam's most bitter denunciation of Eve is the direction changed with Eve's famous “Forsake me not thus, Adam … ”(x.914–936). Eve's speech is the turning point, for it is here that one of the guilty pair first attempts to take upon herself the burden of guilt, shows love and asks for love. The direction once taken, Adam is moved to similar affection, and the resulting reconciliation between man and woman is the inevitable prologue and type of the ensuing reconciliation between man and God.

Since 1921, professors hanford, mohl, and others have told us much about the chronology and scope of Milton's reading in history and related subjects; but as yet we lack similarly detailed information regarding the time and nature of Milton's private studies in Greek and Roman literature. For at least a partial knowledge, however, of when and how Milton studied the Classics, source materials exist in annotations found in four of Milton's Greek texts: his Pindar, purchased in 1629, his Aratus, purchased in 1631, and his Lycophron and Euripides, both purchased in 1634. Here—and for the most part in his own hand—Milton has left us evidence of some of his Classical studies during his latter years at Cambridge and his later life; and an analysis of these annotations should supply us with information regarding Milton's intellectual history that we have hitherto lacked.

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.

In their ingratitude toward their predecessors, Ronsard and Du Bellay did not hesitate to ridicule unfairly the achievements of the French poets of earlier generations, even in the act of despoiling them of some of their finest treasures. This is amply illustrated in the remarkable assertion of Claude Binet, the first biographer of Ronsard, who describes the adolescent poet as “ayant tousjours en main quelque Poëte Franĉois … et principalement, comme luy mesmes m'a maintesfois raconté, un Jean Lemaire de Belges … et un Clement Marot, lesquels il a depuis appelé [sic] … les immondices, dont il tiroit de belles limures d'or.” Nevertheless, the influence of Lemaire's “rubbish” is plainly visible in Ronsard's writing from the beginning of his career, particularly in the numerous passages in which he anticipates the Franciade, as well as in the epic itself. “Ronsard, enthousiasmé par la lecture du principal ouvrage de J. Lemaire de Belges, les Illustrations de Gaule, avait jeté son dévolu sur un … sujet, qu'il croyait essentiellement national, mais qui n'était qu'une légende, inventée au VIIe siècle …” (Laum., XVI, In trod. pp. v-vi). This was the legend of the descent of the French from Francus-Astyanax, son of Hector, the Trojan hero of the Iliad.

Old english eorlscipe, commonly considered to mean “nobility, rank; heroic deed(s),” appears to have a specialized meaning in Beowulf, particularly in combination with œfnan. It is usually translated “heroic deeds,” but this essay argues that eorlscipe never has this meaning in Beowulf. It has a highly technical and official (governmental) meaning.

In the more highly developed religions there are five elements, which, though they often occur together, are quite distinct and should not be confused: orthodoxy, or correct belief; piety, or emotional response to the deity or the doctrines or the ritual or any two or all three; mysticism, or the sense of God's immediate presence; asceticism, or denial of the animal appetites; and ethics, or good human relations. It is essential to keep the distinctions in mind when dealing with the work of Catholic writers, most especially that of Joyce, for Joyce's exasperated awareness of them was one of the impelling motives of his work. For Catholics, “sin” is a generic term covering unorthodoxy, impiety, indulgence of the animal appetites, and bad human relations; in the lay mind the distinctions among them are liable to become blurred, with resulting confusion in the conduct of life. One of the purposes of the medieval manuals of the virtues and vices, such as Ayenbite of Inwyt, Piers Plowman, and Handlyng Synne, was to remind laymen of the distinctions and the hierarchy among sins as well as of their generic sinfulness. Ulysses too is, among other things, such a manual; one of its principal themes is Handling Sin, as this is achieved by Dedalus and Bloom, each in his own way; Ulysses accordingly adapts the material of Ayenbite somewhat as it does that of The Odyssey.