The publication of the Diana, probably in Valencia, 1559, marks the birth of the pastoral novel in Spain. Most of what has been written on the book has been centered around the problem of influences, that is to say, the extent of Montemayor's imitation of Sannazaro's Arcadia. Such a view, regardless of its merits, tends to leave unexplained the book itself, since a book—the artistic accomplishment—is not what it is because of any certain, or uncertain, influences, but in spite of them. Life, and thereby literature, are not only the sum total of our actions, of what we do, but also of what we refrain from doing, and, furthermore, our actions are a composite of inherited patterns of reaction plus the new and improvised attitudes we strike when challenged by the renewing and omnipresent crossroads of life. If we are to study the Diana, or any other book, as a distillation of life, one of the important things is not to point out the influence of Sannazaro, which I fail to see, or of anybody else, but to underline the measure of acceptance of such an influence (the thin dividing line between the “done” and “not done” by the author in search for artistic expression), and then to seek the way it is to be harmonized with the new chords the author is trying to strike.

That numerous commentators on Paradise Lost have been repelled by the presentation of the Father in Book III is common knowledge. The objections raised have been voiced variously, ranging from Mark Van Doren's flat statement that Milton's God is a “dull dictator” to G. Wilson Knight's persuasion that sulphur is more appropriate to the poet's Heaven than ambrosia. Behind these and similar statements stands the opinion that Milton's defense of the ways of God to man is, as Sir Herbert Grierson put it, “too purely legal.”.

Gryphius' Stellung unter den Barockdichtern ist eine besondere. Er trat der Weltordnung mit einer Forderung gegenüber, die kein anderer zu stellen wagte, und wenn er sich auch zu zähmen suchte, so stieg doch die Wucht der Anklage während seines Lebens immer an, ja man kann fast sagen: je gefügiger die Worte werden, desto mehr tobt in ihm die Rebellion. Er selbst war sich wohl dessen nicht bewußt, er hielt sich fur einen guten Christen und war es auch, aber er konnte sich nie der Resignation wirklich ergeben. Wir fühlen in seinen Schriften ein ständiges Brodeln wie in einem Vulkan, der einem Ausbruch nahe ist. Die Lava ist nie tobend übergeflossen, denn die Schwere der Gesteinsmassen, die darüber lagen, war nicht zu durchstoßen. Er war keiner von denen, die mit den Dingen leicht fertig werden; er war von Natur schwer und aus dieser Schwere heraus, aus dieser gehemmten Anlage seines Wesens, brannte seine Flamme nie ruhig; seine Sprache, mächtig und reich, muß schwerflüssig und stokkend gekommen sein.

Dryden's place as theorist and exponent of the imagination has never been appropriately determined, and the reason may be as much in the difficulty of the problem as in the temptation to settle out of court for Hobbesian influence. Certainly there is much in Dryden to plague his interpreters: the obliqueness with which he insists upon approaching the subject, the transitional and hence shifting vocabulary with which he works, and the rhetorical density within which he almost invariably transacts his critical discourse. These things make analysis and interpretation difficult and precarious. But of one thing the Dryden scholar need not despair—the lack of evidence. For Dryden had a nagging curiosity about the imagination and a tireless impulse to talk about it.

When Joseph Trapp, early in the eighteenth century, delivered his lectures on science as a subject for poetry, he was enthusiastic about the possibilities but pessimistic over the scientific poetry of his time. “The same age that shew'd a Boyle, a Halley, and a Newton,” he said, had not been able to produce a Virgil. Nothing is more suitable to the dignity of a poem, he continued, “than to celebrate the works of the great creator” or to the variety of poetical subject matter “than to describe the journeys of the heavenly orbs, the rise of thunder, and other meteors, the motion of the earth, and the tides of the sea; the attractive force of the magnet, the impulsive motion of light, and the slower progression of sound; and innumerable other wonders, in the unbounded storehouse of nature.”

Early in the year 1771 Lessing manifested a lively interest in the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Ferguson. He was eager to obtain a certain work of Ferguson's, and his patience was taxed for several weeks until the book arrived. When he finally had it in his hands, he quickly leafed through it and was delighted with what his cursory examination revealed. His comments, occasioned by this first glance through the volume, have given rise to a number of conflicting opinions.

Mark Akenside produced two versions of his best-known poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, which appeared in 1744 and consists of three books. The second version, with its slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination, was unfinished at his death in 1770. We have, however, two complete books of it and portions of two others. The revised version of Book I was printed in 1757 for circulation among Akenside's friends; Book II of the later version appeared in a similar fashion in 1765. Not much attention has been given by critics and commentators to the differences between the two versions of the poem. They have contented themselves with observing merely that such differences exist. But it is clear that Akenside took pains with his revision, and the changes he made reflect both an increase in his poetic powers and his intense involvement with the political and cultural history of his time. He is not only a capable poet, he is that valuable thing, a “representative figure.”

Perhaps someone will eventually undertake the heroic task of making a really systematic study of the file of the Gentleman's Magazine, in the hope of arriving at a more satisfying account of Johnson's part in it than we now have. The following observations do not represent such an attempt; they are the product of a relatively cursory inspection of some of the early volumes, and are offered with the expectation that they will raise more questions than they will answer. Still, such questions ought to be raised, in the hope that a consideration of them will in the end contribute to the higher standards of comprehensiveness and precision in Johnson studies which modern students would like to see attained.

The publication in 1954 of Robert Mayo's admirable paper, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” has made it seem incautious if not foolhardy to claim novelty of theme or technique for the volume of 1798. As Mayo appears to have shown, the Lyrical Ballads conformed in nearly all respects to the patterns prevailing in magazine poetry of the 1790's; the volume's “originality” lay less in any innovations it attempted than in the freshness and intensity with which it developed already familiar conventions. As for the “experiments” alluded to in the 1798 Advertisement and the 1800 Preface, they were, as the comments of Coleridge and others seem to confirm, largely experiments in language alone, and wholly within the boundaries of popular taste.

In October 1838 Edward Bulwer-Lytton started to compose his play entitled Richelieu, in which William Charles Macready was destined to play the leading role. In his introduction to the Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready, Brander Mathews states that “Macready was almost a collaborator in the composition of ‘Richelieu’ and ‘Money’,” and an examination of Macready's Diaries verifies this judgment. On 15 November 1838 Macready had read part of Bulwer-Lytton's new play and noted his dissatisfaction with it: it lacked “continuity of interest” and the character of Richelieu was “not servatus ad imum”; the play would “not do” and could not “be made effective” (p. 476). Two days later he discussed the play with its author, who at first combated his objections, and acceded to them “as his judgment swayed him,” but who, when Macready “developed the object of the whole plan of alterations,… was in ecstasies.” The actor had never seen him so excited. Bulwer-Lytton exclaimed several times that “he was ‘enchanted’ with the plan” and “observed, in high spirits, ‘What a fellow you are!‘” Macready found him “indeed delightful” and “a wonderful man” (p. 477). The Diaries contain many subsequent notations of Macready's reading, marking, cutting and punctuating the play (pp. 477–492). If not an actual collaborator, Macready acted at least as an adviser in the composition of Richelieu.

Critics have found Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man more difficult to classify than any other of his books. Melville himself refers to the narrative as “our comedy,” and at one point signals his reader that he is passing “from the comedy of thought to that of action.” He creates an unusual thematic setting by reducing the dimensions of his characters and by curtailing the scale of their actions. The shallowness of the confidence man, unfitting him for the profound pathos or even tragedy of Moby Dick or Pierre, prepares him eminently for the role of the comic racketeer, the city slicker, horn-swoggling and bamboozling the country (and city) yokels. Certainly we do not cry, perhaps we don't even laugh, but surely we smile, if a little grimly, as the confidence man swindles victim after victim in the course of his adventures, relying frequently on the innate weaknesses in human nature—the desire to get something for nothing, the willingness to traffic in the misery of others. But the confidence man exploits generous and noble impulses, too, and this apparent mockery of traditional values gives the book a complexity and at times an ambiguity that cause many readers to abandon it, bewildered.

Although Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as “rather a shameless potboiler,” subsequent criticism has treated the work with more respect. As Robert Heilman has pointed out, the tale has inspired a surprising amount of discussion and speculation. Indeed, Heilman feels that James must have “hit upon some fundamental truth of experience that no generation can ignore and that each generation wishes to restate in its own terms.”

Many people would be mildly surprised to hear that it is possible to discuss a Swinburnian “love affair.” Some, perhaps, would be astonished to learn that Swinburne had a love affair; others, possibly, to hear that he had only one. Still others, no doubt, gripped by recollections of hot bloodbeats pulsating in persistent anapests, would be startled to learn that such a love affair, if there was one, could be discussed in print. But rumor, even of the printable sort, has not been idle. The story of his affair with Adah Menken, the comely and bosomy vaudevillian who provided Dumas père (aged sixty-four) with an Indian summer and (she hoped) Swinburne himself, aged twenty-nine, with a Pierian spring, has always appealed to raconteurs, and, in all conscience, it is a good anecdote. For years it was bruited about that Swinburne was in love with Mathilde Blind, a bluestocking poetess, and this fantasy had scarcely been dealt with before another ghost appeared—the absurd and irresponsible claim that Swinburne was in love and planned to elope with Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, the wife of his dearest friend. Each of the stories, along with many others, has come, and, after its brief day, gone again, and no great harm has been done. To Mathilde Blind, Swinburne was a friend, an alert and cautious friend, and nothing more. Mrs. Rossetti he adored in life and revered in memory, but not one syllable of evidence supports the assertion, or even the suspicion, that his sentiment had anything in common with romantic love. Swinburne himself pronounced the final word about his relations with the tawdry “Dolores” Menken, and nothing can or need be added or subtracted: she was, he wrote (just after her death) in a private letter to a close friend, “most lovable as a friend as well as a mistress.” But this is not the language of passion. To each of these three women Swinburne was attracted in some way, but by no sophistication of vocabulary could any one of the three attachments be termed a “love affair.”

The publication by I. I. Glivenko of Dostoevski's notebooks, in part in 1924 and in full in 1931, and the consequent re-evaluation of his novels have disposed rather conclusively of the opinion, long held and still occasionally repeated, that Dostoevski, though prophet, philosopher, and psychologist, was not a craftsman; that under the pressure of debts, bad economic habits, and unscrupulous publishers—all true conditions—he patched his novels together as best he could—all untrue.

When William Dean Howells was preparing the Library edition of his works in 1909, he gathered together four of the stories in which the March family had appeared and laid them aside with the hope of publishing them in one volume. In his preface to this collection, which was never in fact published, Howells thanked Isabel and Basil March for the part they had played in nine of his stories. He also supplied the reader with a suggestion as to how he dealt with the problem of actuality and reality in the novel, which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.

La excelencia de la poesía de Juan Ramón Jiménez ha restado importancia al estudio aislado de su prosa, que siempre se considera en términos de su poesía. Esta tendencia está justificada. Los modernistas españoles elevaron la prosa a las alturas del verso dotándola de una gran emoción lírica y obras como Platero y yo se conocen como “poemas en prosa,” que es otro modo de decir “poesía.” Entre lo mejor del verso y la prosa de Jiménez hay la misma proporción, aún cuando lo mejor de su verso es tan desnudo y su prosa mejor es tan vestida. Esta paradójica relación se aprecia mejor separando lo poético de lo prosaico. Según el concepto clásico, la poesía es la expresión artística de la belleza por medio de la palabra sujeta a la medida y cadencia de que resulta el verso. Las conferencias y aforismos que sirvieron al poeta para expresar sus ideas sobre vida y poesía en lenguaje corriente son prosa prosaica y también lo son las narraciones y la crítica, que de por sí no son expresión de la belleza, aunque estén bellamente escritas.