AN important chapter in the history of modern Greek poetry was opened by Claude-Charles Fauriel.1 He circulated a well-organized body of popular verse, fragments of which were known in western Europe to only a few travellers before him, and, of course, to Goethe.2 Yet modern Greek criticism has been ungenerous to him. Although no modern edition of Greek demotic songs can begin without acknowledging his ground-breaking contributions, his editing has been characterized as lacking fidelity,3 and his motives “naturally, indebted to the ideas of German romanticism.”4 Herder's methodological outlook, and Goethe's seminal specimens of 1802 had a great deal to do with the spectacular success of Fauriel's two volumes. Versions of his work were made available in St. Petersburg, Leipzig, and London in 1825, the year of the original publication in Paris.6 On the other hand, neither Goethe's nor Fauriel's motives can be conceived apart from the strong philhellenic sentiment that had so much to do with the physical fate of that province of the Ottoman Empire called Greece. That movement did not differ, either in the kind of dreams that it evoked or in the numbers of romantic and romanticizing adherents that it set dreaming, from those movements that found the Corsicans and the Spanish “exotic” and the Americans “innocent.”

AN AUTHOR who reworks a story adapts the original in such a way that his new story, while obviously based on it, is endowed with new meaning. The original is usually adapted by means of a clear alteration of characterization and plot with a resultant change in underlying philosophy between the original and the reworked story. The Greek plays, for instance, have been altered in this way by Existentialists to diminish the role of fate and to emphasize human responsibility. Rarely is a story reworked in such a way that the meaning of the new work lies not in its difference from but in its similarity to the original.1 To effect this, plot and characterization are only minimally altered and crucial importance is given to a change of period. The new setting superficially disguises but in fact emphasizes the correspondence between the two stories. Some of the key problems encountered in this kind of reworking, such as the avoidance of mere imitation, archaism, and triviality of statement,2 can be revealed by a structural examination of Francisco Ayala's El rapto,3 a short novel based on an episode from Don Quijote.

GEORG Trakl, Georg Heym, and Ernst Stadler are generally grouped together as the early German Expressionists. Each was born within a four-year period, 1883–87, and each died in the two-year period, 1912–14. The three poets produced a great deal of bad poetry before breaking through to both originality and modernity for a few short years before early deaths. Their poetry provided some of the models for the immense following wave of Expressionist lyric and at the same time represents the greatest and most lasting achievement of that movement. They shared many techniques, such as the new kinds of metaphor (described by Schneider)1 or the new kind of lyrical sentence-line (Zeilenstil described by Heselhaus).2

For those who regard Troilus and Cressida as a play marred by incongruous elements and an uncertain purpose, Act iv, Scene v, will always constitute an obvious source of dissatisfaction. Here, a long-awaited andloudly heralded climax—the duel between Ajax and Hector—rapidly subsides into anticlimax: before Ajax is even warm with action, Hector calls an end to the combat on the ground that he and his opponent are cousins. Moreover, Hector explains his motive for withdrawal, and comments on Ajax's reply, in speeches whose diction and style merely add to the discordant effect of his behavior:

IN commenting on Chapman's tragic heroes, Robert Ornstein observes that “Dangerous as it would be to identify Chapman with his Stoic heroes, I cannot but feel that he shared their spiritual isolation and their sense of alienation from an unworthy society.”1 However dangerous (and unfashionable) it may be to look for the author himself in dramatic works, I think a case can be made that Chapman does reveal himself not only in his Stoic heroes but also in many of his poems, plays, and translations, and that he deliberately sought subject matter which best expressed his own outlook and personal feelings. Critics have had a way of not looking into Chapman's works as a whole,2 but to do so is to see a relatively constant pattern, and when the usual pattern does not occur (as sometimes it does not in his comedies and tragedies), even then we have but a variation on it. The good man's confrontation with a corrupt, harsh, hostile, and often destructive world is the image of reality Chapman favors writing about, but a quest for consolations for numerous adversities is not infrequently a concomitant part of that experience. Many characters, fictional and actual, past and present, in the essentials of their experiences, can be read as guises for Chapman's own struggles with the world.

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

T.S. Eliot has appropriately cautioned us against disposing of Dr. Johnson's criticism with indecent haste.1 He may just as appropriately have told us that Dr. Johnson, while always pointing to significant issues, has occasionally said the wrong things about them; though in doing so, Johnson has unwittingly drawn our attention to poetical subtleties that he himself does not perceive. So it is with much that Johnson says of Lycidas, and particularly with what he says of the poem's rhyme scheme. He tells us rather tartly that the rhymes are “uncertain”;2 he does not tell us, however, that the rhymes tend toward certainty until regularity is triumphantly achieved in the penultimate verse paragraph.

BYRON'S Cain, to no one's surprise, is a Byronic hero—disaffected, self-pitying, self-hating, suicidal—but he can be distinguished from such Byronically heroic figures as Lara and Manfred because, for one thing, he is not directly presented to us agonizing over his guilty past. Cain is presented in fact with no past except divine history and he protests, again and again, that this belongs not at all to him but to his blundering parents and God. There is no crime, then, no wretchedly sinful experience, for which this hero can be held responsible, and he is thrust upon us, embittered and complaining, without any personal history to account for the difference between himself and his pious community. Ultimately, however, there is the murder of Abel and, to compare Cain with other Byronic heroes, it should be said the murder replaces the sin or crime in the hero's past which Byron ordinarily leaves obscure. More relevant to my present concern is the fact that the murder has the effect of identifying Cain to himself and his community as none other than Cain, the infamous Biblical murderer. “Am I then my brother's keeper?” he asks.1 The addition of “then” to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible; it also reveals the curious way in which Byron has conceived this particular hero—as reliving rather than living the Biblical myth. In effect, Byron's Cain is a dramatic creature who plays Cain until, voilà, he murders his brother and discovers he is Cain.

MOST CRITICS agree that The Years (1937) was an attempt by Virginia Woolf to modify the form of the traditional family chronicle by combining the externality of chronological events with the internality of poetic vision. We know, however, from A Writer's Diary (1953) that Virginia Woolf originally intended something quite different: she intended to write an “Essay-Novel” which would combine both forms. The facts revealed in the essay part of the novel would be explicit comment on the implicit social, economic, and sexual forces controlling the lives of the fictional characters in any given period of history, and the fiction would illustrate dramatically through characters and situations these general facts of history. Thus, Virginia Woolf's original intention was mainly one of externality, and indeed in A Writer's Diary she cautions herself against the pull toward “vision.”1 Ultimately, she combined fact and fiction by “compacting” the essay into the novel and combined externality and internality by seeking to reveal through internal vision the pattern of continuity in external events.

WHAT is … difficult to understand is his lack of appreciation for Dickens.“1 William Lyon Phelps's belief that Mark Twain had been one of those rarest of nineteenth-century creatures, the writer who had had no interest in Dickens and who had avoided his influence, was shared by most Mark Twain critics for many years. Although writers like Minnie M. Brashear, who sided with Bernard DeVoto in the Brooks-DeVoto controversy, often pointed out that Clemens had been frequently exposed to Dickens' works, the consensus was stated by Stephen Lea-cock when he remarked that while Mark Twain and Dickens are undoubtedly the two greatest humorists of the nineteenth century, ”there is no record, and no internal evidence, to show that either was influenced by the work of the other.“2 Recently there have been signs of a shift in critical opinion concerning Mark Twain's relationship to Dickens. Walter Blair has shown the indisputable influence of A Tale of Two Cities on Mark Twain's masterpiece.3 Ada Nisbet's survey of Dickens research calls for further study of the ”promising subject“ of Clemens' indebtedness to Dickens, and in a recent review Ellen Moers has suggested at least one direction such a study might take.4

HENRY JAMES found writing The Spoils of Poynton very difficult, and for this reason he devoted more space to it in his notebooks than he did to any other work. The seven entries mark places in the composition where James was trying to work his way out of dilemmas in the plot.1 These entries, proposing lines of action often abandoned in the final work, contain an action of their own: the evolution of Fleda Vetch's character. Originally she was put into the story in a minor capacity, but her functions in the novel multiplied, and James had to spend unanticipated pages rendering her character more fully.

THE ATTEMPT to portray hell and its leading personages by relating them parodically to heaven, or, in other words, by using inversions of varying degrees of complexity, is traditional. Scholastic theologians like St. Thomas regularly related the various virtues and kinds of blessedness to their opposites, and both Dante and Milton, the two greatest poetic infernologists, made systematic use of parody or ironic parallelism. Katherine Anne Porter, in “Flowering Judas,” a story dealing with latter-day lost souls, is clearly working in this ironic mode; she uses references to the religion of the machine, two parodie saviours, symbolic perversions of the purification ceremony of foot-washing and of the sacrament of communion, and a nun-like, lapsed devotee of the religion of revolution. At the same time, certain cautions must be observed. Miss Porter is not a theologian, nor a theological poet in the same sense in which Dante is. In most of her other works, although many of them are charged with symbolism, often religious symbolism as she says, there is comparatively little explicit use of the religious and eschatological diction and imagery so prevalent in “Flowering Judas.” In fact, even taking the word in the most extended sense, one would be unlikely to call her a “religious” writer as T. S. Eliot or François Mauriac are religious writers.

IN A la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust often portrays Albertine through imagery perceived by the narrator, Marcel. The loved object, Albertine, is predominantly a projection of Marcel's desires. The images through which he sees her communicate his emotional experience—happiness, jealousy, passion, suffering, and indifference—with Albertine. Springing from the depths of his consciousness, they are outpourings of lyricism. Consequently, the mood which sustains them cannot last for a long period of time. When these images, which are interspersed throughout the novel, are isolated and then juxtaposed, they form a lyrical poem.