These Remarks are written on a hotel balcony overlooking the last of the plains of Lombardy and the beginning of the Alps. The first snowfall of the season covers the distant heights and outlines clearly the great barrier between Italy and the rest of Europe. Just here two thousand years ago was the edge of the ancient classical world. Beyond the Alps were the hordes that threatened that world, that were to conquer much of it, and that in turn were to absorb its culture and carry it to lands then undreamed of. Through all the changes of the millennia these mountains have looked down on this spot. The snows of early autumn with which they are powdered today are no doubt much the same as those surveyed by Hannibal with his elephants, by Caesar on his way to Helvetia and Gaul, by Napoleon, and in these latter days so tragically by Mussolini and Hitler.

Dominant among the effects of some Old English meditative and elegiac poems is the paradox of simplicity. The premise might be advanced that the source of our wonder at, often mystification about, such poems as The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife's Lament is the fact that we are too far separated from the poetic consciousness which gave them being. But surely this would be a profitless premise to begin with, especially since our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture and society and learning is not uninformed. Yet our approach to these poems seems to be one of continual amazement and puzzlement, as the now numerous published critical, interpretive studies so well attest. And this is what I mean by the paradox: most of these poems are, in their essential statements, simple and direct; their themes of exile and transience, of resoluteness in the face of flux, of sorrow and hardship and deprivation are staple and often expressed in identical terms, such as the recurrent use of gnomic dicta and the catalogue of misfortunes or joys. Likewise, the vocabulary as vocabulary is static and conventional; the limited, insular hoard of commonplace simplices finds extension only in the native habits characteristic of bothpoetic and non-poetic composition, of affixation, derivation (e.g., anga, engu, langoð), and compounding, and the compounds themselves are more frequently than not transparent and, quite apart from their use in context, unexceptional.

On the evidence available, it is possible to arrive at a considerable variety of views on the artistic technique of the author of Beowulf. Even so, it is doubtful whether we should attribute to him the subtlety of a Sartre, as, apparently, does J. L. Rosier in his “A Design for Treachery: The Unferth Intrigue.”

The complex and haunting strangeness of Britomart's night at Isis Church in Spenser's Faerie Queene v.vii guarantees that we take no stingy monistic view of its allegorical possibilities. Of these possibilities, however, the historical allegory has been neglected lately, surprisingly in view of the topical allusiveness of much of Book v. Possibly the justice and equity allegorized in the episode have seemed to be too obviously relevant to Queen Elizabeth's rule for anyone to give them an exact point of reference in contemporary affairs. I believe, however, that particularity of historical reference was intended by Spenser. Contemporaries tended to treat dreams as fairly precise communications.

The drunken porter in Macbeth says: “Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (ii.iii). The speech has often been used as one of the means of dating the play because “equivocation” became notorious at the trial and execution of Father Henry Garnett that followed the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. Also, it has been well recognized that equivocation is a major theme in the play, both in the narrow sense of common duplicity and in the larger sense of a blur between appearance and reality. There is equivocation between Macbeth as a man and Macbeth as a woman, and it is Lady Macbeth who cries out to become unsexed. The play is filled with equivocal appearances—women with beards, Macbeth in “borrowed robes,” day turned into night, a peaceful castle without and a burning cauldron of evil within. “All nature's germens” tumble together, and “the whole frame of things” becomes “disjoint.” This paper does not deny these usual interpretations of equivocation.

Und wollen andeuten ... wie Böses und Gutes aus
einem einigen Grunde urstände, als Licht und
Finsterniß, Leben und Tod, Freude und Leyd; und
wie das in seinem Grunde sey. (Mysterium Magnum, Vorrede, 11).

BÖHMES Philosophieren trägt den Charakter einer leidenschaftlichen Theodizee. Gott ist das unbedingte und uneingeschränkte Gute; von dieser Prämisse will der Christ Böhme nicht abweichen. Aber er ist ebenso weit davon entfernt, das Böse in einer Welt zu übersehen, die das summum bonum geschaffen hat. Für den mit der christlichen Tradition Vertrauten ergibt sich damit die Notwendigkeit, die souveräne Willkür Jehovas, die Existenz von Tod, Teufel und Hölle, die Lehre von der Verstocktheit der Bösen und ihrer ewigen Verdammnis vor sich selber zu rechtfertigen und mit dem oben angeführten Gottesbegriff in Einklang zu bringen. Böhme wehrt sich energisch gegen die Idee der Prädestination, die das theologische Dilemma rational auflöst, indem sie das Bild eines gleichzeitig guten und grausamen Gottes entwirft, der sein Recht zur Willkür in der Verteilung von Gnade und Ungnade aus der Erhabenheit des Schöpfers bezieht, der nur sich selber Rechenschaft schuldet. Zwar wird das doppelte Gesicht Gottes zum Kernstück seiner Emanationsphilosophie, die absichtliche Vorherbestimmung zum Bösen seitens Jehovas hingegen ist derjenige Aspekt der Prädestinationslehre, den Böhme nicht hinnehmen kann.

References to animals, epithets that reduce men to the level of animals, anecdotes, proverbs, and allusions which assume that men and animals are in all respects alike, and appearances on stage of animals or of men disguised as animals have been staple ingredients of comedy from Aristophanes to Ionesco. Comedy rarely loses sight of the fact that human behavior has its animal aspects; farce uses it as a cornerstone of its madhouse. It is therefore only natural that the animal world should be represented in Molière comedy. It is not as generously represented, either in incident or in imagery, as it is in Shakespeare; no one is metamorphosed into a donkey from the shoulders up like Bottom, or dons a stag's horns like Falstaff; nor does any animal play a part as important as Citron in Racine's Les Plaideurs, the dog who is tried for stealing a roast and whose puppies, deposited in the lap of the judge in a desperate appeal to compassion, break up the proceedings by an ill-timed response to the call of nature. No animals make their presence felt so palpably in Molière. In fact, animals appear on stage only in his pastoral plays. But their frequent appearances in the dialogue illustrate the richness and variety of the resources which Molière brought to the task of writing comedy.

Since The Way of the World was first presented in 1700, almost every conceivable issue involving this comedy has been subject to critical discussion. For some time, there has been nearly unanimous agreement that the play is a masterpiece of its kind. Yet a notable misunderstanding of what Congreve intended in his portraiture of Mirabell continues to be expressed. Mirabell is commonly but mistakenly regarded as a rake and a cad, who, in spite of his polished manners, is guilty of reprehensible behavior.

Schillers Verhältnis zur Ästhetik ist bisher fast ausschließlich unter der Perspektive seiner Kant-Rezeption betrachtet worden. Was sich darüber hinaus an Hinweisen auf Vorkantisches, vor allem auf die sogenannte “Popularphilosophie” des 18. Jahrhunderts findet, erschöpft sich meist in bloßen Titelangaben oder übernommenen Zitaten. So tauchen Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Garve oder Sulzer, um nur die wichtigsten Anreger zu nennen, lediglich in den Anmerkungen der historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgaben oder in kleinen, wenig beachteten Spezialuntersuchungen auf, während sie in zusammenfassenden Darstellungen häufig übergangen werden, um Schillers ästhetische Anschauungen nicht in den Bereich des “Obskuren” herabziehen zu müssen. Besonders in der Zeit um 1900, die im Zeichen eines blühenden Neukantianismus stand, herrschte fast durchweg die Meinung von Udo Gaede: “Von einem positiven Einfluß dieser Studien [gemeint sind die Popularphilosophen] auf Schillers Schriften wird man im allgemeinen kaum sprechen können. Ihre Theorien waren durch Kants Begründung der Ästhetik überwunden, und Schillers Ideen beruhten zu sehr auf Kant, als daß er sich anders als ablehnend gegen sie hätte verhalten können.”

A problem currently in our reading of Byron's Don Juan is that of identifying the speaker. There is a tendency to deny the presence of a single speaker, and to dissolve the poem into a number of different voices. This, accompanied by an emphasis on the ironic nature of statements made in the course of the work, is intended to move us towards seeing the poem as ultimately ironic, often with some suggestion of the literature of the “absurd.” An extreme statement of this position is offered by William H. Marshall, who claims that the structural basis of the poem is “only the seeming myriad of speakers.”

That the english romantic poets were much more seriously interested in Greek myth, both in itself and as a subject for poetry, than their eighteenth-century predecessors hardly requires demonstration. The divergence may be suggested, admittedly in somewhat exaggerated form, by juxtaposing two quotations: Addison (in Spectator 523) congratulates a new poet because he “had not amused himself with Fables out of the Pagan Theology,” unlike the fashionable poetasters who filled their works with the exploits of river gods; and Keats hopes (in the Preface to Endymion) that he had “not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness.” The poet who uses the “pagan fables,” Addison suggests, can only be amusing himself; while for Keats those fables have become “the beautiful mythology of Greece,” which the poet scarcely feels himself worthy to touch.

In the proliferation of Hawthorne criticism over the past decade every current literary-theory or methodology has had a say. A good deal of this criticism, nevertheless, has shared an assumption that the way to see to the bottom of Hawthorne is to analyze his symbolism or his recurrent motifs. Though there have been many careful studies of separate plots, and though some critics have preferred to approach Hawthorne by way of his biography or his explicit ideas, more usually he is revealed to us in terms of such symbolic categories as “the light and the dark,” “the power of blackness,” the Devil archetype, or the myth of man's fall. This kind of criticism can be fruitful, especially if, as in Hyatt Waggoner's case, a sense of Hawthorne's eclecticism and irony is allowed to temper the zealous pursuit of symbolic consistency. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that the exegesis of verbal patterns can subserve and disguise a critical hobbyhorse; some of the more dogmatic moral and theological readings have been couched as mere explications of Hawthorne's symbols. The rich suggestiveness of Hawthorne's language tempts the critic to ignore what is literally occurring in the plot, to iron out possible uncertainties of meaning or purpose, and to minimize the great distance separating Hawthorne from the tradition of pure didactic allegory. Such, I feel, are the shortcomings of Roy R. Male's Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, which, by analyzing only those symbols that can bear Biblical or sacramental glossing, succeeds in blending Hawthorne into a background of Christian moralism.

The great majority of Thoreau's poems bear in some way on the subject of inspiration: on the conditions of its induction, the description of its progression, the feeling and value of the vision it gives, or the lament for its absence. A study of inspiration in Thoreau's poetry throws new light on his poetic structures, themes, and image patterns, and perhaps offers ground for comment on why Thoreau dropped verse for prose almost entirely quite early in his writing career.

Victor Hugo, observing his unhappy homeland from exile in Guernsey, wrote, in Napoléon le petit: “Et la liberté de la presse! Qu'en dire? N'est il pas dérisoire seulement de prononcer ce mot?” The word and the thing had indeed been effectively muzzled by the decrees of 17 and 23 February 1852, which made of each editor the censor of his own publication and punished infractions in the criminal courts. The history of journalism under the Second Empire is sad indeed, and there is no need to retell it here; for a number of complex reasons, the press law of 1868 eventually eliminated the “censure préventive” and in response to pressures for a “liberal” empire established that “tout Français majeur et jouissant de ses droits civils et politiques peut, sans autorisation préalable, publier un journal ou écrit périodique.” Although it retained the requirements of prior declaration of ownership and staff, as well as the fiscal stamp, the new law was nevertheless a long step in the direction of freedom.

The Problem of Stephen Dedalus is one of the most curious and interesting in modern letters. One aspect of the problem has been brought to our attention recently in a very impressive book by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). Mr. Booth notes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, by its first readers, thought to be an ironic work. It was after the publication of Ulysses, with its presentation of Stephen as the fallen Icarus, that the reassessment of Stephen's character began; and it was the publication of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944 which really accelerated the movement toward a view of the novel as mainly ironic, with Stephen seen as a posturing esthete rather than an actual or even a potential artist. The most extreme version of this ironic view of Stephen has been proposed by Hugh Kenner, in his Dublin's Joyce (1955).

Considering how little T. S. Eliot has written about the novel, one is especially struck by the frequency with which the name of Henry James gets into his criticism. Eliot has left little doubt as to his admiration for James, having referred to him once as “the most intelligent man of his generation,” and on another occasion having placed him among “the greatest novelists.” More than one student of Eliot has shown the influence of James's works on his poetry, but virtually nothing has been said about the nature and validity of Eliot's critical remarks on a writer who has been a stock property of his mind for the last half century. It is the aim of this study to examine the responses that one of America's major novelists has called forth from the most influential critic of our time.

When Brother to Dragons came out ten years ago, its reviewers were inclined to show deep admiration. “An event, a great one,” was Randall Jarrell's opinion, as he sought to substantiate his judgment that “this is Robert Penn Warren's best book.” Another of Warren's fellow poets, Delmore Schwartz, likewise evinced high enthusiasm, calling Brother to Dragons “a work which is most remarkable as a sustained whole,” a work having “perfect proportion throughout.” Both these reviewers, furthermore, placed Warren in some very distinguished company on the basis of this work, Jarrell by finding echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, and Eliot, and Schwartz by observing “Warren's resemblance to Melville.”