The Impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. But something, probably her strict and demanding artistic conscience, prevented their appearance in the form of the intellectual and argumentative feminism found in the first two books. In this novel Virginia Woolf's concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who “is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).” One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter, and makes it clear that Demeter and her daughter Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other.” This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth.

With that little stump of prose, twenty-nine magazine pages long, Knut Hamsun had laid the foundation of a new literature in the North.’ This assessment, so near in time to the event and yet so far-sighted, was that of Carl Naerup writing in 1895; the ‘stump of prose’ was the fragment of Hamsun's first novel Hunger, which appeared anonymously in the Danish periodical Ny Jord in 1888, two years before the publication of the completed work. At that time it took vision to see the real achievement behind the extravagance; the eye was too easily caught by the uninhibited exuberance of Hamsun's literary début to perceive the high seriousness behind it, his vehemence was misinterpreted as the antics and posturings of one whose chief object was self-advertisement; even the sympathetic Bjørnson, who acknowledged the greatness of some of Hamsun's early work, could not suppress an attitude of tolerant amusement: ‘In the field of literature,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘Hamsun began by committing just about all the stupidities that it is possible for a gifted madcap to get away with in a civilized society. … It seems the belief that no young author can any longer win his place without first trying to sweep away all the others is something that must be called typically Norwegian.’

“Remorse! remorse! It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out of me!” This is Mark Twain's “trained Presbyterian conscience” at work, its pangs reverberating through most of his mature writings. Indeed, sooner or later almost any study of Twain or his works must deal with this remarkable conscience; for a sense of guilt is one of the bases of his mind—a corrosive guilt that gives intensity to his moralistic pronouncements, deepens his pessimism, and adds a sense of urgency to his deterministic denial of man's responsibilty for his actions.

Throughout his life as teacher, lecturer, and author of numerous articles, as well as in his letters and in his journal, Robert Henri gave vigorous expression to attitudes and ideas which exerted a pervasive and significant influence upon his contemporaries. It will be seen that these ideas were ultimately linked with the great intellectual tradition of American transcendentalism whose leading exponents—Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—explored, among other problems, the persisting cultural dependence of America on Europe and the individual, social, political, and artistic implications of the new democracy. As one writer has stated in commenting upon the movement, “its vitalizing effect upon American art and literature and, indeed, upon the development of American democracy as a whole, remains unrivaled.”

Emma, justly described by Lord David Cecil as “Jane Austen's profoundest comedy,” has frequently been mistaken for mere “escape literature.” It has been applauded for its “engaging, dear, delicious, idiotic heroine,” moving in “a place of laughter and nonsense,” and excoriated because “it does not instruct … does not teach the modern reader … how to be and move in our world.” At the other extreme, it has lately provoked the sophisticated interpretation of Marvin Mudrick, who sees Emma as a disagreeable, even sinister, creature. A latent Lesbian, unwilling to commit her emotions, and devoid of tenderness, Emma, he believes, attains at the end of the novel simply “relief and temporary awareness.” The transcendent irony of the book for Mudrick is the author's having shown an apparently reformed Emma, whereas actually she remains imperious and ruthless. Joseph M. Duffy, Jr., who describes the novel as concerned with “the awakening of a normal, intelligent young woman to the possibilities of physical love,” has produced the most apposite recent study. But knowledge of physical love is only one aspect of Emma's awakening, and even Duffy is uncertain whether she is truly regenerate.

As my starting point I shall take a statement about Goethe's relation to science which is both recent and precise, and which was made by Ronold Ring, professor of physics at Harvard University. According to King, Goethe was a true scientist in every respect, except that he limited his inquiry in two ways: he practiced observational science but rejected experimental science; and he formulated scientific insight in terms of fundamental principle, but not in terms of mathematical law. Goethe's aversion to experimental science is explained by King as a fear of analytical processes which do not lead to a subsequent reintegration or synthesis, and this fear, in turn, is attributed to Goethe's failure to understand that the application of mathematics to the findings of experimental science produces precisely such syntheses. King believes that “if Goethe had anticipated that out of analysis and planned experiment might rise the great tower of systematic world-science … he would have met the challenge of mathematics in nature and in life as resolutely and as effectively as he had met the challenge of observational science to the anti-rationalism of his youth.”

In Blake's Notebook drafts of The Tyger we have a valuable record of the growth of a great poem, a record which not only brings the poem itself into clearer focus but gives us as well another glimpse of the poet during a crucial but scantily documented period of his life. Yet, curiously enough, critics have largely neglected them. The fact that Blake revised this poem more than any other has been noticed, to be sure, and some critics have shown how a line or a stanza in the final poem is an improvement over earlier versions. But only one extended study of the drafts has been made, Joseph Wicksteed's attempt to reconstruct Blake's composition by association of ideas. And that is incomplete: of the three full drafts of the poem (counting the final version as the third), and the additional drafts of two stanzas, Wicksteed studies thoroughly only the first draft and an additional draft of one stanza.

Die dunkle welt der dämonischen Mächte, wie sie bei Tieck und anderen vorkommt, ist der Philologie ein Gegenstand von höchstem Interesse, weil sie als Zeugnis der Einbildungskraft und der Ungeheuer-lichkeit des Problematischen im menschlichen Intellekt dasteht. Diese Traumwelt, deren phantastische und rätselhafte Eigenschaften aufierhalb der tastbaren Erfahrungen des realen Weltalls schweben, gewährt dem Menschen einen Blick in das Zeitlose, in das Unendliche hinein, und wird deshalb von der Tiefenpsychologie eifrig durchforscht, weil sie als eine Widerspiegelung des Unbewußten aufgefaßt wird und weil sie vielleicht zu einem Verständnis des menschlichen Seelenlebens und der Seelenkrankheiten führen könnte. Ludwig Tieck blickte zitternd in das Reich des TJnbewuCten hinein und wurde von seiner Grenzenlosigkeit bezaubert, ohne zu wissen, was diese Welt des Unendlichen eigentlich sei, und ohne es zu ahnen, daß er in Gefahr stand, die reale Welt ganz aus dem Auge zu verlieren und in den Bereich des Unbewufiten völlig hineinzustärzen. Ja, er spekulierte sogar, daß das Reich der Träurne die wahre Welt sein könnte und das Bewußtsein dagegen ein Verdammern oder eine Hemmung. Die Neigung zum Unbewußten zog ihn so mächtig an, daß er sich oft in dieser unendlichen Welt verlor und sich einbildete, er habe Geister aus dem Jenseits gesehen. Gläcklicherweise sind diese Gesichte von der Welt des TJnbewuCten nur vergängliche Erfahrungen gewesen, sonst hätte Tieck das Schicksal anderer Dichter erlitten und die Hälfte seiner Tage im Irrenhaus zugebracht, denn sich im Unbewußten zu verlieren bedeutet geisteskrank zu werden.

Evocation of the spirit of a former age is one of the surest ways to demonstrate that the past can never be the present. Sheridan, in writing The School for Scandal, made an excursion into the Restoration, an act of literary nostalgia, and a recognition, perhaps, that he had been born a century too late. His purpose was clear: to write a neo-Restoration high comedy of manners. That he achieved it outwardly is certain. That he succeeded in resurrecting the spirit is a question—one which raises still another question: wherein lies the “spirit” of Restoration comedy?