On 31 January 1842, shortly after Dickens arrived on his first visit to the United States, he wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton, “There is a great deal afloat here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the time I come home.” And certainly Dickens' observations were to “some purpose.” The American visit produced a fine series of letters, a travel book, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and the famous American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). These three basic sources—the letters on America, which were never intended for publication as such; the Notes, which represented Dickens' public statement of what he saw in America; and Chuzzlewit, the fictional recreation of the America he found—form an extraordinary trilogy of materials made to order for the study of the relationship between fact and fiction. But strangely enough, despite the immensity of the Dickens bibliography, one hunts vainly for such a study. And yet, by analyzing the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in the light of Dickens' letters from America and his American Notes, it is possible to achieve a better understanding of his artistic methods and limitations. One can see, for example, how Dickens the observer, the selector, worked, how he broke up some experiences and fused others together. One can watch impressions and images recur and reappear as the associations with which they are connected also recur and reappear. Finally, one can better understand the fictional difficulties and shortcomings in the American interlude of Martin Chuzzlewit; one can better explain a good many artistic lapses and seemingly wild exaggerations.

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.

Literary genius in the nineteenth century was associated with “inspiration,” “spontaneity,” “emotion,” “imagination,” “the unconscious,” and other such indications of the nonratiocinative. Not all critics and writers of the century stressed all aspects of the nonratiocinative: some spoke of effect, using this cluster of words to denote the appearance of spontaneity, the freedom from classical or mechanical rules, the superiority of the mysterious, the individual, the unanalyzable in a work of art; others, especially those in that growing group whose concern was with the relationship between the writer and his work, stressed the irrational elements in the creation of literature. Among the latter there were differences in emphasis too: some stressed the whim of inspiration, its independence of the will; others stressed the frenzy, the ecstasy, the total unconsciousness of the act of literary creation. Among the latter there were those who further claimed that a passage created under the “spell” is never revised; for if this external or internal force is irrational because superior to reason, its results cannot then be submitted to the lesser pronouncements of rational judgment. Some even went so far as to combine all of the above into a single antiratiocinative aesthetic: the writer of true genius composes only when the whim of the muse dictates; he does not prepare himself for these moments of vision by planning or “calculating” his subject or approach; he is seized and illuminated, writing swiftly and effortlessly; he does not revise; the result gives the reader a comparable spontaneous, ecstatic, undefinable emotion.

Rooted in awareness of pain and flux, Keats's odes of 1819 reveal the poet's desire to escape the painful actual and seek repose in beauty, in the ideal. More than any other of the odes, the implicit subject of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is the ideal itself. While the permanence of art is the poet's bulwark against flux, it is not the ultimate perfection that he seeks. Too many inner tensions, as the poem develops, shape the ideal into something much more complex, unattainable in either life or art since it encompasses both life and art. Keats's attempt to define this ideal accounts for the difficulty of the concluding lines. The purpose of this paper is to try to illuminate Keats's mode of thought and feeling as he wrote the poem and thereby, perhaps, to approach more closely his meaning.

Herzlich Willkommen! Soyez les bienvenus! Siate ben venuti, tutti! Boas vindas! Dobro pozhalovat'! Céad mile fáilte! jEstán ustedes en su casa! [Felices Pascuas y Próspera Año Nuevo! (No, that's for Christmas cards.) You see, I can espeak the English too! Also! So I shall add, translating one of these greetings, “A hundred thousand welcomes!” Welcome to the city described by Esquire as “Everybody's Other Home Town,” and by our local Board of Trade as “Beautiful, Exciting Washington!”

While the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater may be found in innumerable editions, what is usually reprinted is the revised text which De Quincey prepared for a collection of his principal writings in the last years of his life. It is well known that this version of the book differs greatly from the original, and some of the differences have from time to time been pointed out; yet no one has gone to the trouble of comparing the two in any detail. The result has been some inaccurate literary history. It is important to know whether a book was written in the time of Scott and Byron or in that of Dickens and Tennyson. What is more, a comparison of the two forms of the Confessions throws a great deal of light on De Quincey's development. Only by the publication of a two-text edition could all the differences be pointed out; but since an accurate reprint of the 1822 text has recently appeared, while the revised text of 1856 is readily accessible, this hardly seems called for. Instead, I shall here confine myself to indicating the main differences between the two forms of the book—that of 45,000 words and that of 90,000.

In a letter written four hours before his death on 8 February 1882, Berthold Auerbach asked Friedrich Spielhagen to prepare an edition of his complete works. Among the five items he wished excluded from this edition was a “Bearbeitung einer Abhandlung von Channing über Selbstbildung.” Auerbach's reasons for omitting the essay Der gebildete Bürger (1843) were probably several. Not least was the doubt in his own mind as to any originality he might legitimately claim, which in fact is even less than his biographer Bettelheim implies in his one allusion to the inspiration of William Ellery Channing and the “partial” use of an address by this “greatest American preacher” (p. 143). Although virtually disowned by its author and ignored by critics, this essay of Auerbach's, intended for the improvement of popular education, marks an early instance of the reception of Channing in Germany and represents a brief chapter in the influence of American thought in Germany. It indicates one aspect of the meaning of America in the nineteenth-century European liberal movement with its social, economic, and theological upheavals reflected in many writers from 1830 on. The Channing episode in Auerbach's career reveals a great deal about the absorption of American ideas by a German liberal who elsewhere in his writings made allusions to the land of freedom and opportunity and sent fictional characters on trips to America.

More than any other critic of his day, Algernon Charles Swinburne judged poetry by its music, but, because Swinburne is so often ignored as a critic, much of what he had to say on this most elusive subject remains buried in his involved critical prose. Yet, what Swinburne had to say about the music of poetry is often instructive, for one so renowned for musical effects in his own poetry demands our attention when he discusses this subject.

Whitman liked to picture himself as an innocent, primitive genius whose “barbaric yawp” was prompted by nature, not culture, and whose originality was ignorant of precedents and uncontaminated by book learning. But modern scholars and critics have shown that he and his art are not so simple as they pretend to be. They are products of a well-advanced artistic and literary development. My purpose is to examine one of his best poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” in relation to one of the oldest, most highly respected literary traditions in our civilization—that of pastoral elegy. Everyone knows that “Lilacs” is an elegy, and several writers have compared it in a general way to others, such as “Lycidas,” “Adonais,” and Emerson's “Threnody.” George Meyer of Newcomb College has pointed out the relation of “Lilacs” to pastoral elegy in class lectures, and doubtless others have noticed the same relation in various ways. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic study of it.

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

The year ending 30 September was a very active one for the Association. This activity is reflected in the fact that both receipts and disbursements ended by exceeding even the figures of the revised budget which we worked out in the Spring. Among receipts, a few items deserve particular comment. Almost $53,000 was remitted to the Association in dues, an increase of more than $3,400 over the preceding year. Library subscriptions increased moderately; sales of PMLA and the Style Sheet brought us about $1,000 more than they did last year. The Style Sheet I would again like to single out especially: we sold over 12,000 copies, realizing more than $3,100; the cost of printing and distributing it came to slightly more than $1,100. Our net profit, in other words, amounted to more than $2,000. Last night at the Council meeting someone referred to the Style Sheet as Bill Parker's permanent legacy to the M LA—and when one considers that this sum is almost half of what we received from our investments, one appreciates how true this characterization was.

Anumber of critics who have written on Browning believe that the Duke's little chat with the emissary of the Count in “My Last Duchess” constitutes a clever man's instructions as to the sort of behavior he expects of his next wife. Mrs. Sutherland Orr, for example, says that the Duke's “comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plailnly state what he will expect of her successor.” Others, like Edward Berdoe, S. S. Curry, Ethel C. Mayne, William Lyon Phelps, and Ina B. Sessions, not to mention numerous editors and anthologists, find a similar purpose in the Duke's monologue. Although Berdoe's reading of the poem (p. 282) is perhaps not typical, it summarizes what the other critics have in mind: “When the Duke said ‘Fra Pandolf’ by design, he desired to impress on the envoy, and his master the Count, the sort of behavior he expected from the woman he was about to marry. He intimated that he would tolerate no rivals for his next wife's smiles. When he begs his guest to ‘Notice Neptune—taming a sea horse,‘ he further intimated how he had tamed and killed his last duchess. All this was to convey to the envoy, and through him to the lady, that he demanded in his new wife the concentration of her whole being on himself, and the utmost devotion to his will.” Browning himself is often quoted in support of at least the first part of this argument. Asked what the Duke meant by the words “by design,” the poet answered briefly but equivocally, “To have some occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it.”

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November 1865. On that same day the New York Weekly Review announced (xvi, 5): “… a contribution from the sprightly pen of Mark Twain, one of the cleverest of the San Francisco writers, will appear … next Saturday.” Accordingly, on Saturday, 25 November, the Weekly Review printed “The Great Earthquake in San Francisco” over the signature of Mark Twain.

Your very kind applause encourages me to say that it is a pleasure to find myself with but this single responsibility at an MLA meeting. I shall repay you in part with a very brief report.