The idea that Spanish literature is essentially national and popular is no longer so kindly received as it used to be. Dámaso Alonso has repeatedly attacked this interpretation, and in recent years several distinguished scholars, among them Ernst Robert Curtius, have joined him in demanding a complete re-evaluation of the Spanish literary tradition. The force of their attacks is itself the best indication of how deeply-rooted the older view had become.

For critics in the Age of Pope the classical epic was the only genuine epic. It was regarded as a principal, if not always the supreme, form of literature; as an unsurpassable vehicle of moral instruction, of ageless wisdom lightly cloaked by an exterior of violence and adventure, of sentiments “whose truth convinced at sight We find.” Stressing the permanently valuable as they did, these critics spoke of Homer and Virgil as the greatest of geniuses in poetry but rarely treated them as human beings who had actually lived in specific times and places: both were visualized as “conscious” craftsmen skilled in adapting plots to enforce basic “lessons” and equally skilled in blending into ideal harmony such elements of the epic as action and episode, description and dialogue, the supernatural and the human. To be sure, historical backgrounds were not entirely ignored: Pope wrote at considerable length of Homer's “religion, country, genius of his age”; and men of wit like Swift and Dennis compared the excellences of ancient and of modern literature in general. With its emphasis upon matters of form and universality, an essentially Aristotelian approach was, nevertheless, the dominant approach of Augustan England.

The days have passed when the question “Who reads Goethe?” elicited, on the part of most educated Germans, the equivalent of a disdainful “Why, everybody who's anybody, of course!” Familiarity with Goethe is no longer claimed by many Germans whose fathers were brought up on Götz and Faust. Others again, individuals and entire social groups, have recently come in contact with Goethe for the first time. Changes in the modern image of Goethe have been followed—in some cases anticipated—by changes in the composition of the reading public. Until the Gallup Poll in the fullness of time takes an interest in German literature, any answer to the question posed above must remain incomplete. This does not mean that we should refrain from giving a partial answer, any more than anthropologists should forego speculation about the Neanderthal man merely because no complete specimen has ever been found. So much has been written about Goethe himself that his public has been largely ignored—as if the fact that we still read Goethe were not partly due to the efforts of previous generations of readers in publishing and explaining his works, and handing them down to us intact and accessible. Our prototype, the composite Goethe reader of the past seventy years, can be partially reconstructed by examining the history and membership of an organization which has done much to change our concept of Goethe, and to modify the literary tastes of a substantial portion of Germany's reading public: the German Goethe Society.

Professor Hoxie N. Fairchild has conclusively shown that Thomas Hardy took much of the inspiration, the thought, and the structure of his epic poem of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, from Robert Buchanan's Drama of Kings, published in 1871. But the story does not end there. The purpose of this article is to make clear that Buchanan was, in turn, a liegeman of Victor Hugo and borrowed extensively from the poetry of the great French exile for the form and much of the matter of his Drama of Kings; that, specifically, Hugo's La Légende des siècles furnished much of the inspiration and the substance of Buchanan's poem; and that Hugo, rather than Buchanan, is thus the original source of Hardy's epic.

The women that Hawthorne created divide rather neatly into three groups. Such fragile creatures as Alice Pyncheon and Priscilla, who are easily dominated by other personalities, form one of these groups. Another is made up of bright, self-reliant, and wholesome girls, such as Ellen Langton, Phoebe, and Hilda. The third consists of women whose beauty, intellect, and strength of will raise them to heroic proportions and make them fit subjects for tragedy. Hester Prynne, Zenobia, and Miriam—these women are capable of tilting with the world and risking their souls on the outcome. With them in particular Hawthorne raises and answers the question of the proper status of women in society and the relation, whether subordinate or superior, that love should bear to the other demands that life makes upon the individual. With the other types Hawthorne fills out his response to that question.

Dans la nuit du 14 au 15 juillet 1844, vers la fin de sa 72e année, mourait à Paris Claude-Charles Fauriel, membre de l'Institut. Cet événement est rappelé dans un post-scriptum de 26 lignes (en petit texte) ajouté à la “Chronique de la quinzaine” de la Revue des deux mondes, en date du 31 juillet et signé V. de Mars: “La perte si regrettable et subite de l'auteur du recueil des Chants Populaires de la Grèce a fait une impression profonde auprès des hommes éminens dont M. Fauriel avait été l'ami et sur lesquels son esprit … avait exercé une influence d'autant plus digne de remarque, que le public n'avait guère été à même de l'apprécier.” L'auteur y loue “l‘écrivain à qui Cabanis adressait ses fameuses lettres des Causes premières, l'ami dont Manzoni écoutait l'inspiration et à qui il se faisait honneur de dédier sa première pièce, l'homme que Mme de Staël consultait sur la littérature allemande, qui donnait à M. Cousin le goût de la philosophie ancienne, à M. Raynouard celui des troubadours, à M. Augustin Thierry celui des races du moyen âge, à M. Ampère celui des littératures comparées … ” Si élogieuses que puissent paraître ces observations, elles ne rendent pas complètement compte du rôle de Fauriel dans l'histoire littéraire de son temps. Elles ne disent rien, par exemple, de son rôle d'initiateur de la critique dantesque en France, tel que l'a montré Frédéric Ozanam dans un article du Correspondant en date du 10 mai 1845 et intitulé “M. Fauriel et son enseignement.” Ce n'est qu'après la publication, due aux soins de son amie et exécutrice littéraire Mary Clarke Mohl, des deux volumes sur Dante et les originesde la poésie italienne (Paris: Durand, 1854), qu'on put pleinement apprécier ce rôle. Au cours de cette même année 1854, à l'occasion d'une traduction de l‘Enfer par le président Mesnard, Sainte-Beuve parle de la “fortune” en France de Dante, qui trouvait la faveur après de longs siècles d'oubli. “Il est des révolutions dans le goût et dans les manières de voir qui ne peuvent réussir qu'en s'appelant de leur nom et en se dessinant hardiment … Fauriel était destiné à opérer ce changement profond dans le goût, je ne dirai pas du public, mais de tous les littérateurs instruits et de la portion la plus éclairée de la jeunesse française.”

If we assume that recurrent images, structure, tone, and literary allusions contribute to the meaning of “Rappaccini's Daughter”— and students of Hawthorne will agree, I think, that such an assumption is valid—the traditional interpretation of the story as a warning against intellectual pride appears inadequate. Such an interpretation, as I hope to make clear in this paper, overlooks the basic paradox of Giovanni's position as he wavers between the two aspects of evil represented by Rappaccini and Baglioni. Achievement of a fully satisfactory reading is difficult, however, because this is Hawthorne's most complex story, one which presents what he elsewhere describes as “a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world” (II, 377).

It may seem surprising that there is reason today to reexamine a more or less public episode in the lives of two major English writers of the last century. For nearly seventy years there has existed among biographers of Dickens what might almost be termed an official version of the so-called Garrick Club affair, that provided by Edmund Yates in his Recollections and Experiences of 1884. Because of the absence of an authoritative Thackerayan biographical tradition, there has been no full statement of Thackeray's side of the case. Thackeray's biographers have tended to rely instead on Yates's testimony not merely for much of the detail but even for the structure of their narratives of this incident in his life. Some of them have supplemented Recollections and Experiences with John Cordy Jeaffreson's Book of Recollections (1894) and more recently with the late Walter Dexter's edition of Dickens' Letters (1938) and with my edition of Thackeray's Letters and Private Papers (1945-46), but by relying primarily on Yates instead of thinking the problem through for themselves, they have arrived at much the same story as that provided by Dickens' biographers. Malcolm Elwin's Thackeray: a Personality (1932) constitutes an honorable exception to this generalization, but Elwin did not attempt a comprehensive treatment of the Garrick Club affair, nor did he have access to much significant manuscript material which has come to light since he wrote.

A fruitful but unfrequented approach to the Lyrical Ballads is through the poetry of the magazines. The volume unquestionably belongs to 1798, and seen in relation to the popular verse of that day, its contemporaneous features are very striking. We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads. Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a “complete change” as some writers would have us believe. Even their eccentricity has been exaggerated. Actually, there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked. It is by way of the general taste for poetry in the 1790's that this essay will approach the poems, and it will attempt to show that they not only conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves.

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

As Henry Seidel Canby pointed out in his life of Thoreau fifteen years ago, there is a strange gap in the biography of Thoreau that has never been filled. In Sanborn's edition of the Familiar Letters of Thoreau (Boston, 1894), there is a letter of 14 November 1847 to Emerson, traveling in England at the time, stating in part:

On 14 July 1849 Poe, who had just arrived in Richmond, wrote to his wife's mother, Mrs. Maria Clemm: “I am indebted for more than life itself to B— [Burr]. Never forget him, Mother, while you live. When all failed me, he stood my friend, got me money, and saw me off in the cars for Richmond.” Poe had left New York on 29 June. In Philadelphia he had gone on a spree and been seriously ill. Burr with the help of one or two others looked after the sick poet until he was able to resume his journey to Richmond. Poe was on his way back to New York when he died in Baltimore on 7 October of the same year.

Daniel defoe's True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal must be restudied in the light of a somewhat longer and more detailed account which has escaped attention from students of literature. This neglected version adds considerable information concerning the apparition; when compared with Defoe's less complete report this account makes feasible an analysis of Defoe's treatment of the affair; and it gives so much information concerning the dramatis personae that it is now possible to identify almost all of them.

AS novelists in nineteenth-century France grew more familiar with their medium through practice in handling it, it became ever more possible for them to conceive of incorporating into it many of the qualities hitherto sought only in poetry or in the theater: the grandeur of the epic, the penetration of comedy, the sublimity of tragedy. The novel, relatively new in comparison with other forms, required the development of new techniques and new understandings which force the critic regretfully to abandon many criteria made comfortable through long use; but some of the basic problems remain and carry over with them some at least of the older canons. An enquiry into the meaning of Madame Bovary may properly raise the familiar question of tragedy or pathos and, although the question is posed in terms foreign to the older forms, the criteria for them may be restated to meet the new issues. One such canon is the matter of “aesthetic distance,” which has recently been defined as “an implicit set of directions concerning the distance from the object at which the reader must stand if he is to see it for what it is.” Studied in this light, Madame Bovary shows constantly shifting distances which lead to a richness and variety prohibited in the shorter compass of most of the older forms but which also proportionately increase the difficulties for the novelist, who must bring unity and meaning into this complex.