Studies of Henry David Thoreau as a man of letters have led primarily to an examination of his attitude toward nature, society, government, and religion, and, on the purely literary side, of his style. His theory of the art of poetry has received less emphatic attention, perhaps because Thoreau wrote very little verse, because he failed to embody his theory in any formal discourse, and because it is commonly assumed that in the main his theories coincide with those of Emerson. Nevertheless, Thoreau was deeply interested in the theory of poetry. His utterances concerning it may be found in every volume of his writings and would, if brought together, comprise a noteworthy body of poetic theory.

Luigi Capuana has experienced in his literary reputation what the philosopher-father of Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore experienced in his moral reputation: just as the Pirandellian character became “fixed” in the mind of his step-daughter as a highly immoral man because of one unfortunate contretemps, so Capuana has become “fixed” in the minds of most students of Italian literature as a verista because of a few years of ardent enthusiasm for Zola and his materialistic methods. In Italy, verismo (naturalism) appeared first in Sicilian dress in the works of Giovanni Verga and Capuana. This new type of local literature dealing with the peasant classes, and well-named campanilismo, then spread to many other Italian provinces and was developed by a large group of authors. It is true that Capuana was indeed the banditore del verismo, loudly proclaiming the excellence of Zola's theories and the brilliance of their exemplification in Verga's Nedda (1874) and succeeding stories. But what is too often forgotten is that Capuana is of equal importance in other literary movements, and that he himself rebelled at being too narrowly thought of as a verista.

In one of the several accounts Théophile Gautier gave of the life and works of his friend Gérard de Nerval, he expatiated on the extraordinary modesty of the man. The tumult and turmoil of the age was destined to die down; the whisper of Nerval's voice has been echoed down the years, and has become sweet music. His poetical lineage has radiated in every direction, and constitutes the purest lyrical filiation of the century.

Walter Pater is commonly known as an impressionistic critic. Many who use the term of him consider it a compliment. For instance, A. J. Farmer admires him greatly, and calls the Preface to the Renaissance an “admirable plaidoyer” for impressionistic criticism. He explains it thus:

La beauté, écrit-il [Pater] en substance, ne sairait se réduire à une formule ab straite; elle est multiple et diverse, elle varie selon les époques et même selon les individus. A quoi bon essayer de l'enfermer dans tel principe d'ecoie, dans tel concept fatalement arbitrare? La tâche de critique ne consiste-t-elle pas plutôt à communiquer au lecteur ses enthousiasmes, à lui décrire les sensations qu'il a éprouvées devant l'ceuvre d'art, à lui montrer les images qui se sont succede dans le miroir de son ame?

In this paper, I am analyzing Strindberg's trilogy To Damascus with regard to two basic elements—situation and character. Through this study, as well as others in kind, I hope that eventually a literary æsthetic may be evolved. The final purpose, of course, is the attainment of æsthetic judgment in literature.

In a letter to Cardinal Newman, written when he was fifty years old, Matthew Arnold mentions four people from whom he is conscious of having learnt—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and Newman himself. Arnold goes on to explain that he does not mean merely receiving a strong impression but actually acquiring “habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me.” Much as he admired Newman, Goethe, and Wordsworth, Arnold's literary fame owes more to Sainte-Beuve than to any other one man. The two volumes of Essays in Criticism, which contain Arnold's most interesting and enduring prose, are a lasting monument to the force of Sainte-Beuve's ideas. Posterity would gladly exchange Arnold's attempts to rationalize religion for a few more volumes of literary essays, but unfortunately, much as he admired Sainte-Beuve, he was too much of an Englishman to follow in Sainte-Beuve's footsteps. Sir Walter Raleigh used to maintain that Arnold was thoroughly unEnglish in his tastes and that he invariably condemned everything that was characteristically British. If that were true he would not have yearned for England as he did whenever he went abroad. Arnold had an unerring eye for national defects, but no man could care more deeply for the welfare of his country. Beneath the gay exterior of the man of the world Arnold was serious to the extent of didacticism. In the letters to his mother he is continually saying that he thinks such and such an article “will do good.” Sainte-Beuve never spared himself in the Causeries du Lundi, but he probably worried more about giving a faithful portrait than about “doing good.”

It seems to be a widely accepted opinion that the words father (<OE fæder) and rather (OE rather <*hrathor) have had an identical historical development since ME. Both words occur in the questionnaire of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Both have been recorded regularly with rather placed in two entirely different contexts—“I'd rather go” and “rather cold.” The more than 400 records of the Atlas reveal conditions in present-day dialect. We shall try to establish, by comparing the vowel qualities as recorded in father and rather, whether the theories of the scholars are confirmed or not.

During a recent re-examination of The Return of the Native I stumbled upon a feature in the construction of that story to which I had been for years totally blind. Turning for similar investigation to others of the Wessex novels, I was startled at the hitherto unsuspected evidence of a special kind of careful workmanship.

In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, the Symbolist movement started as a reaction against the positivism and utilitarianism of the preceding epoch. The eighties and the early nineties were periods of pervading rationalistic thought. Dostoevski and Turgenev were dead. Tolstoi had withdrawn from literature to expound his dogmatic, rationalistic Christianity. The poetry of the so-called civic poets had sunk to the lowest possible level. It was the “autumnal” period of Russian literature.