The close relationship between the spirit and disease in the work of Thomas Mann is well known. Disease, far from being only a medical phenomenon, appears under certain conditions as a spiritual or, better, spiritualizing force which urges man, and above all the artist of genius, to overcome the limitations of common health and to raise himself to a new level of artistic experience and expression inaccessible to healthy-mediocrity. Mann never ignored the element of danger which is present in this adventurous contact with the ambiguity of life, hidden in disease. Following the romantic tradition, however, he shows such a high esteem for the productive impulse of illness that its perils are overshadowed by the positive value it has in the field of thought and art. In certain cases disease is supposed to serve the development of individual culture and literary genius. It may help to bring about another type of man, as superior to the average as the average man is to the animal, a type who represents a higher embodiment of the humanistic ideal.

In Presenting the third issue of Research in Progress, containing information, for the most part positive, concerning approximately 10,000 projects, the editor feels that its principle and reputation are sufficiently established for him to be able to refrain from rehearsing seriatim its aims and benefits, and to limit himself to describing his policy in the arrangement of material.

Ces lignes de Valéry Larbaud proposent à la critique une tâche considérable, utile assurément, mais des plus délicates. Nulle question en effet n'a soulevé plus de controverses que la notion d'influence en littérature. Or, de tous les noms que cite Larbaud, celui de Baudelaire est l'un des plus fréquemment mentionnés par Proust, qui a également consacré un article à l'auteur des Fleurs du Mal. Il est donc légitime de penser qu'une étude de cette nature pourrait jeter un jour supplémentaire, non seulement sur la personnalité et sur l'œuvre de Proust, mais encore sur celles de Baudelaire lui-même. De nombreuses questions se présentent immédiatement à l'esprit: Proust a-t-il fait à Baudelaire des emprunts directs? A-t-il trouvé chez lui des vues sur le monde et sur l'art semblables à ses propres conceptions? Baudelaire est-il à l'origine de l'esthétique proustienne? L'auteur du Temps retrouvé n'a-t-il au contraire tiré de l'œuvre de son prédécesseur qu'un encouragement à la dépasser et à affirmer son originalité propre? S'est-il borné notamment à juger que certaines audaces de Baudelaire justifiaient les siennes? Sans prétendre apporter une solution à tous ces problèmes, l'on peut examiner les analogies existant entre la vie et le caractère des deux hommes et étudier, d'après les textes, ce qui, dans l'œuvre de Baudelaire, semble avoir plus particulièrement attiré l'attention de Proust. Peut-être alors sera-t-on mieux en mesure de préciser la nature de l'influence du poète sur le romancier.

S'il est un esprit universel parmi les écrivains français d'aujourd'hui, et qui ait consacré sa vie à la recherche de lui-même, et à travers lui à la recherche de la nature humaine de tous les temps et de tous les pays, c'est bien André Gide. Il ne s'est jamais reconnu d'autre obligation que d'être lui-même, entièrement, complètement, sans affectation, sans réticence non plus. Ses livres, à quelque genre qu'ils appartiennent, romans, récits, mémoires, uvres dramatiques, études littéraires, sont autant d'essais de psychologie, intime et générale à la fois. A ses yeux, ce n'est pas par époques, par patries, par classes sociales, par écoles littéraires, par confessions religieuses ou philosophiques, que se distinguent et se groupent profondément les hommes, mais par familles de corps et d'esprits, par affinités instinctives encore plus qu'électives. Aucune place, semble-t-il, dans sa conception de la vie comme dans l'ensemble de son uvre, pour le milieu, le moment, l'hérédité, chers à Taine et à ses disciples. Bien au contraire, l'acte révélateur de la personnalité de chacun, l'acte gratuit, jaillit, éruption imprévisible, du plus secret de nous-même. Par sa critique de la notion d'influence en matière d'art, par sa négation d'une immuable et universelle essence humaine dont nous ne serions les uns et les autres, que des manifestations particulières plus ou moins semblables, André Gide apparaît à juste titre comme un précurseur du surréalisme, de l'existentialisme, des systèmes qui proclament l'indépendance complète de l'homme, et particulièrement de l'écrivain créateur. N'est-il pas ridicule de prétendre associer l'individualiste le plus forcené, l'être le plus protéiforme de notre temps, à une quelconque fraction de la France ou même de la planète? Qui ne se rappelle, au surplus, la boutade fameuse de l'article de L'Ermitage: “Né à Paris, d'un père Uzétien et d'une mère Normande, où voulez-vous, Monsieur Barrés, que je m'enracine?

William Dean Howells became the first great champion of realism in American fiction, not by setting out to reach this goal, but as the logical culmination of his own development as a writer. He began to write about his own experiences and observations in the natural course of his job as a newspaper reporter. Later as American consul in Venice he continued to record and comment on his experience. Fiction entered his writing in a mild way in Their Wedding Journey (1871), when he combined experiences from two trips, created the characters of Basil and Isabel March, and invented little episodes to enliven the travelogue. In succeeding novels plot superseded geography as the unifying element, and characters were more fully drawn, but his own experiences continued to provide the raw material out of which his stories were formed.

If Contemporary critics are inclined to see William Cowper as “first and foremost … an Evangelical preacher”,1 the tradition (though not in every respect the judgment) is well founded. Significantly enough, the first serious biographical interpretation of the poet was not a biography at all but an Evangelical sermon preached by the Reverend Samuel Greatheed at Olney on May 18, 1800, shortly after Cowper's death. Greatheed was one of the pupils of the Reverend William Bull— Cowper's beloved “smoke-inhaling Bull”—at his academy in Newport Pagnell for the training of members in the Independent Church; he was a friend and correspondent of Cowper in the last years of the poet's life; and he became one of the first editors of the Eclectic Review when it was founded in 1805.4 The sermon was preached while Greatheed was supply pastor for the Reverend Thomas Hillyard's Independent Congregation in Olney, and it was shortly afterward published at Newport Pagnell and in London.3 In the year of its publication, it appeared in digested form in the Evangelical Magazine4 and quotations from it formed the bulk of “An Account of the Life and Death of William Cowper” in the Gospel Magazine and Theological Review.6 For the next three years it became the basic source of Evangelical comment on Cowper in periodicals and in at least two “memoirs” in book form. However, in spite of its interest as an early biographical source, its importance is greater as an opening gun in the long (and even yet inconclusive) warfare engaged in by critics and biographers over the part that Evangelicalism or Methodism played in Cowper's madness.

MLA Members wishing to submit scholarly M'SS for consideration by any of these presses should write to the manager or director, giving full details. This is not a list of all university presses. It includes only those known to be interested in books on modern literatures written by extramural scholars.

In the various studies of French Hellenism, attention has rarely been directed thus far to determining with exact precision where French travellers went in Greece.1 And yet their itineraries are often very revealing. This is particularly true of Gustave Flaubert. From his itinerary, not only may we know what he saw and what he chose to omit, but also we may divine the reasons for his choices. Their implications will allow us to establish one more facet of his place in nineteenth-century French Hellenism. Further, but within this broad framework, a closer study of the specific problems of his trip through the Pass of Thermopylæ and of his difficulties with its topography will permit us to begin evaluating his approach to the problems of Greek archæology, upon whose resolution so much of modern Hellenism has depended. In his life and works, Hellenism occupied an important place. From the first version of the Education sentimentale begun in 1843 to the final version of the Tentation de saint Antoine published in 1874, passages in his works frequently center about it; and his esthetics are profoundly imbued with the implications and conclusions which he drew, over the years, from his intimate study of ancient Greece. As one part of the total definition of his place in the movement, I am presenting here his itinerary, based upon the confusing data which he has left us,2 and, as a sample of his archaeological efforts, I am offering an elucidation of his complex notes on the Pass of Thermopylæ.

Fanny Burney's diaries and the reading lists to be found in her unpublished notebooks and memorandum books yield many references to the courtesy writers and to the courtesy books and allied works widely read in her age. The date of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, often taken as the culminating point in studies of the courtesy literature for men, marks the beginning of an accelerated production of courtesy books for women. In 1759 Thomas Marriott, the author of Female Conduct, was rejoicing that “such an agreeable Theme” should have been so long reserved for him. As far as he could remember, “very few [had] touched this Subject in Prose, and None in Verse” to any appreciable length before him, so that he was able to appropriate, as he thought, an uncultivated “Spot of Ground in Parnassus.”1 In the following decades, however, the problem of the conduct of the young lady was investigated so thoroughly that the lifetime of Fanny Burney, or more accurately the years 1760–1820, which saw also the rise of the novel of manners, might be called the age of courtesy books for women.

Seine Verehrung für Goethe hat Gustave Flaubert oft und gern kundgetan, sei es, daß er Zeitgenossen wie Dumas und Victor Hugo grundsätzlich nach ihrem Verständnis des deutschen Dichters beurteilt, sei es, daß er ganz selbstverständlich Goethe neben Homer, Rabelais und Shakespeare stellt, wenn er seine höchsten Vorbilder nennt.1

Until 1876 Nietzsche paid Luther very high compliments. The works and letters of his first creative period abound with praise for the German reformer. The youthful Nietzsche, professor of Greek and philosopher of culture, more than once expressed his intellectual indebtedness to the spirit of Wittenberg. In those early years he felt himself the heir of the Lutheran Reformation and the inveterate foe of Roman Catholicism. Though anything but an orthodox Protestant, he was nevertheless firmly convinced of the intellectual and moral superiority of Protestantism to the Church of Rome. As late as 1876 he looked upon Protestantism as a source of light and freedom and upon Roman Catholicism as the embodiment of darkness and intellectual bondage. However, all his complimentary utterances on Luther and the Reformation are scarcely based on an intimate knowledge of the man and the movement he inspired. They rather express little more than the idea of Luther held by most educated Protestants of that day. What he said reflects the general, favorable attitude characteristic of Protestant Germany: Luther the great hero of the Reformation, the first representative of modern culture, without whom the world in which we live would be quite unthinkable. In other words, Nietzsche identified himself as late as Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) with the then prevalent Protestant opinion of the Reformation: “Halten wir an dem … Geiste fest, der sich in der deutschen Reformation … offenbart hat …” (IV, 54).

Die Jahrhundertwende ist die Spätzeit der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und ihrer Dichtung. Immer mehr lösen sich die sozialen, geistigen und ethischen Formen auf, denen der Mensch vergangener Epochen eingegliedert war. “In solchen Zeitaltern vereinsamt der geistig Schaffende auf eine eigentümliche Art.” Der Künstler sieht sich der Hülle einer schützenden Tradition beraubt, unter der er seine Werke gestalten könnte. Es erwacht in ihm die Sehnsucht nach einer neuen Daseinsform. Typisch für das fin-de-siècle war diese gemeinsame Not und Sehnsucht, und daß es sonst so wenig Gemeinsames hatte. So geschah es, daß gerade die bedeutendsten Männer der Jahrhundertwende, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke oder Dehmel, zu Suchern und “Pilgern” wurden. Doch auch in den Reihen der kleineren Geister verbreitete sich eine angstvolle Unruhe, bis es schließlich kurz vor dem Kriege zu einem allgemeinen, verzweifelten Aufbruch kam. In der Literaturgeschichte pflegt man diese Bewegung als Expressionismus zu bezeichnen.

At the risk of setting up further waves of what Joyce calls the “true scholastic stink” I feel it necessary to add a few more observations to the many already made on the philosophic clarifications of his own aesthetic position that Gerard Manley Hopkins found in Duns Scotus. The attention of critics is becoming more and more absorbed in studying the poetic process itself, the poet's perception of complexity and coherence, and his attempt to express them in terms of aesthetic structure. For such a study Hopkins offers rich materials. His own critical acumen forced him early to coin new terms, “inscape” and “instress”, in order to express more accurately the nature of poetic insight and response. It is apparent, therefore, that the more we can find out about inscape and instress, the more fully we shall grasp the nature of Hopkins' poetic experience, and ultimately the quality of the poems to which it gave rise. It is this purpose which justifies further explorations into fourteenth-century philosophic subtleties.

[1–29: 1 no inf; 2, 3, compl; 4 title garbled last year, corrected below; 7 compl; 8 no inf; 8a compl; 13 discont r.n.g.; 14 ch add Houghton Library, Harvard; 15, 16, 17 no inf; 20 compl; 23 discont, no support for project; 24a compl; 26 no inf; 27 compl; 28 no inf; 28a ch add The Warburg Institute, London; 29 no inf].

From “Head's” in New York, on August 23, 1844, James Fenimore Cooper wrote Mrs. Cooper: “Charles Wilkes is in this house superintending the publication of his work. It will be a very magnificent book, and I make no doubt will do him credit.” This book is the handsome and profusely illustrated Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838-1842, a record prepared by Lieutenant Wilkes, commander of the expedition sent out by the United States Navy. In the preface to The Sea Lions (1849) and several times in the novel itself Cooper refers to Wilkes, but the extent of his indebtedness to the Narrative seems not to have been pointed out.