A problem currently in our reading of Byron's Don Juan is that of identifying the speaker. There is a tendency to deny the presence of a single speaker, and to dissolve the poem into a number of different voices. This, accompanied by an emphasis on the ironic nature of statements made in the course of the work, is intended to move us towards seeing the poem as ultimately ironic, often with some suggestion of the literature of the “absurd.” An extreme statement of this position is offered by William H. Marshall, who claims that the structural basis of the poem is “only the seeming myriad of speakers.”

Like Hofmannsthal's youthful works, which were first regarded as typically beautiful but unsubstantial products of Neo-Romanticism, only to be later widely extolled for their depth of significance, Der Schwierige has been the object of an evolving critical evaluation. This comedy, published in 1920 and first performed in 1921, has often been pictured as a basically precious comedy of manners anachronistically glorifying the Austrian aristocracy after its demise in 1918. Such an interpretation seems at least partially supported by Hofmannsthal's own words: “Vielleicht hätte ich die Gesellschaft, die es [Der Schwierige] darstellt, die österreichische aristokratische Gesellschaft, nie mit so viel Liebe in ihrem charme und ihrer Qualität darstellen können als in dem historischen Augenblick wo sie, die bis vor kurzem eine Gegebenheit, ja eine Macht war, sich leise und geisterhaft ins Nichts auflöst, wie ein übriggebliebenes Nebelwölkchen am Morgen.” Yet, at another time, he suggests a more profound aim when he says in a letter to Wildgans: “Sie werden finden, daß ich darin das eigentlich Seelenhafte, das persönlich Metaphysische . . . versteckt habe unter der Ironie der Gestaltung . . . und doch ist dieser individuell-metaphysische Kern sehr stark.” In recent years increased attention has been given to the critical exploration of this serious core, which reveals Der Schwierige in its essence as a universally valid character study in the high-comedy tradition of Minna von Barnhelm and Weh dem, der lügt rather than in any sense either an anachronism or a period piece. The discovery in Hofmannsthal's Nachlaß of a number of early plans and sketches promises to extend still further our understanding of Der Schwierige. This material, previously unpublished for the most part, makes it possible to clarify both the author's basic intentions and his application of them to the finished work.

Critics have always been struck by the death scene that concludes The Turn of the Screw and, being struck, have given us a variety of interpretations—psychological, religious, poetic; but they have never accounted for the improbability that Miles—whose good health and sound heart are never questioned in the tale—should die of heart failure. In James's other stories concluding with the death of a young boy (“The Pupil” and “The Author of Beltraffio”) we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final death. Not so with Miles. We are not even prepared to find him bewildered and demoralized by the series of embarrassing questions put to him by his governess: Miles is presented as remarkably well-poised for a ten-year-old.

Le point de départ de ces réflexions sur l'esthétique du théâtre en France au dixneuvième siècle fut une remarque de M. J. Mistier qui a écrit dans son Introduction à La Renaissance de Gobineau: “Un étonnant paradoxe a voulu que de toute la production dramatique de notre dix-neuvième siècle les trois œuvres qui sont demeurées les plus vivantes n'aient jamais été destinées à la représentation: les Comédies de Musset, les drames philosophiques de Renan, la Renaissance de Gobineau.”

Sowohl in der Literatur über Klopstock als auch in der Literatur über Stefan George wird heute immer wieder darauf hingewiesen, daß Klopstock Stefan George und seinem Kreis weit mehr als ein durch Schule und Universität überlieferter Name war. Klopstock gehörte zu den dichterischen Vorgängern Georges, zu den anerkannten Kultgestalten des Kreises, denen George sich in seinem eigenen künstlerischen Wirken verpflichtet fühlte und deren Bedeutung für die deutsche Dichtung er hervorhob. Norbert von Hellingrath bleibt das Verdienst, als erster Literarhistoriker auch die innere Verwandtschaft Georgescher und Klopstockscher Dichtung erkannt und formuliert zu haben. In dieser Erkenntnis folgten ihm Hans Gerhard, Claude David, Karl August Schleiden, Jean Murat, Eric A. Blackall und Paul Gerhard Klussmann. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich im folgenden insbesondere auf das Phänomen, daß von einem Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts und seinem Kreis ein deutscher Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts wieder in seiner besonderen Bedeutung betont und gewürdigt wurde, und sie soll sich Einzelheiten zuwenden, die es rechtfertigen, eine innere Beziehung Georges zu Klopstock anzunehmen.

That the english romantic poets were much more seriously interested in Greek myth, both in itself and as a subject for poetry, than their eighteenth-century predecessors hardly requires demonstration. The divergence may be suggested, admittedly in somewhat exaggerated form, by juxtaposing two quotations: Addison (in Spectator 523) congratulates a new poet because he “had not amused himself with Fables out of the Pagan Theology,” unlike the fashionable poetasters who filled their works with the exploits of river gods; and Keats hopes (in the Preface to Endymion) that he had “not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness.” The poet who uses the “pagan fables,” Addison suggests, can only be amusing himself; while for Keats those fables have become “the beautiful mythology of Greece,” which the poet scarcely feels himself worthy to touch.

The influence of the writings and personality of Thomas Carlyle on the poetic and critical career of Matthew Arnold is a complex story, the outlines of which have only recently begun to be traced. Kathleen Tillotson, in her illuminating Warton Lecture on “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” revealed in great detail how passage after passage in Arnold's poetry is related to Carlyle's early writings. Since the bulk of Arnold's major poetry was written by 1853, her study in effect proved how much more “puissant” than earlier Arnold scholars had suspected, the voice of Carlyle had been for Arnold—one of the four “voices,” as he said in later life, he had heard at Oxford in the early 1840's. Significantly, however, in that list of 1883, in which Carlyle's name is linked in dignity with those of Newman, Goethe, and Emerson, Arnold departs from his subject in order to turn his keenest critical instruments against Carlyle; and he rejects him for a temper “morbid, wilful and perverse,” as well as for his “perverse attitude towards happiness” (DA, p. 198). In a similar mood of reminiscence Arnold had written to John Henry Newman a decade earlier: “There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself” (UL, pp. 65–66; 28 May 1872). Curiously, there is no mention of Carlyle here, though demonstrably Carlyle's influence on Arnold's thought and writing extends far beyond mere “strong impression.”

Maria francesca (1827–76), eldest of the four Rossettis, has come down to posterity unfairly characterized by an anecdote and a remark. For the anecdote Christina Rossetti is responsible although if she had suspected the extent to which it would have shaped future generations' opinion of her sister, she probably would never have originated it. In her “Reading Diary” Time Flies (London, 1885), Christina wrote that Maria “shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realisation of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers” (p. 128).

Thomas mann began his career under the influence of naturalism. While naturalistic tendencies are apparent in all of his writings, there exists at the same time another tendency, counteracting the danger of one-sidedness inherent in a strictly naturalistic approach to reality. The aesthetically refined world of Der kleine Herr Friedemann, which collapses when confronted with real life and the visionary experiences found in Gladius Dei and Der Kleiderschrank are indications that Mann's broader scope was present in the early stories. Tristan displays both naturalistic and visionary aesthetic tendencies. In Buddenbrooks, it is religion, including Tony's family worship, which balances the naturalistic trend apparent in the style as well as in the concept of biological decadence. In Der Tod in Venedig, myth is used with extraordinary effectiveness to complement naturalism.

“I have been reading Newman's Apologia pro Vita Suâ,” wrote George Eliot in 1868, “with such absorbing interest that I found it impossible to forsake the book until I had finished it. ... I have been made so indignant by Kingsley's mixture of arrogance, coarse impertinence and unscrupulousness with real intellectual incompetence, that my first interest in Newman's answer arose from a wish to see what I consider thoroughly vicious writing thoroughly castigated. But the Apology now mainly affects me as the revelation of a life—how different in form from one's own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens—I mean spiritual needs and burthens.”

In the proliferation of Hawthorne criticism over the past decade every current literary-theory or methodology has had a say. A good deal of this criticism, nevertheless, has shared an assumption that the way to see to the bottom of Hawthorne is to analyze his symbolism or his recurrent motifs. Though there have been many careful studies of separate plots, and though some critics have preferred to approach Hawthorne by way of his biography or his explicit ideas, more usually he is revealed to us in terms of such symbolic categories as “the light and the dark,” “the power of blackness,” the Devil archetype, or the myth of man's fall. This kind of criticism can be fruitful, especially if, as in Hyatt Waggoner's case, a sense of Hawthorne's eclecticism and irony is allowed to temper the zealous pursuit of symbolic consistency. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that the exegesis of verbal patterns can subserve and disguise a critical hobbyhorse; some of the more dogmatic moral and theological readings have been couched as mere explications of Hawthorne's symbols. The rich suggestiveness of Hawthorne's language tempts the critic to ignore what is literally occurring in the plot, to iron out possible uncertainties of meaning or purpose, and to minimize the great distance separating Hawthorne from the tradition of pure didactic allegory. Such, I feel, are the shortcomings of Roy R. Male's Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, which, by analyzing only those symbols that can bear Biblical or sacramental glossing, succeeds in blending Hawthorne into a background of Christian moralism.

In 1917 Conrad wrote two letters on the subject of The Shadow-Line, one to his agent, J. B. Pinker, the other to his friend, Sidney Colvin. Both letters emphasise that this story is exact biography. To Pinker he wrote of “That piece of work which is not story really but exact biography,” and to Colvin he stated, “The very speeches are (I won't say authentic—they are that absolutely), I believe, verbally accurate. And all this happened in March-April 1887.”

Although there is an obvious virtue in a plot which moves directly through time and space, the final justification of form is how well it conveys the author's theme, his vision of life. Conrad experimented with form: we must keep in mind his habitual refusal, beginning with Lord Jim, to follow a straight time sequence. In Lord Jim, Marlow the narrator is responsible for the complexity of time shifts which characterizes both the Patna and Patusan episodes. And the fact that the plot does break into two discrete actions makes the form of Lord Jim a special problem. Thematically, this break is compensated by a myriad of small parallelisms in action and image. While enlightening, the binding quality of such parallelisms (much noted by critics recently) goes only part way toward remedying the split. A more satisfactory approach to the problem is to assume that the two episodes represent the necessary embodiment of Conrad's conception. I would say that, in Lord Jim, Conrad came the closest he ever did in his attempt “to render the highest kind of justice” not only “to the visible universe” as he affirms in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but also to the invisible universe within. In the same preface, Conrad asserts that “the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” And “his appeal is made ... to that part of our nature which . . . is . . . kept out of sight.” In Lord Jim, Conrad's aim and his triumph was to explore the world of the imagination more thoroughly than he had in Heart of Darkness or ever would again.