On 14 August 1869, Matthew Arnold copied fragments of The Buried Life and Stanzas in Memory of the Late Edward Quillinan, Esq., on the flyleaves of a set of the two-volume edition of his Poems (London, 1869). The volumes belonged to a longtime friend of Arnold, Jemima Quillinan, daughter of Edward Quillinan and step-granddaughter of William Wordsworth. The fragments are valuable because they contain unrecorded variants, and the fragment of The Buried Life is especially interesting in that Arnold has changed the meaning of the lines. After Jemima's death, the volumes went to May Wordsworth and are now in the possession of the author.

The history of the piracy of Dickens' humorous works in the New York Spirit op the Times shows that both his presence in and his disappearance from the paper contributed to the shape of early comic realism in America. The Spirit (1831-61) is generally thought to have been devoted to the tall tales and humorous yarns of the South and Southwest, but its editor, William T. Porter, also pirated British serials such as Pickwick just when potential American humorists were beginning to read and contribute to the Spirit. The evidence in the journal indicates that they deliberately imitated Dickens. After the publication of American Notes, letters to the editor violently attacking Dickens reveal some acute American sensitivities of the period. When Porter saw that American Notes was creating a controversy, he stopped pirating Dickens' works and encouraged his contributors as humorists in their own right. Thus Dickens inadvertently played an influential role in what is usually thought of as a purely native American literary genre.

Upon Appleton House is a poem in which superficial sprightliness and subterranean portentousness, a variety of rhetorical stances, and a loose, episodic structure apparently conspire to create disunity. But a unifying principle is supplied by the formulaic topos of the locus amoenus. As this convention developed from Homer through the Elizabethans, it took on potentially ambiguous connotations of refection, generation, and eroticism. Marvell systematically exploits these connotations, making of the Fairfax estate a double microcosm which reflects a disorderly world and his own uncertain relation to it. The confusion is further mirrored in Marvell's deployment of the topos. As rhetorical device, its impact should normally be synchronous, so that its elements strike the reader as a unit, not as a sequence of terms successively qualifying one another. But Marvell breaks the unit down, anatomizes it, taking its topographical elements (garden, grass, shade, water) serially and discontinuously. Gradually, however, the locus reasserts its mythic totality. As it does, Marvell also traces a historical movement back through the development of civilization to the first locus amoenus, Eden, and a rhetorical movement from critical objectivity to devotional subjectivity. These movements come to a focus in the figure of Maria Fairfax, whom Marvell, as poet-priest, adores as summarizing the virtues of Appleton House, now become the emblem of a reordered cosmos, a refuge from the corrupting processes of time and change. The vision cannot last, as Marvell implies by sustaining the mocking extravagance of his language right through to the last, ambiguous lines. The unity is only poetic, conceptual, rhetorical. But a unity it is, sung out of confusions, with the locus amoenus as its major chord.

Hazlitt's early interest in painting and philosophy profoundly influenced his subsequent work as a literary critic. His view of abstraction as a process of individuation rather than generalization, developed between 1805 and 1812, was an improvement on the nominalist and conceptualist theories of the eighteenth century and anticipated the findings of modern philosophy. In its development, Hazlitt was clearly influenced by his training as a painter and his general conclusions find support in the writings of contemporary and nearcontemporary painters and art critics. His theory has important esthetic implications and provides a philosophical and psychological rationale for the new critical movement toward particularity in the evolution of which painting was a major influence. Since it was within this tradition that Hazlitt worked, it also determined the nature of his response to literature and the manner of its expression in his criticism. The influence of painting on his critical terminology suggests caution in accepting the view that music replaced painting as the dominant analogy in the literary criticism of the early nineteenth century.

Lamb's Shakespearean criticism unfortunately survives as an injunction not to perform the plays. This is an oversimplification of a carefully reasoned critical opinion. An assessment of all of his Shakespearean criticism demonstrates that it is derived from an awareness of the limitations of the London theater of Lamb's time and of its audience, and by extension, of the limitations inherent in transforming any script into performance. Relying on clumsy scenery in enormous theaters, having to please an audience that did not easily distinguish between art and life, allowing star-system actors to employ melodramatic techniques (e.g., exploiting a certain comic self-dramatization inherent in some Shakespearean heroes and villains), working from freely cut or “improved” texts of Shakespeare's plays–all helped convince Lamb (1) that “the plays are made another thing by being [thus] acted,” and (2) that no foreseeable production could extract all the imaginative richness available to a reader of an uncut text.

Although a collection of stories, The Piazza Tales achieve unity by revealing Herman Melville's pessimistic state of mind during the early 1850's. Three persistent concerns of the author run through the six stories that make up the book: the difficulty of human perception, artistic and otherwise; the dangers of human isolation; and the catastrophic effects of human servitude.

An analysis of the multiple versions of many of the novel's events contained in E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India increases our understanding of the published work. Examining his changes in the “Caves” and “Temple” material supports the notion that the novel is a philosophic one, whose themes were in Forster's mind from the beginning–largely as a result of his Indian experiences–but whose dramatic structure was developed slowly as he sought to create characters who would animate his ideas. Thus, the nihilistic message of the Marabar Caves–that “everything exists, nothing has value”–is substantially the same in even the earliest version, only there it is the schoolmaster Fielding, rather than Mrs. Moore, who encounters this bleak pronouncement. Since such a vision could never alter Fielding's admirable yet limited humanism in any significant respect, Forster decided to have Mrs. Moore enter the cave instead. In the published work, Mrs. Moore emerges in a dominant role as a disillusioned mystic after her earlier MS beginnings as a conventional, God-fearing Christian lady.

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.

Marcel Proust stated clearly and repeatedly in his vast A la recherche du temps perdu his determining theory of involuntary memory. Proust's entire work was based upon experiences of total recall from a store of memories unconsciously preserved in the mind. In a paper delivered in 1957 by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute are to be found physiological bases for Proust's esthetic experiences. Wilder reported that forgotten experiences were revealed to patients in great detail when electrodes were applied to various parts of their brains. Penfield thus supports Proust's view of a stream of memories (or, as Penfield calls it, a continuous filmstrip) preserving an individual's total experiential responses from childhood onward. The juxtaposition of Proust's statements with those of the neurosurgeon about the nature of this stream of unconscious memories, their relation to conscious memory, and the conditions under which they are recalled throws light upon the validity of Proust's technique.

Tortilla Flat (1935) was John Steinbeck's first artistic and commercial success. The novel's promise was dimmed by Steinbeck's evident inability to understand his real success. His continued insistence that a parallel to Malory's Morte d'Arthur does control the novel, and his reliance in later work on predetermined, external, and arbitrary ordering devices, make it sadly apparent that he did not learn much about structural harmony from Tortilla Flat. For, in fact, the novel is loose and episodic, and a sophisticated comic irony is used to locate socioeconomic and Catholic values in a colorful paisano community. In short, there is very little of Morte d'Arthur in Tortilla Flat. Moreover, the somewhat ugly commercial success of Tortilla Flat turned Steinbeck against the novel as it really is. Apparently he felt that he had structured the novel rigidly; that this was a good way to achieve structure; that only the stupidity of a mass audience obscured the issue. All of this appears to have had grave consequences in a good deal of Steinbeck's later work. The entire matter illuminates the failure of a greatly talented writer to develop into a major novelist—a failure that has puzzled many Steinbeck readers.

ON A recent exam, I gave my students the following problem: Of the two passages below, the first describes the opening of the gates of Hell; the second, the opening of the gates of Heaven. Point out how the sounds help to indicate the manner of the opening of each. On a sudden op'n fly, With impetuous recoil and jarring sound, Th' infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder. Heaven op'n'd wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving.

It is inaccurate to maintain (see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, PMLA, lxxxiii, 1968, 284-297) that Edgar Allan Poe's vision of death and dissolution is totally ecstatic and beatific simply because the metaphysical and esthetic “Unity” presented by death is part of the basic “design” of the Universe as Poe conceived it. Instead, the esthetic cosmology of Eureka and the implicit themes of other of Poe's works, especially Pym, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” present a tension between hope and despair, reason and madness, Divine Purpose and seeming Nothingness which must be called “skeptical.”

There is a strong parallel, in form and in theoretical basis, between the writing of Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The power and depth of the film demonstrate that Gertrude Stein's theory failed only because it was applied in the wrong medium; Robbe-Grillet's combination of images with words brings out its full artistic possibilities. That his work should so re-create hers, bringing out its latent value, is more fortuitous than a matter of conscious influence, but both artists spring to some extent from common modern tendencies in art and literature. Robbe-Grillet's critical essays share many conceptions with Gertrude Stein's, and would have led to an art as impenetrable as hers if he had followed his own prescriptions closely, but his repetition of word patterns accompanied by image patterns gives Marienbad that which Tender Buttons and A Novel of Thank You lack. Marienbad rises to the level of metaphor, and gives a dramatic meaning to the art without time, without plot, without character, and without outcome, that Gertrude Stein put forward in the early twentieth century.