To scan The Duino Elegies once more, forty years after the poet's death, smothered as they are under an avalanche of interpretations, is a hazardous venture. To do so for a body of readers including many who know this poetry only through the blurring medium of translation seems questionable. To single out one of the Elegies, moreover, and present its poetic statement as embedded in the matrix of a much larger whole, within the space of a short paper, seems impossible. The hope that a group of serious students, perceptive to all the nuances of Rilke's mythopoeic language, will find something not only new but valid in my exposition, prompts me to this essay. For those readers who have command of the secondary literature I wish to state that I have pondered and thoroughly digested many commentaries, including the latest and most voluminous by Jacob Steiner.

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

The trouble with allegory is that it has become a fashionable current preoccupation and people like to be for it or against it. Polemics always tend to vulgarize issues, critical problems get lost among the involvements with “positions,” scholarship becomes a device for finding proofs in history for tightly held hypotheses, and argument becomes a form of rhetoric. But an even worse consequence of such controversial constriction is that it puts literary studies in a straightjacket. There is an important truth in that account of Western literary criticism in the Middle Ages which sees it primarily as a working out and extension of Augustinian doctrine, with the problems of Christian allegory at its center, and there is sufficient evidence in history to support and enlighten that view. Those, on the other hand, who are uncomfortable with allegory and find this view somehow less than satisfactory for the reading of certain texts may accept the allegorists' description of the tradition generally but at the same time justify their dissidence by pointing out (1) that there were other forms of allegory in the Middle Ages, which such a statement of tradition does not adequately consider, (2) that not all literary pieces were formed by their authors under the influence of that tradition, whatever interpreters afterwards may have done in reading them, and (3) that, in any case, even the Christian doctors most learned in the allegorical art did not claim that it could operate uniformly in all its variety everywhere or in every piece. On the contrary, they were the first to warn against such an assumption. Yes, say the proponents of allegory in response, but we don't make so rigid a claim as you imply; we are aware that not every medieval poem can be read by all the kinds of interpretation at once; some pieces obviously intend no more than the simplest sort of old-fashioned moralizing. And so it goes, pro and con, in secula seculorum.

The concentration of allegory in the air in the Middle Ages was heavy. Readers and hearers were exposed to it from various sources, and many probably followed simple allegories on the literal and on the figurative levels as naturally as we understand editorial cartoons. An audience at a morality play followed the physical actions and the speeches of actors, knowing that the characters were personifications of virtues and vices, and other abstractions. No one expected such characters as Lechery, Pride, Gluttony, or Good Deeds, Goods, Kindred, and the like, to be rounded human beings. Homiletic allegories and spiritual and moral interpretations of scriptural texts were heard from the pulpit; no doubt, most of the congregation got the point. A deeper meaning than the literal sense on the surface was sought in poems which were true allegories, such as The Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, and it was taken for granted that it would be found. The author usually made sure that his primary intention, the allegorical thrust of the work, was rather evident. Modern readers may interpret minor details or symbols in different ways, but there is seldom room for disagreement on main points.

That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.

One tries to transcend something in order to escape it, to dominate it, or to turn it into one's slave. The ambiguity inherent in any attempt to transcend is the obvious fact that one must transcend something; the relation between the two “positions” is therefore dialectical—both are as it were defined against and thus tied to each other. The Christian's fight to bring the body into subjection to the soul, by which the soul may “transcend” the body, illuminates nothing so much as the usurpation of the soul's attention by the body: the soul's activity is controlled by the body in its very attempt to negate this control. Between persons, parties, and nations transcendence takes the form of a power-play, yet the story is the same. Snobbery is an even clearer example and has its most explicit and radical paradigm in the master-slave relationship. The snob and the one he is snobbish to (transcends, dominates) both share the same system of values, that is, both value being “in,” although only one has achieved that envied status. In other words, the snob can only define himself against those before whom he parades his superiority, and so, paradoxically, we can say that the snob needs these to the exact degree that he wishes to reject them. Those below him, the slaves whom the “master” beats, are like him insofar as they want to be “in” so that they too can “beat” those below them as they themselves have been beaten. They both love and hate the master: love him because they want to be like him and hate him because they are not and are beaten by him. Likewise the master both “loves” and hates his slaves, insofar as the hate which motivates his transcendence is dependent on their continual presence to him as that which he is transcending. If we substitute for social snobbery a scale of transcendence in which praise and power are the controlling values, we will have both the controlling scheme of the action of Coriolanus and a good part of its theme as well.

In his study of Swift's satire Edward Rosenheim observes that some satirical works are ephemeral and do not outlive the issues that give them birth: “Like any form of pamphleteering, satire tends to claim the attention of the reading public only so long as that public is capable of a concern, approximating that of the satirist himself, for the questions under discussion.” The tract of Swift's which I am about to discuss was certainly occasional and has but modest claims to universality; indeed, there is no general agreement even now among Swift's commentators that the work originally had a satiric intent: most prefer to read it, the Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners (1709), as a serious reforming tract of the times. As such, the Project is undoubtedly of limited interest, but it yields hitherto unsuspected complexities and ironies, not to mention comedy, when we inquire into the now forgotten issues that gave it birth.

A number of critics, most thoroughly A. D. McKillop in his excellent Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist, have commented on Richardson's tendency to repeat himself. Like other novelists of fairly limited experience (e.g., Jane Austen) or with a strongly intuitive way of perceiving the world (e.g., D. H. Lawrence), Richardson tended to use similar character types and involve them in similar situations, and this even more pervasively and significantly than has so far been noted.

Perhaps the most curious episode in Henry Fielding's masterpiece occurs toward the end of Tom Jones's journey (Book xii, Chapters xi–xii), when Tom, Partridge, and their less than Virgilian guide lose their way in the darkness of a stormy winter's night—a night, indeed, so obscure and inclement that Partridge, whose Jacobitism extends to a belief in demons as firm as that of James I, believes the company to be enchanted. Having strayed from the plain high road to Coventry into a dirty lane, the wayfarers at length discern the lights of a barn and hear the confused noises of merrymaking from within. Inquiring the road to Coventry, Tom, together with his companions, is given shelter and hospitality in the barn by a strange, jovial crew who prove to be “no other than a Company of Egyptians, or as they are vulgarly called Gypsies … now celebrating the Wedding of one of their Society” (xii, xii).

Tennyson's “hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre,” written when he was ten or eleven, and “the six thousand lines à la Walter Scott,” written “at about twelve,” have passed into oblivion. “The Devil and the Lady,” an unfinished blank verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, was not published until 1931. “The Lover's Tale” is the first of his early long poems to be published in his lifetime. That this product of Tennyson's youth was so long cherished in obscurity and ultimately published with affectionate apology affords grounds for speculation regarding the relationship of the writer and the written.

Afrail-Looking, self-absorbed man of letters, A. E. Housman had no attributes visibly suitable for the profession of arms. Nevertheless, soldiering and the accidents of military life fascinated him; and a large number of his poems, including some of his best ones, are on military and warlike themes. This trait of Housman's has not been systematically studied, and casual explanations of it have been contradictory. For example, Norman Marlow asserts that soldiers attracted Housman “by their colourful uniforms and their destiny,” and again because they are “men paid to die,” and in another place, and a higher register, because of their “relentless pursuit of glory” (A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet, London, 1958, pp. 114, 158). Housman's biographer George L. Watson traces four other causes. Housman found in soldiering “not the glory of the battlefield, but the discipline of the drillmaster”; he loved soldiers for being “not so much heroes as automatons.” Then the fact that a soldier might be “often susceptible to his own sex” appealed to Housman's invert imaginings. Also, says Watson, Housman yearned toward “the gallant bearing and ripe masculinity of men in uniform.” In sharp contrast, he felt through his own disasters “a sense of closer kinship with their unhappy lot” (A. E. Housman: A Divided Life, London, 1958, pp. 59–60, 145).

It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.

“Uriel” is a poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson's early philosophy. Most interpretations of the poem have, however, emphasized its biographical significance. Stephen E. Whicher, for instance, has used the poem to illustrate the shock felt by the sanguine transcendentalist at the unfavorable reception of his Divinity School Address. But “Uriel” is important not simply because the “stern old war-gods” who “shook their heads” may be Andrews Norton and the Harvard Divinity School faculty, or because the “seraphs” who “frowned from their myrtle-beds” were the budding young powers of New England theology, assembled in 1838 at their “holy festival.” To be sure, one of the poem's highlights is its trenchant and witty satire of what Emerson called, in his Address, “historical Christianity.” That false faith, however, was but one manifestation of a pernicious mode of perception and discourse which the author found throughout history and contemporary thought. The poem was inspired not by a local animus but by a comprehensive, “meter-making” philosophical argument. It was probably composed early in 1845, well after the immediate animosities of the controversy over the Address had fallen into perspective. From that distance, Emerson generalized the biographical incident into a clash of opposing philosophies.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Howells wrote three books on England: London Films (1906), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), and Seven English Cities (1909). As with most of his book publication, nearly all of these three had appeared in magazines, with about forty pages of London Films first coming out in the December 1904 issues of Harper's Monthly and the North American Review and with one essay of Seven English Cities printed in Harper's as late as July 1909. The first two books resulted from Howells' visit to England from March to October 1904, and the last partly from a visit in May and June 1908, though it drew also upon his earlier, longer stay. From the beginning he showed an outward reluctance to return to travel literature, his first extended work in the genre since Tuscan Cities in 1886 and A Little Swiss Sojourn in 1892. In a letter of 12 April 1904 to his wife he complained that Colonel George Harvey, of Harper & Brothers, “in spite of our agreement … has told round that I'm going to do a book,” and he went on to ask her to remember “that I have not yet promised any sort of book on England, though probably I shall do one of some sort.” But in the same letter he reported doing “a tentative impression which could be used in the Spectator and Harper's Weekly” (neither did print it); he had already written letters and sent a “diary” to his wife, from which his daughter, who accompanied him to England, has observed he drew upon for his first two books; and he had begun the first of four notebooks soon after his landing at Plymouth in March. At least as early as February 15, as Robert W. Walts has found, Howells had written to F. A. Duneka of Harper's about a proposed travel book; and as Walts remarks, after quoting more extensively than I have from the April 12 letter to Howells' wife: “Nevertheless, after the indignation had been smothered, two books, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, were produced from that trip.”

The “Estoria de dos amadores” interpolated into the autobiographic El siervo libre de amor by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón tells two love stories which embody conflicting ideals of love. This thematic duality is reflected in the descriptions that surround each relationship, and two meaningful patterns emerge, one relating love to nature, the other relating love to the life of the court. The first appears in the story of Ardanlier and Liessa, in which a life of pleasure and sexual fulfillment is associated with their retreat to the forest; while the second emerges from the story of Ardanlier and the Infanta Yrena, a tale of suffering and sexual frustration acted out in the ambience of the court. The thematic key is provided by the epithets applied to the two women, the “plazentera Liessa” and the “padeçiente Yrena.” The tension between these two poles of feeling is resolved on a narrative level by the tragic death of Liessa, the resulting suicide of Ardanlier, and the self-immolation of Yrena. This resolution is reflected thematically by the fusion of the two worlds of love, the courtly and the natural, into the single, semi-divine image of the lovers' tomb. The elevation of the tomb to a shrine by means of enchantment perpetuates the fame of the protagonists' exemplary lives and combines their conflicting emotional experiences.

A unque la temática religiosa constituya una de las facetas más ricas de toda la creación galdosiana, no cabe duda que ésta alcanza su apogeo en el autor, como cantera de materia novelable, entre 1876 y 1878. En cuatro Novelas de primera época, publicadas entre los años citados, concentró Galdós toda su extraordinaria capacidad de concreción literaria sobre esa problemática de actualidad insoslayable: Boña Perfecta (abril, 1876), Gloria (diciembre, 1876; mayo, 1877), Marianela (enero, 1878) y La familia de León Roch (junio, octubre y diciembre, 1878).

The intricate architectural structure of Valle-Inclán's Ruedo ibérico is one of the trilogy's most original features. Not only does the work portray what is going on throughout that ruedo during the last months of Isabel II's reign, but the individual novels and their constituent parts have been constructed in the form of circles as well. Books i and ix, ii and viii, iii and vii, and iv and vi in both La corte de los milagros and Viva mi dueño bear many and close relationships with each other, leaving Book v in each case as the axis upon which the others revolve. Therefore, every book of Corte and Viva, with the exception of the two central books, has a sister book within the given novel with which it shares setting, characters, and subject matter. However, this broad general circularity is the merest beginning of the total revolution of the Ruedo. In addition to the relationships between certain books within a novel, each book is itself constructed in the form of a circle, as are some of its chapters. Finally, given books in one novel are parallel to their counterparts in the other. Valle-Inclán's use of the circle as an organizational device was not an arbitrary choice. On the contrary, the Ruedo ibérico is a synthesis of form and content whose origin will be found to lie in certain concepts expressed in such earlier works as La lámpara maravillosa and La media noche.

The writing of La Porte étroite occupied André Gide from May 1905 to October 1908. During at least part of that period, the novelist was certainly reading the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, for he notes in his Journal on 24 November 1905 that he has carried a Montaigne with him on a visit to the Louvre, and, although in early March of the following year he declares that Pascal has replaced the essayist in his readings (JAG, p. 200), on 21 March we find him “patiently advancing” in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” (JAG, p. 203), very probably a deliberate choice on his part, since that essay has long been considered the most complete statement of Montaigne's religious philosophy, and La Porte étroite was to have distinctly religious overtones. If we consider, as we must, the element of mysticism and Jansenism in the novel and the actual place the great seventeenth-century French classicist has in it (OC, v, 193—194, 230, 235–236), it is understandable that Gide should at this moment have turned to Pascal, but it is significant that this self-confessed “creature of dialogue” whose works demonstrate a constant search for balance recognized that there are and always will be in France “division et partis; c'est-à-dire dialogue. Grâce à quoi, le bel équilibre de notre culture: équilibre dans la diversité. Toujours, en regard d'un Pascal, un Montaigne; et de nos jours, en face d'un Claudel, un Valéry” (JAG-S, 13 Feb. 1943, p. 191). On 8 April Gide takes a copy of Montaigne with him on a stroll to the bois (JAG, 1906, p. 206), and home in Cuverville in May 1906, he again records that he has read some Montaigne (JAG, p. 220).

Hauptmann hat es eigentlich vermieden, über sein Schaffen zu sprechen. “Bilde, Künstler, rede nicht!” ein Lieblingswort Goethes, zitierte er mit Vorliebe. Aber in seinem Geleitwort zu Shakespeare-Visionen spricht er von dem Schöpfungsprozess, diesem geheimnisvollen Verlauf des dichterischen Genius: “was wissen wir über den Schöpfungsprozess, der den Visionen und Gestalten Shakespeares ihre besondere Art von Realität, Dauer und Weite gibt? … Es geschehen vielleicht in der Dichterseele Ballungen stürmender Rotation, erzeugen im Verdichten Wärme, Licht und zuletzt das Leben. Dabei ist etwas wie Kampf zwischen Ormuzd und Ahriman.”Sein unablässliges Arbeiten, die regelmässigen Stunden des Diktats, die Produktivspaziergänge, die Visionen der einsamen Stunden sind von Behl, Kästner und Voigt wiederholt beschrieben worden. Hauptmann, der naive Künstler, konnte das schöpferische Geheimnis nicht benennen. Wenn er jedoch beim Diktat auf falsche Pfade geriet, spürte er es bald und brach ab. Selbst beim Vorlesen aus neuen, im Entstehen begriffenen Werken, konnte er plötzlich unmutig aufhören, weil er einen falschen Ton hörte. Andererseits war er der glücklichste Mensch, wenn ihm die Arbeit gelang, wenn beim Diktat wundervolle Verse hervorsprudelten oder die Wucht einer Szene ihn mitriss. Es dichtete in ihm, und er wurde zum Sprachrohr einer inneren Stimme. Seine naive Freude daran war rührend. Ein gequältes “Produzieren” im engsten Sinne des Begriffs war ihm fremd. Seine künstlerische Eigenart, das tief Persönliche und Wesentliche seiner dramatischen Arbeitsweise, ist unlösbar mit dem Werke selbst verbunden und nicht davon zu trennen. Die innere Einheit dieses immer noch nicht zu überschauenden Werkes zu erfassen, bleibt die Aufgabe der Zukunft.