Ramón sender, perhaps the most gifted of living Spanish novelists, has been, since 1946, an American citizen. Since 1947 he has been Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico. Nine of his fourteen published novels have been translated into English, and have appeared in both American and British editions.

When A. E. Housman late one afternoon in May 1933 was delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” there may have been some nodding heads in the Senate House audience, but only up to the moment he began to speak of his own methods of composition. He had over the years earned a reputation for the obduracy with which he repelled inquiry into this forbidden subject, but on this occasion he ended with a personal confession which his hearers debated long after they forgot his definition of poetry.

The sound and the Fury was the first of Faulkner's novels to make the question of form and technique an unavoidable critical issue. In any discussion of its structure the controlling assumption should be that there are plausible reasons for the particular arrangement of the four sections and for the use of the stream of consciousness technique in the first three and not in the fourth. Jean-Paul Sartre's comment that the moment the reader attempts to isolate the plot content “he notices that he is telling another story” indicates the need for such an assumption, not only for any light that may be thrown on The Sound and the Fury but for any insight that may emerge concerning Faulkner's method and achievement.

Goethe with his elective affinities, Stendhal with his cristallisation, are among Marcel Proust's forerunners in the use of scientific analogies in fiction. In our time, D. H. Lawrence has made his readers familiar with electricity as an analogue for the passion of love. But it seems safe to say that no writer has ever made more varied and skillful use of metaphors from science than Proust. This is the more remarkable because A la Recherche du Temps perdu is better known for the allusions to painting and music than for the allusions to science. Admirers like André Maurois, Camille Vettard, and Jean Mouton content themselves with citing a few examples. A study of Proust's analogies from the sciences is interesting for several reasons. There is, for one thing, the question of Proust's scientific culture. Another question is the value of these analogies for clarification of the phenomena described. A third point of interest concerns their artistic value. Do they come up to the ideal of the author who wrote: “Je crois que la métaphore seule peut donner une sorte d'éternité au style … ”? What is the function of these metaphors in the novel conceived as a work of art?

I whatever henry James's feelings may have been toward his favorite “Albany cousin,” Mary (“Minny”) Temple, while she lived, it is clear that at her death in 1870, she left with him an indelible image that made available to him as a writer large areas of human experience. This image figured more or less obscurely in several of his stories and minor female characters but according to his own testimony was most fully and consciously operative in his creation of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove.

A study such as Wolfgang Clemen's The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951) indicates that something other than the content of a metaphor, or even its simple recurrence, will prove important for the investigator of images. The skill of the artist may better be revealed in the functioning of his images or the great variety of uses which they are made to serve in different contexts. This suggestion has especial validity when applied to such a craftsman as Henry James. The changing conditions under which he applies certain figures in part explain why James's later fiction becomes more dramatic, at the same time that it remains realistic and more exclusively concerns itself with subjective events.

Professor Hoxie N. Fairchild has conclusively shown that Thomas Hardy took much of the inspiration, the thought, and the structure of his epic poem of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, from Robert Buchanan's Drama of Kings, published in 1871. But the story does not end there. The purpose of this article is to make clear that Buchanan was, in turn, a liegeman of Victor Hugo and borrowed extensively from the poetry of the great French exile for the form and much of the matter of his Drama of Kings; that, specifically, Hugo's La Légende des siècles furnished much of the inspiration and the substance of Buchanan's poem; and that Hugo, rather than Buchanan, is thus the original source of Hardy's epic.

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

AS novelists in nineteenth-century France grew more familiar with their medium through practice in handling it, it became ever more possible for them to conceive of incorporating into it many of the qualities hitherto sought only in poetry or in the theater: the grandeur of the epic, the penetration of comedy, the sublimity of tragedy. The novel, relatively new in comparison with other forms, required the development of new techniques and new understandings which force the critic regretfully to abandon many criteria made comfortable through long use; but some of the basic problems remain and carry over with them some at least of the older canons. An enquiry into the meaning of Madame Bovary may properly raise the familiar question of tragedy or pathos and, although the question is posed in terms foreign to the older forms, the criteria for them may be restated to meet the new issues. One such canon is the matter of “aesthetic distance,” which has recently been defined as “an implicit set of directions concerning the distance from the object at which the reader must stand if he is to see it for what it is.” Studied in this light, Madame Bovary shows constantly shifting distances which lead to a richness and variety prohibited in the shorter compass of most of the older forms but which also proportionately increase the difficulties for the novelist, who must bring unity and meaning into this complex.

Browning's critics and biographers never tire of recounting the original reception of Sordello. We are told again and again Tennyson's remark that only the first and last lines are intelligible and they are both false, or Mrs. Carlyle's comment that after reading the poem through she had still not discovered whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. But even more discouraging to the modern reader who wishes to take Sordello seriously is the tendency of later critics, including those otherwise friendly to Browning, to ignore the poem or pass it by with brief praise for what are sometimes called its “incidental beauties.” Sir Henry Jones, writing on Browning in the Cambridge History of English Literature, passes it by without an attempt at interpretation. Chesterton does the same in the English Men of Letters Series biography, while Phelps, conceding that “in its inmost citadel is some precious secret,” adds “but not only has no one found it, no one knows what it is.” The few studies since 1920 listed in the CBEL all deal with sources and composition, and the yearly bibliographies in PMLA since the publication of the CBEL (1941) list only one interpretive paper. DeVane, in his valuable Browning Handbook (1935), continues the study of sources and methods of composition, showing the evolution of the poem through three successive plans over a period of seven years. As might be expected, DeVane does not find the poem unified. It is, he concludes, “a bewildering potpourri of poetry, psychology, love, romance, humanitarianism, philosophy, fiction, and history.”

On 5 june 1824 Thomas Carlyle, aged twenty-nine, sailed from Leith, Edinburgh, to London on a visit that was to last until March 1825. Within an hour of leaving he had sent his family copies of his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, published in Edinburgh at the end of May; then he was off to the metropolis to visit his friend the Reverend Edward Irving and to resume his tutoring of young Charles Buller. “The expedition was an epoch in Carlyle's life,” writes Froude. “There was, perhaps, no one of his age in Scotland or England, who knew so much and had seen so little.” He had read enormously in history, poetry, philosophy—the whole range of modern literature in French, German, and English—yet he had seen no town larger than Glasgow and little cultivated society. He had no illusions of winning immediate recognition, but doubtless expected the kind of benefits he had foreseen for Jane Welsh had her hoped-for visit to London come to pass: “You will see new forms of life, you will converse with cultivated men, you may gather insight into character and manners, and what is equally desirable, into the nature and extent of your own powers and the best mode of turning them to use.”

The concept of “Dramatic Illusion” is never thought of today in conjunction with Charles Lamb. Rather it is chiefly associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for two good reasons. Coleridge's position on this difficult topic is, in the final analysis, a middle of the road one, between the extremes, say, of Castelvetro on the one hand and Dr. Johnson on the other. Second, his formula, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” whether adequate or not, is so effectively put that it has been granted a degree of acceptance which a less vivid phrase might never have received.

I borrow metacriticism from J. H. Muirhead, who has described Coleridge as combining “a genius for criticism” with “the metacritical craving for a theory of aesthetic.” And I am aware that the framework of critical “modes” into which Coleridge is fitted in the essay that follows is quite an arbitrary one; how arbitrary is readily shown by a glance at a recent anthology of critical writing edited by Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie. Coleridge appears there alongside Aristotle as a critic who emphasizes the “form” of poetry rather than its “source” or “end.” I have used the same kind of triple relationship to define “poetry,” although I have called the relationship that of Poet, Poem, and Reader rather than Source, Form, and End. But I have preferred to treat Coleridge as a “romantic” critic who attempts a synthesis of Aristotelian form and Platonic end by placing his critical emphasis on the source of poetry in the poet's creative imagination.

The “many movements” of a poet's mind are so various, the hiding-places of his power are so obscured, even to the poet himself, that any attempt to

parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square

is very dangerous. Nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to generalize about a poet's mental or temperamental habits, and, if such habits are basic enough, an understanding of them may throw new light on his work. In Wordsworth, a pattern of basic habits of thinking and feeling unfolds itself in a kind of dualism: Wordsworth had a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere, in nature, in individual man and in society, he saw a constant interplay of opposing forces. These contrarieties were a characteristic manifestation of his mind. They found expression spontaneously in hundreds of images which are too short, too obviously unpremeditated to have been the result of conscious thought. Such images are, rather, an unconscious expression of a habitual turn of mind.

In den heutigen Geschichten der deutschen Literatur stoßen Musäus und seine Volksmärchen auf Gleichgültigkeit, Mangel an Interesse oder ausgesprochene Abneigung und Geringschätzung. Josef Nadler speist in seiner umfangreichen vierbändigen Literaturgeschichte Musäus mit einer kurzen Erwähnung ab. Alois Bernt berichtet in seinem Handbuch der deutschen Literaturgeschichte: “Musäus hat nichts von dem innigen Verhältnis zum Volkstum und seiner Überlieferung, wie es Herder empfand; hier werden eben bloß ältere Stoffe in unterhaltlicher Aufmachung einem größeren Publikum vorgeführt, darunter auch die fünf Legenden vom Rübezahl.” Karl Storck schreibt in der zehnten Auflage seiner Deutschen Literaturgeschichte: “Unter Wielands Nachahmern ragt Johann Karl August Musäus hervor. Er ist hauptsächlich bekannt durch seine ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen.’ Als echter Wielandschüler hat er kein Verständnis für die gläubige Naivität und Naturfrische dieser Volksdichtung.” Erstaunlicherweise erwähnt Ferdinand Joseph Schneider in seiner Deutschen Dichtung vom Ausgang des Barocks bis zum Beginn des Klassizismus 1700-1785 (Stuttgart, 1924), die als dritter Band der bekannten “Epochen der deutschen Literatur” erschienen ist, Musäus’ Märchen überhaupt nicht. Ebensowenig würdigt Hans Röhl in seiner verbreiteten, für Schule und Haus bestimmten Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 8. Auflage (Leipzig und Berlin, 1931), den armen Musäus auch nur eines einzigen Wortes. In seinem kleinen Wörterbuch zur deutschen Literatur (Leipzig und Berlin, 1921; 2. Aufl., ibid., 1931) verzeichnet Röhl Musäus als den “Herausgeber der ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen,’ in denen er allerdings Volkssagen wie die vom Grafen von Gleichen, von Libussa, von Rübezahl usw. gesammelt, aber mit satirisch-moralischer Tendenz in Wielands Art dargestellt hat.” Diese Erwähnung ist besonders bezeichnend, da Hans Röhl ja stets ein getreues Echo der traditionellen Bewertung von Literaturdenkmälern ist. Es ist seltsam, daß Röhl dem Verfasser der Volksmärchen moralische Tendenzen anhängt, wo doch gerade Musäus ein Unikum von moralischer Unbefangenheit darstellt. Ersichtlich hat sich Röhl ebensowenig wie die anderen genannten Verfasser in die Lektüre der Volksmärchen vertieft. Als Erich Schmidt-Schüler folgt er der herablassenden Bemerkung Wilhelm Scherers in der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: “… Musäus, ein Erzähler der Wielandschen Richtung, dessen ironisch vorgetragene altdeutsche Sagen, ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen,’ wie er sie nannte, ihre Beliebtheit noch heute [1883] nicht ganz verloren haben.” Der bekannte Schopenhauer-Anhänger und -Herausgeber Eduard Grisebach schreibt in seiner Behandlung der Novelle von der treulosen Witwe nach einem kurzen Zitat aus der Erzählung “Liebestreue,” die Musäus im dritten Teil seiner Volksmärchen bringt: “In dieser unerträglich widerwärtigen, witzelnden, mit geschmacklos angewandten Fremdwörtern kokettierenden Manier verunstaltet dieser Weimarer Schullehrer die herrlichsten Märchenstoffe.” Musäus ist von den zeitgenössischen Literarhistorikern recht schlecht behandelt worden. Auch in einer Leipziger Doktor-Dissertation, die unter der Ägide von Albert Köster erschienen ist, äußert sich ihr Verfasser, Erwin Jahn, ungünstig über die Behandlung, die Musäus den Märchenstoffen hat angedeihen lassen: “Eine gänzliche Ahnungslosigkeit über den Sinn und die Bedeutung dessen, was wir im Märchen als wunderbar empfinden, spricht sich darin aus.” Selbst wenn wir hundert Jahre zurückgehen, wird das Urteil nicht günstiger. Der Märchenerzähler Ludwig Bechstein ist in seinem mit Recht vergessenen wissenschaftlichen Werk Mythe, Sage, Märe und Fabel im Jahre 1855 in seinem Urteil zwiespältig. Einigermaßen lobend schreibt er: “Durch und durch Gemütsmensch [dies ist übrigens das letzte, was man zu Musäus’ Gunsten anführen könnte], erschien er als der glückliche Finder der Wunderblume, der Wiederfinder und Wiedererwecker des verlorenen Märchens, wenn auch, was er Märchen nannte, nicht eigentlich Märchen sind.” Dann aber bemerkt er grimmig von der Erzählung “Richilde”: “Richilde, nach Brabant verlegt, ist das Märchen von Schneewittchen, widerwärtig modernisiert und der Anmut des einfachen Märchens völlig entkleidet.” Bechstein findet, man müsse sich von Musäus' Stil und seiner Behandlungsweise verletzt abwenden. Zu loben weiß er eigentlich nur die Verbindung von Märchen und Volk, wie sie sich schon in dem Titel Volksmärchen der Deutschen, den Musäus seinem Werk gegeben hat, ausdrückt. In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts vernehmen wir ein uneingeschränktes Lob unseres Musäus nur aus einem bedeutenden Munde. Der große Humorist Wilhelm Busch weiß die Kunst der Volksmärchen wohl zu schätzen. Er hat ein volles Verständnis für das “Zopfbild” ihres Stils und ist überzeugt, daß eine Erzählung wie “Stumme Liebe” noch gelesen werden wird, wenn die damals gerade im Vordergrund des Interesses stehende thüringische Erzählung Otto Ludwigs “Die Heiteretei” längst vergessen ist.

J.M. Lappenberg in his collection of Briefe von und an Klopstock (Brunswick: Westermann, 1867) was able to include thirty-three unpublished letters to Klopstock through the generosity of Meta von Winthem, a descendent of the brother of the poet's second wife. The impression was given that these were all that she could supply, though it is now clear that she had made her selection solely from the letters of the more well-known literary figures. It was not until the 1920's that those interested in Klopstock became aware that other manuscript material was still to be found at this source, and the family was generous in acceding from time to time to specific requests from scholars. However, no general access to the originals was permitted. The full extent of Klopstock's literary remains only recently became apparent when the Hamburg Municipal Library acquired the whole collection by purchase.

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was early recognized as a prime mover of the revolution in literary taste that occurred in the later eighteenth century. The compilation had stimulated, according to Jeffrey, the “first revulsion” to the older literature. Wordsworth did not think there was “an able writer in verse of the present day” who would not willingly acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques. It had “absolutely redeemed” English poetry. Of Percy's enormous contribution to ballad scholarship proper, one need hardly quote testimony. It is no wonder, then, that literary scholars have gone to such inordinate pains to unravel the complicated editorial history of this (for its time) ambitious work. Since the publication in 1867-68 of Percy's principal source, the precious Folio MS., almost too much has been written about Percy's textual manipulations. Curiosity has been no less lively as to Percy's criteria for admitting ballads and songs to his collection, the guiding purpose behind his arrangement, and the sources of the scholarly data that went into his able headnotes and essays. Excellent hints on these matters abound in Percy's correspondence with the syndicate of scholars that assisted him during the years he was putting together his ballad book—Edward Lye, Thomas Astle, James Grainger, William Shenstone, Dr. Johnson, Richard Farmer, Thomas Warton, Sir David Dalrymple; and though otherwise undistinguished, these letters have been making their way into print for over a hundred years, until they now constitute a shelf of sober volumes. “Shenstone's billets,” the slips on which Percy's most influential mentor rated the contents of earlier poetical miscellanies, were edited twice in two years; no less than five recent studies have been devoted to the cancels and late alterations in the first edition of the Reliques.

Source-hunting notoriously has its perils. The warnings of Harold Williams to Swift scholars are thoroughly salutary. “A Tale of a Tub,” he writes, “offers no great opportunities for the ingenious hunter of source books… .” And of Gulliver's Travels: “The eager search in hidden corners for similarities of phrase or narrative may easily become a mistaken pastime.” The fact remains, however, that when one does encounter similarities of phrase or of theme, or even extensive similarities of tone, one pricks up one's ears.

In The Senecan Amble (London, 1951), George Williamson, attempting to account for the innovations in prose style in seventeenth-century England, uses the term “anti-Ciceronianism” to describe the movement toward the new simplicity. Yet more than thirty years ago, Morris Croll, in one of his essays on this subject, made it clear that the term “anti-Ciceronianism” is “open to several objections,” one of which is that “it may be taken as describing a hostility to Cicero himself, in the opinion of the new leaders, instead of to his sixteenth-century ‘apes,‘ whereas in fact the supreme rhetorical excellence of Cicero was constantly affirmed by them, as it was by the ancient anti-Ciceronians whom they imitated.” Certainly Cicero and Quintilian were read and studied in the seventeenth century. Their influence continued to be a strong one during the very period in which the new critical movement was directed against those of their followers who, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, had debased the study of oratory to a mere concern with the tricks of declamation.