Fontane confessed on several occasions to a feeling of uneasiness in the presence of scholars, for he was always aware of the irregularity and meagerness of his education and of the consequent gaps in his knowledge. Nor did he believe that he deserved an eminent position as a critic. On the other hand, his long experience as journalist and as successful novelist, together with his wide acquaintance with European literature, make the critical utterances of the mature author particularly significant. But few of the scattered critiques which appeared in various journals, especially the Vossische Zeitung, during the author's lifetime, have been brought together in the posthumous volume of the collected works, under the title Literarische Studien and Eindrücke. However, these essays, with the valuable material found in the poet's correspondence, enable one to form a very fair opinion of Fontane's conception of the novel.

We all know that linguist has lately become a magic word. Men who used to be merely English or Spanish professors find that when they are called by this term they are welcomed almost as equals by ecologists and astrophysicists; and scientifically trained administrators on public platforms, anxious to show the breadth of their interests but not feeling quite up to coming out in favor of poetry, are happy to be able to bow in the direction of departments that once seemed hopeless. For the first time within living memory there is even a good deal of money and patronage available for language students—as long as they are labeled linguists.

One is to infer from this characterization that Beowulf is exceedingly strong. Perhaps one can learn no more. For there may be no significance in the facts that the dragon is fifty feet long (l. 3042), that Beowulf rules the Geats fifty years (ll. 2209, 2733), that Hroþgar rules the Danes fifty years before the coming of Grendel (l. 1769), and that Grendel's dam holds the moors fifty years (l. 1498). And there may even be no connection between these facts except that Beowulf, Hroþgar, and Grendel's dam rule their domains for a very long time and that the dragon is a very long beast. Anything which approaches thirty or fifty in dimension, conventionally approaches the marvellous. Accordingly Deor says (ll. 18–19):

Đeodric ahte þritig wintra
Mæringa burg …

It has long been known that the distinction between sl and tl, which existed in Old Norse, has been lost in the modern dialects of Norway. In his Norsk Grammatik of 1864 Ivar Aasen wrote:

An important and currently relevant statement about the role of methodological discourse in literary criticism is contained in the writings of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's relationship to the mainstream of western methodology is examined with particular reference to one of his main sources, Sir Isaac Newton's account of the method of analysis and synthesis. Central concepts of the tradition Johnson received are illustrated from various other writers who shaped the discourse he adapted to the purposes of his literary investigations. It was Johnson's achievement to bring the fruits of this discourse about method in science and philosophy into the arena of literary criticism and to show as no other English critic before him had the importance of rigorous attention to the complicated relationship between phenomena and received opinion in literary inquiry and what the requirements were for knowing something in critical discourse.

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

Despite reservations we may have about Emerson's theory of Compensation, it was fundamental to his philosophy. Nor was its truth or falsity settled by Stephen Whicher's assertion that “the notion of an automatic moral compensation ... is without question the most unacceptable of Emerson's truths, and a major cause of his present decline of reputation.” As Emerson himself said, “the great questions affecting our spiritual nature are not one of them decided. . . . The system of Compensations in moral and material nature, and a hundred other questions of primary concernment to the state of man, are all open to discussion.”

Robert greene himself tells us actually .very little about his university career except that he was a gadabout who finally proceeded to the M.A. degree.

A fruitful but unfrequented approach to the Lyrical Ballads is through the poetry of the magazines. The volume unquestionably belongs to 1798, and seen in relation to the popular verse of that day, its contemporaneous features are very striking. We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads. Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a “complete change” as some writers would have us believe. Even their eccentricity has been exaggerated. Actually, there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked. It is by way of the general taste for poetry in the 1790's that this essay will approach the poems, and it will attempt to show that they not only conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves.

Coleridge maintains a lifelong ambivalence toward nature. As early as the 1795 version of “The Eolian Harp,” he toys with incompatible speculations upon nature and, for the moment, retreats from the pantheistic implications of a bold metaphor. After long worrying about the problem of nature, he arrives at a more stable resolution of his dilemma : in The Stateman's Manual (1816) and in his “Essays on Method” (1817), he employs a traditional distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. Regarded in this latter aspect, nature becomes a source of sacramental symbols: Coleridge holds that the imagination is peculiarly fitted to create symbols and, hence, to apprehend natura naturans. In 1817, twenty-one years after its original publication, he adds to “The Eolian Harp” a key phrase, “the one Life within us and abroad.” This addition, Coleridge's poetic equivalent of natura naturans, reconciles the poem to his Christian Platonism. Despite a growing dualistic aversion to nature in later life, Coleridge, as witnessed by dated footnotes added to his works in the 1820's, continues sporadically to reassert his sacramental faith in nature. Coleridge's adaptation of natura naturans, though it does not resolve all ambiguities, binds through common assumption a considerable body of his mature writings.

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4

He who would enter upon anything like an adequate explanation of the remarkably complex and contradictory character of Chaucer's Wife of Bath must expect heavenly guidance and receive aid from the stars. Though one may not be quite prepared to accept entirely the pronouncement that she “is one of the most amazing characters … the brain of man has ever conceived,” still she is so vividly feminine and human, so coarse and shameless in her disclosures of the marital relations with five husbands, and yet so imaginative and delicate in her story-telling, that one is fascinated against his will and beset with an irresistible impulse to analyze her dual personality with the view of locating, if possible, definite causes for the coexistence of more incongruent elements than are ordinarily found in living human beings. Some time ago when I proposed casting the horoscope of the Wife of Bath, it was with the supposition that rules of natural astrology might be used exclusively in the interpretation of certain data, concerning planets and their influence, which Chaucer has furnished us; but it is not entirely so. In the full presentation of the Wife's “fortune”—her character, personal appearance, and the significance and location of mysterious “marks” about her body—constant reference must be made to what the mediæval mind believed to be truths found in the “science” of celestial physiognomy and perhaps of geomancy.

“Those who remark their religious experiences are generally looked on with Ridicule;” wrote James Boswell, “but very unreasonably, for they are experimental philosophers upon the most important subject.” No one can read BoswelPs Life of Johnson or any of the Boswell Journals and letters without recognizing the vital place religious thought held in his life, for he was a man who did remark his religious experiences with interest and without embarrassment. An outline of his religious life demonstrates the profound revolutions and constant turmoil of his religious thought and indicates the lasting impression religion made on the man James Boswell.

El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, was published in Nueva España in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.

Goldsmith's extensive borrowings from other writers, especially from French writers, have long been known. It has been established that he was heavily indebted to Buffon, Voltaire, Marivaux, Montesquieu, D'Argens, and the Encyclopédie. To these French sources of Goldsmith should be added La Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche, published in eight volumes in Paris between 1732 and 1751. La Spectacle de la Nature is a medley of popularized scientific knowledge, presented in dialogue form. It includes material on zoology, botany, physics, and astronomy, with a strong teleological motivation. Its popularity in England may be seen in the fact that the English translation appeared in 1733, almost immediately after the first Paris edition, and went into an eighth edition between 1754 and 1763. To the English sources of Goldsmith, moreover, should be added William Derham's Physico-Theology, first published in London in 1713, which includes astronomy, physics, and natural history, and which, like La Spectacle de la Nature, promulgates the argument from design.

Old French, until the end of the Gallo-Roman period, was physiologically characterized by articulatory laxness to a high degree. This laxness of articulation chiefly manifested itself by intensifying certain syllables while weakening others, and by producing diphthongs and affricates out of strongly situated sounds while others tended to disappear or remained as they were. During the ninth century, physiological characteristics of precisely opposite nature started to appear, and French gradually gained in tenseness until it became about what it is today: the tensest of known languages. We reject here the theory proposed by W. von Wartburg concerning the effects of Germanic invasions on early Old French changes. “Le provençal s’étendait autrefois jusqu’à une ligne qui allait depuis l'embouchure de la Loire jusqu'aux Vosges méridionales. Cette ligne coïncide assez exactement avec une limite ethnique et politique qui s’était formée vers 500, grâce aux invasions germaniques.” And we accept the opposite views which attribute the early Old French laxness to the Celtic substratum and only the tenseness of a later period to the Germanic superstratum. They are well exposed by Dauzat:

It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.

In his essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote, Ivan Tourguéniev stated that no man aspires to be called a Quixote. The Russian novelist did not presurmise the dream of Miguel de Unamuno. If the Knight-Errant makes clear that his duty binds him to protect the weak, relieve the oppressed, and punish the bad, Unamuno accepts and practices his creed. But Unamuno, being by far more quixotic, than Cervantes, interprets the psychology of his hero, adapting it to his own way of feeling and thinking. In his work Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, he says, in relation to another of his masterpieces, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho:

The restoration theatrical audience was dominantly skeptical and naturalistic in temper. Yet for over ten years this audience patronized the heroic plays of Dryden and contributed to their popularity. This anomaly has long puzzled scholars; and typically, Allardyce Nicoll remarks: “This heroic tragedy is obviously a thing entirely apart from the comedy of gay licentious manners. With its flaunting honour and its impossibly idealistic love passions it seems indeed so far away both from that comedy and from social life as we have seen it displayed in the theatre that it would appear impossible to find any link between them.” Like most other critics, Nicoll offers an unsatisfactory explanation of this anomaly:

The audiences were no longer noble in temper, and consequently the heroic tragedy, removed a further stage from the actual, may be regarded as the true child of the enervation that had come over England. The age was debilitated: it was distinctly unheroic: and yet it was not so cynical as to throw over entirely the inculcation of heroism. To present, however, heroism in real-life plays would have raised too sharp a distinction between what was and what might have been, and accordingly in the heroic tragedy heroism is cast out of the world altogether and carried to an Eastern or an antique realm of exaggerated emotions, mythical and hopelessly ideal. The heroic play is like a Tale of a Land of No-where. (p. 88)