While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.

At the present time, the only known manuscript of Berceo's Martirio de San Lorenzo is the eighteenth-century copy that belonged to Padre Ibarreta, and Solalinde expresses the conviction that the Sánchez edition of the poem is based on the Ibarreta manuscript. On several occasions Sanchez mentions the fact that he had at hand the Ibarreta manuscript, and he likewise states that he had his own copy of several of Berceo's poems and that he used the Ibarreta version “para cotejar algunas que yo tenía, y copiar las que me faltaban.” That there is a close relationship between the Sánchez and Ibarreta versions of the Martirio de San Lorenzo is evident from the following facts; in both versions the poem is incomplete, containing only 105 stanzas; both versions have five verses in stanza 15; both versions use, consistently, the forms, ome, omes, sancto, sanctidat, lazdrar, judgar, nunqua; and they conform in the use of the exceptional forms cipdad 10d, cipdat 12d, Katolicos 2d, Karidad 10b, Karidat 47b. Furthermore, the three specific errors of construction or legibility mentioned by Sánchez are also found in the Ibarreta manuscript: the omission of Dios in 10b, omission of the rhyme word in 102d, and omission of seven letters in avrie despecho 105d.

Garrod, in his essay on Keats, equates Wordsworth's “wise passiveness” with Keats's “negative capability.” At least, he fancies that Keats's expression embodies “a quality not essentially different” from Wordsworth's. I contend that, in truth, the two are poles apart.

In context, Garrod is referring to Keats's attitude toward Coleridge, as set forth in his famous letter of December 1817 to his brothers. Going to and returning from a Christmas pantomime with his friends Brown and Dilke, Keats had “not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects”; whence, suddenly “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously— I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”2

The critical history of Molière's Dom Juan is full of uncertainties and controversy on literary and many other grounds. Among its competent critics there seems to be no clear-cut decision for or against the play. Its enemies willingly ascribe to it a high degree of excellence, even to calling it a masterpiece. Its friends, not all of whom agree that it is such, are equally willing to find fault with much of it. Friend or foe, those who call it a masterpiece do not say with any precision what they mean: There is a marked tendency on the part of most writers to pass it over with a minimum of comment of any kind.

Spanish poets of the seventeenth century were very fond of the contrast between the physical limitations of men, especially when prisoners,—“ ces eternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux” (Victor Hugo)—and the freedom of birds that fly at will, or of “ fishes that tipple in the deep.” But nowhere has the comparison been given such artistic form and signal appropriateness as in the mouth of Calderon's hero, Segismundo. This young Titan felt himself fettered by stone walls. They were a real prison to him and he rebelled against his lot. He was not in a mood to admit, had it even occurred to him to do so, the superior advantage of man's mental freedom over the physical freedom of fishes and birds and brutes, or running brooks. But the thought was not original with Calderon, nor, according to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, was it original with any of Calderon's immediate predecessors, but went back to the Greek philosopher, Philo. Lope de Vega was probably the first to transplant the conceit to Spanish soil,—and it bore abundant fruit. In one of his early plays, El Remedio en la desdicha, written before the close of the sixteenth century, occur the following verses:

Rendido estoy á tu nobleza, y veo
Que mi ignorancia fué mi propio engaño;
Aunque si amor á todos da disculpa,
¿ Porqué no la tendrán mi amor y celos ?
Si tú, si tus soldados, si los hombres
Si las aves, los peces, si las fieras,
Si todo sabe amor, si todo teme
Perder su bien, y con sus celos propios
Defiende casa, nido, mar y cueva,
Llora, lamenta, gime, y brama; advierte
Que celos y sospechas me obligaron
Al desatino que á tus pies me rinde.

The Scandinavian analogues to the adventures of Beowulf are of considerable interest to students of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Stories of this type, occasionally affording striking resemblances in detail, appear in distant countries,—among the Japanese and the North American Indians, for example,—but these are clearly of little significance for the evolution of the tale on Germanic soil. And we need hardly attach more weight to the feats of the Celtic hero Cuchulinn, nearer neighbor though he be, than to those of Tsuna in Japan. The case is different with parallels in märchen and saga found among the very peoples by whose kinsfolk the deeds in the epic must have been celebrated. In two instances the story is told of heroes of later times. Grettir the Strong, who subdues two trolls, one in a hall and the other in a cave under a waterfall, was a historical character of the eleventh century, and Orm Storolfsson, whose struggles with a demon cat and a giant recall in many ways the deeds of Beowulf, flourished some two centuries later. The validity of a third parallel, in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, is by no means clear. Here the problem is complicated in various ways. The saga itself is late, hardly older than the time of Chaucer in its present shape, and possibly dating from the early part of the fifteenth century.

Visitors to Westminster Abbey may remember the memorial statue to David Garrick with its inscription:

To paint fair nature by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Tho' sunk in death the forms the poet drew,
The actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though like the bard himself, in night they lay
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day;
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.

It is well known that from 1900 to 1906 (and even before) Proust made a thorough study of Ruskin and translated The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906). Yet it is rather startling to hear him mentioned by André Maurois as “Ruskin's great disciple,” for there does not seem to be much of an affinity between the man whose writings on the architecture of Venice have been termed: “A sermon on stones” and the passionate pilgrim of the human heart who was never hampered in his minute psychological explorations by any of the reformer's ethical theories or creeds.

Absalom! Absalom! is a unique fictional experiment—unique in relation to Faulkner's other novels and to modern fiction generally. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that in point of technique it constitutes the last radical innovation in fictional method since Joyce. A “difficult” work, its difficulties do not inhere in verbal subtleties or in excessive refinement of perception, but in the strain imposed upon attention and sensibility in comprehending its monumental design.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

The aesthetic movement in England (1870–1900) now seems remote, yet since no history repeats itself more faithfully than that of criticism, the historian of ideas may well inquire what relation the Art for Art's Sake movement has to the mental, moral, and social confusion of today, especially when one hears a reviewer warning us that John Crowe Ransom, like other formal aesthetic critics of today, “often sounds like an aesthete of the 'nineties.“

William Hazlitt is read to-day as an essayist and a critic of literature. His art-criticism, except for a few papers preserved in his best known books, is familiar to few readers, and to them it will probably remain a matter of curious interest rather than of serious concern. Before Hazlitt's day even, the foundations had been laid, in the works of Wincklemann and Lessing, of a more precise study of aesthetic principles, which was destined to make obsolete most of the eighteenth-century treatises on art; with their works Hazlitt was, like most other English writers of his day, unacquainted. He was thus so far removed from the best thought of his time that his opinions on art have, for the student of aesthetic theory, little historical importance. The archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the rise of impressionism in painting, the spread in all quarters of art and criticism of what may be somewhat roughly termed the naturalistic movement, and especially the development of a more strict and comprehensive study of aesthetic principles, have combined to make large sections of Hazlitt's theoretic discussions unacceptable to-day.

No reader of John Forster's Life would suspect that Dickens was a good friend of George Henry Lewes for thirty-two years, almost as long as he knew Forster himself. In the first two volumes of the book Lewes' name is mentioned only twice, once in the cast of a play, and once in a page-long list of “other acquaintances”: “Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby.… ” J. W. T. Ley, the editor of Forster's Life of Dickens, thought that this shabby allusion was inserted to placate Lewes,

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

Sir Edmund Chambers writes that “Peele's hand has been sought in nearly every masterless play of his epoch.” The evidence advanced for such attributions has usually consisted mainly of parallel passages and verbal tests, with the result that plays as different in structure as The Troublesome Reign of King John and King Leir have been fathered upon Peele by the same critic. Most scholars have been inclined to overlook the importance of structure as a means of determining authorship, though the dramas of Jonson and Shakespeare structure appears to be as much a constant as style or characterization. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Peele's known plays reveal a fairly constant type of structure, and that this type can be used as a determinant in considering the authorship of anonymous plays.

Goethe's first letter to Schiller, in which he agreed to support the Horen, and which marks the beginning of their unique alliance, contains a passage, in effect, as follows:

Detailed study attendant upon the preparation of a critical edition of the Woman Hater has led me to the conclusion that the play is not an unsuccessful juvenilium in the Jonsonian “humour” school, as it has often been described, but is rather indebted to the evil influence of the outlawed satirist, John Marston, and identifies its author as one of a group of daring young comedists who took for their common subject the crimes and follies of the Court of James I. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to discuss the evidence of this satirical cabal of which Marston was unquestionably the arch-conspirator, but to point out several topical allusions to the King and his court in Marston's Fawn and Beaumont's Woman Hater.

Four years ago I read before this Association a paper upon a single figure of speech,—allegory. In order to make a careful study of that figure, it was necessary to give some attention to other figures, especially to these three,—simile, metaphor, and personification. From time to time during the last four years I have followed up trains of thought that were opened by my earlier study, and thus have been led almost unconsciously to note the various relations of the more important figures, until I have come to feel that the best way to arrive at an understanding of any one figure is to study figurative language as a whole as well as in its parts.1 Each year the subject has been brought anew to my mind by the necessity of presenting it in the class-room.