In the recurrent derogation of Cooper's Indian characters as unrealistic and idealized, their figurative language has been the chief specific ground of attack. In most cases, it has been the only concrete issue raised. Thus General Lewis Cass—whose condemnation inflicted lasting damage because of his eminence as Indian fighter and Indian agent—delivered his major broadside against Cooper incidentally, in the course of an article of almost fifty pages devoted to consideration of the current status (in 1828) of study of the Indian languages. After quoting from The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie some twenty figurative expressions, he declared: “This is not the manner in which Indians talk, nor is it the manner in which any people talk.” Further consideration of the language which Cooper had put into the mouths of his Indian characters brought Cass to his damning and often quoted conclusion: “His Uncas, and his Pawnee Hardheart … have no living prototype in our forests. They may wear leggins and moccasins, and be wrapped in a blanket or a buffalo skin, but they are civilized men, and not Indians.” Another critic who knew Indians at firsthand, William Josiah Snelling, in reviewing the autobiography of Chief Black Hawk in 1835, found the authenticity of the work “unquestionable” except for the figurative language employed in it—blame for which he proceeded to lay on Cooper. “The only drawback upon our credence is the intermixture of courtly phrases, and the figures of speech, which our novelists are so fond of putting into the mouths of Indians. … The term pale faces, often applied to the whites in this book, was, we think, never in the mouth of any American savage, excepting in the fanciful pages of Mr. Cooper. There are many more phrases and epithets of the like nature, and we only mention them, because we think it time that authors should cease to make Indians talk sentiment.” Even more formidable authority was ranged against the authenticity of Cooper's Indian characters, and on the same grounds, by Francis Parkman's dictum in his survey of Cooper's work shortly after the novelist's death: “his Indian characters … it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn.” The only concrete reason given by Parkman for this condemnation was that “the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome. Such as they are, however, they have been eagerly copied by a legion of the smaller poets and novel writers; so that, jointly with Thomas Campbell, Cooper is responsible For the fathering of those aboriginal heroes, lovers and sages, who have long formed a petty nuisance in our literature.“ Some ninety years later, John T. Flanagan emphasized the attacks of Cass and Snelling on the figurative language of Cooper's Indians, with special reference to The Prairie, adding as his own conclusion: ”Admitting … literary convention … one can yet reject as unnatural the tropes of the Indians.“ James Grossman, who in his James Fenimore Cooper (1949) accepts in general the view that Cooper's Indians are idealized, observes of two major characters in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, the chief Conanchet and the Puritan Heathcote: ”Unfortunately the two derive their speech, if in different degree and with different authenticity, from the same model, the King James Bible“ (pp. 69–70). It remained for a European scholar to report ”the discovery … that the language of Cooper's Indians was modelled … on the style of Ossian.“ He concludes that Cooper's Indians ”are idealized; they are related to Scott's clan chieftains, Byron's pirates, and Ossian's Celtic heroes; all these figures are but phases of the same romantic movement. Cooper saw his Indians in the light of romantic idealism. … Cooper's Indian rhetoric is a poetic creation and not the speech of living men.“

Major manuscript anthologies of Middle English secular lyrics are rare; apart from the very early Harley MS. 2253 and the Charles d'Orleans translations, there are not more than three large collections: the early-sixteenth-century Bodleian MS. Rawlinson C. 813 (S. C. 12653), the Newton holograph, and the present manuscript, Ff. 1. 6 of the Cambridge University Library, which contains many well-known longer secular poems as well as a large group of short lyric poems.

I have recently expressed the opinion that the story of Androcles and the Lion, a tour de force by Apion the Egyptian, was suggested to its author by an actual occurrence in the amphitheatre at Rome; and that Apion supplied both motivation and decorative incident out of his own fertile fancy, much as a journalist of our own time would elaborate a column sensation out of a small nucleus of fact.

Notwithstanding the existence of innumerable and scattered bits of information and comment on the reception of nineteenth-century French realism in Germany, the general history of the subject has been curiously neglected. Only one comprehensive study, that of Flaubert's fortunes in Germany, has been published; German criticism of Stendhal prior to 1918 has been examined in an unpublished dissertation; the reputation of Zola has not been traced beyond 1893. Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Huysmans have virtually been ignored. Even the longer studies are almost exclusively concerned with the vicissitudes of one single author; few or no comparisons are drawn with German echoes of other French realists, and therefore no conclusions of wider significance could be secured, no total picture emerges.

In an age when thinking was emerging from the dominance of Christian dogma to become once again, as in Classical times, man-centered—when Pico was raising new hopes by his Oration on the Dignity of Man, and Calvin new anguish by his outcry over man's lost dignity—Shakespeare brought the mood of the times to a focus in Hamlet. The mood had two sides, as Theodore Spencer has argued: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. “To Pico and the earlier humanists,” he writes, “man belonged with the angels. But to Montaigne, and the satiric, melancholy, realistic writers of the 1590's he belonged with the beasts.” Which is truer of man, then: the dignity of an angel, or that of a beast? The conflict of appraisal is mirrored, Spencer contends, in the hero of Shakespeare's most famous play, providing that play one of the main reasons for its greatness.

Despite its place in the French Revolutionary motto, fraternity lacks a literature. Blake, who makes an important contribution toward that literature, draws largely from the New Testament, which offers two grounds for brotherhood: we are sons of the Father, we are brothers in Christ. Suspicious of transcendent gods, Blake develops only the latter concept. We are in essence brotherly beings; unfraternal behavior is death. Brotherhood is not kindliness, however, but “wars of love” for one another and willing self-sacrifice. “Atonement” only makes matters worse. The New Testament Christian fraternity rests on Paul's dualism; Blake agrees to the extent that “nature” (and woman) threatens brotherly love. Yet women can be brothers, too, despite the misogynist symbolism Blake chooses to inherit.

What the public gets to see of museums is in the exhibitions in which their holdings are presented; beyond the archival functions of conservation, categorization, and restoration, this presentation is at the heart of museums as cultural institutions. Until a few decades ago, exhibitions were predictable in format and structure. Visitors attended monographic and period exhibitions to be instructed and to enjoy themselves according to the old adage of utile dulci. Every exhibition was an episode in a traditional conception of the management of art's relation to the public. Curators were also conservators; they studied, preserved, and categorized art objects and presented a selection of these according to the knowledge acquired. The space in which the objects were presented was kept as neutral as possible, so as not to disturb the viewer.

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”

In terms of its effect on subsequent literary-theory and practice, the proposition that actions constitute the true subject of poetry is the most important aesthetic principle advanced in Laokoon. At the opening of the sixteenth chapter, Lessing attempts to derive this proposition deductively by arguing:

Doch ich will versuchen, die Sache aus ihren ersten Gründen herzuleiten.

Es ist heute eine allgemein bekannte Tatsache, dass das Werk Rousseaus von wesentlicher Bedeutung für Herder gewesen ist, aber es fehlt fast völlig an Versuchen, dieses Verhältnis genau zu bestimmen. Jedermann weiss, dass Herder Rousseau vieles verdankt; aber was er ihm eigentlich verdankt, in welcher Richtung sich der Einfluss des Franzosen ausgewirkt hat, das ist bisher entweder nur flüchtig oder nur unter Beschränkung auf gewisse Spezialgebiete dargelegt worden. Schon Gervinus glaubt, Herders Wesen am besten dadurch verdeutlichen zu können, dass er ihn Rousseau gegenüberstellt, beide als im Grunde gleichartige Geister erkennt und den Unterschied zwischen ihnen allein in ihren Uebertreibungen sieht: Herder geht zu weit in seinem Optimismus, Rousseau in seinem Pessimismus. Sieht Gervinus hier noch von einer Untersuchung der kausalen Bedeutung Rousseaus für Herder ab, so erscheint Herder bei Hettner fast ausschliesslich als ein Schüler des Genfers, und diese Ansicht findet sich in neuerer Zeit bei Bartels wieder, der Herder bedenkenlos als den deutschen Rousseau bezeichnet. Zweifellos geht Bartels dabei weit über das Ziel hinaus, und diese Uebertreibung ist umso erstaunlicher, als der Biograph Herders, Haym, deutlich genug auseinandergesetzt hatte, dass der Einfluss Rousseaus, so gross er auch ist, jedenfalls Grenzen hat und schon von Hettner überschätzt worden war. So zuverlässig aber auch die Ausführungen Hayms über das Verhältnis Herders zu Rousseau sind, so ist doch der Biograph im Gegensatz zu Hettner zu sehr geneigt, gewissen abfälligen Aeusserungen Herders über Rousseau übermässigen Wert beizulegen, und dadurch erscheint bei ihm dieses Verhältnis wieder zu sehr im negativen Licht. Die schon von Hettner erkannten Uebereinstimmungen im Werke Herders und Rousseaus entgehen auch Haym nicht, doch möchte er sie mehr dem “genius epidemicus der Zeit,” als einer direkten Beeinflussung zuschreiben. Einer eingehenden Untersuchung, die allein das Problem von Einfluss oder Parallelität entscheiden kann, geht aber auch Haym aus dem Wege, sodass die Frage nach wie vor als ungelöst gelten muss. Dies gilt in ganz besonderem Masse von derjenigen Lehre, die sowohl bei Herder wie bei Rousseau im Zentrum ihrer Werke steht, der Lehre von der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, wie sie der berühmte Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes am eindrucksvollsten verkündet hat.

Two hundred years ago, in April, 1744, there was printed in London a long didactic poem in blank verse, The Art of Preserving Health, which brought its author, Dr. John Armstrong, considerable literary reputation during the following century in England, Italy, and America. In this work there are occasional passages of very pleasing poetry, but the goddess Hygeia, whom Armstrong invoked with all due fervor, failed to inspire him to create an enduring masterpiece on such themes as air, diet, and exercise. Consequently, during the last century there has been little interest in his poems and essays, or in his life, personality, and friendships. There is, of course, A. H. Bullen's short article in the Dictionary of National Biography, which added little, however, to Robert Anderson's memoir, or to Robert Chambers' account, and more recently Mr. Iolo A. Williams paid tribute to The Art of Preserving Health and published a bibliography of Armstrong's works. But there is no likelihood that Armstrong's writings will be much read or discussed in the future except by literary antiquarians and special students of the eighteenth century.

Like the English language, English law may be regarded as the fusion of two great cultural forces—the Germanic “folk-laws,” expressed in the early dooms of Æthelberht (c. 600) and in the laws of Alfred and Canute; and Roman law, as interpreted by the Norman conquerors, and set forth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Glanvill and Bracton. From this fusion has developed a body of law which, in scope and influence, is probably without parallel in modern history. It is interesting to see how many of its basic principles find expression in the common proverbial wisdom of the folk. These proverbs correspond, on a popular level, to the Latin legal maxims of the learned, which represent the concentrated experience of generations of lawyers.

Translation, interpretation, adjudication, and objective knowledge are possible in a world without a foundation, a world that precludes the testing and squaring of claims against a reality external to conceptual schemes. In critical studies the prevailing relativist views assume that meanings and references are unstable, that facts, things, emphases, and values depend on various culture- or community-driven conceptual schemes, and hence that defining the inherent interests of literary and other texts is impossible. On the contrary, texts are knowable as internally justified, preregistered systems of intentionality and rationality. Each text exists as such a system prior to interpretation, and it is this system of determinate values and emphases to which interpretive analysis is accountable.

On New Year's Eve, 1828, Washington Irving, who was stopping in Seville during his first visit to Spain, made this entry in his diary:

Literary endeavor in the Middle Ages, as in the Renaissance, was essentially an art of imitation. Since little emphasis was placed upon originality of subject-matter, since praise went rather to the combination and interpretation of familiar materials—or to stylistic qualities —the author felt free to appropriate whatever themes or episodes best suited his fundamental conception. Thus an Arthurian romance was usually a tissue of commonplace incidents and motifs, developed in accordance with the purpose or the taste of the individual writer. To distinguish between the narrative content of a work and the particular interpretation applied to it by the artist, the Middle Ages employed the terms matière and sens. The matière might come from any source; the sens alone was the contribution of the latest reworker.

By the vagueness of his injunction, the ghost in effect leaves up to Hamlet a choice among available sanctions for revenge. Two such alternatives—unlimited ill will and the code of honor—are eventually discredited in the eyes of the audience, the one by being repellently embodied in Pyrrhus, the other by being set in opposition to the law of nature and (through a parallel with suicide) to conscience and Christian doctrine. Though Hamlet never abandons his commitment to unlimited retribution, he manages to palliate it by appealing from conscience and charity, first to the code of honor, and then, having come to think of himself as a doomed scourge of God, to divine command as a fiat superseding moral reason. These appeals lead up to Hamlet's ultimate reconciliation of conscience with divine fiat, and mark a steady spiritual decline from which he is rescued, through no merit of his own, by the brief madness of his final burst of anger.

One major theme in modernism is the desire to wring the neck of rhetoric. The best modern poetry feels compelled both to accept the metonymic mode of discourse and to transcend it to allow for the full play of human consciousness without making consciousness equal interpretation of experience. Both the symbolist mode of Yeats and Eliot and the objectivism of Williams and contemporary poets can be seen as methods for responding to this problem. Symbolism seeks to complement the objective image by reconstituting versions of Idealism’s Absolute Self. The poet achieves a vision of the fullness of human consciousness by meditating on the implications of his own creative act, a process first adumbrated by Flaubert. Williams, on the other hand, particularly in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” brings the full play of consciousness into objective experience by seeking to render the act of mind as a process sharing the palpable physical qualities of things.