When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”

Generally speaking, we take Wordsworth too seriously. Perhaps we have been unconsciously conditioned by the equine solemnity of portraits of the aged poet and need to remind ourselves that Hazlitt, who himself painted a lugubrious portrait, described Wordsworth as “grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour,” and noted “a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth”—a hint of which appears in Shuter's 1798 likeness. Wordsworth's humor may be “slight” and “sly,” but it is pervasive; it crops out in mirth, gaiety, gamboling playfulness, and quirkish wit. Humor, wrote Landor, may be distinguished from wit in that it “indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point.” This breadth of drollery is particularly Wordsworth's vein. He is not devoid of wit, but he supposedly said that he did not consider himself a witty poet, and specifically asserted in “The Waggoner” that he made “no pretense / To wit that deals in double sense.” He is characteristically droll.

Fagin, the first of Dickens' great villains, is a Jew. In making Fagin a Jew, Dickens drew on a tradition of villainy that had been in English literature from the beginning. Only in our own time has there been a widespread reaction against this literary injustice. One effect of this reaction has been to introduce into our response to characters such as Barabbas, Shylock, and Fagin problems that are not only insoluble but perhaps irrelevant. No responsible critic has, to my knowledge, ever called Dickens an anti-Semite. If the character of Fagin arouses racial hostility in the reader of Oliver Twist, as some overzealous guardians of the public weal would have us think, it is more because this character, by its archetypal nature, appeals to emotions and prejudices already firmly set by custom and tradition. The main fault is not in Dickens but in his readers. Dickens' only sin was that writing at a very early age his first real novel and writing rapidly under the pressure of serial publication, he drew on a tradition already widespread in English literature and, with Fagin at least, made it powerfully and uniquely his own.

Ernst R. Curtius (1886-1956) was the first modern scholar who discussed the traditional rhetorics of the pastoral landscape with both critical insight and an astonishing historical erudition. In Chapter x (pp. 191-209) of his Europäische Liter atur und lateinisches Mittelaller (1st ed. Bern, 1949) Curtius suggests an instructive list of topographical and botanical “stage props” (“inszenierende Staffage”) traditionally employed to describe the happy rural environment of amorous shepherds and pastoral lovers. It is, of course, hardly surprising that in the intricate process of literary transmission, as outlined by Curtius, Vergil fulfills a central task: by his sophisticated use of elements from both Homer and Theocritus, Vergil unfolds, in his Bucolics as well as in the Georgies, the characteristic “pleasant landscape” (“locus amoenus”) which is later reverently systematized in handbooks of medieval rhetoric, eruditely echoed in the Renaissance, and elegantly alluded to in classicist poetry.

In the 1930's after Melville's vessels had begun to display their ample accommodations, R. P. Blackmur wrote in somewhat hostile fashion that Melville “made only the loosest efforts to tie his sermons into his novels: he was quite content to see that his novels illustrated his sermons and was reasonably content if they did not.” In the 1950's after the ship plans were better understood (albeit some specialized new quarters—particularly nurseries, bathrooms, and bedrooms complete with one-way glass—had been added from the outside), R. W. B. Lewis opined that “Melville understood the nature of plot, plot in general, better than any one else in his generation.”

In common with other such enduring works of art as The Faery Queen, Gulliver's Travels, and Alice in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has many levels of meaning. At the narrative level it offers a charming and delicate fairy tale to delight a child—if a somewhat precocious one. At the symbolic and allegorical level, it conveys certain Christian ethical assumptions. At the psychological level, it suggests emotional experience universally valid.

It is more and more frequently said that we need a critical edition of Matthew Arnold's prose works. Not that a sense of this need is of recent origin. The late E. K. Brown made note of it more than twenty years ago in the Preface to his pioneering Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935); and before that, though with a considerably different emphasis, J. Dover Wilson, in the Editor's Preface to his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1932), had pointed up the “surprises” which lie in store for readers of the first edition of Arnold's “Essay in Political & Social Criticism” who have known the book only from texts which have incorporated the author's revisions for the second edition of 1875. We now have a fine critical edition of the poetry (ed. Tinker and Lowry, Oxford, 1950), and we are, I think, coming very near to the time when a critical and definitive edition of the prose will be possible. Unpublished letters are being turned up and printed, anonymous contributions are being identified, and we are learning more and more about the developmental history of Arnold's books. In the first part of this article, then, I wish to add some new information and a new speculation or two about the evolution and text of Arnold's major effort at social criticism, Culture and A narchy.

David Garnett achieved a triumphal entry into the citadel of fiction with two short fantasies, Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924). The former was awarded the James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. The latter was welcomed by eagerly waiting reviewers, who expressed their delight that he could follow a tour de force, the most dangerous of beginnings, with a work showing intellectual solidity and range as well as virtuosity. Both books have kept their places of esteem in modern fiction.

In 1850, mindful of Victor Cousin's second call for a re-edition of the Pensées? Alfred de Vigny made the following comment in his Journal:

In the literature on Notes from the Underground the protagonist is always called “the underground man” (podpol'nyj chelovek), as if he were an archetypal entity, rather than “the narrator,” an accepted literary convention of the Icherzählung. The nomenclature is significant, for critics have treated the work as the turning point in Dostoevsky's development, ransacked it for philosophical, political, and sociological formulas, noted the profound psychology, but have never analyzed the Notes in detail as an artifact. By so doing critics distort the Notes structurally and substantively, because they concentrate on and overemphasize the first part of the work almost to the exclusion of the second, and because they accept and discuss the narrator's formulations in this part without analyzing them as the expression of a literary creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the unity of the Notes: to ascertain the relationships of its two parts; to indicate the thematic function of ordering episodes in a particular sequence; to note the recurrence of certain objects, the symbolism involved therein, and its effect on the unity of the Notes; finally, to assess the effect of artful integration on the apparent “meaning” of the work.

In the summer of 1896 or ‘97 Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his father, Dr. Hugo Hofmannsthal, were sitting in a train bound for Bad Fusch, a small resort in the Austrian Alps and the favorite vacation spot of the Hofmannsthals. Sitting in the same compartment with them were four attractive young ladies whose pleasing demeanor prompted the poet's father to exclaim, in English: “Nice girls!” “Yes,” answered the poet, “but there are too many of them!” The Hofmannsthals’ attempt to be discreet was unsuccessful; the girls' blushes and giggles attested to their proficiency in English. Introductions and a lengthy conversation followed; they marked the beginning of a long acquaintance between the Hofmannsthal family and the four daughters of Hofrat Dr. Albert Speyer.