It is no exaggeration to say that in the mind of a large number of Spanish American intellectuals during the nineteenth century Spain symbolized the origin of many of the cultural, social, and political ills which afflicted the Iberian New World. And this in spite of the admitted influence of the advocates of Spain and the defenders of her official policies, neither of whom have ever been lacking in Spanish America. From the earliest stages of the Conquest the criollo (Spanish American Creole) and mestizo were treated as the inferiors of the native-born Span-iards, or peninsulares, and felt themselves to be different from the Iberian conquistador. In the course of time this feeling of social separatism deepened. In addition to the Indian and Creole uprisings against the peninsulares, which persisted sporadically throughout the Colonial period and frequently were motivated more by political convenience than by ideological differences, another type of rebellion developed during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries. And it was the latter—promoted in its intellectual aspects by such figures as Rodríguez, Miranda, Nariño, and Bello—in which were established the ideological bases of the liberation carried out by San Martín, Bolívar, and the Mexican patriots.

Looking Backward, America's classic contribution to theutopian novel, has a religious genesis which has never been fully explored. Although Edward Bellamy has received widespread critical attention, his thought has not been adequately related to the religious temper of his time and region. Reared in traditional Calvinist concepts with emphasis on prayer, soul-searching, and individual respectability, Bellamy propounded new, daring concepts of the divine to meet the challenges posed by the industrialization of New England. In his religious doubts and strivings, he drew from, and contributed heavily to, three inter-related movements that reshaped religious thought in late nineteenth-century America—the New Theology, the Religion of Humanity, and the Social Gospel. This paper presents religion as a major genetic factor in Edward Bellamy's social thought and in modern American intellectual.

My older hearers will recall that after the First World War a number of our state legislatures and our school boards prohibited the teaching of German in the public schools. Today, I think, most of us would consider such a prohibition with regard to Russian, for instance, absurd and self-defeating. Even the man in the street could be made to see that it would be as if a regiment in the trenches, knowing that the enemy was preparing for an offensive, were ordered to close its eyes, so that it couldn't see what direction the attack was to take.

From the publication of his first signed poem, Paracelsus (1835), Browning thought of himself and was considered by his contemporaries as a dramatic poet. In the preface to this volume he stated, “I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem,” but Paracelsus has a dramatic form nonetheless. The longest review of the poem was written by John Forster and was entitled “Evidences of a New Genius for Dramatic Poetry—No. I.” William Charles Macready, the leading actor of the London stage, read Paracelsus and recorded in his diary for 7 December 1835: “the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time.” And from 1835 to the present numerous critics have called him the great dramatic poet of his century. At the same time they have almost unanimously declared him a failure as a dramatist.

In midsummer 1855 the announcement that Alfred Tennyson would soon publish a new work stirred the reading public with eager expectancy. He was acknowledged to be the foremost living English poet and had worn the bays as Victoria's laureate for almost five years. His new volume was awaited, wrote one reviewer, with much of the avid anticipation that had attended the productions of Scott and Byron. Yet it is generally said that when Maud, and Other Poems appeared on 28 July 1855, there was serious dissatisfaction with the title poem. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of literary history that “Maud” was vociferously condemned by the British periodical press, and Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet's latest biographer, writes, “Poor Maud was received with almost universal reprobation.” But John O. Eidson main-tains, with some evidence to support his claim, that “the British criticism of ‘Maud’ was rather sharply divided,” and Amy Cruse unqualifiedly asserts that the poem “was received with tremendous enthusiasm.” In view of the conflicting testimony it seems valuable to determine as accurately as possible the critical reaction to “Maud” and also to examine its effect upon Tennyson's revision of the poem and upon his decision to proceed with the Idylls of the King.

“Wordsworth, give me leave to introduce you to my only admirer.” Thus one day in 1815 Charles Lamb introduced Thomas Noon Talfourd “to the person whom in all the world I venerated most” Not always, however, had this young lawyer of the Inner Temple held Wordsworth in such high regard. Until he went to London in 1813 and met Barron Field, his opinions had taken their direction from Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Renew. Field, however, induced him to try to read Wordsworth sympathetically and understandingly. As a result, Talfourd declares, “my taste and feeling, as applied to poetry, underwent an entire change.” Aversion to Wordsworth and the “new poetry” gave way to an enthusiastic acceptance of the gospel of Romanticism, and from it he never afterwards swerved.

In an Epilogue to the Queen, with which Tennyson closed his Library Edition of 1873, the Laureate noted, among many threats to the “mightiest of all people under heaven,” the danger to art from “poisonous honey stol'n from France,” Readers from queen to commoner could nod their heads in pious agreement, for they shared Tennyson's Gallophobia. Deeply distressed that Swinburne should have contributed a sonnet in praise of Mademoiselle de Maupin to Le Tombeau de Gautier (1873), he could only regard those who sipped such honey as un-British to the core. Tennyson was not thinking of his contemporaries, Thackeray and Arnold, who, though they may not have seen France whole, at least had left it steadily. Rather, he reserved his strictures for those later Victorians who seemed willing, even eager, to embrace French culture, though the fruit of that embrace might be lubricity and aestheticism.

As a professor of English, who also happens to be entrusted with the direction of this new MLA project, I hope that every foreign language teacher in this room realizes what a difficult problem of translation the preceding speeches pose. It is my job to translate them into 'action. If I do not do so, with your help, we shall merely have spent a morning congratulating or consoling ourselves. After what you have heard, I probably don't need to tell you that my acts of translation will inevitably lose much of the peculiar eloquence and overtone of the originals, but I do want to assure you that I shall try my best to preserve the spirit of what has been said today. Don't expect me, in other words, to be always literal; and don't expect me to do anything that will stir you as you have been stirred this morning. From now on, it is a workaday matter of files and figures, committees and conferences, interviews and press releases, and endless letters. We live, for better or for worse, in such a complex world. Our critics or detractors have long understood this, and have taken advantage of our otherworldliness. Let them take notice: we may betray our inexperience for a time, but the MLA is this morning outside the classroom and the study, speaking up for something it deeply believes in.

The moral significance attached by the nineteenth century to Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King has been largely responsible for its gentle disappearance into that twilight world of poems known to all but read by none. However, when once the poem can be understood as something more than a tapestry of allegorical figures on a medieval landscape, the way is clear to see its connection with such a poem, for example, as The Waste Land, on the surface so apparently antithetical. Eliot's use of the Grail legend and his symbolic revelation of man's moral infertility have their counterparts in Tennyson's epic—the difference, if there is one, being that between suggestion and explication. Eliot says: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience” (v. 328-330). This characteristic motif of the poem has a relevant connection with the passing of Arthur and the demoralization of the Round Table. But in neither poem is there a curate's moral to be extracted, a reformer's remedy suggested. Both poems simply present, in a form suitable to their century's tastes, a diagnosis of modern civilization—a civilization as hollow as the sacred Mount of Camelot.

From his youth William Hazlitt was fond of prow fiction and liked to discuss it with other readers. When he turned from painting to literary criticism as a career, he therefore paid considerable attention to novels and romances. Since his criticism appeared chiefly between 1815 and 1830, it largely parallels the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's novels from 1814 to 1832—an important period in the development of the novel and its reading public. This was a time when most first-ranking critics refused to take novels seriously, had not made up their minds about them, or ignored them altogether. Hazlitt contended that this “department of criticism” deserved more attention for “settling the standard of excellence, both as to degree and kind” (vi, 108). He repeatedly asserted the worth and dignity of the genre, approved its effects upon readers, and judged novels by his fundamental aesthetic principles. Although his “Lecture on the English Novelists” is well known, the full extent of his criticism of prose fiction is not generally realized. For example, he wrote four essays on Sir Walter Scott. In addition to articles on various novelists, including minor figures, there are passages on prose fiction throughout the twenty volumes of Hazlitt's writings. From this mass of criticism it is easy to reconstruct his conception of what a novel should be—the first clear and well-defined conception of fiction from a great English critic

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.

In this essay I hope to restore to Washington Irving a small measure of his fame as the first significant author of American fiction. Irving has been acclaimed as our literary mediator with England, where he was the first American to win critical praise. He is valued, too, as a pioneer, introducing Continental romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing. But I wish to praise him on other grounds: as the first important American author to put to literary use the comic mythology and popular traditions of American character which, by the early nineteenth century, bad proliferated widely in oral tradition. The case for Irving's achievement in this direction rests primarily upon the personalities of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” There he gave our literature its first important statement of the clash of regional characters—the Yankee vs. the backwoodsman— who had already emerged as the dominant types in our regional folk traditions. The conflict between them was soon to become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history.

L'Espoir et Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, les deux derniers romans d'André Malraux, sont écrits dans un style qui présente avec celui des œuvres précédentes des différences importantes.

Le lecteur a l'impression que l'auteur hausse souvent le ton et qu'il vise a Vampleur la ou il se contentait naguere de violence. Gaetan Picon a remarque que Malraux ecrivait plus “grand” et plus “large” qu'auparavant. Le but du present article est de montrer que, loin de constituer des metaphores, ces remarques definissent le caractere essentiel de ce qu'on pourrait appeler le “style cosmique” de Malraux.