Unless and until the Modern Language Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.

The middle english poem King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is at one and the same time a metrical romance and an exemplum on the theme that the proud and mighty are brought low. The pious tale relates how a king, arrogant and boastful, is displaced from his throne by an Angel-usurper until the debased and beggared king learns proper humility. The story was widely known in the Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the vernacular tongues. Curiously enough, the poem has aroused almost no interest among English scholars, although the medieval English version achieved a well-merited popularity in its own day. It is indeed an affecting and carefully wrought narrative, sensitive to the tragic ironies of the pious “reversal.” Further study of this poem and its close analogues reveals the superiority of the English version; and its skillful synthesis of themes from folklore, Biblical commentary, and history not only encompasses a discriminating artistry, but provides fresh evidence of the process by which Biblical exegesis was transmuted into legend and into romance.

Jusqu‘à présent la plupart des études consacrées au sentiment de la nature au XVIIe siècle ont eu pour but d'infirmer les thèses de Lanson et de Brunetière en s'efforçant de prouver par des exemples précis l'existence de ce sentiment à une époque réputée pour sa peinture exclusive de l'homme. Mais ce grand pas étant accompli, d'autres questions se posent. Il conviendrait de déterminer dans quelle mesure le sentiment de la nature affecte certains courants de la philosophie, de la morale ou de l'esthétique au XVIIe siècle. Il importerait aussi de se demander comment l'homme sensible au spectacle du monde pense l'homme. Peu d‘écrivains de cette époque furent plus sensibles à ce spectacle que le chevalier de Méré. En même temps personne ne contribua plus que lui à définir l'idéal de “L'Honnête Homme.”

Although the years 1701 through 1703 saw the number of Collierite publications markedly diminish, the zeal of the reformers and the consequent distress of the theatres seems hardly to have abated. It was in this perilous atmosphere that Farquhar attempted perhaps the most ambitious and potentially telling attack upon Collier's abolitionist demands: the publications, in February and December 1702 respectively, of the Discourse upon Comedy and The Twin-Rivals. The relativism of the Discourse strikes at Collier's aesthetic position both by denying the validity of his classical authorities and by affirming that of popular consensus. The Twin-Rivals rebuts the force of Collier's moral invective by presenting, concretely, the kind of moral comedy that Collier himself claimed to favor and that the various apologies for comedy had presented, verbally, as a justifying ideal. In demonstrating the value of comedy, Farquhar meant to confound the abolitionists and make the stage flourish. The Twin-Rivals failed and thus accomplished neither. I would suggest, however, that its ethos and its structure make it an extremely interesting document as well as a skillful play. I should like to discuss its purposeful novelty and its relationship both to Farquhar's canon and to the development of the stage at the beginning of the eighteenth century, drawing an eventual moral.

The best remembered aphorists have contrived to state new truths in brief and telling ways. Less fascinated than most authors with leaf, twig, and branch, they strike immediately for the pith. Almost every reader of their work first pays tribute to this concentration of effort with the repeated shock of joy and enlightenment that marks his response. It seems likely that such writers try to achieve a compression of statement that corresponds to the instantaneous character of their insights. Like Dante, they are stirred by the hope of economizing glimpses of eternity into single-worded statements; unlike him, they never quite despair of doing so. Anyone who has responded to the success of their efforts can appreciate the temptation to discover something about the means by which these paradoxical compositions achieve their effects, particularly those that time and again tumble their reader's complacency. It is with the ways in which those effects derive from the structural patterns of the aphorism that this essay is concerned. The method will be first to classify aphorisms according to structure and then to examine the ways in which each class affects the reader.

The success of smollett's Humphry Clinker has been attributed largely to the novel's central character, the misanthropic sentimentalist from Wales, Matthew Bramble. In Matt Bramble, Smollett finally created an acceptable, nonmalicious satirist who could express benevolently and yet virulently the satire he had been striving to write in his earlier novels. Matt's misanthropy, which evokes from him the invective of the traditional railing satirist, derives from several interrelated causes. In the first place, Matt is a valetudinarian who has not dwelt in the busy haunts of men “within these last thirty years.” Matt often appears as somewhat of a querulus laudator temporis acti, even though he wishes to deny it. He admits that the “rotten parts of human nature” have probably always existed, but his sudden reappearance into the world suggests to him that mankind has “contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity” since his youth. In the second place, Matt suffers physically from the gout and the spleen, so that, as his nephew, Jery, writes, “his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility” (xi, 20). Matt is, then, in part an eighteenth-century splenetic humorist whose misanthropy can be traced medically to the humorous melancholy cynics and misanthropes of the Renaissance character-books and Stuart drama. In Con-greve's words, the “character of a splenetic and peevish Humour” displays itself in a “satirical wit.”

The presence of features of recurrence in works of art is both an acknowledged empirical fact and—in proper relevance and proportion—a source of esthetic excellence. Meaningful recurrence is one of the factors that distinguish the art work from undifferentiated reality. In literature it is everywhere, in rhyme and alliteration, in the standing epithet, in the significant detail of Dickens or Mann, in motif, theme, and symbol. Repetitions of this sort can make a substantial contribution to the unity of a literary work, and it is one purpose of the following pages to establish areas and kinds of recurrence in a play generally regarded as chaotic (by its detractors) or variegated (by its defenders). The play is Goethe's Götz. There is an important second purpose: to see what support these stylistic and structural features give to the reading of Götz as a drama of character, displaying inner tension, conflict, and ironic depth.

During the reconsideration of English Romanticism that has been going on for more than a decade, repeated attention has been given to individual poems, to the myths and “systems” of individual poets, to common images and themes, but oddly not to common forms. One of the most important of these is the ode, in which many of the best known and most often examined Romantic poems were written. Although today we have a better understanding of the major Romantic odes as poems, the general notion of the form remains much as it was a generation ago. What is obviously needed is a method of reassessment that will go beyond the older exclusive and now inadequate concern with prosody, stanzaic structure, and conformity to classical models. The approach in the present study, which is offered as a tentative beginning, has been suggested in large part by an essay published several years ago by Norman Maclean, who led up to but did not carry his investigations into the Romantic period. According to Maclean's thesis, in brief, the English ode in the seventeenth century was constructed as a fragmentary “plot,” with the poet's conception embodied in an “agent” and his “actions,” as in “Alexander's Feast” by Dryden. In the eighteenth-century ode, on the other hand, the primary emphasis was on the devices of language—allegorical personification, metaphor, static descriptive imagery—as in the odes of Collins and Gray. While it is possible to question Maclean's distinction in particular instances, the concepts and terminology he borrows in light disguise from Aristotle's Poetics have the advantage of making the ode available to critical as well as historical discussion. In the present study, the Poetics will be drawn on more directly but in somewhat different fashion. Modifying Maclean's conception, I have chosen the terms “rhetoric” and “drama” to express a relation between language and inner structure which makes the Romantic ode as distinctive as its Neoclassical and Preromantic predecessors, at the same time that it carries forward tendencies latent in both.

The Nietzschean presence in Spain between 1890 and 1910 needs more ample documentation even though Nietzsche is already considered the spiritual leader of the Generation of '98. Critics have overlooked his effect on other intellectuals who were not members of the '98 group but whose attitudes constitute an important chapter in Spain's history of ideas. At least three different generations affect a given historical reality by a process of conflicting rhythms that Ortega has called “el anacronismo esencial de la historia” (En torno a Galileo). It would be useful, therefore, to isolate the intellectual background against which the Generation of '98 acted in order to see how the former differed in its position toward Nietzsche. I have tried to do this by excluding from this study members of the Generation of '98 whose positive orientation to the philosopher is known. Since periodical literature is, because of its rapid gestation, the most accurate reflection of evolving ideological positions, I have relied a good deal on such material here, although in several cases I was unable to consult complete sets (Juventud, Mercurio, Revista Blanca, Revista Ibérica, Vida y Arte). This essay is descriptive and synthetic rather than analytic. It begins with the reception given Nietzsche in Spain, tracing the extent to which he was read and discussed (I). Next is an account of the diffusion of his ideas and their influence upon young intellectuals (II). Then follow sections dealing with specific topics: critical reaction to Nietzsche's method (III), the Superman and his sociological relevance (IV), ethics and will (V), art (VI). The final section attempts to focus the Nietzschean phenomenon historically, and weighs the importance of the German's biographical image in Spain (VII).

Like Hofmannsthal's youthful works, which were first regarded as typically beautiful but unsubstantial products of Neo-Romanticism, only to be later widely extolled for their depth of significance, Der Schwierige has been the object of an evolving critical evaluation. This comedy, published in 1920 and first performed in 1921, has often been pictured as a basically precious comedy of manners anachronistically glorifying the Austrian aristocracy after its demise in 1918. Such an interpretation seems at least partially supported by Hofmannsthal's own words: “Vielleicht hätte ich die Gesellschaft, die es [Der Schwierige] darstellt, die österreichische aristokratische Gesellschaft, nie mit so viel Liebe in ihrem charme und ihrer Qualität darstellen können als in dem historischen Augenblick wo sie, die bis vor kurzem eine Gegebenheit, ja eine Macht war, sich leise und geisterhaft ins Nichts auflöst, wie ein übriggebliebenes Nebelwölkchen am Morgen.” Yet, at another time, he suggests a more profound aim when he says in a letter to Wildgans: “Sie werden finden, daß ich darin das eigentlich Seelenhafte, das persönlich Metaphysische . . . versteckt habe unter der Ironie der Gestaltung . . . und doch ist dieser individuell-metaphysische Kern sehr stark.” In recent years increased attention has been given to the critical exploration of this serious core, which reveals Der Schwierige in its essence as a universally valid character study in the high-comedy tradition of Minna von Barnhelm and Weh dem, der lügt rather than in any sense either an anachronism or a period piece. The discovery in Hofmannsthal's Nachlaß of a number of early plans and sketches promises to extend still further our understanding of Der Schwierige. This material, previously unpublished for the most part, makes it possible to clarify both the author's basic intentions and his application of them to the finished work.

The influence of the writings and personality of Thomas Carlyle on the poetic and critical career of Matthew Arnold is a complex story, the outlines of which have only recently begun to be traced. Kathleen Tillotson, in her illuminating Warton Lecture on “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” revealed in great detail how passage after passage in Arnold's poetry is related to Carlyle's early writings. Since the bulk of Arnold's major poetry was written by 1853, her study in effect proved how much more “puissant” than earlier Arnold scholars had suspected, the voice of Carlyle had been for Arnold—one of the four “voices,” as he said in later life, he had heard at Oxford in the early 1840's. Significantly, however, in that list of 1883, in which Carlyle's name is linked in dignity with those of Newman, Goethe, and Emerson, Arnold departs from his subject in order to turn his keenest critical instruments against Carlyle; and he rejects him for a temper “morbid, wilful and perverse,” as well as for his “perverse attitude towards happiness” (DA, p. 198). In a similar mood of reminiscence Arnold had written to John Henry Newman a decade earlier: “There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself” (UL, pp. 65–66; 28 May 1872). Curiously, there is no mention of Carlyle here, though demonstrably Carlyle's influence on Arnold's thought and writing extends far beyond mere “strong impression.”

“I have been reading Newman's Apologia pro Vita Suâ,” wrote George Eliot in 1868, “with such absorbing interest that I found it impossible to forsake the book until I had finished it. ... I have been made so indignant by Kingsley's mixture of arrogance, coarse impertinence and unscrupulousness with real intellectual incompetence, that my first interest in Newman's answer arose from a wish to see what I consider thoroughly vicious writing thoroughly castigated. But the Apology now mainly affects me as the revelation of a life—how different in form from one's own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens—I mean spiritual needs and burthens.”

Although there is an obvious virtue in a plot which moves directly through time and space, the final justification of form is how well it conveys the author's theme, his vision of life. Conrad experimented with form: we must keep in mind his habitual refusal, beginning with Lord Jim, to follow a straight time sequence. In Lord Jim, Marlow the narrator is responsible for the complexity of time shifts which characterizes both the Patna and Patusan episodes. And the fact that the plot does break into two discrete actions makes the form of Lord Jim a special problem. Thematically, this break is compensated by a myriad of small parallelisms in action and image. While enlightening, the binding quality of such parallelisms (much noted by critics recently) goes only part way toward remedying the split. A more satisfactory approach to the problem is to assume that the two episodes represent the necessary embodiment of Conrad's conception. I would say that, in Lord Jim, Conrad came the closest he ever did in his attempt “to render the highest kind of justice” not only “to the visible universe” as he affirms in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but also to the invisible universe within. In the same preface, Conrad asserts that “the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” And “his appeal is made ... to that part of our nature which . . . is . . . kept out of sight.” In Lord Jim, Conrad's aim and his triumph was to explore the world of the imagination more thoroughly than he had in Heart of Darkness or ever would again.

The “Cabalistic” diagram of The Awkward Age (1899) whereby James explained the novel to its original publisher (Harper's Weekly) comprised “the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object. The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.” Each of the “lamps” was a “single social occasion” in which James proceeded to exhaust, as he says, the scenic possibilities; the “occasions” corresponded, he continues, to “Acts of a Play,” and his purpose in using them as a basis of form was to achieve “objectivity” that required no “going behind” scenes to explain, as fiction so often does, and as drama does not. “To make the presented occasion tell all its story itself” was then his purpose (AN, p. 111). The careful arrangements of The Awkward Age are only slightly suggested, however, by James's diagram of circles. The following analysis will attempt to describe the mutual relationships of the order of the “circles” (the books or “acts” of the novel, each of which is named for a different character). Each of the “acts” is divided into numbered units which we may, for convenience, call “scenes.” There are thirty-eight such “scenes” rather evenly distributed among the ten character-named books of the novel.

The use of color by Galdós has so far failed to attract the detailed attention of literary scholars. This lack of attention may perhaps be explained by the fact that Galdós is so well known and so esteemed for his external and psychological realism that scholars have not been inclined to seek special connotative values, nuances, and interest for particular colors in his literary creativity. Galdós' penchant for drawing black-and-white sketches and two recent, very careful, and highly regarded studies—which only mention in passing specific instances of Galdós' lack of concentration regarding color—likewise fail to hint at its importance in his novels. That Galdós was interested in color, however, may be seen in his perennial use of yellow—an especially important chroma which occurs not only prominently at critical junctures in certain novels but also as the surname of an important character: Juan Amarillo in Gloria.

St. Mawr has generally been treated as if it were a story about a symbolic horse, as if the other characters in the novel had obviously been intended to be subordinate to him, and as if his disappearance seven-eighths of the way through were an indication of Lawrence's inability to concentrate or of his ineptitude in constructing a novel. More than anything else in the book, St. Mawr's failure to cross the finish line has upset critics and has led even so able a commentator of Lawrence as Father Tiverton to describe the novel as “bi-valvular,” because near the end of the book Lawrence “forgets all about the horse-hero, St. Mawr himself, and becomes absorbed by New Mexico.” It is a matter for regret that Lawrence gave his novel the title he did, since it has been instrumental in leading critics into a new variant of the intentional fallacy: the titular heresy, which has made many besides Father Tiverton regard St. Mawr as a structural failure. In fact, the mystery of St. Mawr is bound up with the entire problem of the novel's organization, since the fuss about the horse is only symptomatic of the more profound frustration with what a recent critic has termed the “essential inchoateness of the book.” Therefore the fundamental problem involved in reading St. Mawr, which is one of the book's formal integrity, requires the exploration of the techniques Lawrence employed to shape his work; this problem solved, it then becomes easy not only to understand why the horse is dropped so casually from all notice, but also to see what vision of life the book as a whole means to communicate.

Im Jahre 1928 wandte sich die deutsche Zeitschrift Die Dame an die literarische Prominenz mit der Aufforderung, sich zu dem Thema “Der stärkste Eindruck” zu bekennen. Am 1. Oktober erschien in den “Losen Blättern”, der Beilage des Blattes, Bertolt Brechts Abhandlung zu dieser Enquete. Sie bestand aus einem einzigen Satz und lautete: “Sie werden lachen: die Bibel.”

The best parts of Robert Y. Turner's article “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well (PMLA, lxxv, Dec. 1960) concern the denouement of that play. He acutely points out that it is Bertram, with his agonies and perplexities, not Diana, who ”holds the center of the stage“ during her long series of paradoxes; he shows how Shakespeare has added details to his source which prolong and intensify Bertram's distress; and he relates this distress to that of other similar heroes as well as to that of earlier comic butts. I should like, however, to question a number of other points in this article and thereby to challenge as unproved what I take to be its main thesis: that in All's Well Shakespeare ”produced a comedy more of an age than for all time“ because he chose there to follow a contemporary vogue for ”prodigal son comedies“ whose conventions ”have lost their savor.“