Few men of letters have been personally loved and revered like Hermann Broch. Reducing the sphere of his private wants to an unbelievable minimum, he radiated a warmth and tolerance and sympathy to rare at to be unforgettable. His seeing eye, set in the face of a raven, had a quality of timeless wisdom that neutralised specific curiosity regarding his private past and even his literary development. For such things, so far as they mattered, there would be plenty of time, it seemed, in years to come. Did he not say with a chuckle that he would live to be a hundred? Then came the stunning shock, on a late May morning in 1951: he was dead.

Heartbreak house, begun in 1913 and completed In 1916, is one of Bernard Shaw's most provocative plays and merits fuller aesthetic analysis than his critics have yet given it. Distinctive both for its architectonic firmness and its elusive symbolism, Heartbreak House is one of Shaw's major accomplishments as artist. It summarizes, furthermore, the themes and attitudes of his previous work, in particular the ideas broached in “The Revolutionist's Handbook” appended to Man and Superman (1903). It also holds in embryo Shaw's departures in doctrine and technique in the plays beginning with The Apple Cart (1929).

Admiration for the best qualities of W. H. Hudson it not inconsistent with a lively distaste for Rima, the bird-maiden of Green Mansions. One cannot believe in her as anything. Too avian to be human and too human to be preternatural, too unearthly to be a woman and too womanly to be a bird, she is the most striking example of the truth of Robert Hamilton's statement that the erotic element in Hudson's romances is “quite extraordinarily unconvincing.”

It has been observed that Henry James's prefaces for the New York Edition arc often unreliable as guides to the finished stories because they are so concerned with the germinations of his ideas. The very emphasis upon beginnings is presumably James's way of insisting upon the distance and the labor between the germ and the maturity of a work, a point which he explicitly invites us to ponder in the Preface to The Wings of the Dove:

... some acute mind ought surely to have worked out by this time the “law” of the degree in which the artist's energy fairly depends upon his fallibility. How much and how often, and in what connexions and with what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe, that of his prime object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute for it-or in other words at all appreciably to exist? He places, after an earnest survey, the piers of his bridge-he has at least sounded deep enough, heaven knows, for their brave position; yet the bridge spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of the original design.

In the eighteen-sixties, Arnold was much concerned about the lack of organization in English intellectual life. He compared the “crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering” of his countrymen to the thoroughness of German research and the efficacy of French state-controlled education. His essay on “Democracy,” first published in 1861, his essay of 1864 on “The Literary Influence of Academies,” and his “General Conclusion” in the 1868 edition of Schools and Universities on the Continent are vigorous pleas for reform. Arnold did not pretend that English “provincialism” could be cured by the establishment of an institution like the Académie Française. But he hoped to make his countrymen realize the need in England for a more centralized effort in intellectual matters.

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.

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.

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.

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

In a familiar passage from a letter to W. S. Landor, Wordsworth exposed, as I see it, the central purpose of his art: “Even in poetry it it the imaginative only ... that which is conversant (with), or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me.” “Things,” he said, had to be lost in each other and limita to vanish; otherwise he was indifferent. The argument of this essay is intended to suggest an approach to Wordsworth at the poetic level of infinity. This is the realm of pure universals, the insight of poetry which reveals a state of being independent of sensuous limitations. In the sense of Hegel it is the level of reality, possessing a wholly independent being, as opposed to that of appearance, depending wholly in its existence upon the senses. The exact nature of reality remains, of course, a question for pure philosophy; and it is probable that the discipline of philosophy rather than that of literary criticism must judge finally the dialectic of poetry concerned with infinity. Yet the highest attainment of the fine arts is clearly an act of turning upon the infinite, an invocation in the observer or the listener of a sense of endlessness. Medium, form, and technique are the approaches to the ultimate experience inherent in a particular work. As artistic acts from the world of appearance, they may be analyzed and defined by the particular critical disciplines concerned with them. At the end of these functions lies the problem of philosophy. What is the nature of the wholly independent being which all great art attains? Wordsworth implies in his statement to Landor that awareness of the infinite is the final objective of poetry. My purpose is to investigate the method of Wordsworth's thought at the threshold of this objective rather than to define philosophically what the sense of infinity, in itself, contains. It seems clear that nothing more need be said upon the imaginative process as this is explored in Wordsworth's Prefaces or interpreted by his critics.

Erich Schmidt's thrilling discovery of the proto-form of Goethe's Faust came at a fateful hour. In the year 1887 the mechanistic evolutionism of the natural sciences still reigned almost unchallenged even in the field of literary criticism, which on the academic level at least was mainly philological in nature with occasional purple patches of “appreciation.” The philologist, regarding the Urfaust as a sort of “missing link,” pounced upon it and, in order to make it fit his hypotheses, tore it to pieces. The result was the famous “shred theory” of its genesis, the Fetzentheorie advanced by some of scholarship's most respected names— most notably perhaps, certainly most influentially, by Gustav Roethe, first chairman of the Goethe-Gesellschaft and disciple of Wilhelm Scherer. Even before the discovery of the Urfaust Scherer had of course made far-reaching conjectures regarding the original form and order of composition of Faust.In an essay first published in 1920 Roethe succeeded in reducing the Urfaust to no less than forty-one “shreds,” each of which, according to him, could have been written “at one sitting” (p. 676). Roethe's concept of the work is well summed up in the following words (p. 654): “Goethe, especially in his youth, was inclined to seize first upon that which he felt a strong urge to give form to and more than once he left it up to a later redaction whether the precious ‘patches’ (‘Fetzen‘) were to be sewn into a garment or not. The Urfaust, now, I regard as a provisional collection and redaction of such patches.” This might have been a harmless enough sort of game had not the players taken it upon themselves to cry down all attempts at esthetic interpretation which did not subscribe to their conjectures. Thus Roethe (p. 643) dismisses J. Minor's (not entirely consistent) effort to read the Urfaust as a work in its own right as unsuccessful because Minor slights problems of genesis. The idea that there might be some organic relationship between form and content seems to fill Roethe with a sense of the absurd—this approach he calls “a great, even mystic, overbending of the bow” (p. 677). No, for him the Urfaust remains “a tack, filled with little scraps of paper,” such as it had come down in legend, thanks to A. W. Schlegel.

All of Burke's major biographers have said that he edited Dodsley's Annual Register and wrote its famous Historical Article from 1758 to at least twenty-five years beyond that time. Such statements have been made without the support of an iota of evidence. As a result Burke's share in the Annual Register still remains to be determined. The subject has held the interest of contemporary scholars. Donald Cross Bryant in his account of Burke's literary friendships devotes a separate chapter to the problem. The most recent study of Burke, Thomas A. Copeland's Our Eminent Friend Edmund Burke (New Haven, 1949), contains two such chapters. The matter receives special consideration in Sir Philip Magnus' life of Burke, the latest biography as of today. Burke's other biographers were also interested in his editorship. Macknight observed that “the value ... of the Annual Registers to one who should undertake to write Burke's political history, cannot be exaggerated” (I, XI). Robert Murray says, “It is a valuable source of information on the growth of his thought from 1758 to 1791” (p. 83).

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.

The fame of Abraham Vander-Mylius (Abraham van der Myl, 1563-1637) as a linguist persisted through many generations. The Lingua Belgica of the Dutch theologian, which appeared at Leiden in 1612, had a clarity, freshness, and persuasiveness which were vital factors in establishing its reputation. Even today, the work has value as revealing, both explicitly and implicitly, views on language that were current in the author's time. This article is particularly concerned with the attitude which Mylius displayed toward the historical, diachronic aspects of language. The primary aim is to present as clearly as possible Mylius' own views on this phase of language; only incidentally are we concerned with his sources.

When Iago addresses to Othello his homily on values—“Good name ... / Is the ... jewel of their souls. / Who steals my purse steals trash” (III.iii.155-157)—he chooses words so compact and memorizable that they have come into a kind of separate fame, and, like any other purple passage, seem a special added attraction, displayed for admiration during a brief pause in the forward movement, But these quotable lines are closely integrated into the drama, for they imply much that has taken place and much of the character of Iago. They are to be read, not as a neat package of proverbial wisdom, but as an index and a recapitulation, which is to say that their dramatic life extends far beyond the scene in which they occur.

That the direct source of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale was a passage in the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet was first pointed out by the Swedish scholar Bäckström in 1845. Since then, important studies by Edmund Brock, Emil Lücke, and John S. P. Tatlock have compared these two versions of the tale of Constance and drawn attention to some of the changes made by Chaucer. Thus it is now generally agreed that while he closely followed the French original for the main outlines of his plot, he skillfully condensed on the one hand, and on the other hand added many philosophical, humanizing, and imaginative passages to Trivet's conventional and lifeless story.