Galdós' sympathetic resignation to the shortcomings of Spain, already manifested in El Amigo Manso (1882), is artistically expressed in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). No longer preoccupied with censuring social customs or rationalizing contemporary conditions as he had been in his early novels, published from 1870 to 1882, the author imparts his positive view of Spain through the creation of characters who belong to all strata of society. Spain is not envisaged as a divided nation where classes are pitted against each other, but rather as one which embraces heterogeneous groups and individuals. The lives of the characters are not interwoven as a result of superimposed conditions, but because of their intimate problems. Love is the driving force which causes the juxtaposition of their destinies.

In the midst of the large passionateness of Gulliver's Travels it is something of a shock to come upon the passage near the beginning of the Voyage to Laputa: “I OBSERVED among them a Dutchman, who seemed to be of some Authority, although he were not the Commander of either Ship. He knew us by our Countenances to be Englishmen, and jabbering to us in his own Language, swore we should be Tyed Back to Back, and thrown into the Sea.” He continues to be vindictive until Gulliver gets into the canoe: “while the Dutchman, standing upon the Deck, loaded me with all the Curses and injurious Terms his Language could afford.” Swift emphasizes his cruelty by contrast with the lenity of the Japanese pirates. The idea that Dutch Christianity is a mockery suggested by this contrast with the heathen pirates is intensified at the end of the book when Gulliver pretending to be a Hollander yet contrives to avoid trampling on the crucifix, so that the Emperor began to doubt “whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN. However, for the Reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the King of Luggnagg, by an uncommon Mark of his Favour he would comply with the Singularity of my Humour; but the Affair must be managed with Dexterity, and his Officers should be commanded to let me pass as it were by Forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the secret should be discovered by my Countrymen, the Dutch, they would cut my Throat in the Voyage” (200–201). Such venom against a particular nation is out of keeping with Swift's claim that the same vices and follies obtain in every civilized country of Europe and that all are equally indicted in his work. Furthermore, it interrupts the artistic scheme which demands that the satire, both general and particular, be digested into the allegory. Swift's rancor against the Dutch must have had a peculiar force to make him thus break the announced largeness of his plan of vexing the world rather than particular nations and break also the artistic pattern of his mockery.

One comes from a reading of A Tale of a Tub with two dominant impressions: that it is an extraordinarily brilliant work and that it is extraordinarily complex. One recalls Boswell's testimony that Dr. Johnson could hardly believe Swift had written the Tale: “it has so much more thinking, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his.” And again: “there is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life,” as opposed, say, to Gulliver's Travels, where (in one of Johnson's most prejudiced comments), “once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”

As i understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet. So short a time has elapsed since Mr. Eliot took down the sign reading “No Thoroughfare,” and directing an elaborate detour around Milton, that Mr. Brooks enjoys, I imagine, a freedom from embarrassing examples, which I can only envy. Again, he has at command a growing body of theory; for the New Critics have been concerned to provide their own dialectic, whereas historical students of literature have tended to work by a silent instinct of accumulation like the bee. Obviously, no one can hope to supply in a thirty-minute paper a theory of Historical Criticism, though I shall try to set down a few points towards the formation of such a theory. Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being indeed somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (“Have you read my last book?” asked Lord Kames. “No, my lord,” said Monboddo; “I can't read as fast as you can write.”) But secondly (and seriously) because we have had enough, I think, of mutual recrimination, and it is time for each side to make plain, without polemics, what it can do for the elucidation of Milton, in the hope that students who care more for literature than for labels may find something of use to them in both schools. For criticism, of whatever school, is a means, not an end; and the test to be applied to it is purely pragmatic: Does it or does it not throw new light on, or minister to an understanding of, the work or the author under examination? By that test alone it must stand or fall.

Les trois expressions de vers libres, de vers irréguliers et de vers mêlés s'emploient indistinctement au XVIIe siècle pour désigner les vers où se mélangent les différents mètres, sans qu'un ordre puisse être discerné dans le retour du même mètre: La Fontaine dans ses Fables, Molière dans Amphitryon, Corneille et Molière dans Psyché ont usé de cette forme poétique.

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

Manuscript 3726 in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid contains two unpublished documents concerned with the controversy that raged over the poetry of Luis de Gongora: the Antidoto contra la pestilente Poesia de las Soledades, aplicado a su Autor, para defenderle de si mismo; and the Annotaciones y defensas a la primera Soledad de Don Luis de Gongora by Pedro Diaz de Rivas. It is the purpose of this study to discuss these documents in terms of the new light which they shed on one aspect of this controversy.

IN ITS 1948 report the Committee on Research Activities (Albert H. Marckwardt, Chairman) observed that, “without question, the present bibliographical aids to scholarship in our field are in need of improvement and coordination. It would be equally advantageous to have more systematically presented data on those facilities for research in various fields and topics, particularly with respect to primary materials, which are now available in different sections of the country.” The present study is offered as a preliminary step toward meeting the need for coordination of bibliographies, and the Secretary of the Association has been authorized by the Executive Council to look into the feasibility of a survey of the facilities for research in American libraries.

Let me begin by agreeing most heartily with Professor Woodhouse's closing remarks. The disciplines that we represent can have no quarrel; they are both necessary, and necessary to each other. I say this not merely as one warmed and mollified by the excellent paper that we have just heard. For the last decade I have been saying it over and over. But it has to be said over and over, for the world would have it that we must quarrel, and a stubborn prejudice can exert almost as much influence as a social law.

More insistently, perhaps, than any other poem in English, Lycidas raises the purely aesthetic problem of how the emotions may be stirred by lines which at first are much less than perspicuous to the intellect and even after many readings remain obscure at two or three points. Johnson's attack to one side, Lycidas has received all but universal praise, couched often in language so high-pitched that it absorbs easily adjectives like “exquisite,” “thrilling,” “tremendous,” and. “supreme.” Why is the emotional impact so powerful? A reply must be sought (I think) in the affective connotations of words, phrases, and images in formal combination; and it is worth finding because if in one of its aspects literature is history, in another, and not unimportant, aspect it is immediate experience.

THIS edition of Research in Progress is still another supplement to the 1949 edition and, as such, would scarcely need any prefatory remarks that had not already appeared with the 1950 supplement were it not for the fact that a new editor has put his hand to the task and craves the indulgence of those readers and researchers who may find that his ineptness has occasionally got in the way of the desired result.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most formal of seventeenth-century Anglican poems have been so much enjoyed by the anti-formalists in religion and art. The appeal of George Herbert's poetry to the opponents of ritual was a justifying triumph for Herbert's conception of form: in poetry as well as religion Herbert tried to work out-a middle way between “slovenliness” and “superstition.” It was by means of form that the material could be used in the service of the spiritual, that the senses could be properly employed for the glorification of God.

As an aftermath of a popularity which, in addition to being immediate and widespread, has proved to be enduring, there now exists a rather formidable mass of controversial writing having to do with the genesis of The Raven and consequently with the sources that Poe may have used in creating the poem. The late Killis Campbell, in his scholarly notes to The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, has left us a concise critical estimate of most of this controversial matter.1 Some accounts of the origin of The Raven are quite fantastic, and Campbell dismisses them with little comment as apocryphal. Others he considers not wholly convincing although he does not deny that they may contain at least a modicum of truth.

Modern readers are prone to find the tragedy of Brutus in his incorruptible devotion to high principle and fair play. Many members of the Globe audience, however, could see in him not only magnanimity but rich complications of misplaced sincerity and self-deception. For in sixteenth-century views of Roman history the conspiracy against Caesar often exemplified a flouting of unitary sovereignty, that prime point of Tudor policy, and thus was bound to end in the anarchy thought to accompany “democratic” or constitutional checks upon authority. Certain judgments of Elizabethan political writers who refer to Brutus are quite clear upon this point. Although naturally aware of the honor and liberality shown by Brutus, Shakespeare's contemporaries could thus perceive in him a conflict between questionable goals and honorable action, a contradiction lying in his attempt to redeem morally confused ends by moral clarity of means. As with Othello, the Elizabethan tragedy of Brutus is one of confusion, of integrity and plain dealing which not only accompany the protagonist into evil but continue to reassure him in his error.

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.