Recent studies of The Blithedale Romance have demonstrated conclusively the importance of distinguishing the perspective of Miles Coverdale, the first person narrator, from that of Hawthorne. Coverdale thinks of himself as an observer of a drama, as “Chorus in a classic play.” He holds himself aloof so that he may the better act as an interpreter of the action of the Romance. As he interprets, he reveals himself, and through him we get Hawthorne's vision of the internal conflicts which the artist must suffer.

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.

Of late the interest in the work of Ippolito Nievo has been such as to suggest that this author has finally come into his own. Both in Italy and elsewhere, the name of this writer, who seemed permanently interred under the stern and negative judgment of Benedetto Croce, today reappears almost triumphantly. Recently the publication of Nievo's complete works was begun in Italy (Le confessioni di un italiano has already been printed by Ricciardi and II novelliere campagnuolo by Einaudi), while Le confessioni has been translated into English for the first time, under the title The Castle of Fratta (Boston, 1958). A new translation of this work has also appeared in German (the first German version was published as early as 1877, the year in which another of Nievo's novels, Angelo di bontà, was translated). Notwithstanding the widespread interest in Nievo, a critical study clarifying his position with respect to the nineteenth-century Italian novel as a whole is still lacking. Thus far, purely aesthetic judgments alone have been the concern of most scholars dealing with this author's work.

Robert Browning's theatrical career began with a casual remark at a dinner party in 1836 and ended with a bitter quarrel in 1843. The somewhat unwilling sponsor and mentor of the young playwright, responsible for both the beginning and the end of his career, was William Charles Macready, the leading actor-manager of the early nineteenth century. Between these two men there existed a relationship —more than mere tutelage, but never quite friendship—which played an important part in the making of the poet.

Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.

Despite the large body of Melville criticism, Melville's short stories still await a critical reappraisal. The attention the tales have received—and it is slight in relation to their importance—has frequently been marred by the critic's idée fixe on Melville which causes him to bend the material he works with to fit preconceived notions, or to approach Melville's symbolic art from so oblique an angle that he ignores dramatic and thematic elements central to Melville's perception. “I and My Chimney” is a significant case in point. In miniature this story embodies, among other things, several themes explored in Melville's other works, an implied criticism of America's “infatuate juvenility,” and particularly Melville's recurrent insistence upon what one recent critic has called “an inductive and empirical evaluation of experience.” In fact, “I and My Chimney” may be considered a thoroughgoing symbolic expression of Melville's basic epistemology.

In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.

The preconditions for a truly parallel treatment of the French and German Catholic Revival of the twentieth century do not exist. The main reason is that spiritually minded great authors like Paul Claudel or François Mauriac became fervent Catholics while German religiously minded poets like Rilke and Hofmannsthal used their cultural Catholicism for secular purposes. Of course, we still can single out certain literary productions which are comparable on the basis of their subject matter and general tendency, although they may be found rather in second-class authors. As such common topics and tendencies I am inclined to consider the following: the quasi-mystical experience of the religious conversion as a challenge to a merely para-psychological explanation of spiritual events; or the defense of the Church as the only factor of salvation against any humanistic, humanitarian, or political messages; or the praise of womanhood as inspired by the virginal motherhood of Mary, opposed to modern female emancipation and stressing of sex; or the serious explanation of evil by sin and Satan, open to spiritual cures, versus any theory of the absurdity of the world or the interpretation of evil as maladjustment open only to psychiatric therapy; or along the critical line, the fullness of specific Catholic insights, culminating in charity as a basis of an empathetic understanding of literature versus any formalism or philosophically destructive criticism.

Two of the surest critical propositions about Melville are that his prevailing theme is the problem of moral evil and that his prevailing narrative vehicle is the ship-microcosm. With few exceptions his major works have some fairly obvious basis in the fusion of that image and that theme. In most cases the competent study of source materials and of the image-theme pattern peculiar to the work in question has yielded an understanding sufficient to the purposes of responsible criticism. Only The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has continued to tantalize both casual readers and dedicated students, notwithstanding the scholarly and critical attention which has long been lavished on it and which is now available to all in the admirable edition of Miss Elizabeth Foster. The singularly baffling quality of this novel is the more surprising, too, for its wearing so plainly on its face the signs of its author's characteristic theme and image; not even Moby-Dick bespeaks its artistic character so forthrightly. In order to penetrate a little farther into the stubborn mysteries of The Confidence-Man I propose to examine some antecedents, both in and out of Melville's own writings, which may have exerted a significant or even a definitive influence on its structure and meaning.

In 1828 Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem “Ančar,” usually rendered in English as “The Upas Tree.” Because of the obviously derivative theme of the lyric, scholars have been searching for the exact place where the poet learned of this tree and its terrible powers. At first the searchings were random. Professor Sumcov, writing around the turn of the century, claimed that Pushkin had read of the tree in some of the popular “travels to the east.” Not convinced by Sumcov's argument, P. O. Morozov proposed a stanza (iv, 126) from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Valerij Brjusov, the scholarly Symbolist poet who edited a collection of Pushkin's works (1919), thought that a poem by Millevoye, apparently “Le Mancenillier,” was the real source. In the collection of essays entitled Pushkin in World Literature (1926), N. Jakovlev showed that a proposed epigraph for the poem was from Coleridge; ten years later the Academy edition of Pushkin's works had this note: “the poem is thematically related to Coleridge's work Remorse.” In an interesting short study Professor Jakubovič has shown a certain parallel with Pushkin in a passage from Colman's play The Law of Java; the passage, however, could hardly be the only direct source.

In the year of Huysmans' death, 1907, Léon Daudet wrote of him: “Il a jeté un pont entre le spiritualisme chrétien et le vocabulaire moderne.” In a brief panegyric paper, the critic merely defends Huysmans' continued use of a naturalistic style in his later Catholic novels, without analyzing the idea to any extent, either historically or stylistically.

The great importance which Emile Zola gave to physical appearance in character portrayal is well known. It seems to have escaped notice, however, that as a source of material Zola evidently tapped a curious body of pseudo-scientific theories even before he undertook the composition of the Rougon-Macquart series. These theories concern physiognomy, the recognition of character through a study of the permanent form of the human features. Exploitation of a striking corollary to this same study, evident in almost all of the Rougon-Macquart novels, is especially noted in La Fortune des Rougon and in La Bête humaine. Zola applied to creative literature the most fantastic theory of certain physiognomists: the claim that human resemblances to various animals are highly significant indices to the recognition of character.

Yeats's interest in Byzantine art and civilization began in the Nineties and continued through his life. The first issue of “Rosa Alchemica” (1896) refers to the mosaic work at Ravenna (“mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty”), work which Yeats probably saw when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gregory. Unfortunately, Yeats has left us no account of his visit to Ravenna. A revision of “The Holy Places,” final section of Discoveries, made for the 1912 edition of The Culling of an Agate, shows that between 1906 and 1912 Yeats's knowledge of Byzantine history had increased. In 1906 he wrote of “an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of better stone;” in 1912 this became “had John Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look … a hearty disposition to fight the Turk.” In preparation for the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, which Yeats wrote at Capri in February 1925, and left virtually unchanged in the revised Vision of 1937, Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and studied Byzantine mosaics in Rome and Sicily. He did not return to Ravenna, being fearful of its miasmal air. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Wisdom” (1926-27); then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium” (1930).

As an appendix to Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Der Prozeß (The Trial) Max Brod has published a series of fragments more or less closely connected with the main body of the text. One of them, with the heading “Staatsanwalt” (“Prosecuting Attorney”), has lately caused considerable discussion, especially in view of the new order suggested for the entire novel by Professor H. Uyttersprot.