Quizá porque las ideas estéticas de Abel Martín han ofrecido mejor oportunidad al crítico y al estudioso o quizà por las dificultades inherentes a toda poesía, el hecho es que los poemas publicados en De un cancionero apócrifo no han recibido todavía la debida atención. Pero precisamente porque sabía Machado con exactitud consciente el derrotero de la poesía, la de sus últimos años es màs certera y acertada. Y nunca màs que en “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela,” un poema de extraña complejidad que se había publicado por separado en la Revista de Occidente del mes de noviembre de 1931. Las preocupaciones estéticas de la prosa de Machado afloran en sus últimos versos que desarrollan a veces los conceptos filosóficos de Abel Martín y Juan de Mairena, quienes habían asimilado a su vez no pocas de las intuiciones del juvenil Antonio Machado. Pero “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela” no trata de definir lo poético, sino de senalar y dibujar los contomos de la poesía del autor.

German schools are gradually outgrowing the stage of chaos into which they had been plunged by the war. In a great effort the worst difficulties of the post-war period have been overcome, but conditions cannot yet be called normal. Classes still comprise 40 pupils and more. Although many schools have been rebuilt or newly built since the war, the bigger towns, which were nearly all heavily bombed, are still so short of accommodation that most school buildings have to be used in double shifts, i.e., two schools share one building, one school going in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The teaching load of a high school teacher is 25 periods (of 45 minutes each) a week. But in some respects peacetime conditions are gradually returning. Thus, the production of textbooks is approaching a satisfactory stage. There are two or three dozen different English courses for schools on the market, and a very large number of English and American texts in school-editions (with annotations). A catalogue published in the summer of 1955 enumerates 532 such editions printed in the Federal Republic of Germany, and there is nothing to prevent German schools from buying reading materials from Britain or the United States. A number of the German Länder have introduced a system by which all schoolbooks are provided free of charge.

The importance of music in James Joyce's life and art has always been evident. A volume of his poems he called Chamber Music; the title of his last book is that of an Irish-American ballad. Almost the first recollections of young Stephen Dedalus were musical; and one of the most moving passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes Stephen's hungry young brothers and sisters singing “Oft in the Stilly Night,” in which Stephen joins. Music plays an essential part in several stories in Dubliners, notably in “The Dead.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to music and musicians.

No Writer ever revised more carefully or used his rough notes and sketches more economically than Joyce. Each work grows out of its predecessor and prepares the way for a succeeding work already contemplated. Ulysses was first conceived as a short story for Dubliners, the Portrait is a prologue to Ulysses, and many of the themes and characters of Finnegans Wake are adumbrated in the earlier works. Even Chamber Music, which appears to be unrelated to Joyce's great achievements, can be shown to foreshadow the action of A Portrait and to hold the key to many passages in Ulysses and the Wake. There is a sense in which one can say that James Joyce wrote only one book, a continuous effort to endow his own life and the Dublin of his youth with a universal significance. T. S. Eliot has emphasized this continuity in his foreword to the catalogue of the 1949 Joyce exhibition in Paris: “Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.”

When Shaw was alive the public had little opportunity to come to any conclusions about his attitude toward tragedy—and especially toward Shakespearean tragedy—because the septuagenarian, then octogenarian, then nonagenarian was always willing to publish yet another play, another pamphlet, or another letter reminding his readers that he was inordinately fond of Shakespeare's verbal music, quarreled not with Shakespeare but with Irving, and had included a question mark after the words “Better than Shakespear?” His pronouncements have often embarrassed his admirers, and a number of friendly critics have sought to clarify and make tolerable his opinions by demonstrating that he admired much in Shakespeare, that his fundamental conflict was only with bad Shakespeare or badly adapted Shakespeare.

Zola's literary career opened in 1864 with the publication of the Contes à Ninon. Between then and 1881 he produced fourteen out of the thirty-one novels he was to write. Concurrently, he was writing almost continuously for the press; it was only after 1881 that, for reasons which I have suggested elsewhere, he gave up this activity, and for a long while desisted from all regular newspaper work. In this considerable journalistic output, attention is usually accorded only to those portions that Zola himself thought worthy to be preserved, and which he accordingly published in what are by custom referred to as his Œuvres critiques. Of the nine volumes grouped under this heading, one only, Mes Haines, contains a selection from his pre-1870 critical writing: it consists almost entirely of essays published originally in the Lyons newspaper Le Salut public in 1865 and 1866; they are interesting enough, one would think, to arouse curiosity concerning the rest of Zola's newspaper contributions during the years when he was making his name as a novelist and before he had emerged as the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

Major Barbara can be considered the epitome of Shaw's total dramatic output. It embodies most of the social ideas and stage techniques of his earlier plays, and it distinctly foreshadows the ideology of the remaining four decades of his literary life. Moreover, Major Barbara is probably Shaw's most religious work; certainly it is the play of his which deals most explicitly with the threefold theme of sin, repentance, and salvation. (Back to Methuselah is less explicit, more diluted, as a play about religion.) Hence to label Major Barbara as Shaw's “Divine Comedy” is meant to be neither facetious nor hyperbolic, but to indicate a new point of departure from which to view the play. At the same time, to use the lens of the Divine Comedy to re-examine Major Barbara is not to imply that the two works are necessarily equal in artistic merit or that they are even fully comparable. Yet the Dantean perspective can, I think, help us to see Shaw's play in a new and brighter light, and by so doing clarify its central position in the Shavian canon as well as its possible stature as one of the great works of the twentieth century.

Nietzsche began as an admirer of Luther and the German Reformation. The age of Luther ranked as high in his early opinion as the age of Goethe and Beethoven. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on, this favorable attitude toward Luther underwent a strong transformation. In the five years from 1878 to 1883, Nietzsche's second creative period, Luther emerged as a highly questionable figure, even as a most regrettable event in the history of German and European thought and civilization. But all these severe pronouncements on Luther were only a prelude to the scathing denunciations to come in Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings.