Is Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance chiefly the story of Hollingsworth and his unsuccessful philanthropic scheme, or the story of Zenobia and her tangled relations with Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Westervelt, and Old Moodie, or the story of Coverdale, the cold observer, or the story of the Blithedale experiment? Any of these candidates could be defended. Hollingsworth has the strongest effect upon the plot, and Hawthorne originally intended to name the novel after him; Zenobia is the most vivid character, and her story receives even more space than Hollingsworth's; Coverdale is the character whom we know most intimately; and although Hawthorne prefatorially states that his description of the communal farm “is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance,” his remarks about Blithedale's purpose, operation, and failure constitute an evaluation of the Brook Farm experiment. Yet none of these sub-plots clearly dominates the rest. Unless some principle of unity holds them together, Blithedale is at best a noble failure; until we are aware of this principle of unity, we cannot read the novel with satisfaction.

Modern scholars of the Restoration stage have been content largely to overlook the career of Samuel Sandford, the famous actor of villain parts. What little information is available on Sandford is widely scattered, but the few facts that can be assembled deserve careful attention. Because he was an actor of some eminence in his age his career is interesting per se. More important, from almost the beginning of his career in 1661 to the end around 1700, Sandford was typed in the public consciousness almost exclusively as an actor of villains. And so an analysis of his career not only affords some insight into the process by which a Restoration actor became typed but also permits several interesting speculations concerning the influence exerted by the audience over the Restoration stage. My purpose, therefore, is twofold. First, I shall examine why Sandford became typed; and I shall suggest that this occurred primarily because Sandford's personal appearance and histrionic techniques suited his audience's preconceptions of stage villainy. Secondly, I shall examine the results which ensued from Sandford's being typed. And I shall make two additional suggestions: that after the public image of Sandford as villain had become established, stage managers found it difficult, though not impossible, to cast him for parts which violated that image; and that playwrights, too, not only succumbed to the public stereotype but took advantage of it by writing into new plays villain parts tailored even to Sandford's personal appearance.

In the monographs and articles dealing with America and the New World in German literature Friedrich Schlegel is usually ignored. There are of course many gaps in our knowledge of America in German literature, as Harold Jantz pointed out in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß (Berlin, 2nd ed. revised, 1960); the case of Friedrich Schlegel is a striking example. If he is mentioned, as in Paul Weber's America in Imaginative German Literature (1926), Hildegard Meyer's Nord-Amerika im Urteil des deutschen Schrifttums (1929), and in the recently published Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens (1959) by Ernst Fraenkel, he is represented only by two quotations dating from the last few years of his life. The first treats of the familiar notion that the center of culture might move westward and that the United States would take over the role traditionally played by Europe. In 1792 Herder had asked “O Muse, nimmst du westwârt [sic] deinen Flug?” and in 1818 Platen wrote in his “Colombos Geist”: “Denn nach Westen früchtet die Geschichte, / Denn nach Westen wendet sich der Sieg.” Friedrich Schlegel suggested in 1820 that the shift was conceivable but that it would not take place in his time. Weber, Meyer, and Fraenkel stress SchlegePs underlining of the future, not his concession that the possibility existed. The second quotation is from the seventeenth lecture of the Philosophie der Geschichte (1829) in which he characterized North America as the breeding ground of destructive political principles which initiated an epidemic of revolutions.

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

This Paper had its origin in three main considerations: (1) my observation of the many references to Thomas Arnold's ideas and works in Matthew Arnold's familiar correspondence; (2) my recognition of many striking parallels in the Biblical criticism of the two men; and (3) my gradual realization that the great wealth of scholarship about the Arnolds contained no detailed attempt to indicate the precise nature of Matthew's indebtedness to his father's ideas about the Bible. The unlikeliness of any unique indebtedness is, of course, patent when one considers the wide diffusion of liberal religious ideas in mid-nineteenth-century England and, more particularly, when he remembers Matthew's expressions of interest on various occasions in the work of Spinoza, John Smith (the Cambridge Platonist), S. T. Coleridge, C. C. J. Bunsen, Renan, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and Benjamin Jowett. Nevertheless, the inherent probability of at least a contributory influence, a predisposition to accept similar ideas from other sources, appeared to justify a comparative study of the criticism of the Arnolds.

It is well-known that in Songs of Experience several of the poems are direct contraries to some of the Songs of Innocence, the precise nature of this opposition being reflected in the subtitle of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience: “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” And Blake emphasized this essential organic unity of the contraries by giving four of the opposing poems identical titles: “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “Nurse's Song,” and “A Cradle Song.” Occasionally he changed the title almost imperceptibly: “The Little Boy Lost” becomes “A Little Boy Lost,” “The Little Girl Lost” becomes “A Little Girl Lost,” and “The Divine Image” becames “A Divine Image.” The great majority of Songs of Experience, however, have either totally new titles or changes of the Songs of Innocence titles which make more explicit the nature of the opposition between the two states. Thus in the two introductory poems the piper yields to the bard, in others “The Lamb” becomes “The Tyger,” “The Blossom” becomes “The Sick Rose,” “The Ecchoing Green” becomes “The Garden of Love” or “London,” “The School Boy” becomes “The Little Vagabond,” and “The Divine Image” becomes “The Human Abstract.”

Although traditionally “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been regarded as a “horror” tale, close examination reveals that it possesses many characteristics similar to those which Poe termed “ratiocinative” in other stories. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn, after defining the tale as “arabesque,” pointed out briefly its systematic duplication of theme in the treatment of Usher, of his house, and of his relation to his sister. More recent scholarship has concentrated upon reclassifying the story and upon exploring the subconscious or even Freudian recesses of Roderick's nature, particularly as these concern his attitude toward his sister Madeline. In the present study I propose to continue Quinn's investigation of the structure and form of the story, including recurrent ideas and character relationships. My thesis is that behind the mood and the characterization of “The Fall of the House of Usher” exists a pattern of thought and of thematic development as rigorous in its way as the more sharply denned rationality of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and that a study of this pattern explain the significant themes of the story.

The increasing importance of the hand-image for Rilke is an indication of his steadily growing conviction that the plastic arts should become the guide for poetry. Consequently, the image of the hand occurs frequently in the early collections entitled Das Buch der Bilder (1902) and Das Stundenbuch (1906). Even in the first poem of Das Stundenbuch, written as early as 1899, Rilke shows a marked interest in plastic representation, which was to become the dominant influence upon his poetry during the period of his close acquaintance with the French sculptor Rodin a few years later:

Da neigt sich die Stunde und riihrt mich an
mit klarem, metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fiihle: ich kann—
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.

Ortega has maintained in his Ideas sobre la novela that action is not the essence of a novel, a principle which he corroborates by the fact that most plots are readily forgotten. For Ortega, the novel's essence is pure being or nonaction, manifested by the state of its characters. One of the most conscientious practitioners of Ortegan theory was Benjamín Jarnés, who in Locura y muerte de nadie (Madrid, 1929) wrote a novel revealing human reality stripped of its vital core: action, passion, and sentiment. The process of devoiding reality of its real content while leaving a mere semblance of reality as the remainder is, of course, “dehumanization” in the Ortegan definition of the term. Two further aspects of Jarnés' novel—the absence of a personality in his protagonist and the use of a highly abstract, cerebral language—serve to supplement the meaning of “dehumanization” at least as far as narrative fiction is involved. But Locura y muerte… also commands attention because its author reaches out into areas of cultural and philosophical significance in order to determine the causes of a comparable dehumanization in contemporary life at the same time that he depicts this life fictionally. My procedure in this essay will be to discuss first Jarnés' notion of the interplay between the masses and the individual personality; then, in the light of this, the attitudes underlying his approach to this particular novel; and, finally, the techniques involved in the verbalization of his novel.

Readers of The Times of London know Oliver Edwards' column as literary chat. It is no secret that Oliver Edwards is Sir William John Haley, editor of The Times and formerly Director-General of the B. B. C. In August 1957, on the publication in England of Gérard Jean-Aubry's biography of Joseph Conrad, Sir William launched an attack on Ford Madox Ford. “Time has an exorable way of taking its own revenge,” he begins. “When Joseph Conrad died, many who had affectionate regard for that master … were hurt or outraged at the way Ford Madox Ford seemed to cash in on the event. In a book about Conrad, in articles, and in other reminiscences the only purpose that could be discerned was to glorify Ford, even if that meant somewhat diminishing Conrad… . Ford's nature and experiences were such that by that stage in life he no longer had any touch with reality and had lost what little perspective he ever had.” As the column continues, the accusations become more personal. Ford was “a bit of a bounder,” he writes, whose “inaccuracies were … congenital and venial… . The question remains why Ford acted the way he did.”

Recently there have come into my possession four hitherto unpublished autograph letters which throw further light on Wordsworth's exertions in behalf of the Copyright Act of 1842. Two are by W. E. Gladstone, one is by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, and one is by Wordsworth. These letters were written during 1838, a critical year for the supporters of the bill.

According to Sir Charles Tennyson, Carlyle met Tennyson at the Sterling Club as early as 1839, if not earlier. Previously, Sir Charles says, Carlyle had heard much about him from John Sterling, who had helped to found the Cambridge Apostles' Club, of which Tennyson had also been a member. D. A. Wilson, however, in his multi-volumed life of Carlyle says that the two first met in Carlyle's garden at Chelsea in the autumn of 1840. Sir Charles is more nearly right. Wilson's date is too late, for on 5 September 1840 Carlyle wrote to his brother: “Some weeks ago, one night, the Poet Tennison [sic] and Matthew Allen were discovered here, sitting smoking in the garden. Tennison had been here before, but was still new to Jane,—who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy: who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then where he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man.” From the very first the friendship seemed to flourish. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson later told a visitor at Farringford in speaking of Carlyle's favorable treatment of him in the early forties. In those years Carlyle's reputation had already been firmly established by his French Revolution and his lectures; but Tennyson had not published the two volumes of 1842 which were to do much to give him fame. Both had found the road to fame a long, steep, and difficult one. Both had lost manuscripts: Carlyle that of the French Revolution, volume one; and Tennyson that of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Both had been battered much by hardships and disappointments. Carlyle, who was fourteen years older than the poet, had struggled over a much longer period before being acclaimed by the literary world. But the period of their fame would also be a long one, and in terms of rough chronology they enjoyed their fame during the same years.

In 1865 Émile Montégut, literary critic best known for his long association with the Revue des deux mondes, contributed a major article in two parts to the Moniteur universel on the subject of one of its most distinguished collaborators, Théophile Gautier. In composing this article Montégut had been faced with a problem that might never have occurred to a less conscientious and original critic. His material, after long meditation, was well enough defined. Its content centered around the interpretation of Gautier as a dual nature, “âme gauloise” and “âme contemplative,” and revealed much that was most characteristic of its author as a critic: his concentration on contemporary writing, his interest in defining various forms of the Romantic imagination, his concern with dilettantism as both a strength and a weakness, his frankly personal approach to his subject, an approach based on the belief that in literary criticism there can be no “instrument unique” and that each critic should seek out those aspects of an author with which he has some affinity, hoping that the true meaning and unity of the work will emerge for the intelligent reader from a symphony of individual impressions on the part of numerous critics.

Although Frank Norris' first two novels have been valued both for their intrinsic worth and for their importance in the history of American naturalism, they have also been severely criticized for their inconsistencies. Summarized broadly, these charges are, first, that there is a lack of consistency between Norris' dramatization of a deterministic system in McTeague and his frequent avowals of individual moral responsibility in Vandover; and, secondly, that there are inconsistencies within the novels themselves—that Norris appears to free McTeague from responsibility for his behavior and yet adopts a moral tone when discussing McTeague's sexual desires, and that though Norris for the most part blames Vandover for his choice of an evil life, he also seems to indicate in several passages that Vandover is the victim of irresistible larger forces.