Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote in her most productive year, 1862, are two which gain particular interest from the fact that she returned to them at a considerably later date. Comparison of the early and late versions offers revealing insights into her development. To her poem about a hummingbird, “Within my Garden rides a Bird / Upon a single Wheel—”, she returned, probably early in 1879, to produce a much better poem on the same subject: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel. …” Condensing twenty lines to eight, she transformed a slack little narrative about the bird, her dog and herself, into a brilliant image of the bird's visual impact. Cutting out the personal pronoun, the dog and the philosophic debate, she managed to convey directly her sense of domestic miracle. The two poems appear separately, as numbers 500 and 1463, in Johnson's three-volume edition of The Poems (1955) and thus are taken over into his recent one-volume edition of The Complete Poems (1960).

The marble faun frequently reads like a guide-book. Its characters and narrator describe many landscapes and ruins, comment interpretively on many works of art, and take every opportunity to make general pronouncements on aesthetics. Often at such points Hawthorne's Romance seems interrupted by bits of leftover essays, whose tenuous dramatic plausibility derives from the characters, three of whom are “artists, or connected with art,” and from the Italian setting, which is insistently presented as the home of the “antique, pictorial, and statuesque.”

Wieland is conventionally and correctly regarded as a novel of purpose which marks a turn from the stories of love and seduction fathered by Richardson to the kind of story made prominent by Holcroft, Bage, and Godwin. The particular purposes of Wieland, however, have never been precisely identified, and this reading is offered in the belief that the novel has been subjected by most students to a form of damnation through faint praise. By marveling that an American in 1798 could produce readable fiction, they place undue emphasis on mere chronology and slight the importance of the novel as part of a more meaningful cultural continuity. Wieland is an important novel because of the extraordinary manner in which Brown employs sentiment against itself (rather than simply dismissing it, as it is averred he has done), penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.

Although “The City of Dreadful Night” has long been recognized as James Thomson's masterpiece, a good many critics have insisted that it is an uneven piece of work, inconsistent as an allegory, confused as to intellectual intent. I believe that the solution to many of the problems in this minor classic can be found if the poem is read and studied in its original order of composition, an approach made possible through the Morgan manuscript, a final copy of the poem in which Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written. It has long been known that Thomson wrote the poem in two stages, part in 1870 and part in 1873, but the exact order of composition has never been established, and even Salt's careful biography only records Thomson's statement that “about half of it, not the first half as it now stands, was written in 1870.” The Morgan manuscript, however, makes it possible to chart the step-by-step progress of the poem's composition (see Table on page 616) and, for the first time, to read the poem in the order in which Thomson wrote it. I believe that if it is read in chronological sequence, a good deal of the confusion surrounding the poem can be understood through the realization that “The City of Dreadful Night” as we know it today actually combines two separate poems. Moreover, as I shall attempt to show by treating them separately, the 1870 “City” and the 1873 “City” are unquestionably two very different poems in concept and intention.

I am happy to report to you that the Report of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages has at last been published. It is 326 pages long, a foot high and a foot wide; our printer and staff have affectionately subtitled it “The Monster.” The fullest and most varied report on foreign-language activities produced in our time, it contains twenty-one of the twenty-eight surveys and studies that the MLA undertook in 1959-61 under contract with the U. S. Office of Education through the National Defense Education Act. Here are a few of its highlights. From the 1959-60 FLES survey report, we know that over a million and a quarter children were studying a foreign language from Kindergarten through Grade 8, nearly a million of them below Grade 7. A little over two thirds of these (671,000) were studying in regular programs, with the classroom teacher or a visiting specialist as the model. The remainder (327,000) were learning from a television teacher. Spanish and French accounted for 95% of the enrollments, Spanish with over three-fifths of the total and French with a little over a third.

The nature and degree of George Eliot's commitment to a deterministic world view have been the source of considerable difficulty in the criticism of her work. Critics who concern themselves with the subject take, for the most part, the view either that her belief in determinism seriously marred her art or, on the other hand, that despite appearances she was not a consistent determinist. In both cases, however, determinism evokes extraordinary intensity of feeling, almost everyone agreeing that a commitment to it tends to be detrimental to the artist because it forces a distortion of the facts of existence (or at least a depressing interpretation of them) and leads to an underestimation of man's capacity for action and of his potential dignity.

It is well known that as a young man William Dean Howells was an unabashedly romantic poet with a special fondness for the German romantics, notably Heine. It is even better known that at a later period Howells was the great champion of realistic fiction and one of its leading practitioners. These facts have led to an extensive discussion of what influences brought about the change, of when he became a realist in theory and in practice, and even of whether he ever became a complete realist. Some new light is thrown on these questions by the manuscripts of two of his early pieces of fiction, the unpublished “Geoffrey Winter” and Their Wedding Journey (1872).

Götz . . . has always seemed to me . . . rather a tedious play for non-Germans, says Ronald Peacock (Goethe's Major Plays) Manchester, 1959, p. 12). This verdict strikes uncomfortably close to the apparent value set on the play among English and American readers, and it implies at most a mixed compliment to the Germans, who presumably like it better. In Peacock's view, “a great act of historical sympathy is needed.” To respond to such a need is surely more an act of loyal charity than of critical judgment—and a dubious tribute to the work itself. In sum, Peacock finds the play historically “determined” not only by its sixteenth-century background but by its eighteenth-century genesis: Götz the uncorrupted “natural genius,” an idealized antithesis, in Herder's spirit for example, to the prevailing social order.

Germinal is an almost perfect example of what Zola occasionally called his “lie”—his paradoxical manner of achieving at one and the same time both a convincing documentary realism and a strongly symbolic and subjective presentation of reality. Nowhere can this be more plainly seen than in his brilliant, often surprising, use of color. Obviously he owes much in this as in other respects to such predecessors as Flaubert, but he also, more than has generally been realized, shares in the spirit of his own period. While his color terms and images always have a naturalistic basis, the art with which he distributes them throughout the narrative is quite as stylized and patterned in its own way as a canvas by Cézanne. His symbolic treatment of color, on the other hand, suggests affinities with the symbolists, who were rising to a certain prominence in Paris in 1884, the year Germinal was written. Not only does he simplify and organize his colors into a scheme consistent with his dramatic subject, a great strike; he also invests them like leitmotifs with associations expressive of all three levels of meaning of the novel—the dramatic cadre of the miners' strike, the prophetic historical étude of the struggle between capital and labor, and, finally, the underlying philosophical vision of man and nature. Often he gives a single color or group of colors at least three separate meanings which are interwoven and interrelated within the powerful unity of the whole. And, in the process, he transforms, in this and other ways, the colors of ordinary reality into the often far more intense, significant, and emotive colors of dreams, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions.

Mrs. Bathurst“ may not be the most puzzling of Rudyard Kipling's ‘obscure’ stories, but it has surely become the one most puzzled over by admirers and critics alike. A number of articles have been printed about it in the pages of the Kipling Journal, and many of the important Kipling critics have alluded, a bit tentatively perhaps, to this fine story—Edmund Wilson calls it a ”remarkable story“ and then hurries on—but so far no one has ever really accounted for what happens in ”Mrs. Bathurst“ or has suggested fully what the story is about. There has been much interest in characters and incidents, of course, but almost no consideration of theme. A good deal has been made of Kipling's fondness for cryptic utterance, the implication being that ”Mrs. Bathurst“ is an elaborate puzzle game in which the reader must try to determine, from artfully concealed clues, what the characters in the story are really up to. Other commentators have dealt with Kipling's method of composition, his habit of repeatedly and drastically cutting his manuscripts in general, and the manuscript of this story in particular. C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the momentum of cutting ”Mrs. Bathhurst“ may have carried Kipling, all unaware, past the point of intelligibility and that the obscurity of the story may therefore be accidental. What no critic has reasoned, however, is that Kipling's struggle for compression and his pruning away of representational elements in ”Mrs. Bathurst,“ to permit concentration on other values, justifies the closest possible reading of the text and makes the critic responsible not only for clarifying the surface action of the story but also for discovering the significance of that action. Such a detailed study of ”Mrs. Bathurst“ reveals a powerful tale embodying one of Kipling's profoundest visions of life and composed in a style far enough ahead of its time to account for the story's reputation as a perennial puzzler.

While chatting with Anthony Trollope one day, George Eliot lamented the occasional failure of her inspiration: “There are days together when I cannot write a line.” Trollope, in a rare moment of humility, replied: “Oh, well, with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry.” Perhaps it is unfair to accept Trollope's testimony against himself, but we do his workmanlike talents no disservice if we recognize that the same charge has often been brought against him by his critics, who allege a variety of “mechanical” practices. For example, A. O. J. Cockshut, discussing Trollope's handling of courtship, says, “His stock plot, much too often repeated, of the woman hesitating between two men, is perfunctory.” However, one “mechanical” technique which he repeatedly employed has never been noticed. If we trace the appearance of the two principal sources of conflict in his fiction, we discover not only that two themes are very common but also that they appear with almost predictable regularity. The symmetry of this pattern is, I feel, significant and illuminating in understanding Trollope's literary fecundity, in classifying his novels, and in appreciating the exact nature of his artistic maturity, a matter of special concern in recent Trollope criticism. Paradoxically, this same pattern also suggests that those novels which are most popular at the moment were “mechanically” produced.

Several years ago I published an article drawing attention to a forgotten statement by the nineteenth-century bibliographer T. F. Dibdin to the effect that Thomas Moore and not, as has often been supposed, Hazlitt or Jeffrey wrote the much disputed review of Coleridge's Christabel that appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816 (xxvii, 58-67). Dibdin's phrasing suggested that he might have known the truth from a good source. Testing his ascription in the light of other evidence, I concluded that he was almost certainly right though as far as was known otherwise Moore had not acknowledged the article and might very well even have denied it. It now appears that in effect Moore did deny it, and the question therefore should be reviewed.

How seriously one takes a writer's disavowal of an anonymous publication obviously depends upon the writer and the circumstances. Some authors must be believed without question; from others—Scott is the prime nineteenth-century example—a denial is somewhat less than final. His fellow-Scotsman Jeffrey, on the other hand, though as editor of the Edinburgh Review he had constantly to do with anonymous writing, avoided the alternatives of betrayal or prevarication by a consistent policy of silence; when he did speak out, even inveterate enemies scarcely questioned his word. The difference may be less a matter of ethical standards than of the author's conception of the privilege attached to anonymity, which can sometimes be preserved only by evasion or deception. Thomas Moore leaves us in no uncertainty about his position. “For my own part, I think every possible trick fair with that animal ferae naturae, the Public,” he wrote to the poet Rogers in 1814. This was his justification for a tangle of misstatements and secrecy into which he had been driven by a complex of worry and hope over the reception of Lalla Rookh. It applied equally to his anonymous writing, which he was often disposed to deny when its success was doubtful. “Though I shall of course deny the trifles I am now doing, yet, if they are liked, I shall be sure to get the credit of them,” he wrote in a letter of 1813. “Of course” is the telling phrase in this confession. At one time or another, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, he denied his authorship of the Intercepted Letters, Little Man and Little Soul, Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, A Vision: by the Author of Christabel, and at least one contribution to the Edinburgh Review; he also once planned to pass off an air of his own composing as a “national” air. These denials happen to have survived in his own written records. Others have probably gone unrecorded, for his concealments were many.

The simultaneous flowering of decadent verse and ephemeral little magazines upon the English literary scene of the 1890's is remarked as of central interest in the literary histories of the period. The two phenomena were closely related, for the poets of the English decadent “movement” and the editors of the new periodicals were for the most part members of the same extensive London coterie. The members of the Rhymers' Club were closely identified with the clusters of writers gathered around the Yellow Book, the Dome, and the Savoy; and with few exceptions the production of the group as a whole has come to be regarded as exhibiting certain morbidly exotic traits which gave the predominantly “decadent” flavor to the period. Of the many little magazines which served as admirable show-cases for this decadent poetry, none is more often cited as embodying the spirit of the age than the Savoy. Edited by Arthur Symons, illustrated largely by Aubrey Beardsley, and repeatedly presenting the work of Ernest Dowson, the periodical seemed, during its single year of existence—1896—to speak for all the arch-decadents except the already disgraced Wilde. Bernard Muddiman's description of the Savoy as “the fine flower of the publications of the age” sums up the achievement of its eight numbers; his references to it as providing the pages upon which “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home” sums up its reputation. Yet the reader who turns to the Savoy expecting to find a luscious garden of exotic and forbidden poetry will be largely disappointed, for its verse has less of extravagance and perversity than is ordinarily implied by the description of literature as “decadent.” There is a real danger of misinterpreting the poetry of the decade whenever it is approached along the beaten paths of ruling preconceptions about the “decadent spirit” of the 1890's. The examination of the representative sample of verse provided by the Savoy illustrates the desirability of revaluating that spirit.

DespuéS de cuidadosas y repetidas lecturas de la Antolojía Poética, me he detenido en uno de sus poemas por parecerme que, sometiéndolo a ceñido análisis, podría contribuir a un mejor entendimiento del espíritu poético de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Me refiero al poema n 50, colocado en el grupo IV de la Antolojía con el título general de “Pastorales,” de los años 1903–05: