Georg kaiser's work is often treated as the reflection of its author's unusual personality. Such a treatment, though valid, tends to obscure the fact that his writings, in their probing of existing values, their manifestation of Lebensangst, their quest for regeneration, and their hope for redemption, also reflect the intellectual and spiritual concerns of his period. That his visions were not, as has been often held, the phantasies of an extreme subjectivist, but that they accurately mirrored the age, is demonstrated by the fact that representative thinkers of the period, such as Bergson, Vaihinger, and Jaspers, voiced similar concerns, arrived at similar conclusions, sought similar solutions. There seems to exist a particularly strong affinity between the ideas of Walther Rathenau and those presented in Kaiser's social tetralogy (Die Koralle, 1917; Gas, 1918; Hölle Weg Erde, 1919; Gas, Zweiter Teil, 1920), which was written at a time when the impact of Rathenau's works (Zur Kritik der Zeit, 1912; Zur Mechanik des Geistes oder Vom Reich der Seele, 1913; Von kommenden Dingen, 1917) on the intellectual life of Germany was very strong. Even though explicit references by Kaiser to Rathenau could be found neither in Kaiser's published work nor inhis correspondence and other unpublished material, there is, I believe, enough circumstantial evidence to make a plausible case for Kaiser's indebtedness to Rathenau. To present this evidence and, by so doing, to contribute to a better understanding of Kaiser's social tetralogy, is the purpose of this study. I shall first briefly summarize Rathenau's ideas, then present the evidence for his influence on Kaiser, and, in conclusion, speculate very briefly on the nature of this influence.

The revisions that a writer makes in a work often reveal his method of composition and thus add to our knowledge of his creative process. In an effort to increase our understanding of the creative practices of De Quincey, I have undertaken an analysis of the revisions that he made in the “Dream-Fugue.”

There are extant three different, but incomplete, versions of the “Dream-Fugue.” These are: (1) The manuscript submitted to Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, now in possession of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which contains all except a portion of the last paragraph of the first four parts of the article, is a holograph and thus shows the revisions that De Quincey made while preparing the work. (2) The article as it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1849, being printed apparently from the holograph. (3) The article as it was published in the Author's Edition in 1854, showing the revisions De Quincey made in the magazine version when he included it as part of his collected works. In addition to these versions which are of some length, we have a fragment of three paragraphs found among De Quincey's papers after his death and published in 1891 by A.H. Japp in The Posthumous Works of De Quincey. Thus, we have four documents containing all or portions of the “Dream-Fugue,” with the holograph showing the most changes and therefore being the most useful in determining the author's pattern of revision.

The standard editions of the Canterbury Tales differ in their pointing of G 1236–39. Curiously enough it is the most influential of these editions (those of Skeat and Robinson) that, to my mind, point the passage inappropriately by mistakenly giving a speech that belongs to one character to another. As a result, one of the characters involved seems to be guilty of an inexplicable and unmotivated impropriety, and the dramatic quality of the passage is blurred.

Ruskin is no longer a controversial figure. Most contemporary critics, of art, of society, of literature, ignore him.

Ruskin's own weaknesses are responsible for much of this neglect—not least the flood of words which overflows the thirty-nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn. No single volume, not even Unto This Last nor Praeterita, can be recommended without qualification, nor any single phase of Ruskin's work. His art judgments are often arrogantly inept, as toward Claude and Whistler and Renaissance architecture; his aesthetics is contradictory, homiletic; his social criticism is sometimes antiquarian, proposing quixotic reforms. The fervors of Ruskin's style offend current taste, with our preference for tight, flat, and uncommitted exposition.

Der Für thomas mann besonders in seiner Tetralogie wichtige Begriff der mythischen Identifikation, der mehr oder minder bewußten Ichverschmelzung mit einem Vorgänger, ist gleichbedeutend mit dem Spielen einer Rolle. Die ungewöhnlichen Menschen, wie Joseph, Kleopatra und Napoleon, sind sich “mit freudigem oder düsterem Stolze” ihrer mythischen Wiederkehr bewußt und “zelebrieren ihre Rolle auf Erden, sie führen ihre Charakterrolle weihevoll durch.” Die allermeisten aber spielen ihre Rolle, ohne ihre Vorgänger und Nachfahren in ihr zu kennen, sozusagen als erste und einzige, aber trotz der “Einfältigkeit illusionärer Einmaligkeit und Originalität spielen sie mit einer Würde und Sicherheit, die aus dem tieferen Bewußtsein kommt, etwas Gegründet-Rechtmäßiges, Zeitloses wieder vorzustellen” (GW, x, 515 f.; GF, x, 756; J, 1240).

Aldous huxley's Brave New World is generally recognized as one of the two most widely discussed English fantasies of this century. The other, of course, is Orwell's 1984. The two books seem to present the two plausible alternative directions totalitarianism may take, and for several years after the publication of Orwell's book in 1949 it was common to evaluate the one against the other. 1949 was also the year of publication of Huxley's Ape and Essence, an exploration of still other possibilities of the future. It may be profitable to sidestep the question of the credibility of Huxley's fantasies as projections—which is not, fundamentally, a literary question—and to examine them first in relation to some of the techniques employed in their construction, and secondly as satires of the real worlds they reflect.

Many of us will be in sympathy with some of the views of Thomas P. Roche, Jr., in “Britomart at the House of Busyrane” (PMLA, lxxvi, Sept. 1961, 340–344). On one important point, however, he is almost certainly wrong. It is not a shortcoming of Amoret, “lessoned/ In all the lore of love and goodly woman-head,” that she must view her relation to Scudamour in terms of the abusive Masque of Cupid, and that she must confuse her marriage with “adulterous” or “courtly” love. It is Scudamour who forces her into this position by his own practice of an aggressive mastery in the Chaucerian sense. He does not understand the love which depends on mutual freedom of choice and on concord, as in The Franklin's Tale; what he does understand is the imperious force of the love-deity who is imaged, for instance, in The Knight's Tale, in the Masque itself, and on his shield.

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4

Problems of collecting oral literature range from the purely technical to the esthetic. A top collector must be an engineer capable of operating and often repairing complicated recording machines; he must be a scholar and an historian, bringing a broad knowledge of the culture he is collecting; he must be a public relations man; he must have a sturdy stomach, capable of digesting all manner of food, and a good head to withstand all manner of drink; he must be physically in top shape, capable of hiking up lonesome mountains, of rowing a boat, even of taking a turn at cutting wood, haying, or butchering; he must have a reassuring bedside manner, able to soothe those who think he is planning to put their songs and stories on radio or record and make millions for himself.

Mr. G. B. Johnston's note, “Camden, Shakespeare, and Young Henry Percy” (PMLA, lxxvi, June 1961, 298), while citing Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars as one warrant for Shakespeare's making the forty-year-old Hotspur a contemporary of Prince Henry, finds that Camden's Britannia was behind them both, and was the most likely source; and that the “revised” and translated version of Britannia in 1610 “seems to be recalling the popular play” in adding “an extra flourish on Henry Percy.” This system of priorities is doubtless valid in general; but the further implication—that Shakespeare and Camden were closely linked in the matter, taking their cues for the delineation of Hotspur directly from each other—does not seem as likely. An examination of Mr. Johnston's evidence indicates, rather, Daniel's continued function as middleman in the complex.

The close of the nineteenth century in Spain saw a sudden intellectual revival that has led some authorities to speak of a second Golden Age of Spanish literature. This modern Renaissance ushered in by the so-called “ Generation of 1898” projected its renovating influence well into the twentieth century with later writers who inherited the ideological, moral, and esthetic preoccupations of the initiators of the new currents. The unorthodoxy of the new approaches, however, by no means received an unqualified approval. In fact, perhaps the most characteristic reaction of the critic of this period has been, and indeed still is, to question not merely the value but the very validity of these unconventional creations: Is Ortega y Gasset's cultural ideology the expression of a genuine philosophy? Does Unamuno's intellectualized verse really merit the appellation of poetry? Can Miró's novels be said to progress beyond mere plastic description? This challenging of the authenticity of the literary product, stemming from what one critic calls “la mania clasificatoria,” has been directed most devastatingly against the novel, and perhaps against none more especially than that of José Martínez Ruiz, “Azorín.”

In “Au Sujet du ‘Cimetière marin’,” Valéry tells us that this poem originated from a decasyllabic rhythm, at first empty of content, which began running through his mind: “Une figure rythmique vide, ou remplie de syllabes vaines, qui me vint obséder quelque temps.” He speculated on what a modern poet might do with this rhythm, the type of stanza he might use, the composition he might create, and concluded that his poem would be a personal monologue: “Un monologue de ‘moi,’ dans lequel les thèmes les plus simples et les plus constants de ma vie affective et intellectuelle, tels qu'ils s'étaient imposés à mon adolescence et associés à la mer et à la lumière d'un certain lieu des bords de la Méditerranée, fussent appelés, tramés, opposés . . . ”

Since Valéry speaks of intellectual and affective themes of his adolescence, it is not surprising if we find similarities between “Le Cimetière marin,” written between 1917 and 1920, and a long poem of Valéry's youth, “Profusion du soir,” “abandoned” in 1899 and published for the first time in 1926 in Quelques vers anciens and in the augmented second edition of L'Album de vers anciens. The parallel, however, extends beyond the themes. The two poems have a similar structure, and frequently, at corresponding points in the structure, we find similar images, ideas, and even similar vocabulary. While “Profusion du soir” can hardly be considered an early version of “Le Cimetière marin,” a number of its aspects reappear in the later poem. This fact may well explain the note “poème abandonné” which follows the title of “Profusion du soir.” If Valéry left “Profusion du soir” in an abandoned state, it is possibly because he was no longer interested in working on the early poem after creating “Le Cimetière marin.”