Critics have found Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man more difficult to classify than any other of his books. Melville himself refers to the narrative as “our comedy,” and at one point signals his reader that he is passing “from the comedy of thought to that of action.” He creates an unusual thematic setting by reducing the dimensions of his characters and by curtailing the scale of their actions. The shallowness of the confidence man, unfitting him for the profound pathos or even tragedy of Moby Dick or Pierre, prepares him eminently for the role of the comic racketeer, the city slicker, horn-swoggling and bamboozling the country (and city) yokels. Certainly we do not cry, perhaps we don't even laugh, but surely we smile, if a little grimly, as the confidence man swindles victim after victim in the course of his adventures, relying frequently on the innate weaknesses in human nature—the desire to get something for nothing, the willingness to traffic in the misery of others. But the confidence man exploits generous and noble impulses, too, and this apparent mockery of traditional values gives the book a complexity and at times an ambiguity that cause many readers to abandon it, bewildered.

Commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have generally assumed that George Eliot started with a political novel in mind. What has never been sufficiently considered is that the genesis of Felix Holt was rather in the adulterous intrigue of Mrs. Transome with Lawyer Jermyn and the bitter consequences of this transgression to herself and their son Harold. The politics, and even the role of Felix himself, were probably afterthoughts.

Let us first of all confess that it is not as if we were writing under the persuasion that we have a novel view to proclaim. It is true that the view which we believe to be correct is often under attack today and is sometimes supposed to be outmoded by recent refinements. Its proponents too are often not sure enough of its actual character to defend it with accuracy. At the same time, a look into some of the most recent handbooks and critical essays reveals that there are some teachers and writers on our subject today who expound this view in a perfectly clear and accurate way. We have in mind, for instance, A Glossary of Literary Terms revised by Meyer Abrams for Rinehart in 1957 from the earlier work by Norton and Rushton, or the handbook by Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, published in 1956 by Harcourt, Brace. In the lengthy Kenyon Review symposium on English verse, Summer 1956, we admire the niceties of Mr. Arnold Stein's traditionally oriented discussion of Donne and Milton. There is also Mr. Stein's earlier PMLA article (lix [1944], 393–397) on “Donne's Prosody.” In the Kenyon symposium there is, furthermore, Mr. Ransom. It would be difficult to frame a more politely telling, persuasive, accurate retort than his to the more extravagant claims of the linguists.

The 1948 President of the Association rightly if wryly said: “Our members' interest in research does not extend to PMLA.” There are indexes to PMLA (one for 1884-1935 was published in 1936), but we strongly suspect that most scholars eventually discover references to learned articles of interest to them by reading bibliographies or critical lists or somebody's footnotes. The parts of PMLA that get forgotten, or are hard to find again, or remain unfortunately unknown to the hundreds of new persons who join the Association each year, are the scattered bits of useful information, the special reports, the surveys, the stimulating addresses (presidential or otherwise), the commissioned articles, the recommendations, the rules and regulations.

The extensive commentaries on Ibsen as a writer of tragedy are varied arid, as one might suspect, even contradictory. S. H. Butcher, for example, found Ibsen deficient as a tragic dramatist on nearly all counts. My primary purpose in this essay will be to present Ibsen's concept of tragedy through an analysis of Brand (1866), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Master Builder (1892), with passing attention to Emperor and Galilean (1873), while my secondary purpose will be to determine how successful he was as a writer of tragedy.

Certain Myths exerted an extraordinary hold on Zola's imagination, as one may see not only in La faute de l'abbé Mouret (1875) but also in at least two of his greatest works, Germinal (1885) and La débâcle (1892). These latter novels were written in a period overshadowed by the idea of decadence—the period described by Mario Praz in the last chapter of The Romantic Agony—when Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Schopenhauer's philosophy were the rage in France and such representative authors as d'Aurevilly, Verlaine, and Huysmans gave voice to a gloomy premonition that the Dies Irae of the West—decadent Latin civilization in particular—was at hand. Zola's La joie de vivre (1884), with its setting suggestive of legendary villes englouties, came out the same year as Elémir Bourges' novel Le crépuscule des dieux and the first volume of d'Aurevilly's La décadence latine; and the next year, the year Germinal was published, saw the foundation of the Revue Wagnérienne. It is not surprising that nearly all the myths appearing in Zola's novels at this time reflected this widespread mood of cosmic catastrophism. Yet even where he used the same mythological themes (for example, Sodom and Gomorrah) as some of the decadents and did so in the same historical frame, the sharp differences in their approaches to history clearly emerge. For where the decadents were almost exclusively obsessed with the theme of decline and fall and a sense of “delicious death agony” (to borrow a phrase from Praz), Zola, without being indifferent to this, was predominantly concerned with the theme of cultural regeneration. Significantly, nearly all the myths evoked in the novels we have mentioned are myths of catastrophe and death but also, at the same time, of redemption and rebirth.

Although Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as “rather a shameless potboiler,” subsequent criticism has treated the work with more respect. As Robert Heilman has pointed out, the tale has inspired a surprising amount of discussion and speculation. Indeed, Heilman feels that James must have “hit upon some fundamental truth of experience that no generation can ignore and that each generation wishes to restate in its own terms.”

The three sonnets that Rilke published in his Neue Gedichle (1907–08) under the collective title “Das Portal” were written between 8 and 11 July 1906, during the period of intense productivity following the break with Rodin (May 1906). Ever since it has become fashionable to ignore Rilke's Neue Gedichte as “intellektuell aufgezwungen,” these poems have been overlooked by many scholars and critics; even the most recent and staunchest champion of the Neue Gedichte, Hans Berendt, has failed to explore various aspects of these sonnets that would serve to relate them more closely to Rilke's earlier and later work. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. The three sonnets represent a perfect example of the “Dinggedicht” of this period, being apparently nothing more than the poetic depiction of a particular portal of a certain cathedral in France; such an objective attempt to grasp and express the essence of a foreign “thing” is, by common consent, necessarily alien to the singularly subjective flow of the poet's own thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, this new conception of poetry arose under the influence of the sculptor Rodin, whom Rilke was striving to emulate in his efforts always to capture the essential nature of the model and the “modelé” to the exclusion of subjective impressions. Since Rilke learned much about cathedrals under the tutelage of Rodin, his poems on architectural subjects are even more highly suspect of being “intellektuell aufgezwungen” than, say, poems dealing with gazelles or carrousels. Yet in many of the Neue Gedichte, as has been demonstrated, there is more to be found than sheer poetic virtuosity, and undeniable thematic connections with the entire body of Rilke's poetic creation have been uncovered. A closer examination of the “Portal” sonnets reveals that even here certain characteristic themes may be found.

Although most critics agree that Howards End (1910) is a less perfect novel than A Passage to India (1924), it is, in its own right, spontaneous and vigorous and more confidently authoritative. Even adverse criticism of Howards End has tended to recognize it as “the most ambitious as well as the most explicit of the novels.” Possibly because Forster had not brooded excessively over his materials and because the Great War had not yet accentuated his latent pessimism, Howards End has the force deriving from a poised and fundamentally positive view of life.

If Howards End lacks the fully mature artistry of A Passage to India, it is largely free from the negative effects upon Forster's art of his later skepticism—a disturbing austerity verging upon spiritual fatigue, and an almost excessive distancing of the writer from his characters verging upon indifference to them. In Howards End the Schlegel sisters are involved in emotionally more central situations than are Fielding, Aziz, and Adela Quested, and they are themselves warmer, more impulsive, and more genial. In some ways their perplexities and valuations of experience—reflecting their life in the now spiritually removed period of prosperous Edwardian England—are indeed remote. Yet Helen and Margaret Schlegel, through their sensitivity, conscientiousness, and moral complexity, achieve at times a depth and spaciousness transcending the somewhat limited universe prescribed for their activity and warrant a continued concern with the novel. Forster has also conceived their friends, acquaintances, relatives, and antagonists, for the most part, with vigor, with understanding, and with sympathy.

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.

Many people would be mildly surprised to hear that it is possible to discuss a Swinburnian “love affair.” Some, perhaps, would be astonished to learn that Swinburne had a love affair; others, possibly, to hear that he had only one. Still others, no doubt, gripped by recollections of hot bloodbeats pulsating in persistent anapests, would be startled to learn that such a love affair, if there was one, could be discussed in print. But rumor, even of the printable sort, has not been idle. The story of his affair with Adah Menken, the comely and bosomy vaudevillian who provided Dumas père (aged sixty-four) with an Indian summer and (she hoped) Swinburne himself, aged twenty-nine, with a Pierian spring, has always appealed to raconteurs, and, in all conscience, it is a good anecdote. For years it was bruited about that Swinburne was in love with Mathilde Blind, a bluestocking poetess, and this fantasy had scarcely been dealt with before another ghost appeared—the absurd and irresponsible claim that Swinburne was in love and planned to elope with Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, the wife of his dearest friend. Each of the stories, along with many others, has come, and, after its brief day, gone again, and no great harm has been done. To Mathilde Blind, Swinburne was a friend, an alert and cautious friend, and nothing more. Mrs. Rossetti he adored in life and revered in memory, but not one syllable of evidence supports the assertion, or even the suspicion, that his sentiment had anything in common with romantic love. Swinburne himself pronounced the final word about his relations with the tawdry “Dolores” Menken, and nothing can or need be added or subtracted: she was, he wrote (just after her death) in a private letter to a close friend, “most lovable as a friend as well as a mistress.” But this is not the language of passion. To each of these three women Swinburne was attracted in some way, but by no sophistication of vocabulary could any one of the three attachments be termed a “love affair.”

In march of 1890, after a preparatory experience with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, W. B. Yeats joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans, who at about this time became interested in the activities of the French counterpart of the Golden Dawn, “Le Grand Ordre Kabbalistique du Rose Croix,” Yeats's interests were largely aroused by the willingness of the members of the group to experiment with magical practices. Where Yeats, however, committed himself by oaths and rituals to a cult which pretended to be the guardian of ancient insights into the super-sensory life, Huysmans stood apart, first skeptical, then fascinated, and finally outraged. The eccentric MacGregor Mathers headed the London Rosicrucians, and he and his French wife, the sister of Henri Bergson, were acquainted with all the principal figures involved with the slightly older French order. The latter had been founded in 1888 by Sâr Joséphin Péladan and the self-styled nobleman Stanislas de Guaita. The French group existed on the shady fringe of clerical politics in the hostile rationalism of the early Third Republic, and it was in search of documentary material for a novel about this fantastic circle of clerical Royalists that Huysmans was first drawn to them. Like Saul who only sought lost asses, this quest led him, as he came to believe, to God's grace.

Before he became a Catholic Huysmans was, in effect, something of a Manichean. As Yeats did, he sought experimental evidence to confirm the existence of opposing forces of good and evil, and when he had this evidence he rejected forcefully the Devil through whom he had found God. Yeats was more equivocal. The inversion of values in Huysmans' A rebours, and of ritual in his Là-bas never confounded or reconciled the opposition of good and evil and of false and true worship, as Yeats tried to do in his Rosicrucian stories of 1896. But then Huysmans was never so deeply involved as Yeats in constructing out of the farrago of late nineteenth-century occult beliefs a systematic basis for his life. The Rosicrucian Golden Dawn did provide the beginnings for such a systematic basis, and in his three stories of 1896, “The Tables of the Law,” “Rosa Alchemica,” and “The Adoration of the Magi,” Yeats draws on the beliefs and rituals of his cult. It seems to me that there are elements in the first two of these Rosicrucian stories which have curious affinities to the writings of Huysmans, and these become significant in the context of other relations between the two writers.

Here, in a single alphabetical list for your convenience, are addresses useful to MLA members in their divers scholarly and professional activities. Book publishers: a selected list is offered; all those university presses known to be interested in books on modern literatures written by extramural scholars are included; write to the manager or director, giving full details, before submitting scholarly MSS for consideration. Learned journals and literary quarterlies: editorial (not business) addresses and the names of editors are given; asterisks indicate journals that review; an abbreviation in brackets is the one approved for use in scholarly documentation. Learned and professional societies: all ACLS affiliates and a great many others are listed. Department chairmen: see page 134. Fellowships and grants: see page 158.

There are a number of passages in Hawthorne's “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings. The passages are, in fact, so numerous as to indicate that one of Hawthorne's principal reasons for writing the tale when he did was to criticize through personal satire Poe's outlook on literature and life. In this connection it may be rewarding to take another look at this most repulsive of Hawthorne's tales.

Sherwood Anderson's autobiographical works attest his continuing absorption with the incidents and the form of his short story “Death in the Woods.” In his Memoirs he says that he tried to write the story “a dozen times over as many years.” It appears in a tentative early version in Tar. Many of its episodes are used in a seldom-read fragment entitled “Father Abraham,” which supposedly developed the life of Lincoln; indeed, the story's materials occupy a dominant position in that strange, often autobiographical work. Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 310–312), he relates the incident of the dogs' death ritual as having happened to himself. We may doubt the literal truth of that account, since Anderson himself repeatedly questions whether the event was fact or dream; in any case, however, the story was filled, for Anderson, with great personal and artistic significance.