Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”

Magere Ergebnisse fördert zutage, wer die echten Schelme in der deutschen Dichtung aufspüren will and dazu die üblichen bibliographischen Handbücher, die zusammenfassenden Darstellungen motiv- und stoffgeschichtlicher Art und die nach Gattungen geordneten Sachbücher befragt. Josef Körner nennt in seinem Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums nur eine geringe Anzahl von wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen unter dem Stichwort “Schelmenroman”, wovon die meisten sich auch noch auf das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und die Lazarillo- und Don Quichote-Nachahmungen beschränken. In seiner durch ungeheuren Fleiß ausgezeichneten Anhäufung von Material, The Literature of Roguery (1907), teilt Frank W. Chandler der deutschen Schelmenliteratur nur neun Seiten zu, wobei sie sich diesen Platz auch noch mit der Diskussion des Genres in Holland teilen muß. Außer kurzen Hinweisen auf die deutsche Schwankliteratur, Meier Helmbrecht, Wittenweilers Der Ring, das Liber Vagatorum, Sebastian Brants Das Narrenschijf und auf einige Barocksatiren werden nur Grimmelshausens Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und seine späteren Simplicianische Schriften einer knappen Besprechung für würdig erachtet. Chandler schließt mit der Erwähnung mehrerer Robinsonaden und dem bezeichnenden Satz: “as elsewhere in letters, the ideal and the sentimental replaced picaresque realism. And so for a time the spirit of Rousseau and Richardson ruled.” Gero von Wilperts Sachwörterbuch der Literatur zählt einige der deutschen Übersetzungen und Nachdichtungen der Gattung im Barockzeitalter auf und nennt au der neueren deutschen Literatur Wincklers Der tolle Bomberg, Thelens Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts und Thomas Manns Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Das klassische Werkzeug aller Germanisten, der Merker-Stammler, räumt dem Schelmenroman auch nur verhältnismäßig wenig Platz ein. Es wird hingewiesen auf den Bayern Ägidius Albertinus, den “Vater des deutschen Schelmenromans” und seine Bearbeitung des “Gusman von Alfarache” und auf einige obskure Verfasser und Bearbeiter. Man beeilt sich jedoch hinzuzufügen: “Von einem deutschen Schelmenroman kann …kaum gesprochen werden.” Und weiter unten heißt es: “Sowohl die Schelmenromane wie die Romane Grimmelshausens haben … wenig Nachahmung gefunden.”

Recent Books and articles on John Gower have laid stress on his role as a moralist and as keeper of the king's conscience during a particularly brilliant and bloody era. He has been presented to us as a fearless critic of the corruption of his time and as the exponent of a moral philosophy which remains consistent throughout his three major works, the Mirour de l'Omme, the Vox Clamantis, and the Confessio Amantis. Gower himself would not have quarrelled with this image; indeed it is one that he tried to cultivate, as we see from some Latin verses which prefix the Vox Clamantis in certain manuscripts:

Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto;
At ubi iustus erit, nulla sagitta ferit.
Sed male viventes hos vulnero transgredientes;
Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi.

It has long been known that Chaucer translated portions of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis for use in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, but his artistic reasons for doing so have never been determined. If the translated passages from the De Miseria were short and all in one place, there might be no compelling reason to search for an artistic purpose: Chaucer may simply have wanted to insert a passage from a work that he was translating at the time out of his love for authorities—a love shared by almost all medieval writers. But the facts are that Chaucer made more extensive use of the De Miseria in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale (nearly fifty lines) than anywhere else in his works, that the translated passages are from five different chapters and two different books in the De Miseria, and that they are scattered in five places throughout the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. It is therefore highly likely that Chaucer added the passages from the De Miseria for particular artistic reasons, and it is the purpose of this paper to determine what those reasons were.

A modern reader of the Poema del Cid cannot fail to be struck by the general oddity of its verbal system, especially in the tenses of the past, where one finds perfects, preterites, imperfects, pluperfects seemingly interchanged in no meaningful pattern; consequently he leaves the work with an impression of confused tense relationships, an indication (he is convinced) of the lack of skill of the poet (or poets) and the impossible primitiveness of the language. There have been recent stylistic attempts to interpret the uses of the tenses, in particular those of the past, as functions of aspect rather than of time, or as poetic devices in the delineation of heroic character, or as specifically epic techniques of narration. Simpler explanations given earlier, which saw in the unusual frequency of the imperfect, for instance, nothing more than the need to meet the rhyme, have found little favor and have been supported only by intuitive arguments. But those who have rejected the earlier views have not provided conclusive proof of their assertions. In fact, despite the great scholarly interest in the language, metrics, and style of the Cid, there seems to be no study of the possible relationship between rhyme and verbal structure. As a contribution to the study of the Spanish epic as well as to the larger field of historical style and syntax, the present paper seeks to clarify the issues and to provide an objective basis for a conclusive determination of the problem.

Athough The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet in theatrical popularity, it ranks low in critical esteem. A play that is difficult to classify, it is variously labeled tragi-comedy or romantic comedy; but neither label embraces nor harmonizes the seemingly disparate plots. Further, the plots are often condemned as preposterous and unrelated to life; and a fairly common view is that the play is a fairy tale: “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk.” Critics adopting such a position find the chief merit of the play in its “flesh-and-blood characters” who triumph over the shortcomings of the story, with emphasis on Shylock, who is sometimes regarded as the protagonist. The approach to Shylock has been diverse, ranging from Stoll's notion of him as a comic butt in terms of Elizabethan conventions to the view that he is a tragic figure. Readers have shown a preoccupation with Shylock the Jew as scapegoat, stereotype, victim, or Elizabethan usurer; usually this interest has taken a realistic turn, with concern over questions of anti-Semitism and the legality of the trial.

In many respects Juan de Zabaleta seems close to the costumbrismo of the nineteenth century: the lack of narrative elements, the detailed description, the use of conversation in the presentation of types and as part of scenes rather than for narrative purposes, the urbanity of his style, the directness of his vision. The mental atmosphere of Zabaleta, on the other hand, is completely different: the curious time-lessness of his description, contrasted with the notion of transition; his choice of subjects for their moral value, contrasted with the search for the typical and picturesque; the sense of belonging to an ordered universe where laws may be broken but never repealed, contrasted with the irony of the later period where sometimes virtue is its own punishment. The list could be endless, for we are as much contrasting different ages as individual writers.

Although the Oxford-educated Thomas Traherne is indeed “thoroughly representative” of the “salient ideas” of the Cambridge Platonists, and without a doubt should be classed with them philosophically, he is most akin emotionally to that maverick among the Cambridge men, Peter Sterry. Yet ideological differences separate him from Sterry, and even the emotional intensity which seems to link them takes radically variant forms. The case is the same with Henry More, whose work we know Traherne read, and whose spiritual autobiography resembles Traherne's: their responses to the new ideas of space were remarkably alike in feeling, yet Traherne took issue vigorously with More's theories of space and deity, and in general lacked More's intellectual extravagance in other theological matters. We may, then, speak best of affinities with, rather than debts to, the Cambridge Platonists: the portrait of Traherne's mind shows an eclectic intellect and—more important in shaping Traherne's persistent individuality—original, highly personal feelings.

Un Critique a récemment mis en relief ce qu'il y avait chez Saint-Simon du comportement d'un voyeur, qui observe clandestinement les hommes afin de démasquer leurs mobiles les plus secrets. Il nous semble que la remarque est également valable pour La Bruyère qui, de sa loge privilégiée chez les Condés, considère les hommes subrepticement (on ne savait pas que ce modeste précepteur préparait un ouvrage sur les mœurs du siècle). Prenant sa revanche des mortifications qu'il a subies dans un monde où il demeure un étranger, La Bruyère savoure le spectacle pitoyable et risible de ces hommes qui défilent devant lui. Notons par ailleurs que ces misanthropes ne s'en tiennent pas à une contemplation passive des vices de leurs prochains: se décidant à sortir de sa solitude et de son silence, le voyeur peut se transformer en historien ou en moraliste. Sans pour autant songer à revenir à la méthode critique de Sainte-Beuve ou de Taine, il nous paraît essentiel de souligner dès l'abord l'influence qu'a dÛ avoir sur La Bruyère cette optique particulière sous laquelle le monde de Versailles et de Chantilly se présenta à, lui (et cela, dès sa jeunesse, c'est-à-dire bien avant qu'il eût la possibilité de l'observer de près).

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:
Let it cry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Henry V in.i.3-14

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the sympathetic imagination. There can be no question of the importance of sympathy in Hazlitt's understanding of the imagination; it is a central idea with moral, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ramifications in Hazlitt's thought. But it does not by any means sum up Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination as an aesthetic or creative faculty; and since sympathy alone is clearly incapable of creating a work of art, emphasis on that quality obscures Hazlitt's more nearly complete understanding of artistic creation and appreciation. Furthermore, his application of sympathetic doctrine is rather more limited than is generally understood. I propose here to suggest some of these limits and to investigate the major supplements to sympathy in Hazlitt's criticism—associational aesthetics and the formative imagination.

Sainte-Beuve au travail. On se l'imagine assis, soit à, son bureau chargé de livres, soit dans une bibliothèque, se documentant avec soin. Gros travailleur, il n'a que sa plume pour gagnepain. Meurtri dans sa vie sentimentale, il se cloître dans l‘étude, il se fait l'esclave de son labeur. Son existence n'a rien en commun avec celle de ses collègues comme Jules Janin ou Loève-Veimars qui, mondains, boulevardiers, familiers des coulisses, tiennent la rubrique théâtrale d'un journal. Sainte-Beuve n'a pas leur verve fantaisiste ni leur talent pour prendre le pouls au public. Quoique n'exerçant la profession de critique qu'à contre-cceur, il prend son métier en particulier et les lettres en général trop au sérieux pour bâcler chaque soir un nombre requis de lignes sur le premier vaudeville venu.

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.

Este estudio pretende ser un examen minucioso de los numerosos afijos de que se sirve el pueblo mexicano para ponderar, apreciar, calificar, y en cierta medida poner su sello personal a una buena parte de lo que dice. Estos afijos, especialmente los llamados diminutivos y aumentativos, le brindan al mexicano—así como a toda persona de habla española—un medio de exteriorizarse, un vaso sumiso en donde descargar su subjetivismo. En la formación y aplicación de los “apreciativos” es donde el idioma cede más, y más libertad le concede al que lo habla.