A Passage to India, apparently the last, and certainly the best of E. M. Forster's novels, was published twenty-nine years ago, in, 1924. It was accorded instant recognition, as a fine novel and as a perceptive and sympathetic treatment of the problem of “Anglo-India,” The years that followed saw the book established as a modern classic. It has reached a wide audience in the Everyman, Modern Library, and Penguin editions, and has challenged as well the attention of able critics. But, though the novel has received its just dues in many ways, there remains one aspect—and, I think, a fundamental one—still unexplored. It is acknowledged on all sides that thought is the most important element in Forster's novels; yet the dialectical pattern of A Passage to India has never, to my knowledge, been fully and specifically recognised. This omission has resulted not only in a certain incompleteness in critical accounts of the book, but in not a little confusion and obscurity as well.

A great deal of attention has been given to the surge of critical interest in metaphysical poetry that followed the publication of Herbert Grierson's edition of John Donne's poems in 1912. Theodore Spencer and Mark Van Doren, for instance, have examined the revival of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets from 1912 to 1938. The achievement of these and of other recent critics has tended to obscure the earlier phase of the metaphysical revival. It has been assumed frequently that the revival began with Grierson's edition and that current theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were first presented in some essays by T. S. Eliot that appeared in the early 1920's. In reality, however, Grierson's edition and the reviews that acclaimed it marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival. His edition was no doubt in part the cause of the enthusiasm about Donne that reached a scholarly climax in 1931 with the observance of the tercentenary of the poet's death. It was also the result of the increased interest in Donne's poetry and personality that began during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Eliot's essays were not so much a new note as a sensitive formulation of ideas that had become familiar by 1912.

In Henry James's story, An International Episode, two English-men visit America. One of the visitors is Lord Lambeth, son of the Duke of Bayswater and brother of the Countess of Pimlico. In New York City and in Newport, the Englishmen are hospitably entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Westgate, not because the Americans are in any way obligated to the visitors but solely because of their open-hearted habits of hospitality and friendliness. After the Englishmen have returned to Great Britain, Mrs. Westgate and a Boston friend, Miss Bessie Alden, go to London; but on their arrival there, they find Lord Lambeth's family very slow in returning the courtesies he had been shown in America. Henry James remarks that “Bessie Alden . . . saw something of . . . English society . . . and . . . especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated . . . authors and artists,”' but of the Duchess of Bayswater and the Countess of Pimlico she and Mrs. Westgate saw very little. At first they saw them not at all. And after the haughty English ladies had at last made a reluctant call on the visitors from America, Mrs. Westgate remarked: “They meant to overawe us. . . . They meant to snub us.” Bessie Alden observed that “their manners were not fine.” And Mrs. Westgate replied: “They were not even good!” Shortly after being snubbed in London, the Americans departed for the continent, leaving the reader with the impression that they were far greater ladies than the titled representatives of British ladyhood who had tried to overawe them in London.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the mind of a large number of Spanish American intellectuals during the nineteenth century Spain symbolized the origin of many of the cultural, social, and political ills which afflicted the Iberian New World. And this in spite of the admitted influence of the advocates of Spain and the defenders of her official policies, neither of whom have ever been lacking in Spanish America. From the earliest stages of the Conquest the criollo (Spanish American Creole) and mestizo were treated as the inferiors of the native-born Span-iards, or peninsulares, and felt themselves to be different from the Iberian conquistador. In the course of time this feeling of social separatism deepened. In addition to the Indian and Creole uprisings against the peninsulares, which persisted sporadically throughout the Colonial period and frequently were motivated more by political convenience than by ideological differences, another type of rebellion developed during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries. And it was the latter—promoted in its intellectual aspects by such figures as Rodríguez, Miranda, Nariño, and Bello—in which were established the ideological bases of the liberation carried out by San Martín, Bolívar, and the Mexican patriots.

Looking Backward, America's classic contribution to theutopian novel, has a religious genesis which has never been fully explored. Although Edward Bellamy has received widespread critical attention, his thought has not been adequately related to the religious temper of his time and region. Reared in traditional Calvinist concepts with emphasis on prayer, soul-searching, and individual respectability, Bellamy propounded new, daring concepts of the divine to meet the challenges posed by the industrialization of New England. In his religious doubts and strivings, he drew from, and contributed heavily to, three inter-related movements that reshaped religious thought in late nineteenth-century America—the New Theology, the Religion of Humanity, and the Social Gospel. This paper presents religion as a major genetic factor in Edward Bellamy's social thought and in modern American intellectual.

In an Epilogue to the Queen, with which Tennyson closed his Library Edition of 1873, the Laureate noted, among many threats to the “mightiest of all people under heaven,” the danger to art from “poisonous honey stol'n from France,” Readers from queen to commoner could nod their heads in pious agreement, for they shared Tennyson's Gallophobia. Deeply distressed that Swinburne should have contributed a sonnet in praise of Mademoiselle de Maupin to Le Tombeau de Gautier (1873), he could only regard those who sipped such honey as un-British to the core. Tennyson was not thinking of his contemporaries, Thackeray and Arnold, who, though they may not have seen France whole, at least had left it steadily. Rather, he reserved his strictures for those later Victorians who seemed willing, even eager, to embrace French culture, though the fruit of that embrace might be lubricity and aestheticism.

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.

Thomas de Quincey is one of the few prose stylists whose work is inevitably tagged with that vague suggestion of mélange des genres, “prose poetry.” Such a label, prompted by the rich “poetic” quality of his diction as well as the beautiful orbicularity of hit rhythmical periods, is enough to encourage the question, “What was the position of such a wielder of words on the controversy of his contemporaries over the language of poetry and the language of prose?” The answer takes on more interest when we recall his close association with the giants of that argument. “Like one of our own Family,” he tramped the dales of Grasmere with Wordsworth, who roundly asserted, “There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” He was, however, also a disciple and sacrificial benefactor of Coleridge, who called vital parts of Wordsworth's theory “useless, if not injurious,” and declared that “in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be, an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition.” Some of this disagreement may have been more apparent than real, and it is likely that if confusions of meaning had been cleared up, the two poets would have found themselves close together in their basic concept of poetry. Probably by “language” Wordsworth intended only “diction,” whereas Coleridge used the word more in the sense of “style.” Wordsworth's context, however, admits the broader interpretation and Coleridge's includes the narrower, so that on this issue there appears clear-cut disagreement. De Quincey thought that an “unfathomable chasm of chaotic schism opened between them.” Where, then, between these “mighty opposites” did De Quincey himself stand on poetic diction?

Newell Ford has recently sent several bombshells into the ranks of Keatsians by utterly rejecting allegorical interpretation of Endymion. His accomplice, out of the past, is Amy Lowell, but all of the real ammunition belongs to Ford. With admirable persistence and patience he has brought heavy critical guns to bear on the allegorical fortress and has finally demolished it, as he believes, in the name of truth. The time has come, surely, to make a stand against this total destruction and reconsider the question, “Is Endymion an allegory?”

Of all the “winged words” of Goethe's Faust those of its closing lines,

have probably flown farthest, and they have always been impressive and memorable. On the other hand, one cannot help feeling that the standard interpretation of them does not do justice to their lofty position in the ultimate summary statement of the drama. The commentaries almost invariably relate these lines to the last scene only, that of Faust's salvation and elevation, rather than to the drama as a whole.

Writing of the Dunciad in the year 1745, a rather obscure biographer and critic of Alexander Pope said: “As the Scenery of this Poem changes, and new Characters appear, the ingenious Author has follow'd the dramatick Rule, of shewing the Humour of each Character the stronger, by shewing a contrast Character to it.” Then, speaking more particularly of Dunciad Four, the same writer continues: “The last Scene of the Poem (to keep to my dramatick Parallel) which is to produce the Catastrophe, ends with great Propriety. The Stage is full of all the Goddess's [i.e., the Goddess of Dulness] Votaries, whom she receives with Pleasure. . . .”

It is dangerous writing on marble, where one cannot make errata, or mend in a second edition,“ Jonathan Swift once remarked about an epitaph to be placed in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Latin phrases he framed for his own epitaph, to be set up in that cathedral in Dublin, have been variously considered ”scarce intelligible,“ ”terrible,“ the ”best clue to Swift,“ and ”the greatest epitaph in history.“ They have more than once been offered as proof that he was not deeply a Christian but that he ”hated the chains of oppression more than the shackles of sin.“ Because of W. B. Yeats's version of it in the form of English verse, Swift's epitaph now has a double identity: as an unusually controversial eighteenth-century biographical document, and as a familiar twentieth-century work of literature.

Rudolf Borchardt once referred to Quirinus Kuhlmann as the greatest and most dangerous poet in German literature. Whether we agree with such a sweeping judgment or not, we can at least safely describe him as one of the most completely neglected of all important German poets. This neglect is partly the result of the rarity of most of his works and partly the result of the persistence of the eighteenth-century lack of sympathy for the problems of religious mysticism and illumination. The source for almost all of the studies of Kuhlmann has been the essay by J. C. F. Adelung in his Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheil. The title reveals clearly the partisan nature of his work. In this study, one of a series on Kuhlmann, we shall attempt to cast light on bis early years and on the gradual progress of his religious thought until he becomes converted to the belief in the imminent coming of the millennium.

The old question: Why did Milton's Adam and Eve disobey the Divine Commandment? continues to provoke conflicting answers and consequently diverse accounts of the meaning of Paradiae Lost. That Milton's epic is, like King Laar, or Faust, or Moby Dick, a work able to sustain many seemingly-contrary interpretations—that in fact it contains them all to some degree—is clear to anyone who will reread the poem at intervals, following the lead first of one and then another critical guide. But this richness of implication has obscured the real logical handicap assumed by anyone who attempts to find the ultimate origins of the narrative action in what is familiar to us as occasion or motivation—in a word, in cause.

A spirit of self-mockery and light, ironical humor is best suited to satire on literary forms and fashions. One feels that Peele's OldWives Tale would have been immeasurably improved as parody had there been a motley fool lurking in the shadow of a great oak, waiting to guide us through the enchanted forest. One of the virtues of Shakespeare's As You Like It is that it has just such a wise fool. Jaques, in commending Touchstone to the Duke, gloats over his discovery, “He's as good at anything, and yet a fool” (v.iv.109). This is as far as Jaques may go in magnanimity. Earlier in the play, Rosalind hails the jester as “Nature's natural the cutter-off of Nature's wit” (I.ii.52). And Celia welcomes him with even less grace, for, says she, “always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits” (I.ii.58). Except for the Duke, whose penetrating comments on the witty fool are well known, the noble characters in the play seem to regard Touchstone as a natural or dull fool who sometimes serves to sharpen the wits of his betters.

Among the best liked and most widely known sections of The Canterbury Tales is the Nun's Priest's story of the regal Chanticleer and the lovely Dame Pertelote. For a long time critics have realized that this tale skilfully reflects facets of its teller's character, but only recently have detailed attempts been made to suggest just what sort of person Chaucer intended his audience to visualize as the Nun's Priest. Since Chaucer did not include in the General Prologue a portrait of this Pilgrim, whatever view one takes of the Nun's Priest must be based on the comments to and about him by the Host (VII.2810-15, 3447-60), on his own short comment to the Host (VII.2816-17), on the Narrator's brief remark about him (VI.2818-20), and on the superb tale which he relates to the company. This is to say that any acceptable portrait of Chaucer's Nun's Priest must of necessity derive primarily from the personal interplay during the Canterbury pilgrimage.

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.