It has been generally recognized in critical works which treat Die Elixiere des Teufels that the central event in the story is the revelation of the facts contained in the cryptic document written by Francesko, “der alte Maler.”In this episode, all but a few of the innumerable mysteries which have existed previously in the story are dispelled by this highly concentrated history of Medardus' ancestry. Thus a focal point appears here on which much of the whole novel converges. Hoffmann himself (p. 274) uses this image to describe the role that the manuscript plays in the novel.

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

Jean Giraudoux, if we are to believe certain of his friends, liked to claim he had never read Les fleurs du mal. Was this because of his scorn for a poet who had a conception of literary art too clearly opposed to that which Giraudoux proclaimed in his Prière sur la Tour Eiffel? The very fact that he expressed so strong a revulsion suggests rather that he had contemplated a sufficient number of the fleurs maladives to realize that Baudelaire's immodest genius offered only too many parallels to what his own was in danger of becoming. However unwonted such a comparison may at first appear, Giraudoux's early struggles with his conscience indicate a preoccupation with introspection strikingly similar to that of Baudelaire. Indeed we find in any careful examination of Baudelaire's works and character a young man who is hypersensitive about his uniqueness, a young man who so delights in finding himself different from other people that he does everything possible to further develop his narcissistic tendencies.

When An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland was written in 1650, its readers were puzzled by the praise given to King Charles I. And readers ever since have been puzzled by Marvell's ability to deal with the burning issues of the Civil War without making his political position clear. The best-known explanation is that offered by H. M. Margoliouth:

The clarification of Goethe's concept of mathematics is important not only for an exact delineation of the extent and limits of his thought, but also in defining the relation between the humanities and the sciences. Again and again his spirit is invoked by humanists and scientists alike to define their relative positions. When the peculiar characteristics of the humanities and the sciences are brought into sharp focus, mathematics is usually the separating ingredient, and frequent reference is made to Goethe's supposedly negative attitude toward this science with a resulting unjust classification of his science as unscientific. Such arguments usually terminate upon application of two ancient remedies for deadlocked thought, the sets of supposedly logical alternatives-quality versus quantity, intuition (Anschauung) versus logic. Based on these criteria, Goethe's thought is securely if unilaterally embedded in the realms of quality and intuition, but at all costs immunized against the sinister demons of quantity and logic, which to some humanists are irritating symbols of aridity and vacuity, or even eternal foes of poetry, art, and life.

An attempt to explain the almost complete n neglect of Portuguese symbolism by Spanish literary circles for twelve years after its establishment leads one to an interesting negative situation in Hispanic literature at the turn of the century. The founder of symbolism in Portugal, Eugenio de Castro, who wrote his most original poetry and achieved his greatest acclaim from 1890 to 1900, was known in Latin America in 1896 and proclaimed there as a spiritual brother of the modernista poets. The same date marked the tentative beginning of Modernismo in Spain, and yet it was not until 1902, and even then under the guidance of Latin-American writers, that Spanish authors became aware of the movement of poetic renovation which had been at their doorstep unattended for more than a decade. The time when Castro's work was introduced, the means of presentation, and the results it obtained are all commentaries on the delayed and curious arrival of Modernismo in Spain.