The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”:Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him sayIf ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Any study of Hawthorne's villains seems to demand first of all an examination of the word “villain” lest the category become as unwieldy as that group in Hawthorne's “The Procession of Life” who ranked themselves in “the brotherhood of crime.” When a term becomes all-inclusive, it is no longer useful, and since almost all of Hawthorne's tales and romances show a concern for sin and evil, there is a temptation to call all of his sinners, as well as all of those whose lives or actions bring some harm to others, villains. But this is a distortion since the word is defined simply as a person of depraved and malevolent character devoted to base or evil acts, one who deliberately plots and does serious harm to others.

A father who is deserted by his wife and who sets out to rear his son according to a “scientific System” unconsciously founded on his distrust of women and his own wounded pride should be an ideal subject for comedy. The system, running, as it must, counter to common sense and human nature, is bound to fail. And its collapse, with the consequent exposure of the father's false pride and the reassertion of the collective wisdom of society, would provide the comic deflation and denouement. The laughter provoked by the discomfort of the father, underscored by a reaffirmation of the adequacy of common sense, would produce an appropriate comic catharsis. This same situation, of course, has its serious possibilities. The father may ruin his son's life. But not in comedy. Comedy says that the probabilities are that the son, common sense, and nature will overcome the false system of the father. And the comic artist, knowing well that the whole truth will spoil his comedy, is careful not to tell the whole truth—only the comic (probable) side of it. The dark spirit of tragedy always hovers just outside the bright circle drawn by comedy, but it must not be allowed to cross the line. In comedy, as in all art, what is ruled out is as important as what is included.

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.

It is now generally agreed that in Dombey and Son, “the first masterpiece of Dickens' maturity,” Dickens solved the structural problems of the serial novel. There was, he discovered, “no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot’ as he had once felt that he must eschew.” Dickens' “artfully interwoven” plot structure, similarly, is now recognized to be founded on a highly ramified system of analogies, contrasts, and variations in action and character of what is essentially a single, simple thematic idea, supported and colored by a complex body of inter-related symbols.

Swinburne's devotion to the popular ballad is well-known, and his continued experiments with ballad imitation—from “May Janet” to “The Brothers”—attest to the longevity of this passion. But one of the earliest manifestations of his devotion—an unfinished edition of popular ballads—has received less careful attention than it deserves. Furthermore, what little has been written about this anthology has been tainted with errors—errors for which the ultimate responsibility lies on the head of Thomas James Wise. Wise owned the manuscript of Swinburne's ballad edition, described it in his catalogues, and allowed its contents to be printed. Since even the most innocent of the great forger's published statements about the books and manuscripts in his possession cannot be taken on trust, it will be prudent to reexamine what he has said—and what others have repeated—about Swinburne's edition of the ballads.

The poems which Juan Francisco Andres de Uztarroz wrote during the last two years of his life have long been considered lost. Don Ricardo del Arco, in reconstructing the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century Aragon which centered around this famous historiographer, archaeologist, bibliographer, and poet, states that the autograph manuscript containing these poems was seen by the eighteenth century bibliographer, Felix de Latassa, but that it disappeared sometime later and its contents have remained unknown: “Desconocemos gran parte de sus poesfas, sobre todo las breves que vio Latassa en manuscrito.”

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

In 1828, about twenty-two years before the appearance of his second novel and chef-d'oeuvre, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne paid $100.00 to arrange the anonymous publication of Fanshawe, his first novel. Almost immediately upon its public appearance, however, he tried to acquire all available copies in order to destroy them, and enjoined family and friends to silence about his authorship. His suppression of the novel was so successful that when a rare copy turned up twelve years after his death, his wife Sophia at first denied that he was the author. Nowadays a minor bibliographical treasure, Fanshawe can also be valuable to scholars as a primer of Hawthorne's style, because despite its defects—imitativeness, disjointedness, occasional silliness—it provides an opportunity for observing basic characteristics of his writing as they appear at the beginning of his career, secretive and abortive as it was. Even in The Marble Faun, his last completed novel, the manner, characters, and themes of Fanshawe can be clearly discerned. As Stanley Williams has put it: “The characters are thin and two-dimensioned, the dialogue pretentious; but a contemporary was right in declaring that in Fanshawe we may detect the weak and timid presence of all of Hawthorne's peculiar powers.”

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.

The Conventional image of Arnold Bennett as a novelist-at-work has three or four sources: general notions about realistic novelists, inferences from Bennett's completed novels, glimpses of Bennett at his task, and fragmentary remarks by Bennett himself. The image of Zola, notebook in hand, going down into the mines to gather material for Germinal is the image of Bennett interviewing an elderly couple to gather material on the Siege of Paris for The Old Wives' Tale. The ninety volumes of Zola's notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale are matched by dozens of notebooks that Bennett kept. J. B. Atkins asserts that Bennett “would divide his scheme [for a novel] into parts which he numbered and divide each part into sections. He knew in advance what he would put into each part and each section.” And George Doran recollects, in Chronicles of Barabbas, that on one of many silent walks in the forest at Fontainebleau he interrupted Bennett's thoughts to say, “I suppose in these silences you are actually phrasing your thousand words for tomorrow,” and got “yes” for an answer. Some of Bennett's voluntary remarks about his writing support the image. In his Preface to The Old Wives' Tale he comments upon the tedious but necessary research that he undertook for the novel. In an article in the Evening Standard he writes about “moving … an entire bookseller's shop with all its books and dust from a South Coast port to … [Clerkenwell]” to use in Riceyman Steps. And in his Journal, 1929, he says about Imperial Palace, then being written: “I have the whole of the material for the novel; and it is indexed, in a notebook. I would sooner lose fifty pages of the manuscript than that notebook.”

The fiction of Theodore Dreiser has often been praised for its fidelity to the facts of ordinary experience, its massive accumulation and arrangement of incidents, and its criticism of bourgeois America. It has seldom been praised as skillful writing, however; and with almost the sole exception of F. O. Matthiessen, critics have dismissed Dreiser as a poor manipulator of the language, whose effects are achieved in spite of his style. It is usually suggested, furthermore, that beyond a recurring use of clothing as symbols, Dreiser had no awareness of the resources of image and metaphor. It is said that his efforts at comparison were likely to be hackneyed and incredibly jumbled, as in a passage in The Financier about men who fade into poverty: “They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities— via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the cup of poison.”