The long and curious letter to a certain Dr. Stone, in which Dickens discusses his theories of dream psychology, was not published until 1938. Containing approximately seventeen hundred words, it provides us with an ample platform from which to observe the novelist's fictional use of dreams. Oddly enough, the letter, like the whole subject of Dickens' dream fiction, has not yet attracted students of Victorian fiction.

One of the greatest difficulties which faced the dramatists of the Irish Renaissance was how to write heroic plays in peasant dialect. Although the language of the Irish countryman was ideal for the little farces which mirrored the living Ireland, it turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas. “But Grania is a King's daughter”, protested George Moore when Yeats insisted that Diarmuid and Grania be written in peasant dialect. And if we are to believe the story that Moore tells in Hail and Farewell, Yeats even went so far as to ask Moore, who knew not a word of dialect, to write the play in French. Lady Gregory would then turn it into English, an Irish translator would render it in Irish, and Lady Gregory would then turn the Irish literally into English. Although Yeats never got a peasant Grania from Moore, he very nearly realized his ideal when he induced Synge, the acknowledged master of peasant dialect, to attempt a peasant Deirdre. Synge, like Moore, might well have protested against the difficult task his master had set him. “I am not sure whether I shall be able to make a satisfactory play out of it”, he wrote to an American friend. But he plunged on, creating his Deirdre in the image of a Wicklow peasant girl. We can surmise that she gave him considerable trouble, for he rewrote the play more than fifteen times, working on it more energetically than on any other of his plays. We have Moore's testimony that Synge finally began to feel that peasant speech was impossible and started to weed it out of his play. However, the mass of MSS which represent Synge's work on the play up to his death indicate that no such weeding process had begun.

In spite of the wide range of topics and techniques in the poetry of Tennyson, a reader is apt to become aware of certain recurrences which eventually assume an air of familiarity. The present study deals with one of the most persistent of these recurrences, which is especially significant because of a process of change that affected it over a period of years, symptomatic of a gradual shift in the poet's outlook.

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

In most of Wagner's music dramas the source material, generally deep-rooted in Germanic or Celtic tradition, is well known, and Wagner's ndebtedness is transparent. The four works composing Der Ring des Nibelungen, for example, are based chiefly on the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied. Similarly, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival was the inspiration for Wagner's Parsifal, and the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg was followed closely in Tristan und Isolde. These mediaeval works are epic monuments of western European legend or chefs d‘œuvre of the Minnesingers’ art. Wagner has thus ambitiously concerned himself with subjects of impressive grandeur, drawn from sources of no inconsiderable importance.

A première vue, les romans de Giono peuvent nous sembler remplis de provençalismes et devoir être rattachés à la littérature régionaliste. Mais on s'aperçoit vite que les provençalismes authentiques y sont plutôt clairsemés et qu'ils deviennent de plus en plus rares à mesure qu'on avance dans son œuvre. On se rend compte aussi que le régionalisme n'occupe dans cette œuvre qu'une place relative et en somme de peu d'importance, malgré l'influence provençale qui s'y manifeste à chaque page. Il reste cependant qu'une étude de ces deux questions, inséparables l'une de l'autre, comporte un certain intérêt pour l'intelligence de la langue et du style de Giono romancier.

Emerson saw in the art of poetry a process veiled in mystery, and no one fully acquainted with his writings is unaware of the manifold ways in which Emerson approached that mystery in an attempt to explain it. As early as 1838, he began what he hoped would be a long poem on the poet and his art. Occasionally returning to the composition over a period of some years, in the end he left only fragments of his original plan. The essay entitled “The Poet”, published in 1844, integrated more fully many of the conclusions to which Emerson had come on the subject. But still he was apparently unsatisfied. Further early experiments in suggesting the function of the poet are revealed in four poems in the 1847 collection of verses. In “The Problem”, “Saadi”, and “Bacchus” Emerson viewed in different ways the origin of the artist's and poet's power. And in the last poem, entitled “Merlin”, he turned back, for the embodiment of the ideal poet, to the ancient bard.

When Main Street met with a startling good reception in 1920, Lewis was writing for a public that was ready for him. The way had been prepared by Huneker and Mencken and Shaw and George Moore and a self-critical national consciousness induced by idealistic extravagances during a war. Lewis neatly capped a progression. Back of him was Dreiser and back of Dreiser were Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane and the French naturalists. This line of development, of course, is sufficiently well known. It is also well known that American novelists of the 'nineties who were influenced by the French naturalists had a hard time getting started, even though they adopted a decorous treatment of sex and unconventional situations. Crane unsuccessfully sought for three years to find a publisher for Maggie before deciding to publish it himself. Hamlin Garland waged war against sentimentality and sensationalism in order to win a public for his own incisive writings of western life. He even tried to make the controversy one between a democratic and fact-loving West and an aristocratic East tied to traditions and sentiments. In order to attract support, Norris sought to emulate the epic qualities of Zola's writings by having each novel centered about some major enterprise or feature of American life, but his novels in the early 1900's had to make their way against a considerable amount of critical disapproval.

Such appraisals as Samuel C. Chew's, that Hardy knew the Southern Counties as Gilbert White knew Selborne or Arnold Bennett the Five Towns, require no affidavits. But Mrs. Hardy's assertions that he had a knowledge of the city “like a born Londoner”, “as only a young man can get it”, and that there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of his poetry than in all his novels—such statements warrant more study than they have hitherto received.

John Townsend Trowbridge, though one of Whitman's earliest and oldest friends, has not received adequate recognition for his loyal yet discriminating service. Passing reference, it is true, is meted out to him in critical biographies of Whitman or in an occasional article. But even the latest Whitman study accords to Trowbridge only a few pages in which he is associated with the English critic, Edward Carpenter. In consequence the following survey is an attempt to throw added light upon the nature and extent of this relationship.

Mr. R. H. Wilenski protests against the common belief that Ruskin was a kind of Art-Dictator of England in the eighteen-fifties. Ruskin, he says, was not a best-selling author during that decade; nor, on the other hand, was he respected by established artists and architects. So slight was his repute, indeed, that his letters to the Times in May 1851 can have done little to influence either the general or the specialist public in favor of pre-Raphaelitism. This drastic revision of accepted notions has had surprisingly little effect. In Mr. Paul Bloomfield's William Morris, Ruskin appears once more as the critic who gave “status” to the Pre-Raphaelites; and Mr. William Gaunt declares that on May 13, 1851, “an eagle scream was heard, a mighty talon hovered over the correspondence columns of The Times. It was Ruskin to the rescue. The Pre-Raphaelites had found a champion.” Neither of these writers mentions Wilenski's dissent.

Studies of the total work of a dramatic author are likely to be mainly in terms of his subject-matter, ideas, portrayal of character, and literary style. In analyzing and evaluating these, the critic seeks those elements of unity throughout the author's work which will best characterize his art. Less frequently is the same element of unity sought in his plots: sometimes, no doubt, the critic considers them a mere vehicle for the expression of ideas and the presentation of character, although they have certainly had more importance than this to most playwrights; more often the critic assumes that each play has its separate plot, and that while certain comparisons can be made and certain structural tendencies noted there is no reason to seek basic unity in the plots of most dramatists. If by plot we mean the total and frequently complex dramatic action, it is of course true that a competent playwright does not repeat it from one play to another. But if we seek the plot beneath the plot, the type of action on which the writer depends to give him the motivation, movement, and climax needed to hold the attention of the spectator, we shall find that he well can, and sometimes does, create an extensive series of plays on a single pattern of dramatic action and that this has revelatory significance for his personality and art.

J'aime beaucoup les premières phrases de chapitre qui vous donnent par leur tenue une pleine satisfaction de vous-même, vous délivrant en une seconde de toute appréhension d'unanimisme, de passéisme, de populisme, et habillent les personnages pour les vraies tragédies du cœur,—la première phrase de ce chapitre, par exemple. La voici, ample et réelle: Nancy Rolla, adorablement coiffée par Rose Desca, ses jambes croisées mettant en valeur de minuscules souliers en serpent de Perugia, un rouge Antoine spécial et des yeux violets composant sur son visage mat une alliance de couleurs qu'aucun pavillon national jamais ne réalisera, dans le fond de sa Bugatti, et tout en contemplant un magnifique ciel signé lui aussi, attendait Maléna que le chauffeur était monté prévenir, et se demandait pourquoi sa jeune amie l'avait convoquée si tôt—-des aiguilles de diamant marquaient dix heures à sa montre de rubis,—dans ce matin de printemps débutant dont les premiers effluves caressaient, sur une gorge ravissante, les revers et les fronces du manteau de marocain noir livré la veille par Chanel … Au moins l'on sait, avec une pareille phrase, où l'on est, dans quelle époque, quelle humeur, et la littérature atteint une vérité encore supérieure aux vérités que lui procurent les écoles ci-dessus nommées : celle du chromo.

Malcolm El Win'S treatment of Charles Reade's documentary method is for the most part sound, yet his suggested sources for the “flood scenes” of Put Yourself in His Place (1870) are incomplete and misleading. While he is correct in saying that Reade “enacted his principal researches at Sheffield”, and that “the scene of the novel [Sheffield] is thinly disguised under the name of Hillsborough”, he is wrong in assuming that Reade derived his “flood scenes” from the materials included in one of his notebooks.