In the same sense that Dante's great poem can be said to derive its meaning from a Catholic, and Milton's from a Protestant, ethos—so Browning's The Ring and the Book derives its meaning from the relativist ethos predominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. The first sign of the poem's relativism is in Browning's use of dramatic monologues to tell his story. For though he does not entirely succeed, his aim at least in telling the same story eleven times over through ten dramatic monologues and his own account in Book i, was to replace the objective view of events of traditional drama and narrative with points of view. Such a method can be justified only on the relativist assumption that truth cannot be apprehended in itself but must be “induced” from particular points of view, and that there can be sufficient difference among the points of view to make each repetition interesting and important as a psychological fact.

The Purpose of this paper is to analyze one particular aspect of Goethe's creative process which manifests itself throughout his artistic career, a strange and as yet unexplained motivation which prompted him at times to incorporate in his works enigmatic elements which puzzled his contemporaries and continue to confound scholars. Toward the end of Werther, for example, we find several pages of a translation from Ossian. The sixth book of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is purportedly a manuscript entrusted to a doctor by a mysterious aunt and which bears a title of its own: “Die Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele.” Obviously this chapter made a singular impression on the public at that time, because in 1806 an otherwise unknown author by the name of Friedrich Buchholz wrote a novel with this same title and it was reviewed by Goethe. Goethe's chapter has even been issued in a separate edition by the theologian Hermann Dechent. Not many novels contain chapters which can exist independent of their matrix.

Any survey of Hawthorne's life makes it apparent that he was not a churchgoing man. On the other hand, a study of Hawthorne's works discloses that he was a religious man in whose outlook the Christian heritage was cardinal. With respect to its traditional theology he was more orthodox than not: With the basic spirit of Christianity, as it informed values and viewpoints, he was thoroughly imbued. With its institutionalized forms, however, he had no direct affiliation after his youth. It is true that his environment was still Christian externally and that he could draw upon the reserves of Christian culture accumulated by centuries of tradition in America and Europe. But the burden of his faith rested heavily upon himself.

The Modem Language Journal, official organ of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, will be forty years old next month. PMLA salutes a younger brother, wishing him long life and prosperity. To commemorate this birthday we offer herewith a study of the MLJ under its first four editors. These were critical years, not only for the fledgling Journal, but for the whole profession of modern foreign language teachers. The staff of the MLA's Foreign Language Program believes firmly that study of the past can often throw light on problems of the present. It is in this spirit that we invite attention to the period 1916–30.

The Impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. But something, probably her strict and demanding artistic conscience, prevented their appearance in the form of the intellectual and argumentative feminism found in the first two books. In this novel Virginia Woolf's concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who “is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).” One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter, and makes it clear that Demeter and her daughter Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other.” This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth.

“Essays on the Court Wits as individuals, however well done,” John Harold Wilson observed a few years ago, “have always been somewhat unsatisfactory because of a natural tendency to treat the subject of the essay as a phenomenon taken bodily from his cultural environment.” Sir George Etherege has suffered as much as any other important Restoration writer from this critical failing of examining a literary figure outside the context of his own age. The result has been a totally attenuated picture of Etherege as a rather superficial rake; and this has been paralleled by an equally attenuated understanding of his plays. This critical failing is due in large part, I think, to the lack of information about his life.

At intervals, various unpublished articles written by Thomas De Quincey have been unearthed and published. One group which seems never to have received the attention of scholars consists of four articles in manuscript that were part of the collection presented in 1942 to the National Library of Scotland by William Blackwood and Sons. The articles were docketed together with the inscription “four manuscripts of De Quincey, n.d.” and were thus catalogued under that heading.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

In the recurrent derogation of Cooper's Indian characters as unrealistic and idealized, their figurative language has been the chief specific ground of attack. In most cases, it has been the only concrete issue raised. Thus General Lewis Cass—whose condemnation inflicted lasting damage because of his eminence as Indian fighter and Indian agent—delivered his major broadside against Cooper incidentally, in the course of an article of almost fifty pages devoted to consideration of the current status (in 1828) of study of the Indian languages. After quoting from The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie some twenty figurative expressions, he declared: “This is not the manner in which Indians talk, nor is it the manner in which any people talk.” Further consideration of the language which Cooper had put into the mouths of his Indian characters brought Cass to his damning and often quoted conclusion: “His Uncas, and his Pawnee Hardheart … have no living prototype in our forests. They may wear leggins and moccasins, and be wrapped in a blanket or a buffalo skin, but they are civilized men, and not Indians.” Another critic who knew Indians at firsthand, William Josiah Snelling, in reviewing the autobiography of Chief Black Hawk in 1835, found the authenticity of the work “unquestionable” except for the figurative language employed in it—blame for which he proceeded to lay on Cooper. “The only drawback upon our credence is the intermixture of courtly phrases, and the figures of speech, which our novelists are so fond of putting into the mouths of Indians. … The term pale faces, often applied to the whites in this book, was, we think, never in the mouth of any American savage, excepting in the fanciful pages of Mr. Cooper. There are many more phrases and epithets of the like nature, and we only mention them, because we think it time that authors should cease to make Indians talk sentiment.” Even more formidable authority was ranged against the authenticity of Cooper's Indian characters, and on the same grounds, by Francis Parkman's dictum in his survey of Cooper's work shortly after the novelist's death: “his Indian characters … it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn.” The only concrete reason given by Parkman for this condemnation was that “the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome. Such as they are, however, they have been eagerly copied by a legion of the smaller poets and novel writers; so that, jointly with Thomas Campbell, Cooper is responsible For the fathering of those aboriginal heroes, lovers and sages, who have long formed a petty nuisance in our literature.“ Some ninety years later, John T. Flanagan emphasized the attacks of Cass and Snelling on the figurative language of Cooper's Indians, with special reference to The Prairie, adding as his own conclusion: ”Admitting … literary convention … one can yet reject as unnatural the tropes of the Indians.“ James Grossman, who in his James Fenimore Cooper (1949) accepts in general the view that Cooper's Indians are idealized, observes of two major characters in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, the chief Conanchet and the Puritan Heathcote: ”Unfortunately the two derive their speech, if in different degree and with different authenticity, from the same model, the King James Bible“ (pp. 69–70). It remained for a European scholar to report ”the discovery … that the language of Cooper's Indians was modelled … on the style of Ossian.“ He concludes that Cooper's Indians ”are idealized; they are related to Scott's clan chieftains, Byron's pirates, and Ossian's Celtic heroes; all these figures are but phases of the same romantic movement. Cooper saw his Indians in the light of romantic idealism. … Cooper's Indian rhetoric is a poetic creation and not the speech of living men.“

As their schools reopen this year after the summer vacation, about 7,000,000 Japanese children from 12 to 18 years old are spending five hours a week studying English. They are taught by some 85,000 teachers, few of whom have ever heard the language spoken by a native—except, perhaps, over the radio. In the universities hundreds of thousands more are busy with their seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth year of English. In large cities tens of thousands of clerks and secretaries, waitresses and salesgirls, bankers and government employees of all ages go several evenings a week to commercial schools to learn English conversation and business correspondence. Many of these are among several hundred thousand listeners to radio English courses. At newsstands and bookstores, on streetcars and buses, electric trains and subways, thousands more are poring over magazines with English articles, movie scenarios and jokes; over grammar books whose chapter headings, such as “Elliptical Negation” and “Concessive Clause,” suggest their contents; over cram books, word lists and sample examinations. For high schools follow the lead of universities in making English grammar and translation a part of the rigorous ordeal called shiken jigoku, or “examination hell,” a stiffly competitive process of admission. And ever more business firms are requiring job applicants to take English tests.

A fascinating and too often neglected area of literature is the medieval visions of the Afterworld, the detailed conceptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which were to reach a culmination in Dante's Divina Commedia. Several of these visions became widely popular, both in Latin and in vernacular versions. They have been carefully studied for their possible influence on Dante's writing. I propose to explore one aspect of them, the threefold pains of punishment, and to show how this material was used by Milton and Shakespeare.

No reader of John Forster's Life would suspect that Dickens was a good friend of George Henry Lewes for thirty-two years, almost as long as he knew Forster himself. In the first two volumes of the book Lewes' name is mentioned only twice, once in the cast of a play, and once in a page-long list of “other acquaintances”: “Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby.… ” J. W. T. Ley, the editor of Forster's Life of Dickens, thought that this shabby allusion was inserted to placate Lewes,

With that little stump of prose, twenty-nine magazine pages long, Knut Hamsun had laid the foundation of a new literature in the North.’ This assessment, so near in time to the event and yet so far-sighted, was that of Carl Naerup writing in 1895; the ‘stump of prose’ was the fragment of Hamsun's first novel Hunger, which appeared anonymously in the Danish periodical Ny Jord in 1888, two years before the publication of the completed work. At that time it took vision to see the real achievement behind the extravagance; the eye was too easily caught by the uninhibited exuberance of Hamsun's literary début to perceive the high seriousness behind it, his vehemence was misinterpreted as the antics and posturings of one whose chief object was self-advertisement; even the sympathetic Bjørnson, who acknowledged the greatness of some of Hamsun's early work, could not suppress an attitude of tolerant amusement: ‘In the field of literature,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘Hamsun began by committing just about all the stupidities that it is possible for a gifted madcap to get away with in a civilized society. … It seems the belief that no young author can any longer win his place without first trying to sweep away all the others is something that must be called typically Norwegian.’

Faust's Pact with the devil surely presents the most baffling of all the problems raised by Goethe's poem. We are here at the very heart of the myth which the action of the drama illustrates. Goethe has used the wager between God and Mephistopheles and the pact between Faust and the Devil to symbolize the issues which are at stake in Faust's career on earth. In the background we see God waiting patiently for the moment when His trust in Faust will be vindicated. On this vital theme of wager and pact, if anywhere, we have a right to expect unequivocal clarity: on the terms of the pact, on the positions taken by the contracting parties, and on the outcome of the conflict between them. Yet, if we are to believe the critics and commentators, Goethe has hung a veil of confusion over this whole area, so that we are prevented from catching even a glimpse of his intentions. For the last fifty years critical opinion has been sharply divided on the fundamental question as to which of the two protagonists emerges victorious.1 Some hold with Faust; others either side with Mephistopheles or believe that the duel ends in a draw, and that Faust is saved only by an act of grace, which is bestowed on him as by a deus ex machina.

Eugene vinaver, in his 1947 edition of the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte Darthur, has this to say generally about Malory's handling of the source for his sixth section, the French Vulgate Cycle La Queste del Saint Graal: “Malory's Tale of the Sankgreall is the least original of his works. Apart from omissions and minor alterations, it is to all intents and purposes a translation of the French. … His attitude [toward the source] may be described without much risk of over-simplification as that of a man to whom the quest of the Grail was primarily an Arthurian adventure and who regarded the intrusion of the Grail upon Arthur's kingdom not as a means of contrasting earthly and divine chivalry and condemning the former, but as an opportunity offered to the Knights of the Round Table to achieve still greater glory in this world.” Thus Vinaver proceeds in his introduction and notes to this “sixth romance” of Malory's to show in detail how Malory “secularizes” the Grail. In spite of these claims, I think it possible to show 1) that Malory's Tale of the Sankgreall is not simply a redaction of the French material, 2) that Malory's changes are far from mere “omissions and minor alterations,” and 3) that Malory's attitude toward his source is not as Vinaver describes it.