Recently, in his “Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man” (PMLA, lxvi [1951], 363-380), John W. Shroeder has given us what I judge to be one of our most valuable exegeses of this difficult novel. Yet I think his exegesis must be modified somewhat—modified by working as he works, from source to symbol. In this note, meant to be complementary to Mr. Shroeder's essay, I should like to consider further one of Melville's symbols in relation to the source from which it takes its initial meaning. My concern is to try to understand Melville's Indian-hater and the “metaphysics” of his hatred in relation to the tradition from which they are derived.

In the humanities folklore has won for itself only a small place. This is not surprising because it has not been able to free itself completely from the antiquarian and dilettante tradition of collecting curiosities. Proverbs, tales, ballads, customs, or superstitions are thought to be quaint and are recorded and studied for that reason. In the fifteenth century, Italian humanists brought to Germany the idea of an objective description of a country and had imitators who illustrated accounts of Westphalia and Ulm with local proverbs, stories of ghosts and nixes, wedding customs, and other bits of folklore. A little later Johannes Boemus, who ranged more widely in his Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (1520), and Sebastian Franck, who limited himself to Germany, proceeded more systematically. Franck saw that a knowledge of customs and manners contributed as much as knowledge of political, legal, or ecclesiastical history to the understanding of a people. Such collections of materials had, however, a somewhat nationalistic tinge and did not amount to much more than contributions to ethnography, history, or geography. A similar subordination of folklore to history and geography is seen in William Camden, Remaines of a greater worke concerning Britaine (1605). The second edition of this book (1614) contained the first alphabetical collection of English proverbs to be printed in England and we can therefore call it an early example of the organized presentation of folklore. The making of records continued and the manner of presenting them improved somewhat, but a systematic study of folklore did not arise. At the end of the seventeenth century scientific work that had been stimulated by the foundation of the Royal Society led John Aubrey to make two valuable collections of folklore and the miscellaneous interests of German and other polymaths included it. Divergent as these activities were, they did not reinforce each other and did not establish folklore as a recognized branch of the humanities.

Because Dickens nourished an uncompromising contempt for every kind of tyranny, it was inevitable that he should denounce American slavery, whose essential barbarity he observed on his first trip to the New World in 1842. From that time until the conclusion of his second visit to the United States in 1868, a period of roughly twenty-six years, he focused his attention, at intervals, on the issues which grew out of the system. Curiously, though his reactions to America have been subjects for detailed consideration, his continuing interest in the problems posed by our institution of slavery has never received, to my knowledge, any extensive treatment. It seems appropriate, therefore, to give some attention to a matter with which he was occupied for a considerable period. It will be the twofold purpose of the following study (1) to examine in chronological order Dickens' statements on slavery as they appear in his published letters, American Notes, and his principal periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round; and (2) to suggest that at certain points, especially in later years, his thinking on the subject bears some striking resemblances to that of Carlyle.

Hermann Hesse in the “Tractat vom Steppenwolf” makes the following pungent remark about Faust, actually meaning modern man: “When Faust speaks the words which are so famous among school teachers and admired with awe by philistines : ‘Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast!‘ Faust is forgetting Mephistopheles and quite a lot of other souls that he likewise has in his breast ... The breast, the body is always uniform, of course; the number of souls in it, however, is not two nor five but infinite.” The bewildering multiplication of souls in our chaotic age produces an equally bewildering increase of conflicts. This fact cannot be denied, at least not for Germany. Also its literature bears it out. On that basis Hesse's diagnosis is even too simple. The body is by no means uniform. It too is in discord, as the literature of sexual life from Wedekind to Ferdinand Bruckner reveals. The artist as sensitive barometer of his age is particularly affected by the general disintegration. Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse have treated this phenomenon with frightening perspicacity, Hesse most penetratingly in his description of Klingsor's self-portrait. Decadence has become a common slogan for the modern way of life, in Germany and elsewhere.

Much of the modern disappointment with William Dean Howells' work grows from a failure to understand his aims. This misunderstanding arises partly because his literary rationale was far from being as systematic and uncompromising as has often been assumed; close study of the entire body of his critical essays and reviews shows that he did not reject all fiction which departed from a circumstantial fidelity to life. In essence, Howells felt that authenticity concerning human character was the touchstone of great art and that problems of method were secondary. Although he condemned most non-realistic fiction as untrue and therefore finally vicious morally, he was willing to allow imaginative play in that writing which did no harm or which, better still, aimed at faithfulness to the inner verity of existence. Howells, like Hawthorne and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, distinguished between the realistic novel and the prose “romance,” and he of course generally preferred to write the realistic novel. But, instead of being “unsympathetic to books of romance” or harboring a “suspicion of all romantic tendencies including his own,” he also accepted the romance as an estimable genre of fiction.

The first chapter of Henry Esmond opens with the meeting of young Henry and Rachel Esmond, Viscountess Castlewood, and their complex relations provide the major thematic integration of the novel. For most readers, however, the love interest centers in Henry's chronic courtship of Beatrix, Rachel's daughter. In modern criticism of the novel, allusions to the love of Henry and Rachel are usually perfunctory, often indicating little more than that, after the decline and fall of Beatrix, they were wed—a union which distressed many Victorian critics because of its disquieting implications of incest. For a century there has been no widespread perception of Thackeray's intentions regarding this pervasive love theme.

In my opinion Robert (“Fleshly School”) Buchanan's The Drama of Kings (1871) exerted so strong an influence on Hardy's Dynasts that it deserves to be regarded as the immediate source of that work. The contention would appear to be virginal. The biographies and critical studies of Abercrombie, Blunden, Brennecke, Chakravarty, Chew, Duffin, Florence Emily Hardy, Hedgcock, Holland, McDowall, Rutland, South-worth, Symons, Weber, and Webster provide, in their greatly varying degree, suggestions as to the philosophical and literary background of Hardy's trilogy. None of them, however, suggests any relation between The Dynasts and The Drama of Kings. In fact none of them even mentions the name of Robert Williams Buchanan with the exception of Edmund Blunden, who notes the interesting fact that Buchanan dedicated to Hardy his novel, Come Live with Me and Be My Love. He might also have observed that Buchanan elsewhere devotes a laudatory poem to Hardy and warmly praises “Tom Hardy” in another poem.

This sentence, better than any I know, goes to the heart of letters. It defines the personal and professional quest which inspires us day by day, and brings us together in this Association year by year. It is the continuing wonder of man that the pure flame of his life is bound up in words. His greatest moments require the shape of the right words in the right order to be recognized and given meaning. Until they are uttered and recorded, the moment, the experience, is fragmentary and illusory. Emerson spoke of Shakespeare as “the man who carries the Saxon race in him.” It was no exaggeration. He said so much so simply that other men of lesser insight or gift of words have unanimously nodded their heads in agreement and offered their thanks. What they had sharply or dimly felt was given form and meaning. Henceforth it was.

The objection raised by most of Melville's early biographer-critics to the form of his major novels has been found largely answerable by more exclusively textual scrutiny and by recognition of the satiric strain in his literary tradition. It is now widely agreed that such compositions as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd are complete designs, consisting of related parts. But the terms in which Melville's structure has been appraised have not commonly allowed for the operation within it of a structural theory. It has not yet been perceived that he belongs, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, among the American literary discoverers of the principle of organic form.

Some years ago bertram holland flanders discovered in an obscure literary journal called Wheler's Magazine, published in Athens, Georgia, a Longfellow “translation” entitled “A Lay of Courage,” which had not appeared among the poet's collected works. According to its heading the poem had been rendered from the Danish of Ove Mailing, a statesman and historian of some importance but of small reputation as a poet. When Flanders added the translation to Longfellow's bibliography nothing was known of the circumstances of its composition nor had the Danish original been identified. An examination of additional evidence now makes it clear that Longfellow did not translate the poem; that, in fact, he probably did not even consult Mailing's original; and that, actually, he took the product of an earlier translator and, altering it slightly, submitted it to the editor of Wheler's Magazine under his own name.

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.

Brash indeed is the outsider who ventures to talk to the members of a profession about their professional work. I would never have had the presumption, even after your persuasive Secretary's urgings, had I not thought that perhaps my own problems bore some relation to yours. I order books for a library, and try to order them selectively, buying only what seem to me to be the good books, valuable today and valuable tomorrow. Books written by members of this Association are among those to which, almost daily, I must give some scrutiny, and over the years I have reached this paradoxical conclusion: That while literary scholars in the United States are the most literate of the followers of humanistic disciplines, they produce more bad books than do their colleagues in other fields. They are more literate because they are more widely read, are more civilized, and in general, if not many of them write really well, they write better than, say, most of the people in my own profession of history.

In the spring of 1835, George Ripley, a young Unitarian minister of Boston, remembered an old debt. For some years he had been a leader in that transplantation of German literature and philosophy which was now flowering into Transcendentalism. He could read Kant in the original tongue, and he owned a redoubtable library of German biblical criticism and idealist philosophy. Three years before, in the Christian Examiner (xi, 375) he had explained the differences between Kant and Coleridge and asserted the superiority of Kant; this very spring he had written for the same journal (xviii, 167-221) a biography of Herder and a closely critical review of Marsh's translation of Herder's Spirit of German Poetry. But he was still young enough in erudition to remember the names of those who had first turned his eyes to Germany: the Herder article began with a statement of his indebtedness to “sound and liberal scholars, like Carlyle.”