The development of French literature about animals has been studied up to the year 1800. In the nineteenth century its character changed. Until then the story was chiefly one of philosophical debates about the souls of beasts, about animal behavior—whether it be mechanical, instinctive, intelligent, sentimental,— the virtue and vice of animals, their inferiority to or superiority over man. The second half of the 18th century saw the final defeat of animal mechanism and the general acceptance of the idea that animals suffer. Then a sentimental humanitarianism developed which denounced hunting, meat-eating, vivisection, and any form of cruelty to animals. The idea that animals are the friends and servants of man became popular and with it the opinion that man owed them kindness and gratitude. Finally, cruelty to animals came to be looked upon as a menace to human society, and pleas were heard for legislation for the protection of animals. The approach to the subject was philosophical, didactic, sentimental. The great and original contribution of the 18th century was the formulation and wide support of an ethical principle.

Theodor Storm's last and longest “Novelle,” Der Schimmelreiter, may be regarded as his masterpiece. Under the stress of experience, especially private sorrow, Storm's art matured and deepened toward the end of his life. The writer of soft, sentimental idylls, perfumed with faded flowers and blurred by hopeless reminiscence, became a tragic poet, coping in strong, sharp-lined, cogent “Novellen” with the bitter realities of life. Among these later works, again, there is observable both a deepening and a simplification. From the historical remoteness of the “Chroniknovellen,” the. stylized “Minnewelt” of Ein Fest auf Haderslevhuus or the artificial archaism of Aquis Submersus, the Schimmelreiter at length comes home to treat, unsentimentally and in timeless terms, the tragedy of a modern man.

Two schools of thought exist today concerning the Byronic attitude revealed in Espronceda's works: the traditional school declares that it is a reflection of the rebellious, irreligious, Bohemian character of the poet, while the new school believes that Espronceda deliberately acted and wrote in such a way as to make the public think that he was a dangerous rebel, merely to cast an aura of romanticism about his own person. According to the latter critics, Espronceda was playing a part or maintaining a pose. They claim that his friends knowingly contributed to the false portrait and that their accounts of Espronceda's disdain for conventionality—which are taken quite literally by the traditional school—are but fabrications intended to foster a legend. Hence the new critics give no credence to Ferrer del Río's statement that Espronceda was depicting himself in the hero of El estudiante de Salamanca or Escosura's implication that Byron's romantic adventures and disordered existence influenced profoundly Espronceda's fiery soul, “not less naturally rebellious against the common rules of life.”

Robert Browning's life falls into three sections. Thirty-three years form the first chapter: his birth in Camberwell on May 7, 1812; six years of schooling in Peckham; two years of study under a French tutor; a brief term at London University; two months in Russia in 1834, when he was twenty-two; three months in Italy in 1838; a second trip to Italy in 1844; a considerable quantity of poetic production that brought recognition from a few friends.

Thackeray, Dickens, Disraeli, and others of the Victorian novelists frequently gave their imaginative faculties a temporary leave of absence, and proceeded for the time being with characters picked up ready made from their own acquaintance, or from other folk who happened to be prominent enough at the time to attract their attention. The Thackeray Dictionary lists 89 such originals, and a few others have been pointed out since that volume was issued. It is my purpose here to offer some evidence to show that to this list there may now be added the name of Sir Martin Archer Shee, sometime president of the Royal Academy, whom, I think, the author introduces in the forty-second chapter of Vanity Fair, as a Mr. Smee, a struggling young drawing master, who, engaged to give lessons to Miss Jane Osborne, falls in love with her, and is eventually driven from the house by her angry father, who threatens to “break every bone in his skin.”

It is my purpose to note a few indications of a trend toward photographic realism in the successive stages of the composition of les Misérables. While numerous studies of Victor Hugo's documentation have appeared, I believe that this is the first attempt to point out the changing character of that documentation, and to chart roughly a drift towards reportage. I shall rely mainly upon evidence from unpublished correspondence filed away with the manuscript of the novel, material neglected apparently even by the late Gustave Simon, who had access to Victor Hugo's workshop. The discussion will be limited to the following topics: (A) No. 7 Rue de l'Homme-Armé; (B) la maison Gorbeau; (C) the second residence of M. Gillenormand; (D) le restaurant Rousseau; (E) le Petit-Picpus; (F) Javert; (G) Thénardier.

Thomas Hardy's plots often introduce an outsider into a tranquil current of events to project a disturbing force into the story. This outsider turns the current and sometimes continues to deflect it to a tragic end. Critics have called the outsiders “invaders” or “human ‘apples of discord’,” but they have not considered what light may be thrown on the nature of these invaders if they are studied in terms that Hardy himself suggests. In speaking of reddlemen, the class to which the invader Diggory Venn belongs, Hardy uses the term “Mephistophelian visitants.” This term is not inapt, I think, to describe a series of invaders, three of them dressed in red and all presented in a background of suggestions that they are preternatural.

Although almost everyone is aware that Bernard Shaw is the chief disciple of Samuel Butler, the fact that Butler's work had an influence on several other English writers of the first part of this century is not generally recognized. Ernest A. Baker, in his History of the English Novel, does list Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, and ten other novelists as members of what he is tempted to call a Butler school. But the least obviously yet most profoundly Butlerian of all contemporary English storytellers is not included in Baker's list. E. M. Forster should assuredly be placed second only to Shaw in any such hypothetical group of disciples.

As his contribution to the Pascal tercentenary number of the Revue Hebdomadaire, dated July 14, 1923, Paul Valéry chose to make public an attack on Pascal that was impious in its brevity. He entitled it “Variation sur une ‘Pensée’,” and took for his theme “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.” Valéry's own recent and perhaps fleeting fame as a lyric poet did not in everyone's eyes qualify him for the task. Some even among his admirers felt that so antithetical a spirit must inevitably fail to understand Pascal. For the skeptic confronts the believer, the idolator of the intellect its depreciator.

Since the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 it has become a commonplace of criticism to remark that he failed to carry his theories of realism into an artistic practice adequate to all of the central facts in American life. He did not treat what William James called “the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded” and which formed much of the content of the novels of such Howells proteges as Crane, Garland, and Norris. There can hardly be room to challenge this. Howells never truly faced the violent and sordid facets of reality. Mention and object to them as evil he could; leave the abstract and deal with them intimately, personally, objectively, or even imaginatively he could not. I should like here to suggest that the primary source of that inability was simply that life-long psychological difficulties left Howells with a neurotic condition which literally made it impossible for him to know and understand as realities the portions of pain and filth and terror in human living with which a major writer must be at least vicariously intimate. How much the production of the mass of autobiographical material which he produced during the latter decades of his life might represent an attempt to purge himself of the neurotic influences which seem to have haunted his mind throughout the peak years of his fecund artistic career I am not competent to say. But it seems clear that he shrank neurotically from the imaginative absorption of painful reality which truly searching American novels would have necessitated.

Whenever Ferenc Molnar, the Hungarian playwright, is discussed, his name is associated with bons mots, a mondaine psychology, and a kind of sentimentality in which wistfulness and artificial fantasy mingle with love-making rather than with love. The discriminating miss breadth and depth in his plays; they miss the divine law of which Alexander Pope speaks that is “at once the source and end and the test of art.” In the boom years of his greatest popularity in Hungary, it was a criterion of savoir vivre to attend his plays. At times he was severely criticized, but his suavity, his unhampered manner of expression helped the expansion of the theatrical area of Hungary, though he imposed no obligations of deep thinking upon his audiences. His acclaim abroad, of which much was sound and fury, required a re-definition of his place in Hungarian stage-literature with reference to the native drama. The pro and con remarks warrant the conclusion that his universal success was not justified on purely aesthetic grounds. On the other hand, despite his overused technique, it is apparent that by discarding inherited patterns he supplied the theatre of his native land with devices of dramatic expression that were amusing, incalculable, and sometimes artistic. He was unswerving in his theatrical aims, he discovered a new range of possibilities. Hungary never had a Restoration period similar to that of England; however, in some respect, Molnar could be considered a striking example of the polished, dexterous and frivolous violation of patriotic and romantic conventions of the Hungarian stage. As critics pointed out, he himself created a theatrical convention affected by Oscar Wilde, Henri Bataille, Tristan Bernard, Alfred Capus and other western European playwrights, but he also transcended the qualities of his western models and differed from them. In matters of taste the socio-economic stratum that Molnar represented was the upper bourgeoisie, notwithstanding his alleged and true sympathies for underpaid wage earners, or for former human beings, as Maxim Gorkij called homeless vagrants. The quality of his attainments substantiates this classification. Seen against the theatrical horizon of Hungary he differs from traditional playwrights by having his plays built around characters whose main interest was determined by carnal love in its sentimental and ironic aspect, urbanity, cynicism, that is by a carpe diem philosophy in which individual gratifications were the basic impetus of action, and not national, social, or cosmic responsibilities. Molnar had the makings of a cosmopolitan; in fact, the local color of most of his plays is not of decisive importance, though, as Aurel Karpati, the Hungarian critic stated in a panegyric article, Molnar and Budapest develóped at the same time.

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it analytically minded … is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.