Picturesque Qualities Research Articles

From Mary Shelley to Stephen King: the transformation of gothic fiction in English literature

The article is dedicated to studying the evolution of the Gothic novel in English-language literature from the 18th century to the modern stage of development through the lens of genre transformations and stylistic modifications. The purpose of the article is to study the peculiarities of the Gothic novel genre in English-language literature through the prism of genre transformations, the dialectic of tradition and innovation. The research was conducted on the basis of the complex application of the method of analysis and synthesis, comparative-typological, biographical, historical-genetic methods and the method of generalization. By conducting a typological comparison of the early Gothic novel, represented in the works of Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and the later Gothic novels of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Stephen King, it was found that the peculiarity of mature Gothic novels compared to early ones is authorial subjectivity, vivid imagery, and picturesque quality, which eventually evolves into a fascination with supernatural phenomena and horrors. The figurative and symbolic system of the Gothic novel also evolves, as demons and the deceased are replaced by the innocent image of a child or woman, erasing the gender boundaries of the villain hero as the primary catalyst of the plot.

Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community by Jessica Fay

 Reviews most famous work, Women’s Speaking Justified ( and ), ‘one of the first defenses of women’s preaching in the Christian tradition’ (p. ), was completed while she was in prison. e edition, therefore, firmly places Fell as an important and wide-ranging writer ‘not only in Quaker Studies, but more broadly in early modern women’s studies, religious studies, and the history of rhetoric’, as well as feminist scholarship (pp. –). It is likely to be of interest to both scholars and students, and its thorough footnotes on individual texts (particularly concerning biblical allusions) are exemplary. Readers interested in the beginnings of Quakerism, especially women’s role in the early movement, will find much of interest here. A scholarly Introduction outlines the key religious, political, and social concerns of relevance to Fell’s work, and there are individual introductions to each text. However, the most revealing aspect of this edition is the attention given to Fell’s ability as a skilled rhetorician, adept at craing arguments suited to different, though oen overlapping, readerships. is is demonstrated through the editors’ choice of eight texts representing ‘the range of Fell’s writing in genre and chronology’ (p. ), including her autobiography , examination, and several epistles and arguments. e longest sections of the -page introduction to these works make the case that Fell’s reading and rhetorical practices, specifically the way she utilizes scriptural allusions, are examples of ‘collaborative coauthorship characteristic of early modern textual production’, rather than ‘a strategy to authorize the illegitimate female voice’ (p. ). e editors make a persuasive case that Fell, rather than utilizing an ‘ecstatic style’, draws on the ‘humanist tradition of commonplaces’ (p. ), interweaving paraphrases from various biblical books (her ‘favourites’ are Isaiah and the Gospels) in order to adapt her rhetoric to different contexts. Readers of this volume will certainly come away with an increased appreciation of Fell’s literary strategies and her place within early modern reading and writing cultures more generally. One side effect of privileging Fell’s undoubtable literary achievement in this edition is that what is exceptional about her work, and what is characteristic of other male or female Quaker writing from this period, becomes a little obscured. But despite this very small quibble, this important and meticulously researched volume leaves us in no doubt of Fell’s future inclusion in the early modern canon. K U R A Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community. By J F. (Oxford English Monographs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xvi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Beginning with the childhood trips to Furness Abbey narrated in Book  of e Prelude, Wordsworth visited at least forty monastic sites in Britain and Europe over the course of a long life, the vast majority of these in northern England. His attraction to such places clearly had more to it than a strong feeling for their picturesque qualities. Jessica Fay’s diligently researched study explores the apparent contradiction between Wordsworth’s vigorous opposition to Catholic emancipation and his MLR, .,   growing sympathy for the medieval Catholic Church and regret at the violence of the Dissolution. Her focus for these enquiries is the poetry of Wordsworth’s so-called ‘middle period’—the years  to , sandwiched between the ‘Great Decade’ culminating in e Prelude and the later years, which have enjoyed a mini-revival of critical interest of late. Fay’s discussions therefore encompass some of the least favoured and most obscure corners of the poet’s canon, such as e White Doe of Rylstone, e Excursion, and Ecclesiastical Sketches. It is a hard task to lure new readers to these overgrown areas of the poet’s œuvre, and Fay’s deep immersion in her subject perhaps leads her to assume too much familiarity and prior intellectual investment on the part of her audience. Fay’s historical scholarship and critical acumen are such that there are pockets of genuine interest throughout the book. I enjoyed finding out how Wordsworth’s reading about Quakerism coincided with his long period of residence with the Beaumonts at Coleorton in Leicestershire (with nearby Grace Dieu Priory), and how the garden he designed there was meant to encourage quiet contemplation and ‘cultivate...

Du détail décoratif au tableau pittoresque : la reconstruction de l’architecture gothique dans les romans d’Ann Radcliffe

According to Maurice Lévy, a Gothic novel is “Gothic” because its writing is closely related to architecture, the story being the very dramatization of a building. The ruined Gothic castle, abbey or monastery is indeed a cliché of the genre, the prerequisite decor for any real action to happen. The aim of this paper is to explore the aesthetic dimension of Gothic architecture in Ann Radcliffe’s novels, especially its pictorial and visual effects, from decorative emblematic details that stamp a building as “Gothic” to the creation of picturesque “tableaux” composed as true “paintings in words”. This literary reconstruction of Gothic architecture echoes the reappropriation of Gothic forms by the Gothic Revival. Radcliffe transfers this ornamental Gothic into the realm of the novel, adapting the ancient style of the “Goths” to modern dramatic purposes. Characteristic Gothic motifs such as the painted window or the arch are used to create a sense of dread or reproduce compositional effects. Drawing on pictorial models and the picturesque qualities attributed to Gothic architecture, Radcliffe’s descriptions generate “pictures”, literary equivalents of the “Landscapes with [Gothic] Ruins” popular in her days. Finally, by inserting Rosa-like banditti into architectural settings, the novelist fuses the Gothic Revival in architecture with a subgenre then popular in painting, to compose her own Gothic “Landscapes with Banditti”.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

Recycling Ruins

In 1768, William Aislabie purchased an estate neighbouring his own that included the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and proceeded to clear and reorganise the ruins to emphasise them as the subject of a Picturesque view. His intervention resulted in significant critical objection, but the basis of this objection shifted substantially over the ensuing decades. In the 1770s, William Gilpin's objections were founded in ideas of the ‘authentic’ Gothic ruin, a late-eighteenth-century concept based on the building's Picturesque qualities and evocation of mood; in the 1840s, John Walbran's criticism was based on a new concept of ruins derived from empirical examination that valued the original fabric of the building as documentary evidence. The changing concept of ruins exemplifies the shift in the perception of the Gothic, as antiquarian investigation transformed it from a fashionable, private mode of building that was perceived as irrational and disorderly to a principled, moral and public style.

Visualizations of Furness Abbey: From Romantic Ruin to Computer Model

The suppressed Cistercian abbey at Furness in Lakeland was left as a ruin by its owners. It was first recorded as such by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck in 1727 and the earliest known plan was published by Thomas West in 1774. More than 50 artists have recorded it since then, the majority responding to its picturesque qualities, in print, oil, watercolour and photography. Wordsworth's and Ruskin's opposition to the proximity of the railway made Furness a national cause, and accurate surveys, some made by architects, followed. Archaeological excavations were begun in 1896, and the site was placed in the hands of the Office of Works in 1923. The first guidebook did not appear until 1943, photogrammetry in the 1980s and computer modelling in 1988.

"In the Land of a Million Smiles": Twentieth-Century America Discovers the Arkanasas Ozarks

HEMMED-IN HOLLER HAS LONG BEEN a popular attraction for Ozark travelers. Today its rugged beauty and isolation attract hikers and awe canoeists floating on the swift upper reaches of the Buffalo River. Hemmed-in Holler was especially appealing to writers who the Ozarks after World War I and whose preconceptions of Ozark people seemed to be satisfied by Holler dwellers. Perhaps no other community in the Arkansas Ozarks-a region that appeared staggeringly remote to most Americans-was as isolated and removed from the forces of modernization as Hemmed-in Holler. One observer described the exotic terrain in 1935: [were] no roads into the holler. One usually enter[ed] it, afoot, fording the river from one to a dozen times, following a mountainside trail steep enough to become discouraging to a mountain goat.1 This Newton County hollow was home to a community as isolated and anachronistic as any the United States had to offer in the middle of the twentieth century. When Charles Morrow Wilson, a Fayetteville native and freelance journalist, visited the Holler in the midst of the Great Depression, he found twenty-two families living lives similar to those of their ancestors a hundred years earlier. There were no automobiles, radios, or telephones; no electricity or indoor plumbing; no doctors, teachers, or even preachers. Although the Buffalo River bottoms were fertile, the difficulty of transportation allowed only subsistence farming. Most raised their own tobacco, and the women continued to spin and weave wool cloth and make the families' clothes. Cash incomes-estimated at only $60 a year per family-depended upon by-products and incidental crops such as wool, honey, sorghum molasses, cow hides, chickens, eggs, furs, and herbs. The residents of Hemmed-in Holler, their names outstandingly English, could, according to Wilson, swap talk and break bread with farmers of Chaucer's England, and suffer few misunderstandings.2 Hemmed-in Holler was an anomaly on the eve of World War II, an anachronistic, quaint model of a region as it had existed half a century earlier. Yet for all its uniqueness-in the Holler were no cotton tenants, apple orchards, or broiler houses-Hemmed-in Holler matches the Ozark image that developed after 1930. The Holler and other remote communities scattered across the region satisfied the demands of that image so well, in fact, that one must presume they served as the model for the popular Ozark portrait. Not surprisingly, writers and tourism promoters discovered the region and its Hemmed-in Hollers just as the quaint relics of frontier existence-the diverting and picturesque qualities so appealing to nostalgic urban Americans-were fading from the scene, rendered obsolete by the modernizing forces of government intervention and technology. As historian Janet Allured comments in her study of women and family life in the Ozarks: Though many outsiders were loathe to admit it, not everyone was poor, few families kept a still at the spring house, even fewer women smoked a corn-cob pipe, and not every person was superstitious.3 Thus, the image of the Arkansas Ozarks formed during the depression-of log cabin homesteads inhabited by broad-brimmed hat-wearing, barefooted moonshiners and wrinkled women weaving homespun-was based on nostalgia and whimsy, and it was supported only briefly by a select cadre of remote twentieth-century families living almost wholly lives of the nineteenth century. By most standards, life in the Arkansas Ozarks before World War II would have been isolated and difficult, but the isolation and harshness were relative and in most areas decreased in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Isolation and accessibility, like agricultural practices, differed from subregion to subregion and community to community within the Ozarks. Two archaeological studies reveal these contrasts. Artifacts at the Moser site northwest of Lowell in Benton County dispute the backward image and indicate that by the late nineteenth century the people were integrated through a flow of information and goods that connected the site to the community, the region, and beyond. …

Book and verse: a guide to Middle English biblical literature

Exploding the myth that the was largely unknown to medieval lay folk, Book and Verse presents the first comprehensive catalog of Middle English biblical literature: a body of work that, because of its accessibility and familiarity, was the primary biblical resource of the English Middle Ages. The medieval Bible, much like the today, consists in practical terms not of a set of texts within a canon but of those stories which, because of a combination of liturgical significance and picturesque qualities, form a provisional in the imagination. As James Morey explains in his introduction, although the Latin was not accessible to the average English-speaker, paraphrases - systematic appropriation and refashioning of biblical texts - served as a medium through which the was promulgated in the vernacular. This explains why biblical allusions, models, and large-scale appropriations of biblical narrative pervade nearly every medieval genre. Book and Verse is an indispensable guide to the variety and extent of biblical literature in England, exclusive of drama and the Wycliffite Bible, that appeared between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Entries provide detailed information on how much of what parts of the appear in Middle English and where this biblical material can be found. Comprehensive indexing by name, keyword, and biblical verse allows a researcher to find, for example, all the occurrences of the Flood Story or of the encounter between Elijah and the Widow of Sarephta. An invaluable resource, Book and Verse provides the first easy access to the popular Bible assembled before and after John Wyclif's translation of the Vulgate into English.

Is Tourism Governing Conservation in Historic Towns?

Tourism has become a significant economic activity for many historic towns. Not only the wealth of history, but also the picturesque qualities and the accessible human scale of these places appeal to visitors. Increasingly, conservation attitudes in historic towns and quarters are responding to the new demands placed by the visitor and leisure economy, including an exaggerated attempt to keep everything as it is. There is a growing and noticeable emphasis on the exterior and ‘historic’ appearances of buildings in historic towns and places. This paper discusses the relationship between tourism and the externalist and historicist emphasis on conservation and development in historic towns.

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten (review)

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten By Jerry w. Cotten University of North Carolina Press, 1998 253 pp. Cloth, $37.50 The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill owns over 97,000 negatives of photographs taken by the Wootten-Moulton Studio, a New Bern-Chapel Hill photographic business in operation from 1906 until 1954. It also owns 260 original exhibition prints taken by Bayard Wootten (1875-1959). This is a treasure trove of material. Jerry W. Cotten's Light and Air examines the career of Bayard Wootten within the broader history of twentieth-century photography and reproduces a selection of 136 photographs, mostly from the 1930s. These are images of the South: landscapes, wooden cabins, a plantation house, but mostly black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society. Have we seen their faces before? Some were published as illustrations for books, notably Muriel Earley Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (1935), Charles Morrow Wilson's Backwoods America (1934), and Olive Tilford Dargan's From My Highest Hill: Carolina's Mountain Folks (1941). The photos collected by Cotten are both similar to and different from the better-known Depression-era photos: those, for example, of African Americans in Charleston and Appalachian mountaineers taken by Doris Ulmann, those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, or those of Margaret Bourke-White in Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Each of these photographers is associated with the straight or realistic and documentary movement in photography. Wootten, a decade or two older, was a dedicated pictorialist, part of an earlier movement in which photographers aimed to create images that rivaled the form of painting, making use of mood, studied compositions (sometimes posed or contrived), a tendency to favor or sentimental subjects, and an emphasis on atmospheric effects (hence the Light and Air title). Cotten makes astute comparisons between the work of the and Wootten's slightly softer, gentler images. But the distinction between the two approaches is not always as sharp to the reader. The selection of subject matter is crucial, and the choices were often remarkably similar; those of the realists sometimes seemed to deliberately convey images of dire poverty. Born in New Bern, the daughter of a photographer (who died when she was five) and a mother with an artistic bent, Wootten became interested in photography around 1904. Driven by financial need, she set up her own business, a bold move for a woman of her generation. Her half-brother, George C. Moulton, soon joined her and handled much of the routine photography that kept them afloat financially. Early on, Wootten established a contact with the military at Fort Bragg, doing portraits and job work, and in 1928 she and Moulton moved to Chapel Hill to do similar work for the University of North Carolina. (Many of those 97,000 negatives at the North Carolina Collection represent the bread-and-butter business that sustained them.) As early as 1910 Wootten exhibited at a meeting of the Photographic Association of America. She remained a member of its Women's Federation and kept in touch with the Pictorial Photographers of America until that organization's demise around 1920. A few years later Wootten visited the Appalachian School (now Penland) in the mountains of western North Carolina, a school run by her cousin Lucy Morgan with the aim of reviving rural handicrafts as a basis for fireside industries. Wootten took pictures for the school's catalog and in turn grew to love the region and its people. Her first national recognition came in 1932 when she exhibited forty prints of landscapes and portraits at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston. The Boston papers, as well as the Charlotte Observer, praised the natural and picturesque quality of her studies of mountain people. …

La perception romantique de la Castille à travers le récit de voyage de Théophile Gautier

Romantic perception of Castile through account of Théophile Gautier 's travel. — Since 17th century, the representations of Spain in Europe had depended on the perception of Castile by foreign travellers. Théophile Gautier is the romantic writer who best understood this country, outside the Pyrenean mountains. He knew how to find a balance between his romantic exaltation and his intention to bear witness to the regions of Spain through which he had travelled. In his account, Voyage en Espagne (1843), the author analyses the picturesque qualities of the places seen by Théophile Gautier, and compares his descriptions of the landscapes of Castile with the reality of the terrain.

A Selection of Letters from Déodat de Séverac

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the life and piano works of Deodat de Severac (1872-1921), a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, widely honored in his lifetime but consigned almost to oblivion some forty years after his death. In the quarter century since I embarked on my efforts to bring him some of the recognition that was his due, two complete series of recordings of his entire piano oeuvre have been released; an Association of Friends of Deodat de Severac has been established; a new biography is in the works; an earlier one by Joseph Canteloube, never before published, will soon be in print. For the last few years, his home town, St. Felix, has been the site of summer chamber music festivals; and soon, his birthplace will become a museum of memorabilia of the composer and his friends. De Severac produced a corpus of piano works that reveal his deep love of the countryside in southwestern France, near Spain. These pieces bear titles similar to those of Albeniz, whose assistant he was for a few years at the Schola Cantorum, the school established in Paris in 1890 by Charles Bordes (1863-1909) and Vincent d'Indy (1851-1931). They also contain some of the color and picturesque quality of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. But one hardly acquired fame through the composition of piano pieces, and like every other musician at the beginning of the century, Severac recognized that to attain any kind of eminence would require the composition of at least one opera for Paris. He wrote not one but two in that genre: Le Coeur du moulin, produced in 1909 at the Opera-Comique and Heliogabale, performed at the arena in Beziers in 1910. In 1907, as a new graduate of the Schola, Severac entered the mainstream of music and musicians in Paris and apparently was promised a performance of Le Coeur du moulin, an event that did not occur until two years later. After the successful outdoor performance of Heliogabale - fifteen thousand crowded into the arena to hear the opera - the French cellist and conductor Louis Hasselmans (1878-1957) determined to present a concert version at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, using several of the Cobla players from Ceret (another town in the south of France, where Severac. lived for a time) to give the work an authentic folkloric air. Severac's works met with considerable success and for a time he joined the ranks of celebrated musicians of his day. But he was not happy. More and more Severac sought the peaceful surroundings of his native village, St. Felix. A generous, jovial man, he preferred the tranquillity of Languedoc to the bustle of Paris, and he soon settled permanently in Ceret surrounded by a group of artists that included Picasso, Frank Haviland, Stuart Merrill, Aristide Maillol, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Andre Salmon, Max Jacob, and the Greek expatriot Moreas. Several of them established residence in the town, which, for a time became known as the Mecca of Cubism. Later Severac began dividing his time between St. Felix and Ceret. Like many young composers, Severac was concerned with obtaining appropriate performances of his works. How do I get a performance? he asked himself. How do I get the best singers I need? What kind of involvements do these artists have that might prevent their participation in my work? Who can advise me? For answers to these questions, Severac sought the advice of his teacher and friend Charles Bordes. Paul Poujaud, a lawyer who was a close friend of Debussy, also made himself available to the young man for suggestions and assistance. Moreas, (the pseudonym of Iannis Pappadiamantopoulos, 1856-1910), the first writer to use the designation Symbolist, became another confidant. He and the critic Pierre Lalo (1866-1943) are among the correspondents to whom Severac wrote during 1906 to 1911. I recently acquired several of his letters at auction, and I thought they might interest readers. …

A Picturesque Stroll around "Clara-Clara"

Smithson went to see Shift, Serra tells us, spoke of its picturesque quality, and I wasn't sure what he was talking about (p. 181).' This incomprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to early definitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymological origin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorial is one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from his sculpture. In speaking of his first Prop Pieces, he criticizes them for retaining pictorial concerns (the use of the wall as background), since such a reminder detracts from their meaning (which is prescribed by the way they are made) (p. 142). In speaking of the numerous works created by laying out materials on the floor, works that appeared in the late 1960s as a criticism of minimalism, in which he himself had participated, Serra severely judges their debt to painting in this respect: Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture to be viewed pictorially that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane. It is no coincidence that most earth works are photographed from the air (p. 16). Which takes us back to Smithson: What most people know of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example, is an image shot from a helicopter. When you actually see the work, it has none of that purely graphic character. ... But if you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph ... [y]ou're denying the temporal experience of the work. You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the (p. 170). Far be it from Serra, of course, to suggest that Smithson had approved such a reduction of his work to the plani-

森林の風致的施業に関する研究 (I)

Studies or thoughts on the management of an ‘aesthetic forest’ have so far been characterized by their having two weak points. 1) They have tried to set up purely conceptual models for aesthetic forests with little regard to the actual transactions between a man and a forest. This has mainly caused the tendency to limit the amenity of a forest only to its visual or picturesque quality. 2) Their principles as to timber crop in an aesthetic forest have been polarized into two extremes. On the one hand, the production of timber is justified under a preposition that the felling program should be perfectly in accord with the beauty of the forest. On the other hand, the ideal objective of an aesthetic forest is a preserved forest in which any felling is forbidden.We believe that the crop of timber should be taken into account even in an aesthetic forest, but the landscape design should not be restricted by a forest management system which only regulates a timber yield. The Method of Control will be the most effective solution for this specific requirement. Through the application of the method, real freedom of design for forest amenity can be assured. We developed a technique of design upon an assumption that we can apply the Method of Control for a forest for amenity.

The Siting of Classical Greek Temples

FROM THE eighteenth century to the present day an inevitable Romantic essence has clung about Greek temples. It is a Romanticism of distant time, of the very nature of the sites where the ruins stand, and of the picturesque quality of the ruins themselves. No one rounding the high promontory of Sunium escapes the Byronic touch as the wind-scoured columns gleam above the cliff; the temples of Poseidonia bulk solidly on the flat plain which skirts the bay of Salerno; Bassae traces a contrastingly ordered colonnade against the savage hills of Arcadia and from far off the Parthenon crowns the steep rock which rises out of sprawling modern Athens. It takes an effort to look past these visual experiences and only with much research and no little uncertainty can we restore things as they were when the Greeks created them. Not until this has been done, however, and some picture built up with the aid of painful archaeological piecingtogether can we speculate on the Greek approach to the work. It is all too easy to invent a subjective interpretation and all too hard to interpret facts the right way. I do not propose here to advance much in the way of new theory, nor to cover the field with any degree of thoroughness. I hope only to suggest some observations which should be kept in mind in the course of more thorough study. We must first of all think of a temple as a shrine rather than as a place of worship in the usually accepted sense; sacrifices to the gods were made on the altar which lay in front of the temple. The building itself was thought of as the House of the God, a shelter for the cult statue, and with an anthropomorphic concept of deity this is inevitable. But the house association is no ordinary one. We can trace it back to the concept of the house of the chief, the Great One, belonging to the remote ages when northern tribes came into Greece in the beginning of the second millenium before Christ.

Of Democracy in America

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth.”So concludes the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Such a statement appearing in 1945 would, except perhaps for the view that the two countries “tend towards the same end,” be truistic. Even the journalists would understand and accept it. It appeared in 1835. To most Europeans of that day, the United States was a crude and bumptious little nation on the western fringes of the world, just as Russia was the half-Oriental, half-feudal state which was not so much a power as a vast expanse of inhospitable steppes. At a time when English travelers were frequently aware only of the vulgarity of American manners, and when some European visitors to this country were most impressed with its picturesque qualities, Tocqueville was much more concerned with the basic nature and with the future of the complex combination of laws, customs, and mores which were embraced within his inclusive conception of democracy. He came here, not to give slightly condescending lectures and to bolster his own feeling of superiority, but rather to observe and report on the operation of a principle of political and social organization. Partly because he had an inquiring mind and was willing to work hard at his self-imposed task, but largely because he was gifted with rare insight and was not prevented from seeing the trend of events by the surface happenings of his own time, his book on the nature of American institutions remains, after more than a century, one of the few invaluable books on that subject.

Northern Africa in André Gide's Writings

Fundamental characteristics of André Gide are his acute sense of the diversity of man and nature and his fervent desire to apprehend the infinitely varied manifestations of life which seem to him the essence of reality. Nowhere in his writings are these chracteristics more readily perceived than in the works inspired by his contact with the land and peoples of Northern Africa. For Jean Hytier, however, author of an excellent analysis of Gide's art, the sincerity and force of the writer's sympathy with diversity explain a certain lack of provocative, picturesque qualities in his African exoticism; indeed, thinks this critic, “Gide a . . . renouvelé l'exotisme en l‘éliminant, à force d'adhérer de tout son cœur, et sans faire la petite bouche, sans discriminations qui rétablissent l‘étrangeté, avec précisément une volonté, ou plutôt un don, de ne pas rester étranger.”