It has not escaped the notice of students of Storm's novelistic art that many of his Novellen employ the device known as the “frame,” nor have explanations been lacking as to its purpose. Most attention has not unnaturally been paid to the frames of the stories laid in the comparatively distant past—the so-called “Chroniknovellen” and the Schimmelreiler. The first systematic investigation of the use of the frame by Storm and his contemporaries is the study by Hans Bracher, Rahmen-erzahlung und Verwandtes bei G. Keller, C. F. Meyer und Th. Storm (Leipzig, 1909). This monograph examines the problem chiefly from the standpoint of the kind of frame encountered in these writers and the technical uses to which it is put. The question of the inner necessity of the frame is left largely unanswered, a fact of which Bracher himself is well aware. Georg Baesecke in a review of the book by H. Eichentopf, Th. St.s Erzdhlungskunst—in Zeitschrift f. deut. Philologie, XLI (1909), 520–531—has advanced the interesting theory that the frame is for Storm a means of freeing his hand and his conscience; the ego thereby shoves the responsibility for the truth of the epic material upon a third person. Baesecke arrives at this point of view by proceeding on the assumption that Storm's novelistic art grew out of his lyrical art, as the poet himself indeed asserted, though it has never been satisfactorily explained just what he meant by this dictum. Baesecke implies that in the lyrical production the ego is free to speak in its own right out of actual experience. That part of Thérèse Rockenbach's study which has been available to me, Th. St.s Chroniknovellen (Diss., Braunschweig, 1916), hardly throws new light on the “why” of the Stormian frame, though the author calls attention to interesting parallels between Storm's technique and that of others, especially Brentano, Stifter, and Raabe. Walter Brecht—“Storm und die Geschichte,” Deut. Vierteljahrss., iii (1925), 444–462—remarks that the difference between Storm's frames and those of other writers lies not so much in the technique itself as in the “Flut von Stim-mung, die in dem meist unausgesprochenen Nebeneinander in Rahmen und Erzählung steigt.” Storm's central concern, Brecht feels, is the “relation between Then and Now.” The gap between the past and the present is nothing less than the gap between life and death, which is itself a “mysterious connection.” In the frame, which is the instrument by means of which Storm “perspectively elongates” the present into the past, this relationship becomes particularly evident. Franz Stuckert, in his excellent article, “Th. St.s novellistische Form”—Germ.-Roman. Monatss., 27. Jhg. (1939), 24–39—seeks the origins of Storm's narrative art in the oral tradition of storytelling and finds that the frame fulfills for the poet an inner need by creating a situation analogous to that of audience and story-teller.

Joyce was born in a musical city, Dublin. His childhood was filled with music. As a young man he entered a competition in the Irish festival of music, and if he had not refused to sing at sight would probably have won it. Had he done so, his future career would have been more likely that of a concert tenor than a writer. Throughout his life vocal music was his great pleasure and consolation.1 No sensitive reader of Ulysses has failed to appreciate the way Joyce not only uses the sound of words for musical effects, but also employs musical devices in constructing his novel.2 Snatches from songs are woven into the text. Richard M. Kain writes:

In the few poems that Clough wrote during his student days at Oxford one can see signs of a growing perplexity and anxiety with regard to certain problems of life and religion. This perplexity came to a head during the years that he taught at Oriel, and finally led him to resign his fellowship at that College. This resignation may be said to be the most dramatic and significant action of his life, and the story, told many times by his biographers, can now be told more fully in the light of the unpublished correspondence between him and Dr. Hawkins, the then Provost of Oriel College. Nor has sufficient attention been so far given to the circumstances that led to Clough's subsequent appointment as Principal of University Hall, London, and the manner in which his connection with that institution came to an end. It is proposed in the following pages to throw some light also on this important period of the poet's life.

It is a problem in literary criticism to know how to use the growing store of material discovered by historical research. This is only the practical aspect of a larger, theoretical problem: the relation between a written work and the biographical experiences of the writer. It has never been doubted that a poet's experiences, public and private, historical and psychological, reappear, distorted, refined, generalized, reordered, in his poetry. Hence it follows that the reconstruction of the poet's experiences from diaries, letters, accounts of friends, and public records, may illuminate his poetry. But the converse of this proposition is also assumed to be true: if the biographical experience illuminates the poetry, the poetry must also illuminate the biographical experience. The poem, in other words, is an autobiographical document.

Although Stefan George's unyielding protest against the contemporary theatre lasted from the time of his graduation from the Ludwig-Georg Gymnasium in Darmstadt (1888) until his death, his hopes for its reform and his gradual disillusionment are generally little known, since his sphere of influence was restricted to the realm of lyrical poetry. This limitation was apparently both natural and logical for George, whose peculiar genius was that of the lyricist. But it was not entirely voluntary at first, for in his formative years he had been fascinated by the world of the theatre.

THE American Council of Learned Societies and the Modern Language Association of America conducted a joint survey of personnel in the modern language field during the summer of 1950. The survey was an experimental effort to obtain quantitative information on the characteristics of specialists in the field, and was intended to disclose the practicability of the method as well as to furnish the needed information. Members' response to the inquiry was very good, and the tabulated returns accounted for 48 percent of the membership. Details of the questionnaire and processing procedure are appended. The following represents the results of our first effort to obtain information of this kind in one of the humanistic disciplines.

Tennyson once remarked that he had been nearer thirty than twenty before he was anything of an artist, and his 1842 poems, which were his first mature publication, pre-eminently reflect an assiduous artistic novitiate. They have also been alleged to show how early he began that feeble self-adjustment to public taste which supposedly undermined his genius. Since they did appeal more directly than their predecessors of 1830 and 1832 to the prepossessions of the middle-class reader, and since they were produced during the years when he was supposedly kept silent by critical hostility, the disinterestedness of the 1842 volumes can plausibly be suspected. Yet important though it is to know how far this charge is justified, no adequate enquiry has as yet been made into the influence exerted on them by the reviews, for the statistics which must be thoroughly sifted before any reliable verdict can be reached have been over-simplified in the only two detailed enquiries which have as yet been published.3

Pope's debt to Dryden, which is at once immense and unmistakable' has tended to obscure his relation to earlier English satirists. But since in the Imitations of Horace and the Moral Essays he was practising a genre untouched by Dryden—satura, the formal verse satire without a plot—it is reasonable to suppose that Pope owed something to other English satirists. There is evidence that he regarded himself as having a place in an English tradition of formal verse satire. When he came on a copy of Hall's Satires late in life, “he wished that he had seen them sooner”; and according to Warburton he intended to imitate “two or three” of Hall's satires. He was interested in Rochester and Oldham. He read, of course, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion; Young's “characteristical Satires” were no doubt partly responsible for turning his own thoughts in the direction of epistolary satire.

It is often detrimental to the proper understanding of a poet when his most strenuous years of intellectual exploration happen to be the least well documented, and particularly so when that poet, in despair over the lack of recognition accorded him by his contemporaries, makes his appeal over their heads directly to the judgement of posterity; and yet even if Paul Ernst, “like Sir Candy Rackrent in the tale”, had survived his own wake and overheard the judgement of posterity, or even if he had suspected that the succeeding generation of critics, trained in the arts of psychological dissection, would take exaggerated interest in his mental processes rather than in his ultimate poetic assertions, it is doubtful whether he would have willed it otherwise. For indeed one of the more conspicuous results of the greatest crisis in his own life and thought —between, let us say, 1897 and 1900—was a strong aversion to the application of any kind of psychological analysis to matters of literature.

In beginning a discussion of the structure of Rasselas one need not spend much time clearing the ground of previous arguments before advancing one's own. What the new commentator must face—and this is perhaps more disturbing than arguments would be—is the almost universal opinion that Rasselas has only the slightest structure and that the little it does have results from Johnson's not too successful effort to write an ordinary novel or “oriental tale.” The narrative is “episodic,” unimportant, dull, say some critics; the ending concludes nothing, the work merely stops. The action—and some of the characters —say others, lack dramatic power. At the same time that they thus observe, either directly or indirectly, the tale's failure to conform to their notions of what the structure should be, most commentators recognize a fundamental difference between Johnson's piece and those works in the light of which they attempt to judge Rasselas. Wishing to make the difference clear and to do justice to what they feel is a manifest accomplishment, they praise the wisdom set forth in the book and the skill and power displayed in individual chapters.

Pushkin summarized Measure for Measure in Angelo (1833), a partly dramatic, partly narrative poem of 535 lines. He considered Angelo his best work, but critics have slighted it. Russian commentators on Pushkin have perhaps been discouraged from paying more attention to Angelo because it is not an original, independent work. Even Vissarion Bielinsky, otherwise a very attentive critic of Pushkin, dismissed Angelo cursorily. There are numerous studies of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin. These have concentrated on Boris Godunov and a few of the shorter plays, and neglected Angelo. This lack of attention is strange, because Angelo, in addition to being a fine example of the art of condensation, is a piece of Shakespearean criticism by one of the world's greatest poets, who had a very good knowledge of Shakespeare. The poem reveals what Pushkin liked in a play by Shakespeare and what he preferred to change. Its value may be all the greater because its criticism is not expressed in general, abstract terms. Besides the indirect comment in Angelo we have a fragment of Pushkin's formal opinion on Measure for Measure. In 1834 he wrote on the character of Angelo in a further development of his earlier views on Shakespeare's characterization in general:

Criticism of Henry James in our time is verging into metaphysics. The late works have recently been analyzed in terms of “dialectic” and “myth”,1 as products of Swedenborgianism,2 and as an artistic objectification of William James' philosophical pragmatism.3 Despite great individual differences these three approaches hold in common the basic assumption that James' inner and final meaning has not yet been as-certained and the corollary assumption that this final meaning is perhaps expressed symbolically, by technique, rather than overtly by subject matter.4 In this climate of opinion James is conceived of as a kind of nineteenth-century Dante, the architect of a secular Divine Comedy for some later-day equivalent of scholasticism, and the legendary “late manner”, once considered merely idiosyncratic, is thought to be an elaborate structure which metaphorically expresses a coherent system of values. The critical problems are, first, to find James' Aquinas, or the rationale for the body of ideas on which the late works constitute a metaphor, and, second, to define the relationship between this logical statement and James' symbolic one.

It has long been known that the journals of George Ticknor contain a most interesting series of impressions of the later Wordsworth, gathered during Ticknor's two visits to Europe in 1819 and 1835–38. Ticknor's description of the aging poet, his family and friends, his way of life, his poetry, and his opinions, while it is certainly not blindly adulatory, serves as an agreeable antidote to the rather astringent and far more widely known description by another travelling American, Emerson. The relations between Ticknor and Wordsworth are of interest not only to students of the two men individually, but also to anyone who is curious about the literary connections between the two cultures, for “the friendly daily intercourse of Wordsworth and Ticknor, a prominent and influential man of letters in America, was undoubtedly also a means of promoting in this country an interest in the poet and his work.”

“Voltaire'S tales,” asserts Norman L. Torrey, “have a way . . . of summing up certain periods of his existence and certain problems with which he was then faced” (Spirit of Voltaire, New York, 1938, p. 50). In the case of Candide, the period was the decade of the fifties; the central problem, that of human conduct in relation to the somber mystery of physical and social evil. And it is an eloquent testimony to the distinctiveness and realism of its content that, viewed as a whole, Candide pursues a course of intellectual argument which parallels the evolution of Voltaire's cultural attitude during that decade—a decade wherein the most illustrious personality of a highly optimistic age irrevocably abandoned the relative complacency of his earlier years, inclined toward pessimism, and finally won through to a melioristic affirmation.

Racine is generally conceded to have observed more closely than - any of his contemporaries the basic elements of the classic framework, the three unities. And in a sense, any tragic structure of Racine's reveals a number of constants: there are five acts, composed of scenes “linked” in various ways, the bienséances rule supreme, the unities are maintained. The playwright himself readily discussed, in the polemics he thinly disguised as prefaces, such structural matters as characterization and the modification of sources. A tendency, then, to dismiss Racinian structure as highly stylized, and to accept the often disingenuous revelations of the prefaces may have prevented critics from probing deeply into Racine's ordering of his materials. This deeper probing would require, I believe, our going beyond the mere constatation of various structural devices to seek out their broader implications for Racinian tragedy. Such an examination would have value even if it did no more than reveal more explicitly something one has always vaguely felt: that Racine's unity transcends the conventional unities, that the harmony of all the elements in his works, their essential fusion, is the source of their power.