The yellow nineties have always been regarded as fascinating yet also as something of a literary liability, a movement that took more from the world than it gave in return. And yet, although Art for Art may have rested in the “splendid isolation” of individual emotions, as it often did, for instance, in the poems of Arthur Symons, it was, in its debt to the French Symbolists, to Gautier, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, to the perfectionists like Flaubert, and in its over-all aspects to Baudelaire, truly international. There had been, of course, foreign influence on the Victorians, but never had there been such complete sympathy of interests as that which now bound the two intellectual groups facing each other across the water. Cultural barriers changed into cultural bridges, the fear of mal de mer was conquered, and the Channel was crossed and recrossed. London became a Quartier of Paris; Dowson and Wilde walked the streets dressed à la Bohème, the Beardsley group liked to think of themselves as habitués of the Café Royal, and Verlaine found an audience more rapt than that of the brasseries in the Boul. Mich. There was a new union of forces. The powerful influences of France can be traced nowhere better than in the life story of the Savoy, which, in its brief spurt of brilliant life in 1896, was more truly representative of the time than the Yellow Book. It would not be rash to call the Savoy an Anglo-French periodical, and in this, certainly, the first of its kind.

Howards End can be termed a metaphysical novel for the good reason that it is concerned with metaphysical problems. These are implicit in the clash of motive and purpose that directs the novel's action; they present themselves in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the action's meaning. The principles at variance here are in themselves metaphysical opposites—the real and the ideal, the tangible and the intangible, the body and the soul, the many and the one—and they all have reference to a single overwhelming question: wherein lies the reality of experience? Does it consist in the inner life of personal relations, as Helen Schlegel declares? Or is it to be sought in the outer world of practical affairs, as her sister Margaret comes to maintain? How, in any case, is it to be known: through the agency of the flesh or of the spirit? And once known, how is knowledge of it to be preserved in a world where permanence and stability are conditioned by time and change? The answer, a single one, is implied in the words “only connect” that stand on the novel's title page. What must be connected, to state the matter in so many words, is the inner life of intellect and spirit, and the outer life of the physical and the sensory. These, the conflicting halves of experience, must be reconciled, for—and this is the burden of all Forster's work—because they are halves they are mutually dependent, and one without the other cannot adequately endure. The intellect and the spirit are dependent for their very embodiment on the physical and the sensory, faculties which they in turn altogether transfigure when the halves are fused. The contradictory elements that are inherent in the duality of body and soul are reconciled when the duality itself is resolved. The result is the comprehensive and harmonious vision of experience wherein the earthly partakes of the eternal, the particular testifies to the universal, and multiplicity becomes but another attribute of the one. The partial view gives way before a vision of the whole, and the paradoxical quality of experience takes on another dimension as one comes to discern the reality behind the appearance, the substance beneath the accidents.

Karel Čapek's novel Hordubal is the first part of a trilogy which embodies a definition of human individuality and of the relation of the individual to the social order. As René Wellek has observed, the trilogy “centers around problems of truth and reality and constitutes one of the most successful attempts at a philosophical novel in any language.”

In recent years, critical attention has focussed increasingly on The Princess Casamassima, Henry James's novel of the international revolutionary movement seething beneath the surface of society. The sad wisdom of the mid-twentieth century no longer finds incredible the plot earlier critics dismissed as footling melodrama; and with a recognition of its probability, students of James have undertaken a re-examination of the whole novel. Oddly enough, however, little attention has been paid to its reliance on Roderick Hudson, where the Princess Casamassima first appears. The one significant exception has been a short essay by Louise Bogan, though Christina's complexity and interest have attracted other writers. Yet Roderick Hudson deserves study for its own merits; and, as Miss Bogan has pointed out, the character of the Princess is difficult to interpret unless one also remembers her as Christina Light. It is not true, as Miss Bogan asserts (p. 472), that Christina is “the only figure [James] ever ‘revived’ and carried from one book to another,” for not only do Madame Grandoni and the Prince Casamassima share her transposition; the sculptor Gloriani, who makes his debut in Roderick Hudson, reappears in The Ambassadors. But it is true, as Cargill more accurately points out (p. 108), that “Christina is the only major [italics mine] character that James ever revived from an earlier work,” for he questioned the wisdom of indulging wholesale the writer's “revivalist impulse” to “go on with a character.” Hence Christina Light must have struck him as a very special case. He tells us that he felt, “toward the end of ‘Roderick,‘ that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated” (AN, p. 18). In the Preface to The Princess Casamassima he continues this train of thought: Christina Light, “extremely disponible” and knowing herself “striking, in the earlier connexion,… couldn't resign herself not to strike again” (AN, pp. 73, 74).

The retirement to Rye, which occurred in 1897, when James was fifty-four, distinguished between his life of experience and his life from ‘past accumulations’ (as he once called it). His peregrinations over, he set himself, masterwise, to producing a world compact of all he had been able, coherently, to think and feel.“ Despite the fact that The Ambassadors is one of the most original of all James's productions, no novel is so much the result of all his ”past accumulations“ as this one.

Hermann Broch was already in his forties when his first novel, part of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, appeared in 1931.1 One continuing result of the prominence which this work brought to Broch has been an almost complete neglect of his few earlier writings. Thus, Erich Kahler in his introductory remarks in the Gesammelte Werke merely indicates: “Die Anfange seiner Dichtung—Novellen und Gedichte—reichen … bis in die Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs zurück” (Gedichte, 1953, p. 8). He omits Broch's earliest published poem, Mathematisches Mysterium (1913) from his selection of poetry. The two volumes of essays of the collected works, Dichten und Erkennen, and Erkennen und Handeln, edited by Hannah Arendt (1955) also contain no writings prior to Die Schlafwandler. The volume of Briefe, edited by Robert Pick (1957), perhaps because of lack of material, follows this pattern, going back only to 1929.

This selected list, compiled primarily for members of the Association, omits prize contests and a number of purely literary fellowships. For larger, more inclusive lists, see A Handbook on International Study (New York: The Institute of International Education, $3.00), Lovejoy—Jones College Scholarship Guide (Milton, Mass.: Theodore S. Jones, 1956), Study Abroad, Vol. xi (UNESCO), and Scholarships, Fellowships and Loans (Boston: Bellman Pub. Co.). See also the article by S. F. Johnson, “Honors and Prizes in the MLA Field,” PMLA, lxvii (Feb. 1952), 37–58.

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.

In a recent article, Claude Mauriac remarks pertinently, “On a voulu expliquer En Attendant Godot par un improbable jeu de mots: God ne signifie-t-il pas Dieu en anglais? Façon de rendre moins inquiétante cette pièce aussi peu rassurante que les autres oeuvres de Beckett.” Although M. Mauriac may be brushing aside rather too quickly a play on words that is perhaps not so improbable after all, he points perceptively in these lines to an inadequacy that mars a number of otherwise illuminating discussions of Beckett's controversial play. Critics, professional and amateur, have, in fact, often been overly concerned with the “message” of the drama, treating it, unconsciously perhaps, as a kind of thesis play and thereby, one might argue, casting implicit aspersions on its excellence as art. The reviewer for the London Times writes, for example, “… the message of Mr. Beckett as a novelist is perhaps a message of blank despair. The message of Waiting for Godot is perhaps something nearer a message of religious consolation … Waiting for Godot—one might sum up these remarks—is thus a modern morality play on permanent Christian themes.”

An art critic in defining recently the special quality of an artist built up on Aristotle when he said, “The difference between an animal and a plant is that the animal throws off its young while the plant simply grows new buds upon the same stalk. The artist is an animal, not a plant.” One of the central themes of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, is the peculiar need of the artist to eject the product of his creation. The act is life-giving, intimate, and personal, yet at the same time free and objective.

Les trois points de vue qui seront successivement adoptés peuvent être considérés comme dérivés des trois mots du titre de la pièce. L'examen de la mythologie est dicté par le mot “Godot.” En attendant Godot, les personnages parlent; nous examinerons le statut de leur langage. Les résultats négatifs obtenus au cours de ces deux premières démarches dévoilent ce qui reste positif dans le sens de la pièce: l'attente. Les numéros entre parenthèses dans la suite de Particle renvoient aux pages de En attendant Godot (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952).

The fact that the term “criticism” has now come to designate all commentary on textual meaning reflects a general acceptance of the doctrine that description and evaluation are inseparable in literary study. In any serious confrontation of literature it would be futile, of course, to attempt a rigorous banishment of all evaluative judgment, but this fact does not give us the license to misunderstand or misinterpret our texts. It does not entitle us to use the text as the basis for an exercise in “creativity” or to submit as serious textual commentary a disguised argument for a particular ethical, cultural, or aesthetic viewpoint. Nor is criticism's chief concern—the present relevance of a text—a strictly necessary aspect of textual commentary. That same kind of theory which argues the inseparability of description and evaluation also argues that a text's meaning is simply its meaning “to us, today.” Both kinds of argument support the idea that interpretation is criticism and vice versa. But there is clearly a sense in which we can neither evaluate a text nor determine what it means “to us, today” until we have correctly apprehended what it means. Understanding (and therefore interpretation, in the strict sense of the word) is both logically and psychologically prior to what is generally called criticism. It is true that this distinction between understanding and evaluation cannot always show itself in the finished work of criticism—nor, perhaps, should it—but a general grasp and acceptance of the distinction might help correct some of the most serious faults of current criticism (its subjectivism and relativism) and might even make it plausible to think of literary study as a corporate enterprise and a progressive discipline.