The general election of 1831, part of the high tide of Reform feeling, swept many new men into the last un-Reformed Parliament, among them Edward Bulwer. Bulwer, later Bulwer-Lytton, for whom the first flush of literary success had become a more or less permanent roseate glow of popularity, had determined to make his mark as an MP as well as a novelist, and he became, in his own mind at least, the spokesman for literature in the House. As a political neophyte, he needed a cause and he found one in the theatre, whose wretched state was generally decried. In espousing its legal reform, Bulwer saw a means of advancing not only the cause of the drama but also his own political fortunes. On 31 May 1832, therefore, he presented a motion for the creation of a select committee to investigate the state of dramatic literature. He was not seeking information, for his speech showed him to be well-informed on theatrical matters. Neither was he impartial; his mind was clearly made up: he was anti-monopoly, anti-censorship, and pro-copyright. The committee was to make an “inquiry” into the decline of the drama, but under Bulwer's direction it was not to be a forum for airing the grievances of the patent theatres, whose “monopoly” was continually violated. Its purpose was to display to Parliament and to the country at large the inadequacies of the legal status quo. Although earlier attempts to form such a committee had been unsuccessful, Bulwer's motion was passed, and the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature was appointed with Bulwer as chairman.

In an undated and so far unedited letter, now in the Joyce Collection at Cornell University, James Joyce wrote from Trieste, then in Austria, to his brother Stanislaus sometime in the autumn of 1905: “When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.” About the same time, 1 September 1905, Joyce asked Stanislaus by card: “Is it not possible for a few persons of character and culture to make Dublin a capital such as Christiania has become?” Sometime in the next year, 1906, Joyce wrote again to Stanislaus, this time from Rome: “The interest I took in socialism has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites or disgusts me…. Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to : not as doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music.”

One of the finest of Poe's stories, “Ligeia” is perhaps the one in which Poe managed most successfully to give artistic expression to themes with which he wrestled in all of his major literary works. It therefore has a claim to being called the most typical and also the best. On several occasions Poe himself expressed the conviction that “Ligeia” was the best of his stories. He wrote to Edward Duyckinck, the publisher, that “ ‘Ligeia’ is undoubtedly the best story I have written,” and to Philip Pendleton Cooke, the writer, that “the loftiest kind [of tale] is that of the highest imagination—and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.” Poe's critics, also, have agreed. George E. Woodberry, one of the earliest and most reliable of them, says “Ligeia,” along with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” forms the “richest” of Poe's imaginative work, and marks “the highest reach of the romantic element” in his genius. Arthur H. Quinn classifies it as one of Poe's “masterpieces,” and D. H. Lawrence says it is Poe's “chief” story.

In confuting Schlegel's ideas on the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche said that he believed in an aesthetic audience and thought the single spectator to be the more capable, the more he was able to take the work of art as art, namely aesthetically. Some forty years thereafter modern drama felt called upon to awaken the spectator from his “illusionist period”—as if there had been any danger that, again in Nietzsche's words, the ideal spectator might rush onto the stage to free the God from his torment. Yet to prevent this once and for all seems to have been one of the foremost axioms of the Expressionist and kindred revolts of the first decade of this century.

No better “optical symbol” can be found for one aspect of Henry James than the photograph taken in 1906 showing him in top hat, cane and gloves in hand, bending slightly forward in the classic Daumier pose, taking in impressions of a painting. This is a portrait, however, not merely of the occasional James— the art critic, friend and befriender of painters, biographer of a sculptor—but also of the essential James—the master of the art of fiction. That his love of pictures and familiarity with the studio world were grist to his mill is evident in stories and novels such as “The Madonna of the Future” and The Tragic Muse in which his depiction of the artist and exploration of aesthetic questions are thematically central. Reflecting his experience of art less obviously but more significantly are the pictorial effects and art allusions permeating his fiction, both early and late. For though James was first and foremost a literary artist preoccupied with the problems of his own craft, his responsiveness to the visual arts was so keen, was so much an integral part of his consciousness, that it inevitably made itself felt in his literary technique. Clearly, a study of the pictorial aspects of his fiction is justified for the light it may cast on his method as well as on individual works.

The section of A Vision entitled “Dove or Swan” sets forth in brilliant prose a panorama of Western history that is almost without incoherence or irrelevance. Civilizations seem to rise and fall in nearly strict harmony with Yeats's wheels and gyres—and we suspect a yielding to what Henry Adams called the historian's most serious temptation: “if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.” But Yeats might retort with another romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” For, despite conflicting statements of intention, Yeats too was primarily committed to the task of illuminating universal experience. With many other poets of the last two centuries he turned to history for his material—even as historians often turned to poetry for their method. “Dove or Swan” was useful to him as an intermediate stage between the raw data of history and the dense symbolism of his poetry. But it is also important in itself as a typically romantic achievement: a vision of history as art.

Criticism of Henry James's controversial novel The Sacred Fount has tended rather insistently to take one of two interpretive directions. Since Edmund Wilson's famous essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” appeared in 1934 and made everyone more aware of the potential complexity of James's handling of the focus of narration, the perhaps more frequently encountered approach to the novel has been one which regards it, like The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, as principally another Jamesian experiment with a narrator of doubtful omniscience. The other approach, one still found in many treatments of the novel, tends rather to accept completely the narrator's version of events at Newmarch and looks for the meaning and significance of the work in his most obvious preoccupation during the weekend in which those events occur, the vampire theme of fulfillment and depletion in intense human relationships. Both approaches are valid. Indeed, one of the impressive aspects of the serious criticism of The Sacred Fount is that nearly all of the important attempts at analysis have been and remain true to some degree. Leon Edel, following and building on the hints of Wilson, has shown that the novel clearly is about “appearance and reality,” and R. P. Blackmur has pointed out the parabolic nature of the story and called attention to The Sacred Fount as the “nightmare nexus” in the Jamesian struggle “to portray the integrity of the artist and… the integrity of the self.” Even Rebecca West, in her witty dismissal of the book some years ago, was correct—more correct than she knew perhaps since she gives James no credit for a deliberate and skillfully manipulated irony—-in recognizing and mocking the disparity between the passion, pride, and labor expended by the incredibly egocentric, narcissistic narrator and the, if not completely trivial, at least gossamer issues involved. But the irony, like the ambiguity, is both constant and conscious. Unlike the narrator, to whom James has frequently been compared, James presides confidently over his fictional world like, in Lady John's words, “a real providence,” who “knows” (p. 176).

It is now generally known that Bernard Shaw had no love for Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), father of the French pièce bien faite (“well-made” play), or Scribe's well-known disciple Victorien Sardou, whose technical bravura Shaw scornfully dubbed “Sardoodledom.” Perhaps his most outspoken recorded condemnation of the prolific playwright and his factory of collaborators is this (undated) outburst to Archibald Henderson: “Why the devil should a man write like Scribe when he can write like Shakespeare or Molière, Aristophanes or Euripides? Who was Scribe that he should dictate to me or anyone else how a play should be written?” To be sure, a good many literary critics of the past century have disparaged this form of drama, combining a complex plot with a maximum of theatrical ingenuity and an absolute minimum of thought. But Shaw's call to arms against the well-made play and its popular and successful founder echoed so loudly over so long a period that it could not help but arouse many disinterested spectators. No quarter would be, nor could be, given to this mountebank, this cheap magician of the stage.

There is a melancholy convenience in the fact that Dylan Thomas prepared his Collected Poems in the year before his death. The volume, like a last will and testament, contains all the poems that he wished to leave to the world. It is, in fact, a compilation of all five of his previously published volumes reproduced in sequence with very little alteration. Scholars and critics thus have an apparently settled corpus by which to judge Thomas' development in style and subject matter. Unfortunately the defin-itiveness of the Collected Poems, as far as chronology is concerned, is more apparent than real. The evidence given in this article shows that the order in which Thomas wrote his poems is quite different from the order in which they were published; so that statements about his development based on the sequence of the Collected Poems have had only limited validity.

Literature reflects a fascination with the enigma of man's identity. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?—these questions recur, are answered, and yet require always re-asking and new illumination. Contemporary fiction projects man's quest for identity against the background of a fragmented and confusing world where the need for self-definition grows urgent because the social supports of the past are weakened and the opportunities for new and strange definitions in the present are enlarged. In a world that exhibits instability as a norm and social fluidity as an ideal, no clearcut self-image can emerge and receive assuring consent. The search for identity in modern literature takes on the form of a pursuit—a curious pursuit, because the object is often undefined and unvisualized. Joyce's Bloom wandering the maze of Dublin streets, Camus' Meursault arrested in the blaze of Algerian sun, Saul Bellow's Henderson invading untrampled African jungle, crying “I want, I want,” but unable to articulate a predicate—these characters are impelled by a sense of inner void to pursue their identity as whole and self-conscious beings. Undefined to themselves they are all “strangers” seeking the touchstone of some objective reality that can validate their existence or of some assertive self-knowledge that can acquaint and unite them with themselves. The image of man as divided and a stranger recurs in the looming novels of the century, in the works of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; it is beautifully crystallized in the recognition scene at the end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as the hero's revelatory self-encounter. The failure of Proust's narrator to recognize his image in the mirror, his sense of masquerade and strangeness, the jading of his sensibilities as all seems degraded and lost, and then the unexpected swift revelation which unifies and gives meaning to his life—these have become recurrent experiences in contemporary fiction as it tries to illuminate the jagged course of man's search for identity in the modern world.

That curious psychological phenomenon, the involuntary memory, is not an original discovery of Proust. Nor does he claim it as such, since, in Le Temps retrouvé, he himself mentions Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, and Nerval as predecessors. Critical investigations have since amplified this list. What is original, however, is Proust's use of it: only he conceived of its many facets—poetic, dramatic, philosophic— and exploited its possibilities by incorporating it centrally in the substance of a novel. Within his own work the involuntary memory underwent a lengthy evolution, appearing in embryonic form from the outset in Les Plaisirs et les jours and recurring, progressively more refined, in all subsequent writing, but not fully modeled nor centrally placed until the final work. In La Recherche three separate forms of the involuntary memory are delineated. There is a dream memory operating in a state of full or partial somnolence found principally in the “Ouverture” and in La Prisonnière where the senses and imaginative powers pursue a course unchecked by reason or will, where the evocations are fleeting, vague in contour, limited in significance and never surprising. There is a sentimental memory evoking a person once loved by the narrator (Gilberte, his grandmother, Albertine), in effect resuscitating that person since the narrator experiences her as present, as a living reality within him, surrounded by the full force of all old emotional ties.

The widening breach between the study of the English language and of the literature written in it appears anew in the December 1959 PMLA. There, two distinguished literary scholars, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, find need to defend the traditional scansion of English poetry against a “linguistic view.” It is not, of course, the fact of their arguing for their beliefs which is disturbing, although even here the breach is evident: “the more extravagant claims of the linguists,” “these extraordinary claims,” “we wish in the main to avoid the cumbersome grammar of the new linguists.”