In the first pages of The Brothers Karamazov the narrator recalls that he knew a young lady of the last romantic generation who, because of insuperable obstacles to union with her lover—all of which she had invented—one stormy night threw herself off a high precipice into a deep, rapid river. By this act she was able to satisfy her desire to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia; but, the narrator adds, had the precipice been less picturesque—a fiat mud bank, for instance—the suicide most probably would not have taken place. The romantic heroine, whose fate Dostoevsky brings up here only as an aside in his attempt to explain why Adelaida Ivanovna had married Fyodor Karamazov, recalls a character type which flourished on the pages of his works in the 1840's. Every reader of Dostoev-sky's early works will remember his bookish heroes, who prefer the beautiful improbabilities of romantic novels and the fantasies of their own minds to the reality they must live in. I am thinking of such obvious examples as the hero of White Nights, who for eight years has been intimately acquainted with characters from works of Hoffman, Scott, Goethe, and Mérimée, but who does not know a single real person in St. Petersburg. I am thinking, also, of the little hero from the story of the same name, who, in the seconds before he leaps on the unridable horse Tankred, sees in his mind's eye pictures of damsels, tournaments, pages, and all the paraphernalia of chivalry. As one who prefers fantasies to reality, Golyadkin of The Double is an obvious example; but even Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk, turns his back on the miserable conditions of his daily life and plays out the role of the generous benefactor to a young girl, even though the added economic burden drives him to drink and penury. There is hardly a work in the forties that does not have its dreamer: Netochka Nezvanova, huddled in a miserable corner looking across the street to the splendid house and dreaming of an improbable life, is a summary image of the hero of the forties.

Arthur Schnitzler's non-fictional works have been sorely neglected in critical literature, even by those writers who have attempted to evaluate his “Weltanschauung.” His essays and aphorisms have thus on the whole remained almost completely unknown, although a few are readily accessible. One of these works, Über Krieg und Frieden, was published posthumously in 1939 and contains excerpts from Schnitzler's diaries during the years 1915–19. Another is the Buck der Sprücke und Bedenken, a collection of aphorisms published in 1927. Individual sections are not dated and, from the evidence of unpublished material in Schnitzler's “NachlaC,” may be assumed to span his entire creative life. Some of the ideas are fragmentary, often the result of momentary moods, and there are internal contradictions. Schnitzler himself was aware of this, and in the foreword he expressly warned that “dieses Buch will keine Système, keine Weltanschauungen, keine Erledi-gungen bringen,” and added: “Keineswegs hat dieses Buch den Ehrgeiz, für sich allein zu bestehen.” Nonetheless, certain thoughts occur with astonishing regularity—certain “ideas and questions” about “fate and free will,” about “responsibility and conscience,” about “relationships and loneliness,” to quote some of the chapter headings.

When in 1934 Edmund Wilson published his brilliant and provocative essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in which he questions the reliability of James's center of revelation in “The Turn of the Screw,” he provided scholars an intriguing method for approaching much modern fiction. It seems to me that, for example, Roy P. Basler's reading of Poe's “Ligeia” as the unbalanced narrator's unwitting admission that he has murdered his second wife through inability to forget his first, and Simon O. Lesser's interpretation of Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as a revelation of unconscious reluctance to seek a substitute father both owe much to Mr. Wilson. And so do a host of recent Jamesian critics: for two examples among at least a dozen, Marius Bewley, who regards Oliver Lyon, the central intelligence of “The Liar,” as more culpable than the prevaricating colonel; and William Bysshe Stein, who, far from sympathizing with Pemberton in “The Pupil,” brands him a prude. The temptation to doubt the accuracy of the narrator or the central intelligence of a short story by Henry James is beguiling, fatally so sometimes; but succumbing to the temptress can give pleasure to the reader often and an enriched meaning to many a story.

Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love “with excitement,” and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover “noble.” In Lawrence he found an ally “directed against modern abstraction”; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had “almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity.” A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life: these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts in part for their similar response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisler and that hero's search for experience: it was, they felt, guided too dominantly by intellectual choices. In 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous Huxley that he thought “Wilhelm M eisler … amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian.” Yeats remarked that Goethe, a man “in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed,” could “but seek … [Unity of Being] as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences.” He insisted that “true Unity of Being … is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its quantity.” But for Yeats, the poet, it was less problematic than for Lawrence, the novelist, to crusade against Abstraction and Intellection: the poem had its gnomic power to snap meaning at you in an instant of time; the novel had somehow to have people and a story —and a world in which both could occur.

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).

Fin 1945 on vit paraître en France aux devantures des libraires un petit volume portant le titre modeste de Travaux. L'auteur, un authentique ouvrier manuel de quarante-un ans dont c‘était là le premier livre, nous parlait d'une façon très neuve des rapports, d'une richesse insoupçonnée, qu'il établissait avec le monde des choses à travers son travail. Navel se révélait en outre moraliste, préoccupé d'atteindre à plus de sensibilité, à plus de conscience, en dépit des obstacles redoutables que l'implacable rigueur de la condition ouvrière accumulait sur son chemin. Page après page on assistait à cette lutte tenace, malgré les accès de découragement et les retombées, d'un ouvrier qui ne voulait rien abdiquer de ses aspirations d'homme libre à vivre plus intensément, aussi bien par le cœur que par l'intelligence. Bientôt Navel, qui écrivait son livre à la première personne, nous expliquait comment il se rendit compte très jeune que son humanité était non seulement menacée mais contestée par l'ordre social existant. Pour tenter de sauver ce qui pouvait l‘être il oscille entre deux pôles. Tantôt il espère pouvoir faire son salut en même temps que tous les prolétaires, grâce à l'action politique, tantôt il essaye de se sauver tout seul en échappant à l'emprise de l'usine. Les récits que Navel donnait dans Travaux et plus tard dans Parcours et Sable et Limon de ce long combat qu'il devait livrer, entre 1919 et 1945, contre l'engloutissement qui le menaçait dans des tâches purement alimentaires, dressaient finalement, bien sÛr, un bilan de faillite. Mais d'une faillite qui n'avait rien d'une débâcle. Malgré l'inégalité de la lutte Navel avait connu des moments de bonheur et d'exaltation. Il avait préservé sa santé physique et aussi son juvénile appétit de beauté, de générosité et d'amitié. Il n'avait rien renié, rien trahi de ses aspirations de socialiste humaniste. En 1945 une telle attitude, qui illustrait en somme l'itinéraire de toute une génération passée par le Front populaire et la Résistance, valut à Navel de nombreuses sympathies. Son livre eut une excellente presse. Naval était lancé, promu écrivain, édité bientôt par Gallimard.

Commentators on the works of George Bernard Shaw almost invariably acknowledge his great indebtedness to Shelley. Their remarks are, however, limited to a passing statement or, at most, a page or two in which Shaw's enthusiasm for Shelley receives a very general treatment—several quotations from Shaw (and there are two or three favorites) usually being cited as evidence which needs little if any elaboration. Few of the numerous instances in which Shaw directly acknowledges his debt to Shelley have been noted by critics, to say nothing of an examination of decidedly Shelleyan ideas which are prominent in Shaw's writings. I propose, therefore, to trace in considerable detail the background of Shaw's interest in Shelley, its effect upon him, his opinions about Shelley and his art, and especially his agreements and disagreements with important ideas held by Shelley.

Hermann Hesses Erzachlung Klein und Wagner bildet das im Jahre 1919 geschrie-bene Mittelstück der drei 1920 zusammen unter dem Titel Klingsors letzter Sommer veröffent-lichten Erzählungen. Die Erzählung Kinderseele bildet das erste Stück, das dritte ist die Titel-geschichte. Hesse hat dièse drei Erzählungen wohl kaum zufällig zusammengestellt, zumal er sie über dreißig Jahre später in gleicher Grup-pierung in die Gesammelten Schriften aufnahm. In der Technik der Darstellung zeigt sich nämlich eine Verschiebung des Schwerpunkts, indem er in Kinderseele das Beispiel einer psycho-logischen Darstellung gibt, so, wie sie um die Zeit der Jahrhundertwende geübt wurde, dann in Klein und Wagner Einsichten verwertet, die sich von der Psychoanalyse herleiten, um schliefilich in Klingsors letzler Sommer das Individualpsycho-logische weitgehend unterzuordnen. Die Erzählungen bilden so zwar kein thematisches Ganzes, doch sei wenigstens darauf hingewiesen, dafi ein entwicklungsmäßiger Zusammenhang besteht.

Dylan Thomas knew the part his poetry played in his “individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” While this baring “of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body” generated exciting imagery and rhetorical experiments sometimes baffling to readers, Thomas also insisted on communication to others engaged in the same struggle through “a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem”—what he called “narrative.” He said, “I believe in the simple thread of action through a poem, but that is an intellectual thing aimed at lucidity through narrative.” Though we may find his concept of narrative unusually broad, Thomas conceived of it as the life—a main moving column—that “must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.” This view of poetic creation as his personal dialectic of images complements Thomas' principal theme: the paradox of life creating and consuming itself.