That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.

One tries to transcend something in order to escape it, to dominate it, or to turn it into one's slave. The ambiguity inherent in any attempt to transcend is the obvious fact that one must transcend something; the relation between the two “positions” is therefore dialectical—both are as it were defined against and thus tied to each other. The Christian's fight to bring the body into subjection to the soul, by which the soul may “transcend” the body, illuminates nothing so much as the usurpation of the soul's attention by the body: the soul's activity is controlled by the body in its very attempt to negate this control. Between persons, parties, and nations transcendence takes the form of a power-play, yet the story is the same. Snobbery is an even clearer example and has its most explicit and radical paradigm in the master-slave relationship. The snob and the one he is snobbish to (transcends, dominates) both share the same system of values, that is, both value being “in,” although only one has achieved that envied status. In other words, the snob can only define himself against those before whom he parades his superiority, and so, paradoxically, we can say that the snob needs these to the exact degree that he wishes to reject them. Those below him, the slaves whom the “master” beats, are like him insofar as they want to be “in” so that they too can “beat” those below them as they themselves have been beaten. They both love and hate the master: love him because they want to be like him and hate him because they are not and are beaten by him. Likewise the master both “loves” and hates his slaves, insofar as the hate which motivates his transcendence is dependent on their continual presence to him as that which he is transcending. If we substitute for social snobbery a scale of transcendence in which praise and power are the controlling values, we will have both the controlling scheme of the action of Coriolanus and a good part of its theme as well.

Almost all critics of Vanity Fair have assumed that Thackeray's novel had no very carefully worked out structure and have been content to make rather general comments on the form of the novel: it was loosely improvised along the line of a contrast between Becky and Amelia. J. Y. T. Greig, for example, believes that Thackeray not only lacked Fielding's ability to work out a highly detailed plot but also suffered from the additional handicap of being forced to compose hurriedly for monthly serialization. To Greig, “Vanity Fair is unified and shapely up to and including the episodes of Brussels and the Battle of Waterloo: for although it contains two heroines, the adventures and sufferings of the one are causally related to the adventures and sufferings of the other. It becomes unified and shapely again after Chapter xliii (Pumpernickel), and for the same reason. But in between—roughly 300 pages—the plot of the first and last sections of the book is suspended, and the unity of the novel disappears.”

The introductory paragraphs of “Rappaccini's Daughter” pose an issue about understanding Hawthorne's fiction which readers are expected to resolve. Hawthorne states that he attempts only slight portrayal of “outward manners” and seeks instead to create interest by “some less obvious peculiarity” of his subject. Readers must take his stories in “precisely the proper point of view,” because from other vantage points the stories “can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Despite Hawthorne's warning that this unnamed point of view is of primary importance in reading his fiction, critics have paid little attention to the issue. Chapter headings and indexes of major critical studies of Hawthorne make no reference to point of view, and bibliographies list almost no essays on it in the journals. In this study, a brief and tentative essay in definition, I shall maintain that the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream. Hawthorne ordinarily invokes it as a metaphor; readers see the action as what he terms a “conscious dream” (AN, p. 125). He often establishes his metaphor through use of the semblance of actual dream early in a story and heightens its effect by employing the apparition of real dream in later moments or scenes. Only rarely, however, does Hawthorne go beyond the bounds of his characteristic metaphor and cause readers to view all the events of his story as incidents in an actual dream. Hawthorne's fictional definition of the dream point of view is exact and full, his use of it imaginative and subtle. In his own phrase, from the preface to The Snow-Image, the dream mode leads readers to the center of his fiction by revelation of the “burrowing into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance.” Hawthorne is the artist as conscious dreamer, often of dreams that turn into nightmares and bare the tragic realities of human existence.

Anders als bei Kafka und Musil, den beiden anderen großen deutschsprachigen Romanciers aus dem böhmisch-österreichischen Sprachraum, hat Hermann Broch zeit seines Lebens Gedichte geschrieben und die Möglichkeiten der lyrischen Gestaltung hoch eingeschätzt. Seine Gesammelten Werke werden nicht von ungefähr mit dem Band Gedichte eröffnet. Das Echo, das diese Gedichte bisher gefunden haben, war äußerst gering. Claude Davids Urteil über Brochs Lyrik hat durchaus typische Bedeutung: “Man hat auch Gedichte Brochs veröffentlicht, die jedoch in den meisten Fällen nicht über das Niveau formaler Übungen hinausreichen.” Auch die Gedichtpartien, die Broch seinen Romanen einfügte, sind ähnlich abwertend beurteilt worden. Über die “Stimmen”, die Gedichte der Schuldlosen, wurde zum Beispiel in Times Literary Supplement bemerkt: “The stories … are linked by some of those homemade verses that German writers for the past century have been so ready to run up on their sewing-machines” (S. 210). Was diese Urteile miteinander verbindet, ist die Tatsache, daß die Maßstäbe der Bewertung von außen herangetragen werden. Welche Bedeutung das Lyrische innerhalb Brochs ästhetischer Anschauung hat, ist bisher nicht untersucht worden. Dieses Problem hat zwei Aspekte. Einmal geht es um die Frage nach Brochs spezifischer Auffassung des Gedichts, und zum andern ist die Frage damit verbunden, welche Funktion das Gedicht und allgemein das Lyrische in Brochs Romanen haben.

Emerson's faith in the historic role of the hero did not prevent him from evaluating Nelson morally as a man without principle. Unfortunately, he failed to make his criticism specific; only the grouping of Nelson with Napoleon offers a clue to the origin of Emerson's disapproval. Hawthorne and Melville were more well-disposed in their appreciations, which resemble each other in extravagance of sentiment. Whereas Hawthorne's treatment takes the form of an essay, Melville incorporates Nelson into his short novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, and puts to his own uses what Hawthorne called, in Our Old Home, the “symbolic poetry” (i, 275) of Nelson's life.

In his study of Swift's satire Edward Rosenheim observes that some satirical works are ephemeral and do not outlive the issues that give them birth: “Like any form of pamphleteering, satire tends to claim the attention of the reading public only so long as that public is capable of a concern, approximating that of the satirist himself, for the questions under discussion.” The tract of Swift's which I am about to discuss was certainly occasional and has but modest claims to universality; indeed, there is no general agreement even now among Swift's commentators that the work originally had a satiric intent: most prefer to read it, the Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners (1709), as a serious reforming tract of the times. As such, the Project is undoubtedly of limited interest, but it yields hitherto unsuspected complexities and ironies, not to mention comedy, when we inquire into the now forgotten issues that gave it birth.

John bull's other island, Shaw once said, is one of “a group of three plays of exceptional weight and magnitude on which the reputation of the author as a serious dramatist was first established, and still mainly rests.” The other two plays are Major Barbara and Man and Superman. John Bull's Other Island was popular at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 and established Shaw as a great and popular dramatist. Since then, however, this play has not been esteemed as much as Man and Superman and Major Barbara, although I would argue that in humor and insight it is their equal. It has been revived only twice in London in the last forty years—in 1938 and 1947; and it is far less known to the public or to scholarship than are the other two plays. Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw's estimate of his play should, I think, be taken seriously. Some critics have seen the play as original in method, as still pertinent to the Irish situation, and as universal in its significance. “Shaw made out of this topical subject a masterpiece,” Reuben Brower has written, “one of his purest and most sustained comedies.” I believe this view can be upheld.

For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight,
He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;
Thus wole oure text.

Among the many passages in which Chaucer or one of his characters talks about poetry, and more specifically Chaucer's own poetry, one of the most tantalizing is the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. The Man of Law claims to be at a loss for a “thrifty tale” because Chaucer “thogh he kan but lewedly / … Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (ii.46–49). He continues with a partial list of Chaucer's works that consists chiefly of stories from the Legend of Good Women, surprising us with several that Chaucer apparently never got around to writing. He praises Chaucer for avoiding stories about incest and alludes to two such tales with indignation. At last he declares that he will leave rhyme to Chaucer and tell a prose tale and immediately begins a prologue in rhyme royal.

The year 1960 produced a number of interesting statements in widely divergent scholarly contexts calling for a closer scrutiny of the contribution of grammar—of syntax, word order, morphology—to poetic effect. In a journal concerned largely with the teaching of English appeared Harry Warfel's contention that “the significant differences in literature lie in an author's syntactical maneuvering,” and his further suggestion that the characterization in plays, in Shakespeare's at any rate, is subtly indicated by different syntactic patterns in the speeches of the dramatis personae. In a journal devoted to aesthetics, meanwhile, Francis Utley was appealing to the linguistic concept of immediate constituents to suggest the possibility of a “tension of ambiguities” in poetry. Referring specifically to Arnold's

Although literature and philosophy are concerned with many of the same problems, attempts to combine them have seldom been successful; too often the union of fiction and philosophy has produced the hybrid novel of ideas or, more recently, the highly complex symbolic novel, a metaphysical kaleidoscope which creates a Weltanschauung however one twists it. However, at least one modern philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch, has succeeded in creating genuine fictional worlds which are enriched but not dominated by her philosophical interests. One of Miss Murdoch's central theses, propounded in her essays and her book on Sartre, is that both contemporary fiction and philosophy fail to set forth an adequate idea of human personality. Across the spectrum of modern thought—in philosophical works like Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and in novels like Sartre's Nausea—Miss Murdoch finds the same shallow image of man, an image derived from Hume's materialistic behaviorism and Kant's idea of the isolated will. What is needed, she feels, is a better grasp of man's nature and his situation: “we have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we substituted a facile idea of sincerity. What we have never had, of course, is a satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn.” In her novels Miss Murdoch tries to correct the current oversimplified concept of man by delineating with great persuasiveness both the complexity and diversity of human beings and the complicated relationship between the individual and the society; in The Bell the ideas which emerge from a very credible fictional world are concerned with the inadequacy of absolute moral codes, the nature of love, reality, the irrational, and freedom.