WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.

MOST modern criticism of King Lear directs itself resolutely against the notion, said to be held by some critics, that the play forms part of the Christian tradition, that it ultimately affirms the victory of good over evil, specifically, the victory of love over hate, and that it therefore makes virtue prevail in the end.1 On the contrary, Dr. Johnson felt that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice” (“Notes” to King Lear), and the majority of modern critics holds, as Swinburne did,2 that the play is deeply pessimistic, that in writing King Lear Shakespeare deliberately examined such Christian concepts as divine providence, retributive justice, or the existence of some universal moral order, and came to the conclusion that at best man's world was a “great stage of fools” (iv.vi.182), whose false sense of security should make the philosopher chuckle; or that at worst it was a “wheel of fire” (iv.vii.47) upon which not only Lear but every man is bound, an image that should make the poet cry in agony.3

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6

THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Art, or the Life of Art, brought with it characteristics of death, decay, dissolution, pessimism, and nihilism, even when it stood, theoretically at least, for transcendence and transformation. The world of Art, so closely akin to the unconscious and preconscious, fell into the role described for it by Plato, as “frantic and possessed.” Socrates reasons, in a well-known passage, that “the poet is an airy thing, a winged and a holy thing ; and he cannot make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him.”1 The Poet, the Artist, the Creator is, as we know, both ecstatic and calculating. He calls attention to thoughts and acts that lie deep within us and that we try to disguise with logic; in brief, the Artist plays on our unconscious (what we cannot control) by appealing to our consciousness (what, we think, we can control).

TE. LAWRENCE'S BELIEF in the supreme importance of art made it inevitable that he write the history of the Arab revolt and his leadership of it. His conscientious and ambitious character made the composition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom a lengthy and agonizing process, and his letters to friends show that his desire to achieve greatness as a writer was even stronger than his wish to excel as a commander. “Artists excite and attract me,” he tells Robert Graves.1 “I've wished all my life to have the power of creating something imaginative.”2 He feels that “a man never amounts to anything in this world unless he be an artist.3 I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than as a man of action.”4

MOST RECENT critical studies indicate that as the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot move toward their inevitable period of eclipse all of the old critical attitudes are still intact. Since the late twenties there have been numerous charges of inconsistency between Eliot's early and later criticism, and between his criticism and his poetry, and though a few critics have been piecing together the unfinished case for continuity, the cumulative criticism of Eliot's development as a poet-critic-Catholic has led most of us discussing Eliot's work in the classroom to accept the following prevalent assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, skeptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world ; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his conversion in 1927 Eliot's theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an esthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism, but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. But these widespread opinions are misleading, for by 1916 Eliot's classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion, which calls for a full-scale revaluation of Eliot's development and of the primary concerns of his poetry and criticism before 1928, is to examine evidence of Eliot's critical and religious position in 1915–16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.

THE GREAT APPEAL of “Passage to India” is understandable. Following the Civil War and the publication of the 1867 (fourth) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman, close to fifty, had become increasingly preoccupied in his poetry with “thoughts on the deep themes of Death & Immortality.” While he had, of course, explored these themes in his earlier poetry, this strong emphasis on the “universal” was something new and it was to continue to the end of his career. He answered a request from the English Broadway Magazine for a poem by sending five separate lyrics, under the group title “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” Published in 1868, these were, in addition to the title poem, “Darest Thou Now ? Soul,” “The Last Invocation,” “Pensive and Faltering,” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which was actually composed in 1862–63 and reworked at this time with emphasis on the soul rather than on its earlier “Calamus” motif. Quite self-conscious about the spiritual direction his poetry was taking now, he indicated that he would make “no more attempts at smart sayings, or scornful criticisms, or harsh comments on persons or actions, or private and public affairs . . . never attempt puns or plays upon words, or utter sarcastic comments.” And around this time he also indicated that in the next edition of Leaves he would give special emphasis to “religious themes.”1 Whitman was entering the final phase of his career. He had come the full way around. In some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of the soul, the poet of intense nationalism to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic.

HANK MORGAN'S USE of a solar eclipse to impress upon King Arthur and his court that a magician superior to Merlin stands before them is, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's time-travel version of the international novel. Arthur is at least as affected as the reader and, as a consequence, Hank istransformed from being a prisoner into being the Boss. But perhaps the reader does not appreciate that on a symbolic level, this blotting out and temporary displacement of one heavenly body by another parallels the “transposition of epochs—and bodies [human and stellar]” (p. 18) which is the donnée of the novel—the displacement of nineteenth-century America by sixth-century Britain and, subsequently, the displacement, first tentative then total, of sixth-century Britain by nineteenth-century America.1 By equating this “epoch-eclipse” with the apparent extinction of the sun, Twain is implying that the posited world transformation is an event of apocalyptic proportions. In the Revelation of John the Divine, as in traditional symbology, fire is the instrument of apocalypse and, thus, Twain's use of the sun in this context is most appropriate.2

THIS PAPER seeks to investigate the social and revolutionary implications of a predisposition toward violence (variously called “virtu” or “énergie”) so typical of Stendhal's characters. It will aim at showing that when the individual's psychological need for action is frustrated by a stagnant society, he will attempt to shatter the structure that confines him to inaction. Such a temperamental predisposition is all the more likely to become a revolutionary act when the “times are out of joint.”1 Indeed, an important aspect of the revolutionary mentality is what one might call the “chiliastic” experience of time.2

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE'S magnificent poetry has aroused constant speculation on his esthetic theory. Critics have felt that an understanding of his esthetics would give a clearer understanding of his poetic technique; this in turn would lead to a more complete appreciation of the beauty of his poetry. He has also left sufficient remarks, if unsystematized and indeed often contradictory, to pique the curiosity of the critic and to suggest various interpretations of his philosophy. His poetry, a consistent interpretation of his theoretical explanations, and the literary climate in which he lived all lead me to believe that his esthetic doctrine is built upon le sentiment du beau. His “définition du Beau,” his “théorie rationnelle et historique du beau,” his “Beau bizzare” all need le sentiment du beau to resolve their contradictions and their ambiguities. More important, this esthetic doctrine is applicable to all of his poetry: it permits a finer appreciation of both the Christian and the Satanic poems and also of the poems that are neither. It maintains the essential esthetic value absent in the many psychological interpretations. It affords more insight into his poetry than a doctrine of metaphor; it permits a more complete interpretation than the theory that his art is based on a fusion of the spiritual and the material. And there is evidence that Baudelaire's theory of the esthetic feeling not only was a logical development of early nineteenth-century esthetics but was under open discussion among the younger poets of the middle of the century. For Baudelaire did know to his satisfaction what this sentiment du beau is: he understood it to be a perfect fusion of the three modes of the human personality—sensation, feeling, and thought. “Il me serait trop facile de disserter subtilement sur la composition symétrique ou équilibrée, sur la pondération des tons, sur le ton chaud et le ton froid, etc. ? vanité! Je préfère parler au nom du sentiment, de la morale et du plaisir.”1

IE THéÂTRE DE JEAN GENET, qui ne comprend que cinq pièces,1 frappe d'emblée parson caractère agonistique. Alors que les dramaturges contemporains les plus illustres, Ionesco, Arrabal et surtout Beckett nous présentent des personnages égarés ou hagards, incapables de lutter contre un destin dont ils ne conçoivent clairement que l'absurdité, Genet semble savoir où il va. Animés d'une cruauté lucide et efficace, ses personnages ont entrepris d'un cœur allègre la démolition de leur société, de notre société, au nom de l'idée de Révolution. Nous entendrons ce dernier mot au sens qu'on lui accorde généralement dans le vocabulaire politique, en l'opposant au simple coup d‘état, dépourvu de tout idéalisme et qui ne vise au pouvoir que pour satisfaire une cynique volonté de puissance. L'activité révolutionnaire, elle, cherche à opérer un changement de gouvernement afin de favoriser l‘épanouissement des citoyens dans une liberté plus grande. Obéissant au mouvement dialectique qui va de l'analyse de la Babylone à détruire aux exigences de la cité nouvelle à édifier, nous commencerons par la critique de cette société sclérosée, que Genet affirme être la nôtre et qui ne tient plus debout que par habitude, grâce aux lois de la pesanteur et de l'inertie sociologiques. Contre elle se tendront toutes les forces des principaux personnages et, par derrière eux, de Genet. Telle qu'elle est décrite dans Le Balcon et dans Les Nègres, la société à renverser nous apparaît d'abord sous des espèces féodales. En effet l'autorité s'y incarne en ce que Genet appelle “les Trois Figures fondamentales.” Il désigne par là l'Evêque. le Juge et le Général du Balcon. On les reconnaîtra à leur stature surhumaine, à leurs épaules artificiellement élargies et à l'espèce de cothurne qu'ils doivent chausser:

THIS STUDY is to show an interrelationship between Thomas Mann's fiction and certain attitudes he displayed during the course of his life. The word “orientation” is useful because it denotes a practice everybody uses every day. It is similar to the process that shapes a number of words in such a way that they comprise artistic sense in a literary work of art, which we will call “poem.”

BULGAKOV'S NOVEL The Master andMargarita is a confusing combination of different elements: satire, fantasy, serious philosophical and religious questioning.1 The variety of critical commentaries has already shown the impossibility of reducing it to one single interpretation. The action can be stated briefly. Satan, alias Woland, arrives in Moscow with two demonic henchmen, a thug Azazello and a tomcat Behemoth; plus an “interpreter,” Koroviev. Among bureaucrats, petty crooks, and those simply concerned with personal gain they cause havoc.2 But they give aid and protection to a persecuted writer in an asylum, the Master, and to his love, Margarita, after she has agreed to act as hostess for Satan's Ball. A hack poet, Ivan Homeless, is brought to a deeper understanding of life and becomes a “disciple” of the Master. Central to the book is the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate, the chapters of which form part of Bulgakov's text and conclude simultaneously with the story about the Master in an epilogue. A strong connection with the Faust tradition is evident.

ON ITS LITERARY LEVEL Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (Rome, 1535) is presented as a long courtship between an ardent lover, Filone, and his reluctant mistress, Sofia. At one point the clever lady summarizes their respective attitudes by the casual observation that, while she is more interested in the theory of love, Filone is more bent on the practice thereof.1 This wry comment is a capsule of the entire work, for it explains not only the constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical approfondissement, but also the basic paradox that pervades the entire Dialoghi, that of theoria versus action, which appears as the tension between Filone's amorous involvement and Sofia's aloofness but especially as the opposition between the via contemplativa and the via activa!1 In this paper we shall suggest that Leone Ebreo's work may be defined as a dialogue between two philosophies of life or “kinds of people,” the contemplative man and the active man, and that these two human types are represented by the two interlocutors, Filone and Sofia. This view will require revision of the usual critical approaches to the Dialoghi. For one thing, if we take Leone's title seriously and consider the work as a true dialogue, as a confrontation of two substantially divergent points of view, then it is difficult to describe it as essentially a monologue in which only one of the characters—Filone—expresses the author's ideas. Moreover, in addition to the purely philosophical argument, we shall have to pay close attention both to the psychological nature of the characters and to the precise levels of their allegorization. In short, we shall no longer be able to neglect the work's literary nature.3 vient thin