The advocates of the philosophy of engagement assert that learning and scholarship are not value-free, that there is a ubiquitous, even if implicit, commitment to a moral, and therefore basically political, standpoint in the vocation of the scholar and in the mission of the university. The first thing to note about this philosophy is its high-mindedness, its exalted conception of the role of the scholar and scholarship. However, if the commitment of the scholar is moral and not only intellectual, to virtue and not only to truth, how can this supply guidance or a principle of decision where the scholar encounters conflict among moral values? Decisions as to which values are to be given priority flow from the judgments, inescapable moral and political judgments, with which the citizen must concern himself. But the traditional view is that the primary goal of the citizen in his role as scholar is not the quest for virtue or power but the quest for significant truths. The pursuit of truth does not entail withdrawal or isolation from but service to society. Scholars cannot and should not escape the world of politics. But in a rational and humane society there must be some activities and institutions that are beyond politics.

The 176 verses (44 epigrams) of the Walpurgis Night's Dream in Faust, Part I, are structurally divided into three themes and contain elements of aesthetics, cognition theory, and social criticism. In the relationship between Walpurgis Night and Walpurgis Night's Dream, overlapping tendencies toward concrete characterization and abstract figure-allegories pave the way for that interrelation of the “big” and “small” world which is the basic principle of the artistic link between Faust, Part I, and Faust, Part XI. With polemical intentions, Goethe draws a series of types and characters which, as a body, must be understood in the sense of Hegel as an “abolition” of irony in romanticist comedies. In regard to tradition, borrowings from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night'sDream and The Tempest are combined with adaptations of Domenico Cimarosa and the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the inherent unity of seriousness and levity, of the tragic and the comic, of constructive profoundness and slapstick in all these elements which give Walpurgis Night's Dream an important but up to now functionally underestimated place in the complete work of Faust. (In German)

The Damned Crew was a class of roisterers in London from the early 1590's to the late 1620's, their self-styled captain being at one time Sir Edmund Baynham, who was also involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Represented in literature as perjurers, assassins, dissidents, and revellers, they were thought to be reprobate with the damned crew of devils in hell. Indeed, they may have thought so themselves, reacting from misconstrued predestinarianism as desperate libertines with a limited Manichean outlook. Some such interpretation explains their title and behaviour and the view of them taken by theological controversialists such as Dove, Kellison, and Sutcliffe, and by playwrights like Chapman.

Cardenio, a “lost” play of 1612-13 based on Shelton's translation of Don Quixote (1612), is partly preserved, in altered form, in Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood of 1727. Theobald probably altered Cardenio drastically, as he did Richard II. To internal evidence that Cardenio was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher can be added chronological evidence and reluctant testimony to the joint authorship by the publisher Moseley, Charles Gildon, and Theobald. One of Theobald's three manuscripts can be traced in the hands of Moseley, the Davenants, Betterton, Gildon, Theobald's patron (Charles Boyle), and Theobald. A Restoration performance probably was intended. Theobald persisted in claiming that the original play was by Shakespeare alone after he learned otherwise, from Gildon and the Stationers' Register, to save his reputation as a Shakespeare scholar and please his patron. To protect his “Shakespeare” play, Theobald obtained a unique royal license, which Pope ridiculed in the Dunciad. Theobald probably sold his play and Shakespeare manuscripts outright to his publisher. He was prevented from publishing Cardenio by the copyright Act of 1710, the practice of regarding copyright as perpetual, and his quest of money and patronage.

To the various kinds of irony that critics have noticed in Milton's Samson Agonistes may be added another, the irony of alternatives. This irony is based on a proposition with alternative possibilities posited by one of the characters: either this will happen or that; but both choices eventuate, although they appear to be mutually exclusive. Milton calls this kind of proposition axioma disjunclum contingens in his Art of Logic. Samson s prophecy that he will either die or do some great deed, the doubts of his friends whether he has been slain by or is slaying the Philistines, their expectation of either good or bad news are all ironically resolved in the catastrophe, which combines alternatives and reveals the simplifying power of providence. Similarly, although the Chorus states that there are two kinds of heroism, active and passive, either of which may be Samson s, both eventuate. Samson s heroism includes both courageous action and Christian patience as he slays and is slain. In his conclusion, Milton fuses genuine tragedy with religious drama, because Samson as an active hero dies tragically, and as a martyr wins a spiritual victory and the crown of patience.

The major conflict in Hard Times pits Fact against Fancy; but Dickens ascribes two meanings to Fancy: imaginative play and fellow feeling. Each is directed separately against Fact: (1) The narrative personality combines images of life (horses, flowers, the sun, and fire) with images of lifelessness (pits, destructive violence, artificiality) in complex relationships, creating an impressive model of a highly fused, interdependent world, which contradicts the disjointed world of Gradgrindian Fact. (2) The virtuous characters employ fellow feeling to soften ills caused by Fact. But the novel does not show the 'components of Fancy to be coordinate, as Dickens implies. In practice, imaginative play provides a protective atmosphere of delusion, within which fellow feeling is supposed to grow to strength. Imagination fortifies innocence against the sordid and bad aspects of reality. Thus Dickens seems uncertain whether to work toward a coherent, interdependent world, or toward a scattering of islands of innocence—whether to employ imaginative play in building bridges to extend fellow feeling, or in building buffers to protect innocence. The result of his double advocacy is a series of probably unconscious compromises. Because the forces of Fancy are so divided, so fettered, the book's alternative to the Facts of Gradgrind is not so clear and attractive as one could wish.

Most of the early science fantasies of H. G. Wells are, as he defines the term, prophetic: the myths that they develop to a logical conclusion represent a critique of some historical or essential aspect of the human condition. The Time Machine, his first scientific romance, explores the premises of prophetic fantasy at the same time that it embodies a myth of its own. In it Wells envisions the future devolution of man, already outlined in previous essays of his, as the ultimate consequence of what he perceived as a present attitude of complacent optimism, an attitude he dramatizes in the reaction of the Active audience to the Time Traveller's account of the world of 802,701 and beyond. Although the Time Traveller accepts this vision as literally true, his own theories about that world make it clear that its significance pertains to it only as a metaphoric projection of tendencies existing in the present. Thus the structure of The Time Machine reveals the Time Traveller's point of view, like that of his audience, to be limited: his final disappearance into the fantasied world of the future vindicates the rigorous integrity of Wells s prophecy.

Accurate interpretation of Poe's three tales of “mesmerism” depends on the correct historical definition of that term. It referred not to “hypnotism,” a later concept, but to “animal magnetism.” Hypnotism is a psychological phenomenon, a function of suggestibility, demonstrating the influence of one human will upon another. “Animal magnetism” was thought to be a physical “fluid”—comparable to electricity and other “imponderables”— pervading animate and inanimate Being, and acting as the unifier, the cohesive force which organizes both matter and mind. In “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” it is this magnetic “current” which preserves Valdemar's body until the circuit between him and the magnetist is broken, and the body decomposes. In “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” the fluid preserves Bedloe's body and his “nervous field” of identity; it also expands his consciousness into the past, which he relives as the magnetist writes his memoir. In “Mesmeric Revelation” Vankirk's consciousness is magnetized just on the verge of death; i.e., of absorption into the unparticled matter of a magnetized universe. His revelation of this universe relates animal magnetism not only to the attractionrepulsion force of Eureka, but to imagination and “ratiocination,” and the inevitable tension or “magnetism” between opposites in life. The unifying effect of animal magnetism, then, constitutes the “unity of effect” in these tales.

William Carlos Williams invented his own form for Paterson. His long and complex poem has a number of important literary forebears and counterparts, including the other major American sequences (particularly Song of Myself and the Cantos), but in each case it is more unlike than like the work with which it shares significant affinities. The poem is a vast montage comprised of associated images, symbols, and themes. Prose is interspersed with various sorts of poetry, which gains its effects through metrical variations, tonal modulations, and concrete imagery. A close look at a representative formal passage and a loose “unfinished piece” helps to clarify the poet's strategy of maneuvering the reader through a series of alternately high- and low-pitched experiences. Williams pays particular attention to visual patterns and to auditory effects, relying heavily on the American idiom and on spoken language. His diction, like his handling of theme, allusion, imagery, and sound, is part of an attempt to break with outmoded conventions and to find a measure and a form capable of expressing his particular vision of contemporary urban America. The sequence as a whole, though uneven in quality, provides incontrovertible evidence of his integrity and of his skill.

Don Juan and Le Misanthrope depict a comic world in which success, defined as immunity to ridicule, depends largely on the aristocratic “virtues” of dexterity, style, and form—a world in which the “social esthetic” of honêteté has degenerated into a “moral anesthetic” (Krailsheimer). Thus, Don Juan and his female counterpart, Célimène, enjoy an almost constitutional invulnerability to the comic fate which overtakes their often morally superior antagonists. Don Juan is a dazzling rhetorician and consummate actor who, in contrast to the inept Sganarelle, among others, manages to exploit his individuality to the bitter end with an elegant, lordly coherency. So complete is his impunity that only a deus ex machina can thwart his self-aggrandizing schemes. Although morally wrong, he remains esthetically right. So does the devious and corrupt Célimène whose artful self-possession allows her—where Alceste, the moralist, fails—to assert her personality and speak her mind freely even in the conformistic, hypocritical society that she typifies. Don Juan s deft histrionics, like Célimène's imperturbable grace, constitute an art of living, intended by Molière perhaps as an esthetic compensation or consolation for the irremediable moral ugliness that he discerned in a still splendorous but decadent civilization.

By keeping the frame-characters before the reader while they visit Versailles and listen to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, and by informing us of the kinds of emotions Psyché's adventures inspire, La Fontaine uses the elaborate framework to place into perspective our reactions to his art. The frame makes the reader recognize his reactions to the story, mirrored in the four friends responses, as well as to the poet's stylistic devices: badinage, reminders of the tale's oral narration, a variety of rhetorical and narrative modes including verse passages that decorate the tale. The friends intrude according to temperament; each prefers a different literary style for the emotions it induces. Their comments lead to the central “digression” on tragedy and comedy, between Parts I and n of Psyché's adventures. This discussion permits transition between the tragic and comic parts of the tale, and the analysis of pity there prepares for Part n in which compassion is the principal emotion experienced by the characters in the tale and the frame. La Fontaine's strategy of holding the frame-characters before the reader is his most significant contribution to his version of Apuleius' tale.

The tree beset by natural forces, the embrace of elm and vine, and the antithesis of mulberry and almond are related figures which Spanish sonneteers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently used when structuring agudezas por semejanza. The extent to which these stock figures are revitalized in unique poetic artifacts reveals each poet s ability to work within the limitations of an aesthetics of invention through imitation. Moreover, to follow the varying fortunes of these topoi is to assess the efficacy of the modes of correlation (simile, allegory, adequate symbol, or objective correlative); to witness the interplay of the Petrarchan and emblematic traditions; to note the variations on a theme exploited first by the erotic poets, later by the moralists; and to highlight the shift of emphasis from the discursive to the pictorial which marks the transition from the aesthetics of the Renaissance to that of the Baroque. Finally, the precise delineation of the specific context or whole, of which each sonnet is an integral part, permits a more comprehensive exegesis of that sonnet's alma de sutileza, for Gracian the essence of the craft and criticism of poetry.

Dream, which is itself disguise, paradoxically becomes the most pertinent and complex comment on the many disguises of The BlithedaleRomance and on its structurally unconvincing elements. Classically functioning both as revelation and wish-fulfillment, Miles Coverdale's central dream tells the perceptive reader what he already knows. This dream, and two framing briefer dream references, unearth disguise more accurately than Miles's consciously prying self can do. Through Miles, Hawthorne wryly portrays the limited success of the (minor?) artist's effort to “lawfully dream awake.”