Of books and things—east. David Erdman describes a recent installation of “books in parts” in the room adjoining the Arents Tobacco Collection in the New York Public Library. So far as is known, this is the only collection in which the principle of selection is that the work must have appeared piecemeal over a period of time and should still be preserved in its original paper wrappers or board covers. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Trollope first appeared in this way, and the vogue even extended to the entire field of belles lettres, including poetry, essays, biography, and took in such philosophical authors as Herbert Spencer. Famous bird and flower books with their beautiful color plates appeared thus in separate portions. The collection numbering about a thousand pieces, housed in a room decorated in the manner of a collector's treasure house, includes holograph manuscripts of some of the books, original drawings of illustrators and autograph letters relating to the books and their illustrators. Have a look next time you're in New York.

College-bound majority. According to figures released by the U. S. Office of Education, the majority of high school graduates now enter college. There were 1,318,700 graduates of public and private secondary schools in the continental United States in 1956 and 714,966 first-time college freshmen. The percentage is 54.2. (A revised system of classification by the Office of Education reveals that the corresponding figures for 1955 were 1,281,400 graduates and 668,064 first-time freshmen, for a percentage of 52.1. In 1954 it was 49.8%, and in 1952, 44.7%; skipping back before the war, in 1940 it was 34.1%.) It seems clear that high school administrators must recognize that an increasing majority of their students do not terminate education in the high school—that college preparation is now a major concern of secondary education. Take FL preparation. About 60% of the first-time students in 1956 were in liberal arts colleges and in universities, many seeking the B.A. degree. Of the 830 accredited institutions in the U. S. offering the B.A. degree, 254 (30.6%) require FL study for entrance and 694 (83.6%) require FL study for the degree. Spread the word.

As every schoolboy knows, Dante classified the sins punished in the Inferno in descending order, going from transgressions caused by the abuse of our normal instincts down to the graver violations involving perfidy and malice, which both deface the nobility of the human soul and sever us from our fellow men. So, even before crossing the passage from the first to the second circle, we know that there we shall find damned souls worthy still of tears of pity. The damned of the second circle, carnal sinners, are men and women who have subjected their nobler impulses to the animal urges of the flesh. Foremost in the ranks of these stand Paolo and Francesca, and their story is in a certain sense the first truly infernal episode.

Efforts to make paradigms for the verbs of contemporary English run into difficult problems. It is not easy to decide what forms we will recognize, and if we do reach a decision we may still find it hard to group our forms satisfactorily. The kind of paradigms school grammars have contained are severely criticized by the new linguists, who hold Latin grammar and “meaning syntax” responsible. The new linguists have not as yet produced any paradigms with the finished symmetry that characterizes some of their tables of vowel sounds, but they have been giving thought to the matter. It is in order to note what has been done with verb forms in their two principal works of the present decade, the Trager and Smith Outline of English Structure and the Fries Structure of English. Perhaps still another effort at paradigm making can be excused too.

During the eighteenth century it was generally assumed that Addison's marriage to the Countess of Warwick had been an unhappy one. Pope's caustic words in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnol (1. 393) about “marrying discord in a noble wife” were supposed to refer to Addison and his countess. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on hearing of Addison's appointment as Secretary of State, had sarcastically remarked: “Such a post as that, and such a wife as the Countess, do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that is asthmatick, and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both.” The tradition came to full flower in Johnson's Lives of the English Poets: “... at last the lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, ‘Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.‘ The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness: it neither found them nor made them equal. She always remembered her own rank, and thought herself entitled to treat with very little ceremony the tutor of her son.” Johnson gave no authority for his “uncontradicted report,” and it seems likely that the Great Cham was supplementing the available evidence with a liberal use of imagination—a faculty which he elsewhere so strongly deprecated. Still the tradition continued, and at the beginning of the next century, Richard Phillips, in Addisoniana, related as a current anecdote, “that though Holland-house was so large a mansion, yet it could not contain Mr. Addison, the Countess of Warwick, and one guest, Peace.”

While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.

Aune epoque où maints artistes de talent pratiquaient exclusivement des genres qui pussent plaire aux riches aristocrates ainsi qu'aux maîtresses de Louis XV—en particulier Boucher et son élève Fragonard, virtuoses de ce que Malraux appellera “l'art d'assouvissement”—un peintre, de nature modeste, avait courageusement résolu de faire uniquement œuvre de peintre et d'approfondir sa vision personnelle et irréductible du monde. Au cours de sa longue et laborieuse carrière, Chardin n'exploita que quelques genres mineurs: la scène d'intérieur et de vie domestique, la nature morte, et le portrait. Mais l'excellence et le charme discret de ses compositions sans prétention devaient lui attirer l'admiration, non seulement des amateurs d'art du dix-huitième siècle et de connaisseurs tels que Diderot, mais aussi des artistes contemporains, espèce particulièrement envieuse et difficile à contenter. Mais si son talent ne fut jamais contesté de son vivant, à l'encontre des décorateurs en vogue, Chardin ne s'enrichit jamais de la vente de ses tableaux qui, si admirés fussent-ils, n'en n'étaient pas moins considérés comme appartenant à un genre inférieur à “la grande peinture.” Il est cependant intéressant de noter que les lièvres, les chaudrons, et les pêches de Chardin exerceront une plus grande influence sur les chercheurs et les innovateurs du dix-neuvième siècle que les “machines” allégoriques et historiques de Carle Van Loo ou les scènes mélodramatiques et théâtrales de Greuze. Parmi les admirateurs de Chardin l'on peut compter notamment: Delacroix, Fantin-Latour, Pissarro, Cézanne, et Manet.

Die einheit von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren und ihrer Fortsetzung, betitelt Wilhelm Meisiers Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, wird von der neueren Goethe-Forschung fast einstimmig bejaht. Die Verbindung zwischen den beiden Romanen wird einmal durch die vielen Personen hergestellt, die zuerst in den Lehrjahren und dann wieder in den Wanderjahren auftreten. Unter diesen Personen stent natiirlich an erster Stelle der Titelheld selbst, der in beiden Romanen den Mittel-punkt einnimmt. In den Wander jahren werden ferner pädagogische und bevölkerungspolitische Plane, auf die in den Lehrjahren schon hinge-wiesen wird, fortgesetzt und vertieft. Die Forschung hat diese Verbin-dungspunkte geniïgend hervorgehoben. Bisher ist es jedoch nicht gelun-gen, ein Motiv im Wilhelm Meister selbst zu finden, mit dem Goethe diese Einheit zwischen den Lehrjahren und den Wanderjahren auch dichterisch zum Ausdruck bringt. Das Bild vom kranken Königssohn, das an mehreren wichtigen Stellen der Lehrjahre erwähnt wird, bildet ein solches Motiv, das von einem zum anderen Roman weist. Ein beträcht-licher Teil dessen, was in den Wander jahren vor sich geht, wird in dem Geschehen, das auf dem Bild vom kranken Königssohn seine Darstellung gefunden hat, schon vorgedeutet. Andererseits lassen sich einige Szenen der Wanderjahre erst dann völlig deuten, wenn man sie im Zusammen-hang mit diesem Bilde betrachtet. Dieser Gesichtspunkt erweist sich als besonders wertvoll bei einer Analyse des Schlufibildes der Wanderjahre, dessen tiefe Bedeutung für den gesamten Wilhelm Meister sich so zum ersten Mal offenbart.

When coleridge, in the famous Chapter xxii of his Biographia Literaria, used the “uncouth and new-coined word” matter-of-faclness to describe one of Wordsworth's “defects,” he was accurately putting his finger on a strain of prosaic prolixity that is all too evident in Wordsworth's poetry. But when he went on to find the principal cause of this matter-of-factness in “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself,” was he equally accurate? There is no question that Wordsworth, for all that the earth could be to him “an unsubstantial faery place,” was a hardheaded hillsman with an eye to a shilling and a fact; Raymond D. Havens well pointed out that “it was in the man as well as in the poetry that Coleridge lamented a deficiency.” Coleridge's complaint of “minuteness and fidelity” amounts, however, almost to a charge of unselective, photographic detail, of scrupulous concern for factual accuracy for its own sake. And this charge has been and is still being echoed: Emile Legouis writes of “Wordsworth's veneration for accurate facts and minute details” and John Jones, of Wordsworth's “delusion that he had done what was required of him if he stuck closely to the facts.”

Freud, der Philosoph, lebte von früh auf in Hader mit den Philoso-phen. Die Religionen behandelte er wie irgendein Aufklärer des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts—doch subtiler, mit den Waffen einer Psychologie, die sie noch nicht ahnten. Mit den Kunsten lebte er in Frieden ... man könnte fast sagen: in sehnsuchtiger Bewunderung.

On 31 January 1842, shortly after Dickens arrived on his first visit to the United States, he wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton, “There is a great deal afloat here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the time I come home.” And certainly Dickens' observations were to “some purpose.” The American visit produced a fine series of letters, a travel book, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and the famous American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). These three basic sources—the letters on America, which were never intended for publication as such; the Notes, which represented Dickens' public statement of what he saw in America; and Chuzzlewit, the fictional recreation of the America he found—form an extraordinary trilogy of materials made to order for the study of the relationship between fact and fiction. But strangely enough, despite the immensity of the Dickens bibliography, one hunts vainly for such a study. And yet, by analyzing the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in the light of Dickens' letters from America and his American Notes, it is possible to achieve a better understanding of his artistic methods and limitations. One can see, for example, how Dickens the observer, the selector, worked, how he broke up some experiences and fused others together. One can watch impressions and images recur and reappear as the associations with which they are connected also recur and reappear. Finally, one can better understand the fictional difficulties and shortcomings in the American interlude of Martin Chuzzlewit; one can better explain a good many artistic lapses and seemingly wild exaggerations.

Whitman liked to picture himself as an innocent, primitive genius whose “barbaric yawp” was prompted by nature, not culture, and whose originality was ignorant of precedents and uncontaminated by book learning. But modern scholars and critics have shown that he and his art are not so simple as they pretend to be. They are products of a well-advanced artistic and literary development. My purpose is to examine one of his best poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” in relation to one of the oldest, most highly respected literary traditions in our civilization—that of pastoral elegy. Everyone knows that “Lilacs” is an elegy, and several writers have compared it in a general way to others, such as “Lycidas,” “Adonais,” and Emerson's “Threnody.” George Meyer of Newcomb College has pointed out the relation of “Lilacs” to pastoral elegy in class lectures, and doubtless others have noticed the same relation in various ways. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic study of it.

Anumber of critics who have written on Browning believe that the Duke's little chat with the emissary of the Count in “My Last Duchess” constitutes a clever man's instructions as to the sort of behavior he expects of his next wife. Mrs. Sutherland Orr, for example, says that the Duke's “comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plailnly state what he will expect of her successor.” Others, like Edward Berdoe, S. S. Curry, Ethel C. Mayne, William Lyon Phelps, and Ina B. Sessions, not to mention numerous editors and anthologists, find a similar purpose in the Duke's monologue. Although Berdoe's reading of the poem (p. 282) is perhaps not typical, it summarizes what the other critics have in mind: “When the Duke said ‘Fra Pandolf’ by design, he desired to impress on the envoy, and his master the Count, the sort of behavior he expected from the woman he was about to marry. He intimated that he would tolerate no rivals for his next wife's smiles. When he begs his guest to ‘Notice Neptune—taming a sea horse,‘ he further intimated how he had tamed and killed his last duchess. All this was to convey to the envoy, and through him to the lady, that he demanded in his new wife the concentration of her whole being on himself, and the utmost devotion to his will.” Browning himself is often quoted in support of at least the first part of this argument. Asked what the Duke meant by the words “by design,” the poet answered briefly but equivocally, “To have some occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it.”

In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”

Among the manuscripts and typescripts left by W. B. Yeats in the possession of his wife are two unpublished plays, one an unfinished manuscript consisting of two dialogues written in Yeats's inimitable, nearly undecipherable handwriting and the other a rough typescript inaccurately punctuated and proofread. The first was written in 1918 during the period of Yeats's interest in the Noh drama and has to do with a young girl, who lives as a goatherd in an old tower on a hill, and her lover, whose mother wants to block their marriage. This play is mentioned by Birgit Bjersby (though she makes an inaccurate quotation from the MS.) in her study of the Cuchulain legend in Yeats's works. The second play has been mentioned, as far as I know, only by Allen Wade. It is of interest chiefly for three reasons. First, it forms a dramatic milieu for “The Happy Townland,” a poem which Yeats liked well enough to preserve in his Collected Poems. Second, it throws some light upon Yeatsian symbology. And third, it is an example of a collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory. Allen Wade mentions this play only to assert that it evidently no longer exists. But four years ago a typescript of the play was shown to me by Mrs. Yeats. I found it to be a variation upon Lady Gregory's play, The Travelling Man.

Although the importance which Bernard Shaw attached to the work of John Bunyan has often been remarked, no one has systematically explored the many passages concerning Bunyan scattered through Shaw's prose in order to determine what Bunyan meant to him and what influence Bunyan may be assumed to have had on his art. Aside from its intrinsic interest, such a study is of considerable importance because of the widespread acceptance, especially by hostile biographers and critics, of G. K. Chesterton's idea that Shaw was in a quite unmetaphorical sense a puritan. A study of Shaw's responses to the puritan Bunyan suggests that the famous Shavian “puritanism” was merely one of the many masks which G.B.S. held between himself and a world which he meant to irritate, entertain and instruct.

One of the most significant aspects of the intellectual climate of the 1890's in France is undoubtedly the rapid spreading of Nietzsche's thought. Numerous fragmentary translations from his work were published in the literary reviews of the period, such as l'Ermitage, the Revue Blanche, le Banquet, and above all the Mercure de France. Articles on this philosopher were legion, and translations of complete Nietzschean works also began to appear with increasing frequency. The whole process has been described in detail by Geneviève Bianquis in her well-known study of Nietzsche's influence on French thought. By 1895 Nietzscheanism, though still in a rather vague form, was an essential part of the general intellectual atmosphere, and by the end of the decade we can speak of a true Nietzsche vogue.

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.