Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.“ These two sentences, embedded in the well-known Preface to Eminent Victorians, must always be the starting point and a constant point of reference in any discussion of Strachey's conception of biography. The basis of all good biography must be, he firmly held, the humanistic respect for men—men in their separateness as distinct from lower creatures and in their separateness apart from economical, political, ethical, and religious theories; men in their separateness as distinct from one another, men as individuals, various, living, free. It has been well said that Strachey wrote with ”a glowing conviction that character is the one thing that counts in life“ and with a realization that individual human beings, however simple they may appear, are enigmatical, complex, and compact of contending elements. Each person carries his secret within him, and the biographer is one who has the gift for discerning what it is. Hence individual human beings are not only highly important; they are also highly interesting. The puzzle which the biographer has to solve in dealing with ordinary people is fascinating enough; but when the subject is a great man, the biographer works with his problem in an atmosphere of intense excitement, for about all great men there is something wondrous and incredible.

The myth of the cultural “limitations” of Henry James appears to have been the creation of two British journalists, Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, who, while they rendered to James the service of publicity, were not sufficiently read in either James or the classics to generalize as freely as they did on both his riches and his deficiencies. Hueffer led off in 1913 in this fashion:

L'evangéliste d'Alphonse Daudet est à beaucoup d'égards un bien étrange roman. Publié en 1883, au sommet de la carrière du romancier, entre Numa Roumestan et Sapho, il est loin de figurer au même rang que ces chefs-d'œuvre. Pourtant après un succès de scandale, l'Evangéliste n'a jamais cessé d'être lu, réédité et traduit. De plus, la publication du roman a constitué à l'époque un véritable événement littéraire : Parmi les critiques français qui ont publié sur l'Evangéliste des articles dans les quotidiens et les revues, nous relevons les noms d'Edouard Drumont, Paul Bourde, Henri Houssaye, Gustave Geoffroy, Anatole France, Francisque Sarcey, Jules Lemaître et surtout Ferdinand Brunetière. A l'étranger Henry James écrivit après avoir lu l'Evangéliste une étude très perspicace sur l'ensemble de l'œuvre de Daudet. Il ne s'en tint pas là: en 1886, il devait donner sous le titre de The Bostonians un roman qui reproduit la situation, sinon le sujet, de Y Evangêliste.

Melville's Mardi is the account of an ostensible search for a lost, ideal maiden. But from beginning to end its true object seems to be rather an undiscovered, ideal man, such a man as Babbalanja described to King Abrazza: “Cerebrum must not overbalance cerebellum; our brains should be round as globes; and planted on capacious chests, inhaling mighty morning inspirations. We have had vast developments of parts of men; but none of manly wholes. Before a full-developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship.” For such a man Melville's whole literary life, in fact, was a search, which naturally discovered more halves than wholes, more Ababs and Pierres than Jack Chases—more Emersons, Hawthornes, and Goethes than Shakespeares. Without doubt Melville's sympathies between halves lay with the heart, yet he regarded neither as adequate, uncomplicated, or hostile to the other. As the earliest, longest, and most undisguised account of this search for the “full-developed man,” Mardi is the most important single work by Melville for the study of one of his most important themes.

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.

It has not escaped the notice of students of Storm's novelistic art that many of his Novellen employ the device known as the “frame,” nor have explanations been lacking as to its purpose. Most attention has not unnaturally been paid to the frames of the stories laid in the comparatively distant past—the so-called “Chroniknovellen” and the Schimmelreiler. The first systematic investigation of the use of the frame by Storm and his contemporaries is the study by Hans Bracher, Rahmen-erzahlung und Verwandtes bei G. Keller, C. F. Meyer und Th. Storm (Leipzig, 1909). This monograph examines the problem chiefly from the standpoint of the kind of frame encountered in these writers and the technical uses to which it is put. The question of the inner necessity of the frame is left largely unanswered, a fact of which Bracher himself is well aware. Georg Baesecke in a review of the book by H. Eichentopf, Th. St.s Erzdhlungskunst—in Zeitschrift f. deut. Philologie, XLI (1909), 520–531—has advanced the interesting theory that the frame is for Storm a means of freeing his hand and his conscience; the ego thereby shoves the responsibility for the truth of the epic material upon a third person. Baesecke arrives at this point of view by proceeding on the assumption that Storm's novelistic art grew out of his lyrical art, as the poet himself indeed asserted, though it has never been satisfactorily explained just what he meant by this dictum. Baesecke implies that in the lyrical production the ego is free to speak in its own right out of actual experience. That part of Thérèse Rockenbach's study which has been available to me, Th. St.s Chroniknovellen (Diss., Braunschweig, 1916), hardly throws new light on the “why” of the Stormian frame, though the author calls attention to interesting parallels between Storm's technique and that of others, especially Brentano, Stifter, and Raabe. Walter Brecht—“Storm und die Geschichte,” Deut. Vierteljahrss., iii (1925), 444–462—remarks that the difference between Storm's frames and those of other writers lies not so much in the technique itself as in the “Flut von Stim-mung, die in dem meist unausgesprochenen Nebeneinander in Rahmen und Erzählung steigt.” Storm's central concern, Brecht feels, is the “relation between Then and Now.” The gap between the past and the present is nothing less than the gap between life and death, which is itself a “mysterious connection.” In the frame, which is the instrument by means of which Storm “perspectively elongates” the present into the past, this relationship becomes particularly evident. Franz Stuckert, in his excellent article, “Th. St.s novellistische Form”—Germ.-Roman. Monatss., 27. Jhg. (1939), 24–39—seeks the origins of Storm's narrative art in the oral tradition of storytelling and finds that the frame fulfills for the poet an inner need by creating a situation analogous to that of audience and story-teller.

In the few poems that Clough wrote during his student days at Oxford one can see signs of a growing perplexity and anxiety with regard to certain problems of life and religion. This perplexity came to a head during the years that he taught at Oriel, and finally led him to resign his fellowship at that College. This resignation may be said to be the most dramatic and significant action of his life, and the story, told many times by his biographers, can now be told more fully in the light of the unpublished correspondence between him and Dr. Hawkins, the then Provost of Oriel College. Nor has sufficient attention been so far given to the circumstances that led to Clough's subsequent appointment as Principal of University Hall, London, and the manner in which his connection with that institution came to an end. It is proposed in the following pages to throw some light also on this important period of the poet's life.

Pushkin summarized Measure for Measure in Angelo (1833), a partly dramatic, partly narrative poem of 535 lines. He considered Angelo his best work, but critics have slighted it. Russian commentators on Pushkin have perhaps been discouraged from paying more attention to Angelo because it is not an original, independent work. Even Vissarion Bielinsky, otherwise a very attentive critic of Pushkin, dismissed Angelo cursorily. There are numerous studies of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin. These have concentrated on Boris Godunov and a few of the shorter plays, and neglected Angelo. This lack of attention is strange, because Angelo, in addition to being a fine example of the art of condensation, is a piece of Shakespearean criticism by one of the world's greatest poets, who had a very good knowledge of Shakespeare. The poem reveals what Pushkin liked in a play by Shakespeare and what he preferred to change. Its value may be all the greater because its criticism is not expressed in general, abstract terms. Besides the indirect comment in Angelo we have a fragment of Pushkin's formal opinion on Measure for Measure. In 1834 he wrote on the character of Angelo in a further development of his earlier views on Shakespeare's characterization in general:

It has long been known that the journals of George Ticknor contain a most interesting series of impressions of the later Wordsworth, gathered during Ticknor's two visits to Europe in 1819 and 1835–38. Ticknor's description of the aging poet, his family and friends, his way of life, his poetry, and his opinions, while it is certainly not blindly adulatory, serves as an agreeable antidote to the rather astringent and far more widely known description by another travelling American, Emerson. The relations between Ticknor and Wordsworth are of interest not only to students of the two men individually, but also to anyone who is curious about the literary connections between the two cultures, for “the friendly daily intercourse of Wordsworth and Ticknor, a prominent and influential man of letters in America, was undoubtedly also a means of promoting in this country an interest in the poet and his work.”

One comes from a reading of A Tale of a Tub with two dominant impressions: that it is an extraordinarily brilliant work and that it is extraordinarily complex. One recalls Boswell's testimony that Dr. Johnson could hardly believe Swift had written the Tale: “it has so much more thinking, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his.” And again: “there is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life,” as opposed, say, to Gulliver's Travels, where (in one of Johnson's most prejudiced comments), “once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”

Les trois expressions de vers libres, de vers irréguliers et de vers mêlés s'emploient indistinctement au XVIIe siècle pour désigner les vers où se mélangent les différents mètres, sans qu'un ordre puisse être discerné dans le retour du même mètre: La Fontaine dans ses Fables, Molière dans Amphitryon, Corneille et Molière dans Psyché ont usé de cette forme poétique.

More insistently, perhaps, than any other poem in English, Lycidas raises the purely aesthetic problem of how the emotions may be stirred by lines which at first are much less than perspicuous to the intellect and even after many readings remain obscure at two or three points. Johnson's attack to one side, Lycidas has received all but universal praise, couched often in language so high-pitched that it absorbs easily adjectives like “exquisite,” “thrilling,” “tremendous,” and. “supreme.” Why is the emotional impact so powerful? A reply must be sought (I think) in the affective connotations of words, phrases, and images in formal combination; and it is worth finding because if in one of its aspects literature is history, in another, and not unimportant, aspect it is immediate experience.

Theoretically it is true that the application of the genealogical method to a sizable number of manuscripts descended from a single archetype would allow the almost perfect reconstruction of that archetype. Families, groups, and subgroups could be distinguished without hesitation, and readings could be determined with very little recourse to editorial ingenuity. Unfortunately such conditions are not to be found in actual practice. When the text critic has made a systematic record of all variants to be found in the MSS that he has collated, he must determine which of the great quantity of variational groups are genetic—that is, which groups actually reflect in their common readings the genealogy of their transmission. This operation requires the elimination of variational groups formed by the mere possession of the right reading, and random groupings formed by the accidental coincidence of readings.

The fifth edition of Attilio Momigliano's Storia della Letteratura Iialiana (Milan, 1946) still insists on the mainly ornamental function of the Decameron frame story: “II motivo del verde e dei fiori che inghirlandano la lieta compagnia, ha per lo più la superficialità e la povertà di un ornamento: è più decorazione che pittura. Ed è questo il carattere di tutta l'intelaiatura del libro : un largo affresco aristocratico da guardare nel decoro del complesso senza meditazione e senza analisi” (pp. 79 ff.). Yet a number of modern critics have seen in the cornice more than an ornament and have considered it rather an organic part of the entire work. Some of these writers see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure (or escape) from the stricken city to more ideal places, and their assumptions seem to be borne out by the statements of Boccaccio, who actually leaves no doubt about his artistic intention and consciousness in writing the frame story. However, it seems strange that even those critics who see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure from the city should look at the remainder of the cornice as a single setting and should overlook entirely the group's wanderings from garden to garden. Although a detailed study of these gardens has not hitherto been made, they and the group's peregrinations suggest symbolically the philosophy of the whole work and are thus essential to its interpretation.

In the introduction to his edition of Guillaume le Clerc's Fergus (Halle, 1872) Ernst Martin surmised that Guillaume had composed his romance for a patron, Alan of Galloway, presumably while at the court of this powerful noble, in order to glorify Alan's ancestors, Fergus of Galloway and Somarled of Argyle. The validity of this hypothesis, reaffirmed by Margaret Schlauch in her article on “The Historical Background of Fergus et Galiene,” has been challenged, as far as I know, only by E. Brugger, and then merely in passing. Any close connection between Guillaume and Alan—or even between Guillaume and Galloway —seems so improbable to me that I wish to re-examine the problem, first reviewing the evidence which has led scholars to accept—or at least not to reject—the theory advanced by Martin and supported by Schlauch.