One thing we can now surely say of the achievement of Wallace Stevens: He has written, over some thirty years, a whole and continuing poetry whose subject is the life, the form and function, of the imagination. In the recently published Transport to Summer that subject receives its broadest, most complex treatment, yet remains essentially as it was in his first volume, Harmonium: in his language, a problem in the relation of the imagined to the real; in more general language, of the world as known to the world as outside knowing. From beginning to end what has been basic is the predicament of the man who would know. If, read in and of themselves, the poems in Transport to Summer contrast vividly with those in Harmonium, the contrast is as much an aspect of continuity as of difference and opposition. It is a continuity that represents the growth and achievement which, for good and for bad, make the total of Stevens' work greater than the sum of its parts. Viewed thus, the poems in Transport to Summer are inevitable precisely as they show Stevens trying to finish what he began in Harmonium.

In the last of his many discussions of the so-called play of ideas, Bernard Shaw remarked, “I was, and still am, the most old-fashioned playwright outside China and Japan.” This is one of the few statements that Shaw made about his own work of which we may safely believe every word—always assuming him to be correct about China and Japan. He was, to be sure, merely echoing his earlier, confession in the Preface to Three Plays For Puritans, in which he had defended The Devil's Disciple against a reckless charge of originality: “If it applies to the incidents, plot, construction, and general professional and technical qualities of the play, [it] is nonsense; for the truth is, I am in these matters a very old-fashioned playwright.” He elsewhere admonished us: “Remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is ‘to chasten morals with ridicule’ . . .” It is my purpose here to describe and interpret some of the stages through which Shaw passed and some of the attitudes which he assumed in the course of coming to such conclusions.

Edward Simmons, a painter of the last generation whose anecdotes are more genial than his murals, tells this story about Paul Verlaine. He was, says Simmons, a plain, hairy, dirty figure who frequented a Parisian café where Simmons foregathered with his fellow art students. You would not look twice at the ugly, disorderly being unless you chanced to notice his eyes. If he looked at you, you knew you were in the presence of your better. One night Simmons had a dispute with a French friend as to what was the meaning of courage. One argued that it is an admirable quality, the other that it is mere stupidity and vanity. At the height of the discussion Verlaine came in and was appealed to for a decision. He first demanded beer and then listened carefully to both sides. Looking at Simmons, he said: “I decide for the young American.” “But why?” asked the Frenchman. “Because you are right and he is right; you are wrong and he is wrong. But he believes what he says.” Whatever you may think of the forthcoming argument, please consider that I believe what I shall say. If belief is the touchstone of persuasion, as Verlaine seems to have asserted, I may find responsive ears. But remember that the other side could be right too.

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.

Can We Hope for a theory of romanticism? The answer, I believe, is, Yes. But before proceeding further, I must make quite clear what it is that I propose to discuss.

It is well known that D. H. Lawrence was an unsparing rewriter of his fiction, and the tradition persists that “he could never revise, he could only rewrite.” Yet, although he rewrote a number of poems, as he did his short stories and novels, he revised many more—nearly all of them, in fact, either before or after publication. His most concentrated period of activity as a poetic reviser was the winter of 1927–28, when he collected his poems for the publisher Martin Seeker, and he remarked at this time that he felt “like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air.” No wonder he felt this way, for he had been altering rhythms, rhymes, single words, and punctuation in addition to rewriting whole stanzas and sometimes whole poems. In a few weeks he altered the face of his early poems as drastically as the arch-revisers Wordsworth and Tennyson altered theirs in the course of many years.

The Younger Pliny, in closing the letter which gives the famous description of his Tuscan villa, makes the following wise observation, which I quote in Saintsbury's rendering: “I think it is the first duty of a writer to read his own title and constantly ask himself what he sat down to write, and to be sure, if he sticks to his subject, he will never be too long, but will be hopelessly so if he drags in other matters.” This warning is pertinent here because of the somewhat inflated title of my very modest contribution as announced in the MLA Program, and I feel that I should forecast in a few words what I propose to offer.

On 26 January 1895, still in the grip of the disconsolate mood engendered by the crashing first-night failure of Guy Domville three weeks before, Henry James made the following entry in his Notebooks:

The idea of the poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying— if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn t there a little story in it, possibly, if one can animate it with action; a little story that might perhaps be a mate to The Death of the Lion? It is suggested to me really by all the little backward memories of one s own frustrated ambition—in particular by its having Just come back to me how, already 20 years ago, when I was in Paris writing letters to the N. Y. Tribune, Whitelaw Reid wrote to me to ask me virtually that—to make em baser and paltrier, to make them as vulgar as he [sic] could, to make them, as he called it, more ‘personal.’ Twenty years ago, and so it has ever been, till the other night, Jan. 5th, the premiere of Guy Domville. Trace the history of a charming little talent, charming artistic nature, that has been exactly the martyr and victim of that ineffectual effort, that long, vain study to take the measure abovementioned, to ‘meet’ the vulgar need, to violate his intrinsic conditions, to make, as it were, a sow's ear out of a silk purse. He tries and he tries and he does what he thinks his coarsest and crudest. It's all of no use—it's always ‘too subtle,’ always too fine—never, never, vulgar enough. I had to write to Whitelaw Reid that the sort of thing I had already tried hard to do for the Tribune was the very worst I could do. I lost my place—my letters weren't wanted.

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:

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.

Perhaps only one who has long been interested in the phrase organic unity is wholly aware of how commonplace it has become in twentieth-century criticism. The journalist reviewing last night's symphony, the undergraduate finishing the term paper due on the morrow, critics one and all have found the phrase an impressive one. At times the word organic seems to be no more than a mere intensive:, to say that a painting has organic form is to say that it has “lots of form”; a poem with organic unity is a poem with “lots of unity.”