The conclusions of Jane Austen's novels are invariably ironic devices for the final summary of themes and characters. This role is illuminated by three main elements of all the conclusions. First, the novelist parodies the predictability of sentimental “happy endings” in much popular fiction. This accounts for the exaggerated self-consciousness with which she approaches the mechanics of concluding her own narratives, a self-consciousness that seems on the surface to contradict Jane Austen's well-known dislike of unrealistic plots. Second, she subverts the canons of poetic justice that are integral to most happy endings: instead of allocating “rewards” and punishment in accordance with ideal conventions, Jane Austen exposes the prevailing social norms that frequently undermine and replace traditional ideals. Finally, she replaces the arbitrary endings of poetic justice with the logical evolution of character and theme. Each character “punishes” or “rewards” himself, in keeping with his frequently unreliable sense of right and wrong. These features are particularly useful in a much-needed revaluation of Mansfield Park, for they demonstrate that it is not the didactic work described in traditional criticism. Thus Jane Austen's comic conclusion is a consistent device for the realistic, rather than didactic, analysis of character and society.

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.

When read in the context of the 1840's, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” is seen to be neither an explicitly anti-Catholic poem nor a simple historical construct. Much of its bent and many of its details had previously been expressed by so vigorously polemical a Catholic writer as Pugin; they appear again later in Ruskin's pages. Browning's concern rather—and this he shares with Newman, as well as Pugin and Ruskin—was to search out in the past the roots of his own age. The corruption of spirit that he discerns in the Renaissance he also recognizes as extending into his time. The ethos represented by Saint Praxed is dead; the modern world has begun; the qualities of the Bishop are the qualities of Browning's reader. The same historicizing of the past informs “My Last Duchess”, which dramatizes in the deadly embrace of the Duke and the Duchess the destruction of the old order at the hands of the new. The Duchess survives as a frozen portrait, Saint Praxed as no more than a confused and ineffectual memory. But despite the coherence of his analysis, and unlike Ruskin and Pugin, Browning refused to enter the lists with a programme of his own.

T.S. Eliot has appropriately cautioned us against disposing of Dr. Johnson's criticism with indecent haste.1 He may just as appropriately have told us that Dr. Johnson, while always pointing to significant issues, has occasionally said the wrong things about them; though in doing so, Johnson has unwittingly drawn our attention to poetical subtleties that he himself does not perceive. So it is with much that Johnson says of Lycidas, and particularly with what he says of the poem's rhyme scheme. He tells us rather tartly that the rhymes are “uncertain”;2 he does not tell us, however, that the rhymes tend toward certainty until regularity is triumphantly achieved in the penultimate verse paragraph.

The justification in Paradise Lost of the ways of God to men depends as much on Milton's dramatic and psychological motivation of the Fall as on its theological structure. The designed contrasts between Adam's and Eve's reactions on first awakening to life absolve Eve of the usual charge of vanity by establishing her as a feeling in relation to Adam as a ratiocinating being. Under the influence of Satan's venom Eve fails in love to Adam and then to God. But in Milton's view Adam is the faultier of the two because of his conscious failure to assert the absolute authority of his reason over her misguided feelings. Milton formally depends upon Paul's statement that Adam fell undeceived, but in his psychological motivation of the three key episodes of the Fall he differs from the usual interpretation of the Church Fathers that Paul meant only that Satan had not deceived Adam directly as he had deceived Eve. Milton thus reconciles the apparent paradox that Adam was not deceived but instead foolishly overcome by female charm. The scene in which he weakly yields permission is a direct foreshadowing of his acceptance of the apple since both contain the same false rationalization of his unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of his superior wisdom and its proper exercise in command.

In the Life of Johnson, Boswell suggests that Rasselas echoes the vanitas vanitatum theme of Ecclesiastes. Boswell's suggestion is quite discerning, for Rasselas is, in fact, designed to recall both the Preacher's futile quest for perfect happiness and the meaning of that quest as interpreted by a post-Reformation school of commentators on Ecclesiastes. This school includes Bishop Simon Patrick, whose scriptural writings, in conjunction with those of William Lowth, made up the “standard” Augustan commentary on the Old Testament. Rasselas is informed with a complex of images, sentiments, and ideas drawn from Bishop Patrick's paraphrase of and annotations to the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the thematic structure of the apologue follows the thematic structure that the post-Reformation school attributed to Ecclesiastes.

BYRON'S Cain, to no one's surprise, is a Byronic hero—disaffected, self-pitying, self-hating, suicidal—but he can be distinguished from such Byronically heroic figures as Lara and Manfred because, for one thing, he is not directly presented to us agonizing over his guilty past. Cain is presented in fact with no past except divine history and he protests, again and again, that this belongs not at all to him but to his blundering parents and God. There is no crime, then, no wretchedly sinful experience, for which this hero can be held responsible, and he is thrust upon us, embittered and complaining, without any personal history to account for the difference between himself and his pious community. Ultimately, however, there is the murder of Abel and, to compare Cain with other Byronic heroes, it should be said the murder replaces the sin or crime in the hero's past which Byron ordinarily leaves obscure. More relevant to my present concern is the fact that the murder has the effect of identifying Cain to himself and his community as none other than Cain, the infamous Biblical murderer. “Am I then my brother's keeper?” he asks.1 The addition of “then” to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible; it also reveals the curious way in which Byron has conceived this particular hero—as reliving rather than living the Biblical myth. In effect, Byron's Cain is a dramatic creature who plays Cain until, voilà, he murders his brother and discovers he is Cain.

Starting where Yeats and Owen left off, Dylan Thomas developed a system of consonantal correspondences which moved rhyme from the matching of same to the matching of similar sounds. His early verse abounded in such devices as zero consonance (rhyming, in a context of consonance, all syllables ending in an open vowel), partial consonance (rhyming two consonant clusters one of which is deficient in one or two members), close consonance (rhyming consonants which are phonetically similar rather than identical), and frame rhyme (rhyming words marked by both alliteration and consonance). In “Then was my neophyte” Thomas built an elaborate stanza by systematically associating and contrasting rhyming syllables according to the degrees of likeness among them. During the later thirties, however, he began to exercise increasing restraint in his use of the more unconventional of these consonantal devices; and although an unprecedented system of rhymes, founded upon assonance, began to take shape throughout the forties, it never quite attained the hierarchical articulation of the earlier consonant-based system. Instead, Thomas' latest work (his unfinished “Elegy”, for example) shows him preoccupied, just before his untimely death, with the exploration of simple, even quite traditional, stanzas based almost entirely upon conventional true rhyme.

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.

The Gothic novel is defined not by its stock devices—ruined abbeys and the like—but by its use of a particular atmosphere for essentially psychological purposes. Mary Shelley, Maturin, Melville, and Faulkner develop a form crudely forged by Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and M. G. Lewis. Their Gothic novels attempt to immerse the reader in an extraordinary world in which ordinary standards and moral judgments become meaningless and good and evil are seen as inextricably intertwined. Gothic writing is closely related to romantic: both are the product of a profound reaction against everyday reality and conventional religious explanations of existence. But while romantic writing is the product of faith in an ultimate order, Gothic writing is a gloomy exploration of the limitations of man. The one attempts to transcend the flux of the purely temporal to find joy and security in a higher beauty; the other is mired in the temporal and within it can find only absurdities and unresolvable ambiguities.

A prosody has four characteristics: predictability, continuity or wholeness, basis in a prominent feature of the language, and flexibility. Given such a definition, Whitman took significant steps toward developing a prosody that vies with accentual and accentual-syllabic prosodies in its subtlety and in its relative freedom from arbitrariness. Based on the rhythms of grammar, Whitman's poetry is constructed of groups rather than stresses, though stresses are here used to measure the size of groups. He is skillful both in arranging these groups and in controlling their relative size so as to reinforce his meaning. Whether measured in groups/line or stresses/line, his most consistent rhythmic form is the parabola. His use of it occasionally shows a formality and intricacy which are never attributed to him.