The sound and the Fury was the first of Faulkner's novels to make the question of form and technique an unavoidable critical issue. In any discussion of its structure the controlling assumption should be that there are plausible reasons for the particular arrangement of the four sections and for the use of the stream of consciousness technique in the first three and not in the fourth. Jean-Paul Sartre's comment that the moment the reader attempts to isolate the plot content “he notices that he is telling another story” indicates the need for such an assumption, not only for any light that may be thrown on The Sound and the Fury but for any insight that may emerge concerning Faulkner's method and achievement.

With ten volumes of prose fiction behind him, Herman Melville (1819-91) turned to writing poetry at the age of forty. When inability to market his first volume of verse set him to studying poets and poetry it was natural that he include Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Arnold had emerged as an important though not popular young poet in the mid-fifties. Whether or not Melville watched his rise in the British periodicals, which were reviewing his own books, he must have noted it in the pages of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, to which he was a regular contributor and subscriber. By the time Melville passed through England on his way to the Mediterranean late in 1856, Arnold was a figure of some repute. On the way back Melville dropped in at Longmans (27 April 1857), publishers that month of The Confidence-Man; they were Arnold's publishers too and were currently bringing out a third edition of the Poems. Later in the week Melville spent a memorable Sunday at Oxford University. “Most interesting spot I have seen in England,” he wrote in his journal. “Made tour of all colleges. It was here I first confessed with gratitude my mother land, & hailed her with pride… . Amity of art & nature. Accord… . Learning lodged like a faun… . Sacred to beauty & tranquility… . Soul & body equally cared for… . I know nothing more fitted by mild & beautiful rebuke to chastise the (presumptuous) ranting of Yankees… .” Melville's temporary yearning for the peace and tranquility of Oxford life, as he imagined it, where “learning lodged like a faun,” coincided almost exactly with Arnold's moment of consummation. Three days later (5 May) Arnold was elected by convocation to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Melville's words had not been those of an innocent abroad; they sheltered the value judgments of one who anticipated difficult years of wide-open readjustment. Melville's destiny lay elsewhere, but the Oxford incident marks symbolically the dawning community of interests between the later Melville and Arnold. For a moment the American scholar-gipsy looked down on the lights of Oxford, turned, and was gone. Five years later he began to read the Professor's poetry with a sense of coming upon a major contemporary.

Goethe with his elective affinities, Stendhal with his cristallisation, are among Marcel Proust's forerunners in the use of scientific analogies in fiction. In our time, D. H. Lawrence has made his readers familiar with electricity as an analogue for the passion of love. But it seems safe to say that no writer has ever made more varied and skillful use of metaphors from science than Proust. This is the more remarkable because A la Recherche du Temps perdu is better known for the allusions to painting and music than for the allusions to science. Admirers like André Maurois, Camille Vettard, and Jean Mouton content themselves with citing a few examples. A study of Proust's analogies from the sciences is interesting for several reasons. There is, for one thing, the question of Proust's scientific culture. Another question is the value of these analogies for clarification of the phenomena described. A third point of interest concerns their artistic value. Do they come up to the ideal of the author who wrote: “Je crois que la métaphore seule peut donner une sorte d'éternité au style … ”? What is the function of these metaphors in the novel conceived as a work of art?

To one who would explore the range and variety of fictional technique, the Victorian novel presents an infinite resource. It shows us novelists in the exciting awareness of a new literary genre shaping under their hands, aware of a vast new audience to whom they could appeal. They write often uninhibited by conscious theories of technique; they write with gusto and with what Edith Wharton once called the true mark of vocation in any art—abundance.

It has become fashionable in some circles to say that Conrad's prefaces and autobiographical utterances are to some extent oversimplifications and therefore misleading. And, of course, brief essayistic statements of overtly moral intent cannot adequately suggest the interplay of emotional struggles, ideals, and human depravity so richly and variously presented in the conflicts of Conrad's fictional world. Indeed, there may lurk beneath the conscious artifice of fiction subconscious psychic depths, hinted at in such symbols as may reasonably be exploited in terms of Jungian archetypes. I do not for a moment doubt the validity and plausibility of such approaches to Conrad.

I Most of us today recognize but the commonest of the figures of speech or rhetorical devices that we encounter in our reading. Simile, metaphor, pleonasm, even oxymoron still belong to our vocabulary; but most literate people of the present frown or otherwise distort their features at the mere mention of litotes, hendiadys, hyperbaton, meiosis, paranomasia, syllepsis, or zeugma. Our fathers learned to distinguish such figures, with the aid of examples drawn from Vergil and Tacitus, from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, and could even note in passing the clergyman's skillful use of such a device in his sermon.

Any one who has read in chronological sequence the earlier poems of Conrad Aiken is at once impressed with the new note that appears with the publication in 1916 of The Jig of Forslin. And he might be well impressed, at many points, by the strong suggestion, in Aiken's new manner, of Eliot's style in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems of the same period.

Notwithstanding the existence of innumerable and scattered bits of information and comment on the reception of nineteenth-century French realism in Germany, the general history of the subject has been curiously neglected. Only one comprehensive study, that of Flaubert's fortunes in Germany, has been published; German criticism of Stendhal prior to 1918 has been examined in an unpublished dissertation; the reputation of Zola has not been traced beyond 1893. Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Huysmans have virtually been ignored. Even the longer studies are almost exclusively concerned with the vicissitudes of one single author; few or no comparisons are drawn with German echoes of other French realists, and therefore no conclusions of wider significance could be secured, no total picture emerges.

I whatever henry James's feelings may have been toward his favorite “Albany cousin,” Mary (“Minny”) Temple, while she lived, it is clear that at her death in 1870, she left with him an indelible image that made available to him as a writer large areas of human experience. This image figured more or less obscurely in several of his stories and minor female characters but according to his own testimony was most fully and consciously operative in his creation of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove.

The irreverend and not always to be reverenced Frank Harris, in his book on Shaw, has sarcastically quoted Shaw's remark when the playwright was once told that he enjoyed a great reputation in America: “Which? I am a philosopher, novelist, sociologist, critic, statesman, dramatist, and theologian. I have therefore seven reputations.” Conceding his willingness to make Shaw a present of the last six, Harris nevertheless maintained that for the life of him he couldn't see how Shaw got in as a philosopher—even a laughing philosopher. A court jester, perhaps, or a “wit of the first water.” But being a philosopher entails, first, the formulation of a system of thought, and, second, the founding of a school of disciples to carry that thought on. Since, in spite of the “heaps of notes” Harris claimed to have gathered in a vain investigation of this subject, he could discover neither any system of thought nor any body of followers, he announced magisterially that, as a philosopher, Shaw “simply doesn't exist.”

A study of Mann's conception of the man of letters and of the literary artist is necessarily an enquiry into his entire philosophy of life, for to Mann “art is the quintessence of humanity and the artist the most human of men.” Because of Mann's perennial and conscious preoccupation with intellectual and artistic creativity, his views on the writer reflect most of the shifts and oscillations in his career. The present essay does not encompass all of these changes in accentuation and tonality.

A study such as Wolfgang Clemen's The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951) indicates that something other than the content of a metaphor, or even its simple recurrence, will prove important for the investigator of images. The skill of the artist may better be revealed in the functioning of his images or the great variety of uses which they are made to serve in different contexts. This suggestion has especial validity when applied to such a craftsman as Henry James. The changing conditions under which he applies certain figures in part explain why James's later fiction becomes more dramatic, at the same time that it remains realistic and more exclusively concerns itself with subjective events.