THE GREAT APPEAL of “Passage to India” is understandable. Following the Civil War and the publication of the 1867 (fourth) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman, close to fifty, had become increasingly preoccupied in his poetry with “thoughts on the deep themes of Death & Immortality.” While he had, of course, explored these themes in his earlier poetry, this strong emphasis on the “universal” was something new and it was to continue to the end of his career. He answered a request from the English Broadway Magazine for a poem by sending five separate lyrics, under the group title “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” Published in 1868, these were, in addition to the title poem, “Darest Thou Now ? Soul,” “The Last Invocation,” “Pensive and Faltering,” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which was actually composed in 1862–63 and reworked at this time with emphasis on the soul rather than on its earlier “Calamus” motif. Quite self-conscious about the spiritual direction his poetry was taking now, he indicated that he would make “no more attempts at smart sayings, or scornful criticisms, or harsh comments on persons or actions, or private and public affairs . . . never attempt puns or plays upon words, or utter sarcastic comments.” And around this time he also indicated that in the next edition of Leaves he would give special emphasis to “religious themes.”1 Whitman was entering the final phase of his career. He had come the full way around. In some dozen years, the poet of the body had given way to the poet of the soul, the poet of intense nationalism to the poet of internationalism and the cosmic.

A study of Barbey d'Aurevilly‘s “Le Rideau cramoisi” and Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir provides insights into the functioning of allusion as an artistic device. Barbey, with his use of Stendhal's masterpiece, was probably appealing to a group of ardent stendhaliens forming as early as the 1850's. Where a feeling for the rather equivocal reactions aroused in Le Rouge et le noir‘s nineteenth-century readers may be obtained from a perusal of the epoch's criticism, a deeper understanding of the novel arises from an analysis of “Le Rideau cramoisi.” On the levels of vocabulary, imagery, character, and plot, Barbey's story alludes to the earlier work. Within “Le Rideau,” the allusion works in the fashion of a gradually enlarging metaphor. Like metaphor, Barbey's allusion has two terms: Le Rouge et le noir and Brassard's tale. The two terms work as a unit in the framework of the whole story to intensify those elements shared with Le Rouge—an egotistical protagonist incapable of preventing himself from violating the codes of honor and hospitality. Moreover, the allusion serves as the principal means for eliciting the central theme of diabolism. The masterful use of this artistic device partially explains both the continuing interest aroused by “Le Rideau cramoisi” and its power.

The degree of Hemingway's frequently confessed debt to Stendhal as master and model is best seen in his adoption of The Charterhouse of Parma as the matrix of A Farewell to Arms. His use of Stendhal's novel is consistent with his esthetic practice of finding imaginative models to extend the meaning of autobiographical experience. He employed the battle and retreat experiences of Fabrizio at Waterloo as the paradigm of Frederic's experience during the Caporetto retreat. Both protagonists play the roles of outsiders in their armies, endure the suspicions of others, leave their retreating columns and seek survival in smaller groups, desert their routed armies, seek refuge in Switzerland, and later attempt to understand through reading and reflection the changes worked in them by their experiences in the debacles. Hemingway also followed Stendhal's lead in depicting the way in which language becomes a casualty of military catastrophe. In his larger development Frederic builds on the example of Fabrizio, changing from a man initially unable to love because he has no religious belief to one who loves and believes passionately and finds his destiny in his identity as a believer.

Critics have argued that Adam in Book ix of Paradise Lost is responsible for Eve's fall in that he permitted her to go forth alone on the fatal morning. This view of indirect responsibility may not be consonant, however, with Milton's doctrine of individual responsibility enunciated elsewhere in the poem. Neither God in Book iii, Raphael in Books v-viii, nor the Son in Book ximplies that Adam's headship over Eve requires that he control absolutely his wife's actions. If his function as husband was not to restrain Eve, then he can hardly be found delinquent for not having done so. Eve, though inferior to Adam, should not be thought incomplete without him and thereby unable to bear the responsibility of resisting Satan alone. Eve's intellectual inferiority does not make her more susceptible to sin, for Milton has shown repeatedly in Paradise Lost that nothing in a creature's innate being predisposes him to sin and that, moreover, it is not intellectual prowess which enables a creature to repulse sin, but love and allegiance to God. Thus, each creature is responsible individually for his own obedience. It is incompatible with the meaning of the entire poem to suppose that Eve was only conditionally responsible to God and therefore, when separated from Adam, unable to succeed against Satan.

HANK MORGAN'S USE of a solar eclipse to impress upon King Arthur and his court that a magician superior to Merlin stands before them is, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's time-travel version of the international novel. Arthur is at least as affected as the reader and, as a consequence, Hank istransformed from being a prisoner into being the Boss. But perhaps the reader does not appreciate that on a symbolic level, this blotting out and temporary displacement of one heavenly body by another parallels the “transposition of epochs—and bodies [human and stellar]” (p. 18) which is the donnée of the novel—the displacement of nineteenth-century America by sixth-century Britain and, subsequently, the displacement, first tentative then total, of sixth-century Britain by nineteenth-century America.1 By equating this “epoch-eclipse” with the apparent extinction of the sun, Twain is implying that the posited world transformation is an event of apocalyptic proportions. In the Revelation of John the Divine, as in traditional symbology, fire is the instrument of apocalypse and, thus, Twain's use of the sun in this context is most appropriate.2

The numerous interpretations by critics of all decades of Rimbaud's sonnet on the “Vowels” are mostly based on considering A E I O U solely as letters and not as sounds. New perspectives on the poem can be opened by emphasizing its sonorous aspects and stressing the importance of vowels as primeval shouts. An analysis of the sound structure in the sonnet reveals that the profusion of images, colors, movements, emotions, evoked by the five vowel sounds, appear to be derived directly from larynx vibrations and from the shape and movement of the lips as they pronounce each key vowel. This discovery of the “naissances latentes” possible origin in the “Vowels” relies greatly on Rimbaud's other poetic works and on his new theories on poetry. A close look at some of his predecessors' ideas, themes, and images—like Victor Hugo's and Baudelaire's—that elicit a probable influence on the young poet or a strange correspondence with his own objectives further unveils, in the study of each vowel, the esoteric aspects and poetic elaboration of the “Vowels.” A living vestige of Rimbaud's adolescent voice speaking to us in its original spontaneity, the sonnet thus discloses the poet's secret: shown in the very process of creating a new language, he is like a true God: through the magic of his word, he creates light, colors, a whole new world of vivid sound-objects, that illustrate the five stages of man's life from nonexistence to eternity. (In French)

Analysis of descriptive passages in Camus's “Le Renégat” shows that the protagonist associated violence with a means of escape from his unpleasant surroundings in France. Fascinated by violence, he goes to convert the cruel inhabitants of Taghâsa. But on arriving at the town built of salt, excessively hot and violent, he is enslaved. After a time the protagonist freely adores the idol of Taghâsa, believing it to represent a universal and eternal principle of violence, thus becoming the Renegade. He kills the next Christian missionary to come to Taghâsa, but in a decor which negates, thematically, the universality and the eternity of the evil principle of violence which he adores. After this futile murder, the story ends with the Renegade's more futile repentance. The thematic structures of this short story seem to embody the same rejection of violence which can be found in the last section of L'Homme révolté. (In French)

THIS PAPER seeks to investigate the social and revolutionary implications of a predisposition toward violence (variously called “virtu” or “énergie”) so typical of Stendhal's characters. It will aim at showing that when the individual's psychological need for action is frustrated by a stagnant society, he will attempt to shatter the structure that confines him to inaction. Such a temperamental predisposition is all the more likely to become a revolutionary act when the “times are out of joint.”1 Indeed, an important aspect of the revolutionary mentality is what one might call the “chiliastic” experience of time.2

One of the most significant bridges between Montaigne, the thinker, and Montaigne, the writer, is in the use of figurative expression. Through application of a portion of Thibaudet's catalog of Montaigne's images, the organic nature of metaphor in the Essais becomes immediately apparent. Sometimes generating each other, sometimes generated within the writer's thought progressions, Montaigne's metaphors are frequently found in clusters. Such clusters depict the movement of the writer's mind as it strives to give a stylistic form to his thoughts. In both their thematic and organic natures, therefore, his metaphors provide introspective glimpses into the operation of the creative mind.

The heroine of Richardson's first novel is neither a meretricious young hussy nor a paragon of virtue; she is a complex personality who moves from a naive adolescence to a composed maturity in the course of the narrative. The conflict between her devotion to moral principle and her growing affection for Mr. B., which develops in the first, or Bedfordshire, section of the novel, brings a near-psychic collapse in the second, or Lincolnshire, section. The imagery and symbolism show the nature of her torments, her growing awareness of a love that combines eros and agape, and her need for the reconciliation between conscience and libido which is completed after her return to the Bedfordshire estate in the third section. The formal symmetry of the novel evolves from the narrative process within which Pamela is tested and proved capable of an honest love and a tranquil marriage.

The art of Juan Ruiz must be understood in the light of the medieval conception of art as facere, a conception that postulates the artistic independence of a work while emphasizing its didactic nature in the use that individuals can make of it following their own personal motivations. The independent artistic form of Ruiz's work is at the same time an autobiographical form, wherein lies its fictional character. The fiction of the Book of Good Love is not to be seen as the fiction of its imaginary adventures but as the psychological fiction of its protagonist, i.e., the literary illusion that this protagonist mistakes for reality. Such an illusion is best exhibited in the central episode of the book, that of don Melón and doña Endrina, Ruiz's own amplified translation of Pamphilus de Amore. The autobiographical form of the book, therefore, should not be seen as a conventional literary device for self-expression but as an ironic portrait of Juan Ruiz, the man, taking for reality what Juan Ruiz, the artist, knows to be only literary fiction. (In Spanish)

By rejecting Wonderland and the world behind the Looking-Glass, Alice is rejecting not only the horrifying chaos of meaninglessness but the liberating chaos of comedy as well. Thus, the tone of the Alice books is ambivalent in relation to the protagonist. Insofar as Alice suggests a child taking a well-earned revenge on adult silliness or defeating the anarchy of the subconscious, she is supported. But she just as often appears either as an insensitive child, rudely attacking the gentle and the kindly, or simply as a human being, deeply corrupted by her obsession with nothingness, predation, and death. The presence of almost uncontrolled hostility in the Alice books has been noted, but the fact that this malice is often directed at Alice has not. And it is just this tonal ambivalence which makes these books so baffling and complex.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE'S magnificent poetry has aroused constant speculation on his esthetic theory. Critics have felt that an understanding of his esthetics would give a clearer understanding of his poetic technique; this in turn would lead to a more complete appreciation of the beauty of his poetry. He has also left sufficient remarks, if unsystematized and indeed often contradictory, to pique the curiosity of the critic and to suggest various interpretations of his philosophy. His poetry, a consistent interpretation of his theoretical explanations, and the literary climate in which he lived all lead me to believe that his esthetic doctrine is built upon le sentiment du beau. His “définition du Beau,” his “théorie rationnelle et historique du beau,” his “Beau bizzare” all need le sentiment du beau to resolve their contradictions and their ambiguities. More important, this esthetic doctrine is applicable to all of his poetry: it permits a finer appreciation of both the Christian and the Satanic poems and also of the poems that are neither. It maintains the essential esthetic value absent in the many psychological interpretations. It affords more insight into his poetry than a doctrine of metaphor; it permits a more complete interpretation than the theory that his art is based on a fusion of the spiritual and the material. And there is evidence that Baudelaire's theory of the esthetic feeling not only was a logical development of early nineteenth-century esthetics but was under open discussion among the younger poets of the middle of the century. For Baudelaire did know to his satisfaction what this sentiment du beau is: he understood it to be a perfect fusion of the three modes of the human personality—sensation, feeling, and thought. “Il me serait trop facile de disserter subtilement sur la composition symétrique ou équilibrée, sur la pondération des tons, sur le ton chaud et le ton froid, etc. ? vanité! Je préfère parler au nom du sentiment, de la morale et du plaisir.”1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed the distinctive style of thought presented in La Nouvelle Héloïse in order to reconcile conflicting needs for erotic pleasure, innocence, and transparency. The cognitive style thus evolved and put forth as a moral imperative, emphasizing both the subject's ability to lose himself in an emotional fusion with others and the overwhelming power of the passions, found favor with the generation coming of age in 1761. Choderlos de Laclos, a member of that generation, although apparently much impressed by some aspects of Rousseau, presents in Les Liaisons dangereuses a cognitive style which is the antithesis and refutation of the one in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The “sentiment involontaire,” so frequently invoked in La Nouvelle Héloïse as an excuse for the inadmissible impulse or action, is subject to a scornful analysis by Laclos. Whereas Rousseau attempted to seduce the reader into accepting the morality of his novel, Laclos, on the contrary, sets up a trap by which the reader is made to recognize his own complicity, motivated by curiosity, in the maneuvers of the rapacious protagonists.