The magic and holy number seven, sum of the noumenal and phenomenal (3 plus 4) is at the very center of Thomas Mann's novelistic work since Der Zauberberg. It determines the structure and offers a clue to the meaning of his “educational novel.” This meaning becomes fully apparent in Mynheer Peeperkorn, synthesis between Christ and Dionysos. This synthesis is by no means weird and even less blasphemous, as has been often contended. Peeperkorn is the embodiment of Incarnation, and as such subject to the Passion, in both the Christian and the pagan sense. Through the life and death of Peeperkorn, Hans Castorp comes face to face with the highest Lebenswert. It is the great experience, anticipated in the chapter “Schnee,” by which the spell of and sympathy with death is broken. In the triangular covenant Peeperkorn-Mme Chauchat-Hans Castorp, caritus and eros, noumenal and phenomenal, are joined, pointing toward the “Third Humanism” of Thomas Mann's biblical novels. The number game, elucidated in numerous instances, is structure and meaning in one.

Sexuality is a powerful element in Valéry's poetry, but also a dangerous threat. Valéry resolves the threat in ambiguous imagery and this ambiguity has poetic value. His poetry utilizes nineteenth-century themes, but Valéry transforms them through his physiological awareness. His sexual imagery gains force by exclusive focus on physical passion and all possible aspects of the flesh, and by the use of elaborate developments containing an accumulation of related words. But the interests of “poésie pure” impose limits on his realism. Negative attitudes also influence Valéry's choice of imagery. He minimizes sexual languor and excludes intellectualized eroticism from his poetry while significant words in manuscripts and finished poems reflect his critical attitude. There is no celebration of the woman in Charmes and no union with her. Significantly, Valéry prefers words such as “abandon” and “dons” and the breast image to represent the female body rather than hands, lips, eyes—all of which imply union. Préciosité is also used as a defense against sexuality. In the ending of La Jeune Parque, however, sexuality seems to triumph, but this ending is complex, and is far from being as sexual as it first appears.

Broch's novel trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, has a pattern of apocalyptici magery and symbolism which appears at all important junctures of the work and permeates much of its texture. This pattern merges with a pessimistic theory of history, entitled “Disintegration of Values,” and it converges on a hostile portrayal of the German revolution of 1918. The essential function of the apocalyptic symbols is to frighten the reader into an attitude of acceptance toward the philosophy of the work. This philosophy contains an embryonic “theory of revolution” whose main thrust is counterrevolutionary because revolutions are viewed as manifestations of irrational impulses directed against rational institutions. The Epilogue, the prophetic message of the work, projects a curious double or triple vision: (1) apocalyptic fear of the destruction of values by Communism, (2) chiliastic hope for the rebirth of values with the coming of a Messiah (Führer), and (3) a Nietzschean faith in the eternal recurrence of history. Broch's entire oeuvre is apocalyptic or chiliastic with several modifications. He shares this tendency with many writers in the twentieth century, the new apocalyptic age.

The idea of the possibilities of human action in the Middle English Patience rests on a strictly providential view of history. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is part of a larger scheme, invisible to him, in which he has little confidence. The irony of the prophet's failure to understand or trust God's moral and historical purposes is deepened by the fact that he is a figure of Christ. Jonah's blindness to God's immediate purpose—salvation for the Ninevites—is foolish, but his ignorance of his own typological significance is inevitable, for that significance cannot be realized until the incarnation of Christ. Thus patience, the virtue in which Jonah fails so badly, is not simply a dull acquiescence in present necessity, but a sure faith in an eternal order not merely obscure but unimagined except by God. A brief reading of the poem shows that the contours of this faith are defined by those three of God's attributes which characterize the moral quality of events in the world he orders: his power, justice, and mercy.

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne forces us to recognize the limiting and distorting effects of the preconceptions which we may habitually impose upon new experience. This instructive confrontation with our own limits is accomplished by three central methods. Most frequently, we cannot resist judging situations that are under consideration by characters in the novel; then the processes that uncover their deluded prejudices lay bare ours as well. Through what amounts to a technique of parable, we are shown our own limitations as we discover those of Sterne's characters. Second, we are made to participate in the double meanings of words, with the effect that we recognize the tendency of our minds to make reductive assumptions on the basis of unreliable evidence. Finally, the narrator repeatedly manipulates us by deliberately disappointing expectations of narrative form developed through earlier reading. By arbitrarily departing from narrative convention, Sterne shows that arbitrariness lies in the conventions themselves and that our allegiance to them is a sign of a preference for convenient artifice over inconvenient reality. Such reevaluations of ourselves and our habitual responses persuade us of our need for the more complex perceptions of experience that Tristram Shandy demonstrates.

Readers often mistakenly treat Romantic poetry as a poetry of doctrine. It is predominantly a poetry of question, asking rather than telling. Like Descartes in his Meditations, the Romantic poet searches for certainty, employing the test of doubt, submitting supposed certainties to question. As with Descartes, the search leads into the realm of mental activity. But unlike Descartes, the Romantic poet finds further questions here: Cogito, but in what ways does man think? Romantic poetry has two main movements. First, the poetry works in several ways to expose doctrine to question, suspending a reader's sense of certainty. Next, the poetry explores what underlies doctrine, the basic data of mental experience from which doctrine is constructed. These movements establish a number of patterns in the poetry. The Romantic poet does not find certainty, but this failure is the poetry's success: it challenges man's ability to construct doctrine out of the data of experience.

Wordsworth's answer to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” is fuller than has been recognized. In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth indirectly suggests to his friend that he turn to God for the comfort he formerly found in natural objects and that he discover through God the extraordinary strength within himself to master sorrow. He reminds Coleridge, who laments the loss of Joy, of the visionary power of pain and of the spiritual insight and trust that may come from suffering itself. In addition, he asks Coleridge to remember that while storm may follow calm, sunshine may also follow storm. In “Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's ‘Castle of Indolence,’” written immediately after “Resolution and Independence,” comic innuendo and affectionate solicitude replace sober teaching as means of arguing against Coleridge's dejection. Alluding to Thomson's satiric portrait of a poet's melancholy companion, Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge that he is unlike this morose and speechless figure who thanks heaven the day is done. Wordsworth reminds Coleridge of his unusual capacity for delight in common things and of their mutual good fortune in being able to devote themselves to friendship and to art: like Thomson's pilgrims they have been dwelling in the “happy Castle.”

Historical allusions and the theme of history add a psychological and philosophical dimension to Keats's poetry that reflects the change in historical thought during the romantic period. Keats's wide-ranging familiarity with history manifests itself in a development that begins in juvenile hero worship but rapidly matures into a subtle historical vision in the odes and Hyperion poems. His sense of history as a kind of collective memory makes possible a union of poetry and history, since he sees both as products of the imagination that portray the varied particulars of experience. History plays a major part in Keats's deepening acceptance of mortality and an accompanying affirmation of time and process through release from the fear of death. The relative success and failure of his attempts to unite history and poetry confirm his organic analogy: when he relies most on his own imagination and memory, he evokes a more vital sense of the past than when he follows sources rather mechanically. He did not live to effect the revolution in historical drama to which he aspired, but history as a concept within his lyric and narrative poems remains a compelling witness of his powers as historical poet.

Thoreau's color symbols are part of an elaborate system of symbolic imagery he used to express the stage of controllable insight at which the spiritual and moral in nature could be conveyed. But they are especially important because they show the degree of originality and technical refinement he could reach. Emphasizing the sensible properties of natural phenomena allowed him both to present nature directly, as his theory dictated, and artistically to strengthen an appeal designed to be above the level of nature-as-fact. But by making certain of these properties symbolic in themselves, he could increase the range and precision of his expression. Five colors emerged as major symbols because they fitted into his basic system so well. Green, the spring and summer color, he used to stand for organic life activity, for birth and growth. With white he symbolized purity and spirituality, carefully avoiding its associations with winter. Blue, the color of unclouded sky and water, he used to represent the esthetic atmosphere of meditation. With yellow, his sun color, he showed spiritual cause and material effect. And red, his most personally significant color symbol, he used intensively to stand for heroism, strength, and spiritual fruition.

During the summer of 1849, while Melville was in New York writing White Jacket, the New York Herald carried a running story of the arrest and trial of a petty criminal known as the “Confidence Man.” There are several parallels between the Herald's “Confidence Man” and the character that Melville created in his later novel The Confidence-Man. Both the New York “Confidence Man” and Melville's Confidence-Man use the same approach and the same line of reasoning, leading to the same question: “Could you put any confidence in me?” Both men work under several aliases; both men use the former-acquaintance routine to relax their victims. In both the reality and the fiction there is a matter of bail to get out of the Tombs. And in both the novel and a Herald editorial a strong parallel is drawn between petty confidence men and the confidence men of Wall Street. From this correlation there is little doubt that this “Confidence Man” of 1849 was, in fact, the prototype for a major part of Melville's character in 1857.

Coverdale's reaction to Zenobia's sensuality, and the suppression of his sexual desire form the central plot of The Blithedale Romance. He describes her in rather explicit fleshly terms, especially in the early chapters of the novel. Despite Zenobia's frequent efforts to fend him off, he cannot stop pursuing her and trying to meddle in her life. The bulk of evidence supports the notion that his confession of love for Priscilla is a dodge. Parallel to these activities, Coverdale discusses at length the nature and source of his emotions and thoughts. He concludes that his dreams and his feeling that the world is unreal and insubstantial come spontaneously and mysteriously from his “secret mind”—a mental faculty beyond his conscious control.

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.