In “Being’s Centre”

556 REVIEWS children with passion; bothered parents have to forbid too much of it and tell them to get on with their 'work.' Later on, they get seized by the French and Russians in the same way. But even for Germans. to read the great German novel is mostly a 'cultural task'-infinitely rewarding, I believe, but never likely to become a dangerous passion in the reader!" Mr. Pascal's criteria may not always fit the writers of the nineteenth century. but they prove very stimulating in the cases of Mann and Kafka. His analysis of Kafka's Castle is extremely illuminating. and here one could only wish that he had gone further than he did in his conclusions about its symbolism. As for Mann, Mr. Pascal's analysis is one of the best discussions of him that one could desire. Perbaps the most interesting aspect of Mr. Pascal's investigation is to be found in his remarks on the irrational or "romantic" and the rational or "realistic" elements which play such an important part in German culture, and not only in its culture. The view that "The great German novel is the outcome of a perpetually renewed struggle with Romanticism" underlies the analysis of each of the novels under discussion, and it helps a great deal in clarifying the spiritual world from which many of them emerged. In dealing with the novels he has chosen for discussion, Mr. Pascal has followed one method throughout, leading off with a synopsis of plot and following with aesthetic and other observations. The result is an unusually informative book for the newcomer to German literature, and one that will also prove of interest to those acquainted with the field. Yet to this reviewer, it is a question whether it will put the reader into a frame of mind that makes him look forward to a new experience in reading. This is not so much because he has put his criticisms "very sharply. too sharply, of course," but rather because he tends to underrate those elements in German fiction which, for many people, and not only for Germans, have made the reading of it an "infinitely rewarding" and an enjoyable experience. LAURA HOFRICHTER In "Being's Centre" Anyone who reads the rich volumes of Mr. lohnson's edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson is likely to emerge with a humble sense that he has hardly appreciated that poetry before. (The Poems of Emily Dickinson. including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts, edited by Thomas H. lohnson, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer· sily Press, 1955, 3 vols.) It is not merely that all her known poems, 1775 of them, are now at last gathered up before us, instead of lying dispersed in two rival volumes, to say nothing of the other poems scattered about in biographical volumes, collections of letters, and sundry magazines. The sheer bulk is impressive, surely: it shows the profusion and resourcefulness of a major creative energy sustained for thirty years; although the valuable chronological arrangement here shows that the chief demonstration of this power occurred within the years 1858-65. What we feel, viewing the whole, is a REVIEWS 557 lifetime's intense dedication to the poetic art, evidenced particularly by the thousands of variant readings and the frequent recensions of entire poems, now skilfully recorded for the first time. Emily Dickinson's craftsmanship, her canny. persistent search for the just word, bas often left us here with the pleasant task of creating our own preferred text out of a dozen or more good readings within a single poem. All this is testimony to a bountiful gift and in itself would be enough to make this edition one of the great literary events of our century. Yet something more important lies beyond: the new poems that here meet us, and the renewed, refreshed impact of poems that have been familiar and yet have not been truly known until DOW. Mr. Johnson has been modest in counting up the poems here published for the first time: he counts forty-one "known to be unpublished in whole or in part." Yet the detailed textual notes that follow every...