In this essay five ambiguous points in Mrs. Aphra Behn's life are pointed out. i) Aphra's relation with her uncle Johnson. George Woodcock says that Aphra was adopted by her uncle. But Emily Hahn is of the opinion that, though she lived with her uncle for some time, she ran away from his home resenting his harsh treatment. Was she a docile adopted daughter, or an independent run-away? 2) Her sojourn in Surinam, Guiana. As to the time when she was in Surinam, opinion is divided, especially between E. Gosse and Sackville-West. And as to her life in Surinam, Woodcock believes that she lived among the society people as a member of the family of the Deputy Governor. But Emily Hahn states that Aphra was a refugee's mistress and lived as a social outcast. 3) Her marriage. It has generally been believed that she was married to Mr. Behn, an old merchant. Harrison Platt, Jr., however, raised a theory that Aphra's real husband was not Behn but William Scot. Was Aphra an ordinary Restoration woman who was married to an old merchant for the sake of living, or a romantic woman who never marries without mutual love? 4) Her mission in Holland. The general belief has been that she was employed by Charles II as his spy. But Emily Hahn says that Aphra went over to Holland not to render services to Charles II, but in order to set her lover free. 5) Was Aphra a harlot? Robert Gould, her contemporary, calls her "prostitute", "punk", and "harlot". And Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and others accept it. But when we consider the fact that she was buried in Westminster Abbey, the scandal seems to be unacceptable.

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In order to know how Henry Fielding created his so-called 'prosaicomi-epic writing,' which we may regard as his conception of novel, I believe it best to approach his art by tracing the idea of Truth in his novels. So often he declared his strict adherence to Truth. As his chief intention of writing novel was to present a strict picture of that human world which he had so diligently observed and studied, he asserted 'Truth to Nature' first against the false vision of life. He was concerned to write against the idle romances of those days, attacking and satirizing all that seemed to him to be unrealistic and false. Thus, the assertion of Truth was often presented with his satiric view of human nature. But his attack against the false vision of life was not so satirical as Jonathan Swift. He was no misanthrope. He did not satirize human nature itself; he only ridiculed affectation or vanity by the criterion of Truth, which made him a sound moralist rather than a severe satirist. So his idea of Truth was also full of sentiments and emotions. The epic broadness in Tom Jones is the embodiment of the idea of Truth supported by the soundness of the author's moral idea. He believed that reality was an organic, harmonious and perfectly congruous whole. He created his 'epic' by this belief, but the reality was not what he believed. The idea of Truth supported by his optimism could produce Tom Jones, but the optimism could not express the whole reality.

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Edwin Muir (1887-) is known in Japan chiefly as the author of incisive critical works, or as the gifted translator of Franz Kafka. But Muir the poet has been rather neglected even in Britain. His reputation is established only recently. His poetry represents what he calls "an age obsessed by the sense of time, or the historical sense." He was born in the Orkneys and brought up "fulfilled and crowned with life as in a parable, as sweetly as gods together bound." The Story and the Fable (1940) is an autobiographical tribute to the blissful memories of this childhood. Nevertheless, the bitterness of youth bowed him down and drove him to the passionate devotion in the works of Nietzsche. Later Kafka redoubled and refined his tragic view of existence and death. From The First Poems (1925), time has been the great protagonist for him. His poetry is indeed what one. of his titles suggests, Variations of Time Theme (1934). Approaching the everyday mysteries through the Scottish imagination, he makes out of them a new system of mythology, where we have an exact image of mankind's position in the universe as he saw it. And his imaginative interpretation will be, with Eliot's, among the finest achievements in Modern English Poetry. Muir's thought moves between two themes, time and eternity. His poetry arises from the tension or the solution of his conflict. The solution is not final but fugitive and once again the tension rises. Therefore his position is on both sides of the conflict: man's side, and God's. This is the very reverse to the seemingly confidence of Eliot. Muir denies to put himself outside time by the Eliotian "dispossession" of worldly preoccupations. He shows little experiment in the technical side. This is also adverse to Eliot's virtuosity. But the firmness of poetic faith encourages his lifelong quest of symbolic expression. We cannot fail to see the immensity of struggle for liberation in and behind his "carnival of life and death." And his last volume, The Labyrinth (1949), calls our special attention by the delicate reconcilliation of Greek necessity with Christian freedom.

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Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote so brillant an essay on Collins and Dickens in 1927 that a biographer of Collins tells us a legend that the novelist's name had been entirely forgotten until the essay exhumed him. But Wilkie Collins and Dickens must be remembered as a prediction of a quite original novelist's debut. For Mr. Eliot disapproved of the contemporary novels; because of their loss of melodrama and their indulgence in everyday psychology-" the best novels were thrilling." It was violence and suspence (treasures of the film and le roman policier) that the new writer. Mr. Graham Greene re-introduced in the modern serious fiction. He, as a critic, rescued Henry James from the ivory tower which had been built of ready-made criticisms on the novelist, whose name was very delicately mentioned at the end of the essay by Mr. Eliot. The masters of Victorian novels, Dickens or Collins, for instance, were happy enough to depend upon the real society. They could mingle their music with the noises of the concrete world. Believing in their contemporary common sense, optimistic Christianity, they need not have sought after the thorough study of the significance made by complicated dynamism in the thrilling fiction. The writers in our time, however, cannot help pursuing deeper and deeper. It is their unhappy glory. Some knowledge of this glorious danger made writers of the twenties clear it; they receded and built their imposing silent static structures: Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Point Counter Point. Indeed they were heroic. But Mr. Greene was more heroic, as he decided to be a pioneer in the modern melodrama, which demands terrible difficulty to manage both story and significance at the same time. To speak strictly, though he was and is a fine writer of the up-to-date human agony tales with exciting manners, unfortunately Mr. Greene has failed nearly always. The Heart of the Matter, which has reputation as his best novel, is not his best, I think. Three years after the publication, Mr. Walter Allen, who had admired enthusiastically Mr. Greene's vivid and cinematic style, reproached this novel only with the Audenesque style. It is interesting that he took an instance, which was Wilson's entrance on the stage in the first chapter, as Wilson is unreasonably recognized as an unimportant support's role by the leading critics including Mr. Allen himself. He might have vaguely felt that the novelist set a pattern of co-ordinate relation between Scobie, a police-officer who didn't like poetry, and Wilson, a detective who passionately liked romantic poetry. In spite of this brilliant preparatory situation, Mr. Greene didn't, or couldn't research this pattern in the latter half of the novel, perhaps owing to metaphysical or theological helplessness and his pre-eminence as a story-teller. Then The Heart of the Matter has, in the first time in his literary career, the hunter without positive significance, and the novel's theme-"pity"-presents us very ambiguous and faint meaning. The writer was not successful towards the end of The End of the Affair, too. But I am not lamentable about these failures, as I may expect that he will write a best novel which is thrilling not only in story-telling but in architecture of ideality and that he will be a Dostoievsky in our time.

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For the last fifty and odd years we have seen many theatrical experiments. Gordon Craig was one of the most outstanding leader in the history of the modern theatrical movement. Reading through his essays, especially the two dialogues between a stage-director and a playgoer, we can easily understand that his theory of drama leads to creation of visual drama. Improvements in setting, discovery of new methods of lighting, and other theatrical progresses have made drama more and more visual art. Modern poetic drama appears a reaction to the general tendency which has commanded the Western theatre. In other words, modern dramatic poets try to create a drama to listen to, much more than to see. The most important figure in the contemporary English dramatic poets is T. S. Eliot. His earlier theory of poetic drama which was fully developed in A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry was so provocative and influential that no contemporary poet can write a verse play without paying attention to it. Almost all the younger dramatic poets are under the influence of Eliot. Christopher Fry, the most reputed younger poet, is not an exception to it. His earliest work, The Boy with a Cart, is strongly affected by Eliot's theory and practice. It is a religious tableau comparable to Eliot's The Rock. There we can easily point out the lines which denote the traits of influence of this great pioneer. But they are of totally different temperament. Though Fry's verse is richer and more fluent than Eliot's we cannot find here such an effort to discover a new rhythm for a poetic drama that we can see in the latter. It seems that Fry does not concern with the religious problems which make The Kock worth reading. Fry pursues the conflicts of men who have fallen into human dilemmas. Eliot treats the problems of faith under the fictitious disguise of every-day-life play. In his most serious drama, The Firstborn, Fry concerns not with the faith of Moses but with his agony between a.racial responsibility and a love as a man. Another serious drama of his, The Sleep of Prisoners, with all its Biblical allusions, a dvocates human love. The theme of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral is the discovery of the meaning of martyrdom, not the problem of physical life and death. In The Cocktail Party Eliot seems to question how to live, but his naming it "a comedy" leads us to conclude that we should regard this husband-and-wife tragedy as a comedy of Celia who devoted her life to God, that is, a fulfilment of her "life," in this case a physical death. Fry treats the problem of man to man, Eliot man to God. The effusive verse with a tint of Elizabethan glamour characterizes Fry's plays. Those who appreciate The Lady's not for Burning or Venus Observed will remind of Shakespeare in his early days. Generally speaking, these two poets form a striking contrast. It seems they have nothing in common with each other. But there is one point, and an important one, where they meet. They seek after the domain of poetic drama which the life of these precarious ages urges them to find.

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i. Introduction-William Sansom, born in 1912 in London, made his debut on the British literary stage in his 3oth year, when he began contributing Kafkaesque short stories to leading literary magazines in London. Subsequently, his work became wider in range, richer in content. His chief qualities as a writer may be summarized as follows: (a) a knack for description that reflects a delicate sensibility and acute observation; (b) a cinema-like technique by which he ties his colourful settings and convincing realistic characters together with the genius of a born story-teller, (c) a deep understanding of human behaviour as represented particularly by his skilful portrayal of individuals at moments of crisis. ii. Biographical notes and list of principal works. iii. Comments on external facts influencing Sansom's writing-his liking for travel, his service as a fireman, his taste for music, etc. iv, v, vi. Detailed explanation, with examples, of the three features mentioned above (i). vii. Souvenirs of the author's personal contact with Sansom. viii. Conclusion-Though Sansom is at his best in grasping the human mind caught in crisis, he is not an eccentric type of writer; he is, on the whole, an orthodox, a traditional novelist who makes use of all of life with his sound judgment. His writing reflects, what non-English readers might call, an "English" quality-a certain reasonable common sense attitude. Sansom's criticism of Poe's style-"constant drumming" and "over-decoration"-may, to some extent, be true of his own; but, if he goes on deepening his insight into human nature and does not waste his rich talent, he is sure to become one of the British classic writers.

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