The high dramatic quality of the Secunda Pastorum raises a recurrent interpretive question: does the play function as a unified religious statement in a traditional craft cycle, or does it function primarily as a secular farce with a Nativity scene added? Critics of this supremely sophisticated medieval play have moved from the early view that the long secular prologue was unrelated to, and detracted from, the Christ Nativity, to the more recent opinion that the stage business involving Mak is an artful parody of the true Nativity and is structurally adapted to the religious end for which the play was designed.

Nearly half a century has passed since Kittredge made his famous critical pronouncement that Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims “do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa.” Despite occasional objections, Kittredge's observation has received wide general acceptance and its application to the tales by him and subsequent critics has yielded many fruitful insights into the direction of Chaucer's art. The Nun's Priest's Tale, however, apparently defies analysis along the lines suggested by this statement, for the Priest is not described in the “General Prologue” but is merely mentioned as one of three priests travelling with the Prioress. With this fact in mind, R. K. Root has rejected the Nun's Priest completely: “Neither in the General Prologue nor in the links which fit the tale into its framework has Chaucer taken any pains to characterize the ‘gentil Preest’ who tells this tale. So we may dismiss him without ceremony, and imagine ourselves face to face with Chaucer.”

Some admirers of More's Utopia have used the term “satire” to prove that it is essentially a jeu d'esprit. Others have used it to contend that Utopia is essentially a serious didactic argument. But while both schools of criticism use the term “satire” to wrestle with the problems presented by Utopia's form and technique, neither has employed it consistently to resolve the major problems raised by More's little book. How is one to reconcile More's “real intention” (however defined) with his “manner of alternating seriousness and parody?” Why should a canonized Lord Chancellor ever have constructed an “ideal” commonwealth so manifestly antithetical to his orthodoxy? Can the textual and personal sources of More's ideas explain Hythloday's arguments in Book I, or the institutions of Utopian society? These questions remain after half a century of intense scholarship and impassioned appraisal. The latest and most exhaustive study of More's book, having explicitly separated Utopia's “matter” from its “style and form,” concludes that “dashes of wit, satire, and irony add zest to [Utopia's] perusal but make its interpretation intriguing and perplexing … Utopia, it seems almost futile to say, is a complex and enigmatic book.”

Toward the close of the last century, one of the busiest areas of literary research centered about the Faust Book. The Faust image, that unique gift of Germany to Western tradition, had fascinated scholars and critics for over a hundred years, and the oldest printed texts of the Faust Book had long since been established and edited. During the nineteenth century, however, further documentary references to the historical Faust had been accumulating, while at the same time researchers had gained a more complete and accurate knowledge of the scope of the Faust legend together with its relationship to similar sorcerers' tales. Then, beginning in the 1880's, a number of important discoveries were made in such rapid succession as to hinder careful evaluation of any one document.

No one questions the importance of Malherbe. We read and admire some of his poems in anthologies, we know that his literary doctrine was a landmark in French criticism, we are aware that he and his disciples did much to bring about the development of seventeenth-century classicism. Yet, except in the monumental studies by René Fromilhague, not much has been written concerning Malherbe's technique as a poet. Fromilhague has investigated every detail of stanza forms and rhymes in Malherbe but there are many aspects of his art which deserve further attention: his imagery, his sonorities, his expression of emotion, to name just a few. In the present paper I shall limit myself to his odes, which are of course his major writings, and within the odes to the question of their form and content. It will be necessary, first, to discuss very briefly Malherbe's concept of the ode as a literary genre. Then I shall go on to inspect the seven completed odes (in one case virtually completed), particularly their themes and internal organization. The interest of this problem arises from the unanimous acclaim which literary historians have given to the “rigorous logic” or “admirable structure” or the tight “enchaînement des idées” in these poems. Such comments, we shall see, have little to justify them.

Immediately after his tragedy Pompée (1642–43), Corneille wrote Le Menteur (1643), a comedy. In the “Epître” of the latter play, Corneille tried to explain this curious sequence in genre and offered as one of his reasons: “Et d'ailleurs, étant obligé au genre comique de ma première réputation, je ne pouvois l'abandonner tout à fait sans quelque espèce d'ingratitude.” This argument simply recalled to his contemporaries that five, and in a sense all six, of the earliest plays by the author of the tragic masterpieces from Le Cid (1637) to Polyeucte (1641–42) were in the comic vein. Influenced by the incomprehension or hostility of the “classical” period, later generations were little aware of this first flowering of Corneille's dramatic genius.

As a foreword to Amphitryon Molière might have selected the famous passage from Descartes's first Méditation: “Je supposerai donc qu'il y a non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de vérité, mais un certain mauvais génie, non moins rusé et trompeur que puissant, qui a employé toute son industrie à me tromper” (Œuvres et Lettres, Pléiade, p. 272). The play is in large measure a working out of this hypothesis. Examination of the dramatic and symbolic functions of Jupiter reveals, however, that the wicked genius of Amphitryon is no spirit, but reason itself. Jupiter is not a hidden puppet-master, but an active participant in human affairs, seeking human ends and not just the pleasure of deluding people. His descent into the world of ordinary mortals provides the occasion for the dramatic action of the comedy: a world which has been well and securely ordered until then suddenly cracks open. Everything in it becomes potential illusion; nothing can be relied on any more; a man is no longer even sure if he is himself or what he is. Jupiter is a liberating force, dramatically and symbolically. His presence dissolves the world of conventional realities and reveals a new world of possibilities, but these possibilities never achieve substance or consistency, and in the end there is no brave new world, only the old one with all its patterns destroyed. The colorful kingdom of fantasy is suddenly abandoned at the end of the play and we find ourselves back in the world of everyday empirical reality. Jupiter, the brilliant magician, turns out to be an ordinary grand seigneur. All that has happened after all is that a false order has been exposed, vanquished, and replaced by blatant disorder. The rule of Amphitryon has yielded to the rule of Jupiter. But whereas Amphitryon ruled in the firm conviction that the order of things, which happened to suit him very well, was a necessary and just order, Jupiter is without illusions. There is no rational order, no just rule for him. There is only the right of the strongest. Jupiter's justification of his own violence at the end of the play is an obvious and deliberate piece of irony on the part of the author.

Am 1. oktober 1786 folgt Wilhelm Heinse, damals vierzig Jahre alt, dem Ruf an den erzbischöflichen Hof in Mainz und wird Vorleser des Kurfürsten und Erzbischofs Friedrich Karl Joseph Freiherr von Erthal. Daß Heinse in die Dienste eines katholischen Kirchenfürsten tritt, dürfte zu seinen Lebzeiten Verwunderung hervorgerufen haben und hat neuerdings zu Vermutungen über einen Wechsel in der religiös-kirchlichen Einstellung des Dichters geführt. Bis dahin hatte Heinse nie aus seinem Haß gegen Kirche, Religion und Gesellschaftsmoral einen Hehl gemacht. Gegen die kirchliche Métropole Mainz zeigte er sogar eine besondere Abneigung. Am 5. Februar 1772 schrieb er aus Erlangen an seinen Freund Joseph Schwarz entrüstet iiber Wielands Wunsch, ihn zu einem Abbé des päpstlichen Nuntius zu machen, “daß alle Götter der Freuden mich davor behüten möchten, daß ich ein Diener eines Dieners des Nachfolgers der Ungeheuer würde”. Lieber wollte er des Hungers sterben, als einen solchen Schritt tun. Sich in den Pfaffenorten Wien oder Mainz niederzulassen, bedeutete ihm in einem Brief an Gleim vom 17. April desselben Jahres soviel, wie in die Holle reisen zu müssen. Von der Landschaft und der Lage von Mainz ist er immer entzückt gewesen. Mit dem breiten Strom vor dem herrlichen Rund des Gebirges, so schreibt er auf der Ruckreise von Italien 1783 in sein Tagebuch, sind ihm Stadt und Fluß ein prächtiges Amphitheater der Natur; und noch 1789 preist er die Gegend als die erste und herrlichste am ganzen Rhein (VII, 290 u. 321). Aber so sehr er von dem Naturparadies des Mainzer Landes begeistert ist, so abfàllig äußert er sich gegen Kirche, Religion und Gesetze dieser Gegend, wo die Menschen niemals fröhlich werden sollen und “durch Trübsal und ganze Sumpfe voll Ungemach in's Reich Gottes wandern müßten”.

Alfred Tennyson'S poetical career, extending over sixty-five years between first and last volumes—from Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 to his posthumous volume published three weeks after his death in 1892—is punctuated not only by recurrent themes but also by the reworking of old manuscripts and his well-known revision of published texts. His revision and expansion of 110 lines beginning “Oh! that ‘twere possible” published in The Tribute in 1837 resulted in 1855 in the much longer Maud, in which the earlier lyric, now beginning “O that ‘twere possible,” is Part II, Section iv. This lyric is interesting as the nucleus around which Maud developed and also because of its affinities with In Memoriam.

From the death of Mark Twain in 1910 until 1937 Albert Bigelow Paine was the official editor of Mark Twain's literary papers. Paine was not a scholar. He wrote popular biographies, sentimental novels, and books for children. When he came to edit Mark Twain's letters, speeches, notebooks, and autobiography, he made countless deletions, following the procedure often practiced by editors dealing with such material.

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

The Conventional image of Arnold Bennett as a novelist-at-work has three or four sources: general notions about realistic novelists, inferences from Bennett's completed novels, glimpses of Bennett at his task, and fragmentary remarks by Bennett himself. The image of Zola, notebook in hand, going down into the mines to gather material for Germinal is the image of Bennett interviewing an elderly couple to gather material on the Siege of Paris for The Old Wives' Tale. The ninety volumes of Zola's notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale are matched by dozens of notebooks that Bennett kept. J. B. Atkins asserts that Bennett “would divide his scheme [for a novel] into parts which he numbered and divide each part into sections. He knew in advance what he would put into each part and each section.” And George Doran recollects, in Chronicles of Barabbas, that on one of many silent walks in the forest at Fontainebleau he interrupted Bennett's thoughts to say, “I suppose in these silences you are actually phrasing your thousand words for tomorrow,” and got “yes” for an answer. Some of Bennett's voluntary remarks about his writing support the image. In his Preface to The Old Wives' Tale he comments upon the tedious but necessary research that he undertook for the novel. In an article in the Evening Standard he writes about “moving … an entire bookseller's shop with all its books and dust from a South Coast port to … [Clerkenwell]” to use in Riceyman Steps. And in his Journal, 1929, he says about Imperial Palace, then being written: “I have the whole of the material for the novel; and it is indexed, in a notebook. I would sooner lose fifty pages of the manuscript than that notebook.”

With the passing years, the criticism of T. S. Eliot has lost much of the power it once had to influence the literary taste of the age. Yet one casual comment by Eliot echoes again and again through the scholarship and criticism of recent times. “In the seventeenth century,” Eliot wrote in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” “a dissociation of the sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot was eventually to confess doubt about the cause of this dissociation, but he did note that, following Donne and Marvell, poetic feeling became cruder, until, in the eighteenth century, “The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (p. 248).

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:
Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade
Der reinen wolken unverhofites blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb-das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs-der wind ist lau-
Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz-
Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz

Vergß auch diese lezten astern nicht-
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von griinem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Einsamer nie als im August:
Erfüllungsstunde-im Gelande
die roten und die goldenen Brande,
doch wo ist deiner Garten Lust?

Die Seen hell, die Himmel weich,
die Acker rein und glanzen leise,
doch wo sind Sieg und Siegsbeweise
aus dem von dir vertretenen Reich?

Wo alles sich durch Gluck beweist
und tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringe
im Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge-:
dienst du dem Gegengliick, dem Geist.

In two public addresses, Gottfried Benn declared himself one of the many admirers of the famous poem by Stefan George which begins: “Komm in den totgesagten park und schau …” Upon both occasions Benn gave his audience a short resume of his reasons for liking the poem. These remarks, whatever they tell us about George, reveal something about Benn also, for the poet—as T. S. Eliot points out—is a very special kind of critic, inasmuch as he, when commenting on the work of another creator, consciously or unconsciously “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.”

The life of Paul Eluard holds a remarkable number of mysteries for that of a man who became prominent rather young and whose friends frequently made a particular effort to have themselves talked about. Specifically, three crises from the first period of his career, when he was attached to the surrealist movement, are either avoided or barely mentioned by biographers: the strange disappearance from Paris in 1924 which turned out to be a trip around the world; the breakup of Eluard's first marriage in 1930; and the rupture with Breton and the surrealists in 1938. Our ignorance about these questions does not stem from a lack of witnesses, but rather from the tendency of some of the poet's friends to withhold information for reasons of tact, and the tendency of others to write with such an evident bias that their testimony is unreliable. Doubtless we will soon be better informed, since every year new documents appear, and the reasons for restraint or excess become regularly less compelling.