Although this paper is entitled “The Case of Shelley,” an essay of this length can of course present only the brief of a case—hardly more than a dogmatic statement of the heads of an argument which, given room enough, I would undertake to make plausible through the presentation of evidence. The statement of the case is methodical: that is, it proceeds according to a general theory of literary history which Shelley's reputation illustrates, but which was not derived from the study of that reputation alone. The method is inductive or experiential; and since the implications of the experiential method as applied to the writing of literary history are by no means generally understood, I think I shall get farther in the end if I invest a considerable portion of my space in definition.

In one of his most stimulating discussions Ortega y Gasset declares that the function of the critic is neither to defend nor to attack, but to understand. In this sense the critic, he says, actually interprets and completes the work of the author so that the public can better understand him.

Hermann Hesse in the “Tractat vom Steppenwolf” makes the following pungent remark about Faust, actually meaning modern man: “When Faust speaks the words which are so famous among school teachers and admired with awe by philistines : ‘Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast!‘ Faust is forgetting Mephistopheles and quite a lot of other souls that he likewise has in his breast ... The breast, the body is always uniform, of course; the number of souls in it, however, is not two nor five but infinite.” The bewildering multiplication of souls in our chaotic age produces an equally bewildering increase of conflicts. This fact cannot be denied, at least not for Germany. Also its literature bears it out. On that basis Hesse's diagnosis is even too simple. The body is by no means uniform. It too is in discord, as the literature of sexual life from Wedekind to Ferdinand Bruckner reveals. The artist as sensitive barometer of his age is particularly affected by the general disintegration. Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse have treated this phenomenon with frightening perspicacity, Hesse most penetratingly in his description of Klingsor's self-portrait. Decadence has become a common slogan for the modern way of life, in Germany and elsewhere.

The first chapter of Henry Esmond opens with the meeting of young Henry and Rachel Esmond, Viscountess Castlewood, and their complex relations provide the major thematic integration of the novel. For most readers, however, the love interest centers in Henry's chronic courtship of Beatrix, Rachel's daughter. In modern criticism of the novel, allusions to the love of Henry and Rachel are usually perfunctory, often indicating little more than that, after the decline and fall of Beatrix, they were wed—a union which distressed many Victorian critics because of its disquieting implications of incest. For a century there has been no widespread perception of Thackeray's intentions regarding this pervasive love theme.

Of all Melville's novels, the one which has proved most challenging to the critics, and which has been handled least satisfactorily by them, is Pierre—possibly because its great suggestiveness and its many levels of meaning make difficult any attempts at its analysis. Although, as Newton Arvin points out, an evaluation by literary standards shows Pierre to be “one of the most painfully ill-conditioned books ever to be produced by a first-rate mind,” its “badness is an active and positive, not merely a negative one ... the badness of misdirected and even perverted powers, but not of deficiency or deadness.” For, in its textural richness, which amounts, indeed, to a symbolic plethora, and in its ambiguities, the novel offers an almost limitless expanse for critical exploration.

According to James Fenimore Cooper's daughter, Susan, the novelist was “always ready” to read Shakespeare aloud to the family, “entering with unfeigned delight into the spirit of his works, whether comedy or tragedy”; and he carried as his “constant traveling companions” in Europe the volumes of a 32° edition of the plays. Cooper's reading of Shakespeare was evidently not critical but largely for pleasure. In the volumes of the plays in the library at Cooperstown are no significant marginal comments; in the published letters are no important allusions to the dramatist; and of the many references to Shakespeare in the novels, the only notable one of critical nature is that in Jack Tier, where Shakespeare is called “the great poet of our language, and the greatest that ever lived, perhaps, short of the inspired writers of the Old Testament, and old Homer and Dante.”

One of the chief reasons the great Victorian poets are not read with the attention they deserve is that the modern reader is often baffled by the idiom of their more successful poems. We do not know just how to take them, and we find it difficult to do justice to the richness of their language. The case of Tennyson has been particularly unfortunate. In order to discover those poems capable of exciting the contemporary sensibility, one must first discount the adverse critical reaction. Though it may have been historically necessary, it managed to eclipse the Laureate for at least a generation. But having made this effort, one must still penetrate the formidable and misleading mask of household poet which the later Tennyson adopted.

No poet was ever more fortunate in his initial celebrity, more unfortunate in his ultimate fame, than Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. He burst like a meteor upon the ken of the mid-eighteenth century, but his light paled rapidly before the rising suns of German Classicism and Romanticism. The nineteenth century, of which he saw the beginning, rendered him a distant “official” homage but read him less and less; and the twentieth century, despite sporadic evidences of interest, seems likewise minded to verify Lessing's early prophecy that Klopstock would be more often praised than perused.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, for almost a decade, young Henry Fielding was the most prominent and the most productive playwright in England. Between 1728 and 1737 he staged at least twenty-five plays, six of them full-length comedies, the others short farces, burlesques, and ballad-operas. In 1737 his theatrical career was stopped by the Licensing Act, which was aimed by the Walpole government at Fielding personally. In later years appeared two more five-act comedies which he had written during this early period.

The continuous and almost unprecedented popularity of Robinson Crusoe, Part i, has been variously explained. In accounting for the book's superiority to the imitations which it has inspired, several critics have praised Defoe for allowing his island adventurer barely enough in the way of tools and equipment to keep himself alive and gradually to improve his condition. It is often held, too, that Crusoe manifests unusual mechanical ability. But the facts do not support either of these assumptions, and I believe that the reader who makes them has failed to recognize a perennial source of the book's charm.

James Sutherland, Defoe's biographer, commends the author for restricting his hero to “only a few things saved from the wreck,” with which he “proceeds to build up a new life.” In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Robinson Crusoe, Louis Kronenberger agrees with others who, he says, have pointed out that “Defoe allowed Crusoe just enough in the way of equipment and fodder and tools for him at the outset to stay alive, and in the course of time to be made comfortable.” Paul Dottin remarks that Defoe has simplified his task by allowing the castaway “tout ce qui peut etre utile.”

Milton's students have lived, and fairly placidly on the whole, with the problems they have discerned in Paradise Regained or with feeble solutions in despite of the poet's plain instruction to read his work as, before all else, a parable for the church. If we bow to his authority we have only to explain centuries of critical silence; once delivered from the accepted interpretation of the poem as a manual of holy living, we shall no longer need to guess why John Milton, who eternally found his own habits blameless, should in a piece of pietism unique among his works, in a “quietistic, Quaker-like poem” denying his constant humanism, consign to the devil the chief blessings of this world, most of the arts that polish life, many of the goods that he had sought for himself, and, leaving himself without excuse, then invite his friends to regard the result as his finest work. His very pride in the brief epic must, for all its undeniable beauties, seem a little like a mother's love for a defective child unless he meant a little more than meets the careless ear, inasmuch as the most resolute exculpations have not entirely explained away the poem's “inhospitable bareness,” its generous portion of didactic tedium, and the dramatic failure of its static contest.

“Disintegration,” Sir Edmund Chambers has said, “is a constant itch in some minds.” And in order to show how pervasive the disease is, I hope I may be forgiven for using as my example Sir Edmund himself. It is to him, surely, that we owe the most today for our belief and faith that the plays in the 1623 folio are by Shakespeare alone and are, by and large, as they left Shakespeare's pen once and for all. In his British Academy lecture of 1924, “The Disintegration of Shakespeare,” Chambers showed (a) that contemporary records, Henslowe's and Sir Henry Herbert's, showed “very little testimony” for revision of old plays and (b) that the first principles and so-called proofs of the disintegrators could not bear careful investigation. Now what is to me so wonderful about this 1924 lecture is that whereas the author of The Elizabethan Stage (1923) may fairly, I believe, be called a nineteenth-century scholar, the man who wrote William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) not only has learned everything that McKerrow and Greg have to teach but also is more than able to meet Pollard and Wilson on their own ground. In other words, in the space of about seven years, Sir Edmund changed into what I might call a brilliant conservative. In the 1930 volumes, the disintegrators get even shorter shrift than they had received in the 1924 lecture. “Not proved” is the verdict against them again and again.

Francesco sansovino's Concetti politici are a collection of 805 maxims which first appeared in 1578 and which were subsequently republished in modified form in 1583, 1588, 1598, and 1608, together with Guicciardini's Avvertimenti and Lottini's Avvedimenti civili. To the first edition, but not to any of those following, the author prefaced a list of 36 authorities from whose works he presumably drew all or nearly all of his concetti. The list includes the name of Guicciardini to whom, as we have demonstrated in a previous study, Sansovino was indebted for some 123 reflections. Yet it does not contain the name of Machiavelli, from whose writings, however, Sansovino did not scruple to borrow even more extensively. This omission is not difficult to explain in view of the Catholic attitude toward the author of the Principe, particularly after the Council of Trent and the publication of the Index. Although scholars have long been aware that Sansovino derived many of his concetti from Machiavelli, they have simply confined themselves to statements to that effect without every attempting to determine the precise extent of Sansovino's indebtedness. It is the purpose of the present paper to assess this debt.

In the general scorn and neglect by modern literary scholars of the entire area in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, few poets have fared so ill as the sixteenth-century Scottish Chaucerian Gavin Douglas. To be sure, his name appears frequently enough in histories of literature, and occasionally in studies of Chaucer, or Surrey, or Henryson, Lindsay, Dunbar. But one suspects that Douglas has less often been carefully and sympathetically read than he has been hustled into a dusty place of honor by conventional encomium, or relegated to the ranks of the inconsiderable on the ground that he is a mere “Chaucerian,” a petty tracer of his master's matchless strokes.

It has been generally agreed that there are glaring faults in Chaucer's elegy for Blanche and that, in spite of occasional beauties, the 'prentice hand is but too apparent. Critics have found the poem tedious, disconnected, and ill-proportioned, languid in its beginning and abrupt in its conclusion, frequently lapsing in taste and in meter, deficient both in humor and in self-fulfilment. Coulton's verdict—“obviously immature and unequal, but full of delightful passages”—would seem, judging by the printed comment, to be that of most sympathetic readers; though many have emphasized the negative rather than the positive half of the judgment. Because I believe that much of the disparagement has arisen from misunderstanding, I invite reconsideration of a work of art that has been rated a good deal lower than it deserves. It may be that characteristic values inherent in the more archaic of Chaucer's writings will reassert themselves in the course of our scrutiny. There have been signs latterly that a truer appreciation is in the making, as in the comments of Wolfgang Clemen and James R. Kreuzer, and to this impulse I wish to add what force I may. Generally, however, the older critical impatience yet prevails.