“Now there is a man,” says Hrothgar's coast watch as Beowulf appears. No one doubts that nisþæt seldguma means this, once the litotes is resolved, but the precise meaning of the half line is another matter. Seldguma has been compared to Old Norse húskarl and the phrase then read as “this is no mere retainer.” It has been translated as “stay-at-home, cottager,” and compared to Old English cotsetla.

No humanist of comparable influence upon Renaissance learning has been so little known and so long ignored as Joannes Susenbrotus. In addition to two fairly popular Latin grammars, Susenbrotus compiled a definitive treatise on the figures of speech, the Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, which during the century following its first appearance in 1541 was the most frequently printed and widely used work of its kind. As T. W. Baldwin has amply established in William Shakspere's Smalle Latine & Lesse Greeke, in the second half of the 16th century this Epitome generally became the standard work from which English schoolboys—including most probably Shakespeare himself—learned their precepts for eloquence. The influence of the Epitome, moreover, extended far beyond the limits of the Latin curriculum and penetrated yet more deeply into the cultural life of England through various English adaptations. On the continent, in German-speaking areas particularly, the influence of Susenbrotus was no less extensive, but even there his fame did not endure. Despite his considerable contribution to sixteenth-century learning and the wide fame of his Epitome, no encyclopedic or biographical work of the present century so much as mentions his name. The most complete account of Susenbrotus' career, in fact, is a five-page study which appeared more than half a century ago in an obscure diocesan publication—a study still of value, though limited in range and inaccurate in some of its conclusions. There is distinct justification, then, for a detailed study of a man whose importance modern scholarship is only just beginning to recognize.

In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare adopted Elizabethan dramatic conventions more literally than in any play written after his apprenticeship in the early 1590's and, as a consequence, produced a comedy more of an age than for all time. At the time when the War of the Theaters was subsiding and the innovations of comical satire were dramatically fashionable, a rash of plays, in fact most of the plays between 1601 and 1604 which are designated roughly as romantic comedies, used the same plot. This story traces the career of a well-born young man who succumbs to lust and riotous living; usually, as the play opens, he is betrothed or married to a virtuous young lady whom he spurns for a courtesan. As the play progresses, the hero grows increasingly obstreperous in the face of the heroine's stalwart devotion to him; finally the hero's sins catch up with him, he is brought to trial in which either his life is threatened or his pride is deflated by the exposure of his follies. In this trial he is purged of his lust, sees the value of the virtuous heroine and, cleansed, rejoins her to live out his days in true love.

Four seventeenth-century commentaries on the Polifemo are known to students of Góngora. Two of these are still unpublished: Annotaciones y deffensas al… Polifemo by Pedro Díaz de Rivas, the first commentary to be made of the poem, and the unfinished Notas al Polifemo by Andres Cuesta. The other two were published in Madrid a few years after Góngora's death: El Polifemo de Don Luis de Góngora comentado (1629) by Garcia de Salcedo Coronel and Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (1630) by José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar.

It is still undecided in what sense, if any, the ecstasy in Donne's most famous poem should be regarded as mystical. Even if we evade the problem of defining mysticism, there is still the question of what ecstasy meant to the poet. In “The Extasie” the word keeps its literal meaning of ekstasis or exodus of the souls of the two lovers from their bodies, for Donne tells us that they “Were gone out” so as to unite into the “abler soul” which “Defects of lonelinesse controules” (11. 43–44), and makes the discovery that sex was not the source of their love. Recent interpreters have stressed the change which comes over the poem at line forty-nine, where the lover, or as Pierre Legouis insists, the seducer, ends the literal ekstasis of the two souls with a plea for their return to the physical senses of their bodies “Else a great Prince in prison lies” (1. 68).

what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heav'n, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?
—Paradise Lost, v. 571-576

In prefacing his account of the war in heaven with these words, Raphael is saying that it will be not allegorical or merely metaphoric, but analogical; that although he will have to use the language of accommodation in order to convey his meaning at all, still there may be (he puts the statement in a subordinate clause and in the interrogative mood) a relationship between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual, which is inherent in the nature of things. After Raphael finishes his narrative, Adam denies that earth is the shadow of heaven:

Great things, and full of wonder in our ears,
Far differing from this World, thou hast revcal'd
Divine Interpreter… (VII. 70-72)

Occasionally, critics have noted in passing the resemblance both in content and form between certain passages in Diderot's Salon de 1767 and Edmund Burke's influential treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first edition of which appeared in 1757, and a French translation in 1765. Curiously enough, Diderot, who usually did not hide his sources, this time omitted even mentioning the name of Burke or acknowledging his debt, although there can be no doubt that the Salon contains many direct borrowings from the Enquiry. If one cannot find any allusion to Burke's work in Diderot's signed writings, a brief but revealing review of its French translation appeared in the March 1765 issue of Friedrich Melchior Grimm's Correspondance littéraire? This notice, penned either by Grimm or by Diderot himself, reprimands the translator, a certain abbé Desfrançois, but praises the author: “On s'aperçoit à chaque page que le traducteur n'a pas bien saisi l'esprit de son original, ou du moins qu'il n'a pas eu le talent de le rendre avec la netteté et la précision nécessaires. L'ouvrage de M. Burke est estimé en Angleterre, et l'on y trouve, en effet, des vues fines et neuves, quelquefois aussi des paradoxes qu'on ne saurait adopter.” Two years later Diderot was sufficiently convinced of the merits of the book to accept even its boldest “paradoxes.”

Wie die anderen großen Klassiker seiner und früherer Zeiten, hat auch Goethe nie Deutschunterricht im heutigen Sinne genossen. Es mag dahingestellt bleiben, ob er trotzdem oder deswegen ein—Goethe geworden ist. Tatsache ist jedoch, daß er seit etwa einem Jahrhundert im Deutschunterricht gelesen wird und daß es trotzdem noch keine größere, das Thema auch nur annähernd erschöpfende Arbeit gibt über die Behandlung, die sein Werk und seine Persönlichkeit auf der deutschen Schule erfahren haben. Eine seltsame Unterlassung in Anbetracht der sonst schon längst ins Unermeßliche angewachsenen Goetheliteratur ! War und ist die Schule denn nicht der Ort auf dem Goethes großen Nachfolgern, seinen Widersachern, und auch uns, seinem Publikum im allgemeinen, eine erste Kenntnis seiner Art und Eigenart vermittelt wurde? Mogen die Umstânde dieser ersten Bekanntschaft nicht oft genug fürs ganze Leben ausschlaggebend gewesen sein? Und hat Goethe selber die Wichtigkeit gerade des dichterischen Schulerlebnisses nicht hoch genug angesetzt als er in den Wahlverwandtschaften schrieb, daß “ein Lehrer, der das Gefühl… an einem einzigen guten Gedicht erwecken kann,” mehr leistet als einer, “der uns ganze Reihen untergeordneter Naturbildungen der Gestalt und dem Namen nach überliefert?”—Diesen Worten können freilich andere entgegengesetzt werden, etwa diejenigen, mit denen der um den Deutschunterricht besonders verdiente Rudolf Hildebrand in seinem Buche Vom deutschen Sprachunterricht (1867) den damaligen Schulbetrieb charakterisierte: “Der Unterricht im Deutschen gilt den Lehrern… nicht als der leichteste und angenehmste, ja vielen wohl als der schwerste und lästigste, und lästig, nicht selten geradezu langweilig, selbst sterbenslangweilig, nicht den Lehrern bloß, auch den Schülern, und nicht an Volks- und Bürgerschulen bloß, ebensogut, ja besonders an Gymnasien.”

In his rather sketchy notes on Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, Baudelaire observes that this novel is a “livre de moraliste aussi haut que les plus élevés, aussi profond que les plus profonds.” Laclos himself seems to have had a similar view of his purpose in writing; at least in one of his letters to Mme Riccoboni he speaks confidently of having sought to create “l'impression d'horreur que le vice doit toujours exciter” (O.C., p. 712). But if no one, and least of all Mme Riccoboni, who had written to protest as a Frenchwoman against what she could not believe was a true picture of contemporary French life, has ever denied Laclos the power of horrifying his readers, seldom since the publication of the work has this power been granted quite the moralistic face-value ascribed to it by the novelist. Even Baudelaire apparently felt its value was relative, Les Liaisons dangereuses, like other “livres libertins,” having gained in usefulness from the passage of time and the progressive degeneration of standards: “Le mal se connaissant,” he remarks in the same notes, “était moins affreux et plus près de la guérison que le mal s'ignorant. G. Sand inférieur à de Sade” (O.C., p. 738).

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.

Until the appearance of James Grossman's biography in 1949, James Fenimore Cooper's last five novels had received little critical attention. The nineteenth century practically ignored them. Even William Cullen Bryant in his judicious memorial address delivered in 1852 passed over them with hardly a word, while thirty years later, Thomas R. Lounsbury flatly stated that “not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art.” In the twentieth century, the first critics to concern themselves with the rehabilitation of Cooper's reputation—Vernon L. Parrington, Robert E. Spiller, and Yvor Winters—concerned as they were with the broader aspects of Cooper's thought, devoted little space to the discussion of tales that were not especially pertinent to their immediate purposes. During the last dozen years, however, the novels have begun to attract more attention, with Harold H. Scudder and W. B. Gates in particular pointing out various sources that Cooper used in composing two of the tales. Among the critics, Grossman has written the fullest analyses of the individual books, and, most recently, Howard Mumford Jones and Charles A. Brady have each treated the late novels at some length. All three have pointed out the strong religious emphasis apparent in several of them.

Recent studies of The Blithedale Romance have demonstrated conclusively the importance of distinguishing the perspective of Miles Coverdale, the first person narrator, from that of Hawthorne. Coverdale thinks of himself as an observer of a drama, as “Chorus in a classic play.” He holds himself aloof so that he may the better act as an interpreter of the action of the Romance. As he interprets, he reveals himself, and through him we get Hawthorne's vision of the internal conflicts which the artist must suffer.

Robert Browning's theatrical career began with a casual remark at a dinner party in 1836 and ended with a bitter quarrel in 1843. The somewhat unwilling sponsor and mentor of the young playwright, responsible for both the beginning and the end of his career, was William Charles Macready, the leading actor-manager of the early nineteenth century. Between these two men there existed a relationship —more than mere tutelage, but never quite friendship—which played an important part in the making of the poet.

Two of the surest critical propositions about Melville are that his prevailing theme is the problem of moral evil and that his prevailing narrative vehicle is the ship-microcosm. With few exceptions his major works have some fairly obvious basis in the fusion of that image and that theme. In most cases the competent study of source materials and of the image-theme pattern peculiar to the work in question has yielded an understanding sufficient to the purposes of responsible criticism. Only The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has continued to tantalize both casual readers and dedicated students, notwithstanding the scholarly and critical attention which has long been lavished on it and which is now available to all in the admirable edition of Miss Elizabeth Foster. The singularly baffling quality of this novel is the more surprising, too, for its wearing so plainly on its face the signs of its author's characteristic theme and image; not even Moby-Dick bespeaks its artistic character so forthrightly. In order to penetrate a little farther into the stubborn mysteries of The Confidence-Man I propose to examine some antecedents, both in and out of Melville's own writings, which may have exerted a significant or even a definitive influence on its structure and meaning.

The yellow nineties have always been regarded as fascinating yet also as something of a literary liability, a movement that took more from the world than it gave in return. And yet, although Art for Art may have rested in the “splendid isolation” of individual emotions, as it often did, for instance, in the poems of Arthur Symons, it was, in its debt to the French Symbolists, to Gautier, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, to the perfectionists like Flaubert, and in its over-all aspects to Baudelaire, truly international. There had been, of course, foreign influence on the Victorians, but never had there been such complete sympathy of interests as that which now bound the two intellectual groups facing each other across the water. Cultural barriers changed into cultural bridges, the fear of mal de mer was conquered, and the Channel was crossed and recrossed. London became a Quartier of Paris; Dowson and Wilde walked the streets dressed à la Bohème, the Beardsley group liked to think of themselves as habitués of the Café Royal, and Verlaine found an audience more rapt than that of the brasseries in the Boul. Mich. There was a new union of forces. The powerful influences of France can be traced nowhere better than in the life story of the Savoy, which, in its brief spurt of brilliant life in 1896, was more truly representative of the time than the Yellow Book. It would not be rash to call the Savoy an Anglo-French periodical, and in this, certainly, the first of its kind.

Karel Čapek's novel Hordubal is the first part of a trilogy which embodies a definition of human individuality and of the relation of the individual to the social order. As René Wellek has observed, the trilogy “centers around problems of truth and reality and constitutes one of the most successful attempts at a philosophical novel in any language.”

An art critic in defining recently the special quality of an artist built up on Aristotle when he said, “The difference between an animal and a plant is that the animal throws off its young while the plant simply grows new buds upon the same stalk. The artist is an animal, not a plant.” One of the central themes of Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, is the peculiar need of the artist to eject the product of his creation. The act is life-giving, intimate, and personal, yet at the same time free and objective.