In the last of his many discussions of the so-called play of ideas, Bernard Shaw remarked, “I was, and still am, the most old-fashioned playwright outside China and Japan.” This is one of the few statements that Shaw made about his own work of which we may safely believe every word—always assuming him to be correct about China and Japan. He was, to be sure, merely echoing his earlier, confession in the Preface to Three Plays For Puritans, in which he had defended The Devil's Disciple against a reckless charge of originality: “If it applies to the incidents, plot, construction, and general professional and technical qualities of the play, [it] is nonsense; for the truth is, I am in these matters a very old-fashioned playwright.” He elsewhere admonished us: “Remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is ‘to chasten morals with ridicule’ . . .” It is my purpose here to describe and interpret some of the stages through which Shaw passed and some of the attitudes which he assumed in the course of coming to such conclusions.

On 26 January 1895, still in the grip of the disconsolate mood engendered by the crashing first-night failure of Guy Domville three weeks before, Henry James made the following entry in his Notebooks:

The idea of the poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying— if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn t there a little story in it, possibly, if one can animate it with action; a little story that might perhaps be a mate to The Death of the Lion? It is suggested to me really by all the little backward memories of one s own frustrated ambition—in particular by its having Just come back to me how, already 20 years ago, when I was in Paris writing letters to the N. Y. Tribune, Whitelaw Reid wrote to me to ask me virtually that—to make em baser and paltrier, to make them as vulgar as he [sic] could, to make them, as he called it, more ‘personal.’ Twenty years ago, and so it has ever been, till the other night, Jan. 5th, the premiere of Guy Domville. Trace the history of a charming little talent, charming artistic nature, that has been exactly the martyr and victim of that ineffectual effort, that long, vain study to take the measure abovementioned, to ‘meet’ the vulgar need, to violate his intrinsic conditions, to make, as it were, a sow's ear out of a silk purse. He tries and he tries and he does what he thinks his coarsest and crudest. It's all of no use—it's always ‘too subtle,’ always too fine—never, never, vulgar enough. I had to write to Whitelaw Reid that the sort of thing I had already tried hard to do for the Tribune was the very worst I could do. I lost my place—my letters weren't wanted.

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.

Browsing from back to front through a Victorian anthology, I paused recently over two old favorites: first Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” and then Clough's “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” It occurred to me that there must be a direct relation between the two poems. Clough's lines, affirmative and challenging, sounded like a response to the melancholy poem by his friend. Examining the texts more closely, I found Clough's argument and imagery to be so relevant to Arnold's that I could hardly think of the parallel as fortuitous. On considering the probable dates of composition, I discovered no evidence against the theory that “Say not” may have been Clough's reply to “Dover Beach.”

In the Cahiers de jeunesse, the unusually frank record of his thoughts kept by Renan shortly after he had left Saint-Sulpice and while he was preparing for advanced degrees at the Sorbonne, we find a curious series of reflections about the problem of style as he painfully experienced it. “Je ne suis pas encore,” he wrote, “à même de bien définir ma pensée. Elle n'a pas l'acumen nécessaire; je la vois se dessiner comme une pointe de poignard sous un voile, une statue sous un voile” (CV, p. 264). “Ah!” he cries, “que je trépigne de ne pouvoir transpirer tout l'acide de ma pensée” (CJ, p. 329); and then we discover surely one of the most startling prayers ever written by this man for whom prayer was later to become a minor literary genre, polished and somewhat affected: “Mon Dieu! que je souffre! exprime donc ma pensée avec le feu et le fiel qui rongent mon âme en la concevant, faute de pouvoir la jeter au dehors!” (CJ, p. 340). These utterances will serve to introduce us into a relatively little known but critically important period of Renan's formative years, when his prayer was somehow to be answered, the period from May 1848 until September 1850, during which he published, in the radically republican magazine known as the Liberté de penser, his first important essays.

A little studied aspect of the prolific linguistic controversies in eighteenth-century England is the development of synonymy. Not only were books of synonyms late to appear and uncertain as to their function and methods, but synonymy was one of the last departments to be introduced into the English dictionary. This slow development is not surprising, since just discrimination between words of almost identical meaning requires not only an authoritative dictionary and grammar as tools but a relatively settled state of the language and a body of recognized opinion on questions of usage. The evolution of English synonymy not only stems immediately from the French, but the steps leading toward this goal may be paralleled in France from fifty to one hundred years earlier.

It is a problem in literary criticism to know how to use the growing store of material discovered by historical research. This is only the practical aspect of a larger, theoretical problem: the relation between a written work and the biographical experiences of the writer. It has never been doubted that a poet's experiences, public and private, historical and psychological, reappear, distorted, refined, generalized, reordered, in his poetry. Hence it follows that the reconstruction of the poet's experiences from diaries, letters, accounts of friends, and public records, may illuminate his poetry. But the converse of this proposition is also assumed to be true: if the biographical experience illuminates the poetry, the poetry must also illuminate the biographical experience. The poem, in other words, is an autobiographical document.

Pope's debt to Dryden, which is at once immense and unmistakable' has tended to obscure his relation to earlier English satirists. But since in the Imitations of Horace and the Moral Essays he was practising a genre untouched by Dryden—satura, the formal verse satire without a plot—it is reasonable to suppose that Pope owed something to other English satirists. There is evidence that he regarded himself as having a place in an English tradition of formal verse satire. When he came on a copy of Hall's Satires late in life, “he wished that he had seen them sooner”; and according to Warburton he intended to imitate “two or three” of Hall's satires. He was interested in Rochester and Oldham. He read, of course, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion; Young's “characteristical Satires” were no doubt partly responsible for turning his own thoughts in the direction of epistolary satire.

Racine is generally conceded to have observed more closely than - any of his contemporaries the basic elements of the classic framework, the three unities. And in a sense, any tragic structure of Racine's reveals a number of constants: there are five acts, composed of scenes “linked” in various ways, the bienséances rule supreme, the unities are maintained. The playwright himself readily discussed, in the polemics he thinly disguised as prefaces, such structural matters as characterization and the modification of sources. A tendency, then, to dismiss Racinian structure as highly stylized, and to accept the often disingenuous revelations of the prefaces may have prevented critics from probing deeply into Racine's ordering of his materials. This deeper probing would require, I believe, our going beyond the mere constatation of various structural devices to seek out their broader implications for Racinian tragedy. Such an examination would have value even if it did no more than reveal more explicitly something one has always vaguely felt: that Racine's unity transcends the conventional unities, that the harmony of all the elements in his works, their essential fusion, is the source of their power.

As i understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet. So short a time has elapsed since Mr. Eliot took down the sign reading “No Thoroughfare,” and directing an elaborate detour around Milton, that Mr. Brooks enjoys, I imagine, a freedom from embarrassing examples, which I can only envy. Again, he has at command a growing body of theory; for the New Critics have been concerned to provide their own dialectic, whereas historical students of literature have tended to work by a silent instinct of accumulation like the bee. Obviously, no one can hope to supply in a thirty-minute paper a theory of Historical Criticism, though I shall try to set down a few points towards the formation of such a theory. Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being indeed somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (“Have you read my last book?” asked Lord Kames. “No, my lord,” said Monboddo; “I can't read as fast as you can write.”) But secondly (and seriously) because we have had enough, I think, of mutual recrimination, and it is time for each side to make plain, without polemics, what it can do for the elucidation of Milton, in the hope that students who care more for literature than for labels may find something of use to them in both schools. For criticism, of whatever school, is a means, not an end; and the test to be applied to it is purely pragmatic: Does it or does it not throw new light on, or minister to an understanding of, the work or the author under examination? By that test alone it must stand or fall.

Let me begin by agreeing most heartily with Professor Woodhouse's closing remarks. The disciplines that we represent can have no quarrel; they are both necessary, and necessary to each other. I say this not merely as one warmed and mollified by the excellent paper that we have just heard. For the last decade I have been saying it over and over. But it has to be said over and over, for the world would have it that we must quarrel, and a stubborn prejudice can exert almost as much influence as a social law.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most formal of seventeenth-century Anglican poems have been so much enjoyed by the anti-formalists in religion and art. The appeal of George Herbert's poetry to the opponents of ritual was a justifying triumph for Herbert's conception of form: in poetry as well as religion Herbert tried to work out-a middle way between “slovenliness” and “superstition.” It was by means of form that the material could be used in the service of the spiritual, that the senses could be properly employed for the glorification of God.

In an age when thinking was emerging from the dominance of Christian dogma to become once again, as in Classical times, man-centered—when Pico was raising new hopes by his Oration on the Dignity of Man, and Calvin new anguish by his outcry over man's lost dignity—Shakespeare brought the mood of the times to a focus in Hamlet. The mood had two sides, as Theodore Spencer has argued: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. “To Pico and the earlier humanists,” he writes, “man belonged with the angels. But to Montaigne, and the satiric, melancholy, realistic writers of the 1590's he belonged with the beasts.” Which is truer of man, then: the dignity of an angel, or that of a beast? The conflict of appraisal is mirrored, Spencer contends, in the hero of Shakespeare's most famous play, providing that play one of the main reasons for its greatness.

It is proposed here to recall a tragic maritime adventure which has been told and retold in history, epic, and drama and to observe the individual and characteristic ways in which the event—heroic in its proportions—was reduced and adapted to the more intimate confines of the stage by Tirso de Molina and by a contemporary dramatist presumed (perhaps mistakenly) to be Lope de Vega.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary, folkloristic, and social significance of the “peasant-tournament,” a type of mock-epic generally neglected by literary historians. Perhaps the two outstanding examples of this genre are The Turnament of Totenham and the tournament in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring, both of which appear to date from the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turnament is an alliterative burlesque written sometime before 1456 by an unknown English author, who set the scene of his work at Tottenham, a village near London. Its 234 verses tell of a peasant tournament in which doughty village swains contend for the hand of Tyb, the reeve's daughter. The tournament of Lappenhausen is the opening episode in Wittenwiler's Ring, an amazing comic-didactic poem written in northeastern Switzerland about 1420. The Ring tells of the love, courtship, and marriage, of Bertschi Triefnas and his lovely hunchbacked, flatfooted, goitered sweetheart, Metzli Ruerenzumph. In the opening scene, which comprises about a thousand verses (vv. 105-659, 830-1279), Bertschi and his twelve companions ride to the village green and challenge all comers to joust in the name of womanhood. Finding no one who dares withstand them, they joust with each other until joined by Neidhart of Reuental, a peasant-hating nobleman who arrives in disguise and gives them a thorough drubbing.

Chaucer envisaged the Canterbury Tales as presented on the actual London-Canterbury road at various times during successive days, for he offers about seven allusions to place and at least five to time, scattered throughout eight of the nine Fragments which make up the work. That Chaucer had a definite plan for the order of the Fragments is revealed by various kinds of internal evidence, including the mention of towns on the Pilgrims' way, the reality and precise location of which were clear and obvious to the poet and his audience. The ellesmere (or group a) order of the Tales has long seemed unsatisfactory because it distorts the geographical order of allusions to towns, and Chaucer would not have deliberately alluded to Sittingbourne (Fragment in) before Rochester (Fragment vii) on the way from Southwark and Greenwich to Boughton-under-Blean and Canterbury. Accordingly, Henry Bradshaw suggested to Furnivall, as an improvement on the Ellesmere order, that Fragment vn be lifted up to follow and combine with Fragment ii, the Man of Law's Endlink being used as Prologue to the Shipman's Tale.

Views concerning the authorship of Beowulf and its place in Old English literature have changed greatly in the last half century. In any account of the poem published in 1900 one might find suggested or stated more or less positively—often practically as facts—such ideas as these: Beowulf was only one of a large body of Old English epics; its subject matter was originally mythical, symbolic of forces of nature; its adventures were at first ascribed to a mythic hero or divinity named Beowa and later transferred to Beowulf, who was probably an actual person (as late as 1908 Brandi still expresses this view); it took shape by a process of natural accretion of popular lays or short heroic poems, or by compilation and interpolation by several hands; its manner and style were indigenous, characteristic of the form which Germanic epic poetry had attained; in origin it was pagan, the Christian passages having been added late by a reviser or interpolator. It is obvious now that all those statements are hypothetical, but they once constituted an orthodox view which was generally accepted.