The Contending Lovers is a folk-tale of love rivalry— but of love rivalry with a difference. Because it has certain uncommon distinctions, among them a provocative love problem which is usually left wholly unsolved, I have previously attempted to show in brief fashion its affinity with Chaucer's Parlement of Foules and to prove by especial reference to Il Paradiso degli Alberti, a work cut of Chaucer's own period, that the Parlement should be regarded as a poetical and highly sophisticated version of the folk-tale. But the curious and interesting features of The Contending Lovers will support a self-sufficient study in folk-lore, and such a study is primarily the aim of the following pages. The Parlement will occasionally be admitted to the discussion, especially in conclusion, since relationship to Chaucer necessarily gives the folk-tale itself an enhanced interest, but only casual arguments will be made for this relationship. The material, now studied in detail, is meant to form its own argument.

Many origins have been suggested for the type of narrative song appearing in the English and Scottish traditional ballads: minstrel genesis, origin in the dance, improvisations of mediaeval peasant communes, or descent from the dance songs of primitive peoples. The hypothesis of minstrel origin was that first to be advanced and it has always retained supporters. There remains a possibility not yet brought forward which deserves to be presented for what it is worth, since the problem, though it may be insoluble, has its attraction for critic and student. We have but meager knowledge of the ballad melodies of pre-Elizabethan days, and we can get but little farther with the study of the ballads by way of research into mediaeval music. Moreover the earliest texts remaining to us seem to have been meant for recital rather than for singing. In general, the melodies of ballads are more shifting, less dependable, than are the texts, in the sense of the plots and the characters which the texts present. This is true of contemporary folk-songs and it was probably true earlier. One text may be sung to a variety of airs or one air may serve for many texts. Nor can we get much farther with the study of ballads by way of the minstrels. They have had much attention already; and nothing has ever been brought out really barring them from major responsibility for ballad creation and diffusion in the earlier periods. Again, we can get but little farther by studying the mediaeval dance, or folk-improvisations, or the dance songs of primitive peoples, all of which have been associated with the Child ballads to an exaggerated degree. It is time to try a new angle of approach—the last remaining—although the hypothesis which it suggests is far removed from the theory of genesis enjoying the greatest acceptance at the present time, and although it—like its predecessors—may not take us very far.

It has long been the fashion, when Cymbeline has been under discussion, to cite Dr. Johnson's famous criticism, and indeed one feels a whimsical joy in setting down so delightful a bit of square-toed dogmatism. “This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” The really significant thing, however, which makes this opinion worth repeating, is that so many of the best modern critics have expressed substantial agreement with it. Sir Walter Raleigh thinks that “Johnson speaks truly and moderately,” and Dr. H. H. Furness said, “Ay, Dr. Johnson was right in his estimate of this play of Cymbeline,—the sweetest, tenderest, profoundest of almost all the immortal galaxy.” Most writers, while not agreeing directly with Johnson, have taken a half-puzzled, half-apologetic attitude; they have obviously felt what Dr. Furness calls “deterioration” here, after the splendid achievement of the great tragedies and the Roman plays.

From his college days onward Coleridge considered himself, and was considered by his intimate friends, the champion of religion, and particularly of the Christian religion. That this championing of Christianity was frequently attested in his letters and writings; that the most ambitious poem of his youth—Religious Musings— was written in the spirit of its title; that he occasionally preached from Unitarian pulpits; that all his later prose writings were predominantly religious; that he at no time considered the writing of poetry his prime purpose—these facts lead to the conclusion that religion was the dominating interest throughout most of his life.

Scarce ane has tried the shepherd-sang
But wi' miscarriage.
Burns's Poem on Pastoral Poetry.

Wordsworth saw common things with “unaccustomed eyes.” When he gazed upon the landscape about him or when be observed the life of people in humble station, he found many a feature which his predecessors had overlooked or neglected. Nature, he perceived, had been ignored or superficially regarded. Yet Nature, to his mind, deserved the best efforts at interpretation. Similarly, country folk of low degree he found had hearts as sensitive as those of -people in high places, and accordingly he undertook to proclaim the truth to the world. He wished to enforce his own doctrine : “Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility for the delight, honour, and benefit of human nature ! ”

My recent article, The Secret of Chaucer's Pardoner, was the first of a series of studies advanced in support of the general thesis that Chaucer, in his choice of physical peculiarities that would fittingly correspond to the characters of his Canterbury Pilgrims, made use of, or at least was influenced by, the rules and regulations laid down in the universally popular Physiognomies of his time. More specifically, I attempted to show that the Pardoner is a typical example of what the physiognomists would call a eunuchus ex nativitate. The present article demonstrates that Chaucer's Reeve and Miller, in the exact correspondence of their respective personal appearances and characters, are also “scientifically” correct according to the specifications of physiognomical lore, and that the quarrel between these traditional and professional enemies cannot properly be understood unless scanned from the medieval point of view.

A vague suggestion has been in the air of late that there is a more than casual similarity between the so-called Ludus Coventriae and the plays of the Digby Manuscript. The following paper is an attempt to render that suggestion somewhat more concrete and to define the nature of that relation. First, however, it is clearly necessary to deal with the questions of the structure and development of the Ludus Coventriae before its external relations may be considered. Miss Swenson's recent careful study is perhaps most valuable in its metrical analysis; but even this must be tested in the light of Miss Block's somewhat more fruitful examination of the manuscript, which in turn neglects the metrical form of the plays. Miss Swenson is led to believe that the “tumbling” lines mark the chief additions to the cycle; but the changes noted by Miss Block which are indicated by manuscript disturbance go far beyond these in certain respects. We are justified, therefore, in using the evidence from both sources as a basis for a new study, with the hope that further and more specific conclusions may be reached.

Through the kindness of Professor R. M. Mitchell, of Brown University, who has sent me his copy of Venus in Rom, I am now able to give an account of Wilibald Alexis's rendering of the story of Venus and the ring. The materal is handled very freely — tant pis. The scene is laid in the Rome of the Renaissance, where (as one of the characters says) “winkt uns das Alterthum lockend in seine Wunderwelt zurück.” The first half— the whole is a novelette of thirty thousand words—is very slow-moving. Hubert von Stein, a German nobleman, has come to Rome to visit his friend, Theodor Savelli; who has, however, mysteriously disappeared. There are glimpses of Roman social life, of a necromancer and hermit named Palumbus, of the beautiful Viola Gritti, of Savelli's half-deserted palace (with a broken statue which has injured the workmen who were removing it), and even of Raphael painting in the Vatican. And there are violent thunder storms, strange meetings, dreams, visions, at night; a manifest attempt to create an atmosphere of the supernatural. The latter half is more lively. Savelli has appeared, half insane; he tells of a ball game on the day of his wedding, of putting the inconvenient ring on a Venus statue, of his consequent marriage with the goddess and fearful visits to the Venusberg. Hubert's wife Mathilde comes from Germany to find her husband … with a Roman mistress, Faustine, and a baby. Enter Martin Luther. There is an attempt on Leo X's life, a street riot, in which Hubert, denounced as a heretic, defends himself for several pages single-handed against the mob, escapes by leaping into the Tiber, is rescued by his mistress (who dies defending him), and counter-rescued by his faithful spouse. At the end Savelli, still insane, regains his ring— not, however, through Palumbus's aid,—returns to his wife Viola, persuades her to drink poison, burns his palace after an elaborate funeral, and becomes a pilgrim. Palumbus dies. Mathilde and Hubert return to Germany, with little Guido, Faustine's son.

The Platonic origin of certain ideas in the seventh and eighth hooks of Paradise Lost has been ignored by Milton's critics. In Raphael's account of creation (Bk. VII, ll. 621-622), speaking of the stars, he calls them

Numerous, and every star perhaps a world
Of destined habitation …

And again (Bk. VIII, ll. 148-152) :

… and other suns perhaps
With their attendant moons thou wilt descry
Communicating male and female light,
Which two great sexes animate the world,
Stored in each orb, perhaps with some that live.

German lexicographers are practically unanimous in deriving Kartaune, together with its variant Kartauwe, from an Italian word quartana, interpreted to mean either ‘a gun of the fourth magnitude’ or one ‘which shoots a ball of 25 pounds.‘ Kluge, for example, says:

To those who look askance when the drama of the last forty years of the seventeenth century is mentioned, it may be a doubtful honor to connect a minor Restoration playwright with the early history of America. But the fact remains that John Crowne, one of the most prolific of the dramatists of this period, was for three years a resident of New England and a student at Harvard College. He is now remembered chiefly as the author of Sir Courtly Nice, a comedy which held the boards for almost a hundred years.

From time immemorial, it would seem, music and drama have been closely associated, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that music has ever been the handmaid of drama. The import and significance of the choral odes in the Greek theatre, the charming uses of song in Shakespeare's plays, the development of music as a dramatic medium, culminating in the work of Richard Wagner—these phenomena are familiar to all. Yet it may fairly be said that not all the possibilities of the union of music and drama have yet been realized. In musical comedy the dramatic element is negligible; in opera the music is our chief interest. It has remained for a little-known Austrian dramatist to point the way to a new type of play, in which music shall be subordinated, yet indispensable, taking its definite share in the action without usurping the whole stage.

The question of rising and falling rhythm in English verse has received such various and confusing treatment in recent metrical discussion that further consideration is evidently necessary. It is my purpose to point out the factors that make verse rhythm rising or falling, and to emphasize the importance of vocabulary as one of these factors.

We do not grow less certain, as time goes on, that Milton's idea of the divine nature fails to satisfy some of our deepest religious feelings. We require of theology that it be logical; we require also that it be humane. It may become mystical; but when reason fails, theology must not become illogical; and when reason demands, it must not become inhumane. Milton's God is either inconsistent or cruel or both, but he is not a mystery. Hence Professor Erskine, desiring to find the poet humane, can well argue that the idea of death in Paradise Lost undergoes a distinct change, but hence on the other hand Professor Stoll, desiring to find him consistent, can just as well argue, falling back upon the convenient notion of predestination, that there is no change where the change was intended from the beginning. Yet however we argue, Milton fails as a theologian by attempting to reduce the whole mystery of human nature to a formula and arriving at a dilemma. Pain is in itself an evil which it is the ineffable hope of mankind to destroy. The experience of pain may be used for its elimination, and the end is good, but pain is none the less evil. Man's supreme experience is not in causing but in destroying it. What spiritual satisfaction we could find without this experience is a mystery, but we arrive only at confusion when we say that evil and the cause of it, without ceasing to be evil, are good because without them we should be without the experience. Man at his best seeks to accomplish bis ends with as little pain as possible; God should be nothing short of infinitely more humane than man. Milton's omnipotent beneficence can not or will not do for man what man would do for himself if he were Milton's God. The trouble is, of course, with the whole Calvinistic system of thought. The asserter of eternal providence proves more than we wish to believe. He sinks the ship to dampen the sails. He starts up a snake in order to gain credit for killing it. He blackens the moral character of God in order to dispose of the problem of evil.

The similarities of phrase, arrangement, and general development that are to be observed in so many mediæval religious plays in which divergences are nevertheless equally apparent have been variously explained as due to the common scriptural, liturgical, theological, or vernacular sources of these plays. Nor has the possibility that one play or cycle may have borrowed directly from another been overlooked. The paucity of early texts, however, contrasted with the relatively more abundant remains of the later highly developed plays and cycles, has tended to obscure the whole problem. With the recent discovery and publication of the oldest text of a complete French Passion play that has survived—the manuscript is dated from the beginning of the fourteenth century by Dr. Christ— new data has become available, and it can be shown, I think, from the relations existing between this so-called Palatine Passion and other French Passion plays that many of the puzzling resemblances in the medieval drama arise from the fact that the same texts often served as the basis for the representations given in different communities. These texts were at various times subjected to revision, and it is the successive alterations made upon them which have in many eases concealed their original connections.

In the minds of most students of literature, William Godwin's name is associated with the drama, first, through his own two unsuccessful attempts at playmaking, Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807), and, secondly, through Colman's dramatization of Caleb Williams under the title The Iron Chest, and Wordsworth's The Borderers, an exposure of the ethical fallacies of Political Justice. In the present paper, I wish to point out some additional and less familiar facts with respect to Godwin's relation to the stage. I take it that the overshadowing interest in Godwin must always remain his influence upon the great young poets of his time; yet it may not be amiss to specify some of his other less important points of contact with the literary life of his age. I shall not be concerned with the anarchic radicalism of Political Justice, but with the relationship of some of Godwin's novels to certain isolated dramas in England, France, and America; and as connected with these matters I shall, at the same time, give an account of Godwin's intercourse with the American tragedian, Thomas Cooper. These items should be of value in forming a more complete estimate of the nature and extent of Godwin's influence as a whole.