Most contemporary students of the subject seem to agree with Wellek and Warren's view that “the meaning of verse simply cannot be ignored in a theory of metrics,” and that “sound and meter must be studied as elements of the totality of a work of art, not in isolation from meaning.” The notorious exception is no doubt John Crowe Ransom's forthright theory which makes of the meters simply sound textures irrelevant to the meaning. Yvor Winters's well-known critique of Ransom's argument disposes of the latter's general thesis convincingly, it seems to me. The story does not, however, end there.

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway prophesied: “The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” Since then many critics have analyzed the symbols and mythical meanings of Hemingway's prose. A few have tried to imagine what he meant by “a fourth and fifth dimension.” But most have agreed that the phrase is pretty vague.

A proper evaluation of the work of Ramiro de Maeztu at this point is hampered primarily by two factors: an almost frenetic admiration on the part of those who exalt him as a martyr to the cause of Falangism, and the emotional charge implicit in the mantle of oblivion thrown over his memory by those who consider him a lost leader and turncoat. Recently an entire issue of a review published in Madrid was dedicated to apotheosizing the writer who was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War; throughout the four hundred pages comprising the issue it would be impossible to glean a single word of refutation, a single adverse critique of Maeztu's thought. In another issue of the same review, Dionisio Gamallo Fierros announces that 13,000 articles written by Maeztu would be collected in an Obras Completas of 76 volumes. Such a project, we are forced to conjecture, would put far too much emphasis upon much that is topical, hasty, and obsolete in journalistic work covering a span of almost forty years. Yet it is undeniable that Maeztu's spiritual and ideological evolution is one of the most dramatic and characteristic of our times. Although we cannot place him among those who worshipped and later turned away from “The God that Failed,” he is a true enfant du siècle in so far as we can trace the metamorphosis of his enthusiasms from the cause of liberalism and progressivism to a denial of the validity of these attitudes in favor of reaction, tradition, obedience, hierarchy, and clericalism. It is tempting—and perhaps even justifiable —to allow an objective consideration of Maeztu's contributions to literature and thought to be influenced by a natural aversion for his later anti-Semitism, his approval of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, his admiration of Hitler and Mussolini, his dire predictions of the collapse of democratic Europe and America. But perhaps for that very reason we should focus our attention on the phenomenon of yet another man whose enlightenment provided no inoculation against forces of darkness, whose disappointment with the cult of progress led him to wish ardently for the suppression of even the best aspects of modernity, whose religion crowded out all tolerance and left room only for submission. Furthermore, we cannot dispute the fact that Maeztu was sincerely convinced he had found the right formula for the salvation of mankind, that his convictions were rooted in religious faith and the ardent belief that not only Spain and Hispanic America, but all of humanity, could be saved if the lessons of his country's history were correctly interpreted. Lastly, we must concede that Maeztu's voice was raised in denunciation of Communism, that he warned his readers that the materialism of an over-materialistic age would atomize and dehumanize a society bereft of absolute values.

I Most of us today recognize but the commonest of the figures of speech or rhetorical devices that we encounter in our reading. Simile, metaphor, pleonasm, even oxymoron still belong to our vocabulary; but most literate people of the present frown or otherwise distort their features at the mere mention of litotes, hendiadys, hyperbaton, meiosis, paranomasia, syllepsis, or zeugma. Our fathers learned to distinguish such figures, with the aid of examples drawn from Vergil and Tacitus, from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, and could even note in passing the clergyman's skillful use of such a device in his sermon.

Any one who has read in chronological sequence the earlier poems of Conrad Aiken is at once impressed with the new note that appears with the publication in 1916 of The Jig of Forslin. And he might be well impressed, at many points, by the strong suggestion, in Aiken's new manner, of Eliot's style in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems of the same period.

A study of Mann's conception of the man of letters and of the literary artist is necessarily an enquiry into his entire philosophy of life, for to Mann “art is the quintessence of humanity and the artist the most human of men.” Because of Mann's perennial and conscious preoccupation with intellectual and artistic creativity, his views on the writer reflect most of the shifts and oscillations in his career. The present essay does not encompass all of these changes in accentuation and tonality.

The days have passed when the question “Who reads Goethe?” elicited, on the part of most educated Germans, the equivalent of a disdainful “Why, everybody who's anybody, of course!” Familiarity with Goethe is no longer claimed by many Germans whose fathers were brought up on Götz and Faust. Others again, individuals and entire social groups, have recently come in contact with Goethe for the first time. Changes in the modern image of Goethe have been followed—in some cases anticipated—by changes in the composition of the reading public. Until the Gallup Poll in the fullness of time takes an interest in German literature, any answer to the question posed above must remain incomplete. This does not mean that we should refrain from giving a partial answer, any more than anthropologists should forego speculation about the Neanderthal man merely because no complete specimen has ever been found. So much has been written about Goethe himself that his public has been largely ignored—as if the fact that we still read Goethe were not partly due to the efforts of previous generations of readers in publishing and explaining his works, and handing them down to us intact and accessible. Our prototype, the composite Goethe reader of the past seventy years, can be partially reconstructed by examining the history and membership of an organization which has done much to change our concept of Goethe, and to modify the literary tastes of a substantial portion of Germany's reading public: the German Goethe Society.

It may seem surprising that there is reason today to reexamine a more or less public episode in the lives of two major English writers of the last century. For nearly seventy years there has existed among biographers of Dickens what might almost be termed an official version of the so-called Garrick Club affair, that provided by Edmund Yates in his Recollections and Experiences of 1884. Because of the absence of an authoritative Thackerayan biographical tradition, there has been no full statement of Thackeray's side of the case. Thackeray's biographers have tended to rely instead on Yates's testimony not merely for much of the detail but even for the structure of their narratives of this incident in his life. Some of them have supplemented Recollections and Experiences with John Cordy Jeaffreson's Book of Recollections (1894) and more recently with the late Walter Dexter's edition of Dickens' Letters (1938) and with my edition of Thackeray's Letters and Private Papers (1945-46), but by relying primarily on Yates instead of thinking the problem through for themselves, they have arrived at much the same story as that provided by Dickens' biographers. Malcolm Elwin's Thackeray: a Personality (1932) constitutes an honorable exception to this generalization, but Elwin did not attempt a comprehensive treatment of the Garrick Club affair, nor did he have access to much significant manuscript material which has come to light since he wrote.

On 14 July 1849 Poe, who had just arrived in Richmond, wrote to his wife's mother, Mrs. Maria Clemm: “I am indebted for more than life itself to B— [Burr]. Never forget him, Mother, while you live. When all failed me, he stood my friend, got me money, and saw me off in the cars for Richmond.” Poe had left New York on 29 June. In Philadelphia he had gone on a spree and been seriously ill. Burr with the help of one or two others looked after the sick poet until he was able to resume his journey to Richmond. Poe was on his way back to New York when he died in Baltimore on 7 October of the same year.

“All literary history,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “demonstrates that for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets.” The term “plagiarism” may be variously defined in connection with a work of literary art, the crime ranging in degree from servile reproduction to such creative use of sources as one finds in Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, the term is all too often used without any apparent recognition of the fact that an idea—or a phrase—may occur independently to two different minds. To Edgar Poe, harried, beset, frustrated, the thing became an obsession and for him the term gained the widest applicability—particularly as he saw, or fancied he saw, others poaching on his own preserves. Yet ironically the question arises as to whether the author of “Al Aaraaf” might not, by his own definition, be indicted for plagiarizing John Milton; whether, indeed, his reply to Outis —“Can any man doubt that between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost there might be established even a thousand idiosyncratic identities?—And yet is any man fool enough to maintain that the Iliad is the only original of Paradise Lost?”—represents to some degree a defensive attitude? In view of Poe's several footnotes indicating Milton as his source, additional annotation by his editors, and a considerable number of references to the blind bard in his essays and critical pieces, it would seem of considerable importance to determine just how familiar the poet was with his great predecessor.

There is a well-known note in A. C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (pp. 139-141) which defines Wordsworth's “sense or consciousness of ‘immortality’” as “at once a consciousness that he … is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’.” Bradley quotes (very incorrectly) three passages from the Excursion as evidence that we “remain entirely outside Wordsworth's mind” if we read ‘immortality’ without extending the conception to mean infinity, and quotes again from the Prelude a passage to illustrate “the mind's infinity or immortality,” as if the concepts are not merely related but synonymous.

In 1915 Gilbert Chinard concluded his study of Chateaubriand en Amérique with the words: “Si inconnu qu'il fût à cette date, Chateaubriand a pu laisser des traces de son passage; on le trouvera peut-être un jour mentionné dans quelque correspondance d'émigré, dans un journal de colon conservé dans les archives d'une société historique de quelque petite ville de la Nouvelle-Angleterre ou du Canada. D'ici là, il sera sage de se garder à la fois des affirmations trop hardies et des hypothèses trop séduisantes.” Such an investigation as the eminent américanisant suggested seemed an excellent exercise for young scholars established close to Chateaubriand's line of march. Thus, in the autumn of 1952 I imposed on a graduate seminar the task of examining all the known records of the year 1791 in New York State. All the local historical societies were questioned; manuscript collections and newspaper files were consulted; the aid of specialists in the period was invoked.

The love affair which has a title part in the Rape of the Lock was perhaps once so obvious as to need no comment; at least Dr. Johnson thought “the subject of the poem … an event below the common incidents of common life.” By the twentieth century the love story seemed so obscure as to defy analysis; at least Geoffrey Tillotson thought that the rejection of the hero by the heroine was unaccountable. A decade ago Cleanth Brooks refurbished the action as a neo-classic campaign in the unending “war of the sexes” over rites of possession. Some such pattern of pre-marital courtship is doubtless a norm assumed for the comedy of the poem, as it is—William K. Wimsatt reminds us—for Molière's Misanthrope, Congreve's Way of the World, and Meredith's Egoist. While suggestively approaching the plan of the action, however, Brooks has rather too closely assimilated Pope's particular campaign to the general war. If the comedy of the poem posits a norm, it also sets forth a divergence. One is free to speculate that in a hypothetical sequel to Pope's poem the Baron and Belinda might have gone on (like other gallivanting young people, indeed like Arabella Fermor and Lord Petre) to get married—he to another woman, she to another man. But as it stands the poem is not directly concerned with what Brooks calls “the elaborate and courtly conventions under which Belinda fulfills her natural function of finding a mate” (p. 84). Both Belinda and the Baron are at the age of exuberance where the armor of courtship fits rather loosely, like the helmet Swift stuck on Dryden. Feigning “death,” sophisticating love, and shunning marriage, they wage a mock war in a mock-heroic poem. Their maneuvers, I wish to show, make the plot of the poem a contest of wiles between commanding personalities—an uninhibited philanderer and an invincible flirt.

Since 1695, when Patrick Hume, Milton's first annotator, published by subscription The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton, the editors of Paradise Lost have consistently held that the “waters above the firmament” in the Miltonic cosmology are synonymous with or are contained in the crystalline sphere. I propose to demonstrate that in spite of their accord Milton's editors have been mistaken; that in the geocentric universe of Paradise Lost the crystalline sphere has only the functional role originally assigned to it in the thirteenth century by the astronomer-king Alphonso of Spain; and that the “waters above,” derived from theological rather than scientific sources, were located by the poet outside the primum mobile and never by him confused or identified with the crystalline sphere. This view, contrary to the tenor of historic scholarship, was put forth by the Jonathan Richardsons, father and son, early and sometimes disparaged commentators on Milton. In their Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (London, 1734), they explicate P.L. VII.269 thus: “as Moses Gen. i. 7. says there were Waters above and Under the Firmament, Milton Supposes a Chrystalline Ocean, a Sea Clear as the Purest Chryslal, flowing round the New Creation, a Fence (beside the Wall, III, 721) against Chaos. But this is not the Chrystalline mention'd III.482. That was a Sphere, and for a Different use, nor is it a part of Milton's System.” Apparently no serious attention hitherto has been paid to this lone dissenting opinion. It is hoped that this study will encourage a fresh examination of several passages in Paradise Lost and that it will contribute to the understanding of Milton's cosmology as a whole.

A good deal of critical energy has gone in recent years into the attempt to demonstrate that even the best Elizabethan actors were some kind of human marionettes. Some twenty years ago Miss M. C. Bradbrook wrote: the “general consensus of opinion on Elizabethan acting” was this: “There would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalised. Conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off the dramatic illusion.” Since then various articles in learned journals and sections of scholarly books have supported the “formalist” attitude, which now comes to this: that the Elizabethan dramatist's words were all that really counted, and that his actors were trained to be graceful, mannered mouthpieces who recited the dramatic poetry without letting their personalities or their personal ideas of the part played color the performance in any way; they acted formally, not naturally; they did not portray character, they symbolized it. Formalism has tended toward a rigid orthodoxy, although, as we shall see, one of the modern champions of the single style, Professor Harbage, seems to have moved away from his first strict view in the direction of a more liberal formalist attitude of the kind represented by S. L. Bethell. Bethell, frankly facing the rich and lively variety of the Elizabethan plays, noted scenes demanding something like “natural” treatment, and so he allowed a second, relaxed style subordinate to a conventional technique, or sometimes mixed with it. He also saw, as separate modes, the clowning, which he regarded as non-naturalistic, and the elements of vaudeville. But for the regular drama, he argued, “the poetry and its decent delivery were the only real essentials” and “I have no doubt that the formal manner of delivery was used.” The depersonalized actors, Bethell felt, could have made no “addition of ‘personality’ or ‘creativity‘” to their lines; they let the lines tell what the character was, instead of trying to be the character.

Verisimilitude in a work of fiction is not without its attendant dangers, the chief of which is that the responses it stimulates in the reader may be those appropriate not so much to an imaginative production as to an historical one or to a piece of reporting. History and reporting are, of course, honorable in themselves, but if we react to a poet as though he were an historian or a reporter, we do him somewhat less than justice. I am under the impression that many readers, too much influenced by Chaucer's brilliant verisimilitude, tend to regard his famous pilgrimage to Canterbury as significant not because it is a great fiction, but because it seems to be a remarkable record of a fourteenth-century pilgrimage. A remarkable record it may be, but if we treat it too narrowly as such there are going to be certain casualties among the elements that make up the fiction. Perhaps first among these elements is the fictional reporter, Chaucer the pilgrim, and the role he plays in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and in the links between them. I think it time that he was rescued from the comparatively dull record of history and put back into his poem. He is not really Chaucer the poet—nor, for that matter, is either the poet, or the poem's protagonist, that Geoffrey Chaucer frequently mentioned in contemporary historical records as a distinguished civil servant, but never as a poet. The fact that these are three separate entities does not, naturally, exclude the probability—or rather the certainty—that they bore a close resemblance to one another, and that, indeed, they frequently got together in the same body. But that does not excuse us from keeping them distinct from one another, difficult as their close resemblance makes our task.

In the opinion of the late Thomas R. Lounsbury, Chaucer was virtually “free from these verbal quibbles which characterize to so marked a degree the language of the Elizabethan dramatists.” “The single instance,” he went on to say, “in which he furnishes any noticeable example of this sort is the play upon the word ‘style’ in the Squire's tale; though there is possibly one of the same character in a line in ‘Troilus and Cressida,‘ where it is said that

‘This Calkas knew by calkulynge,‘ i., 71

that Troy was to be taken. Still, from conceits of all kinds and of all grades Chaucer's language, at every period of his literary career, was in general wholly free.“

This paragraph introduces a paper which illustrates a larger project: a study of aspects of Gower's works in fourteenth-century historical relationships. The objective is an interpretation of his writings as mirroring the attitude and point of view of a conservative middle-class Englishman for the years 1381-1400 and through them an interpretation of the England of his day. Though these writings show the long heritage of an economic, political, ethical, and religious past, our interest always centers in his immediate present. Non-literary contemporary records consequently provide the first essential materials for this interpretation. Macaulay's standard edition of his works, published half a century ago, based on all manuscripts then available, constitutes the printed source for this study. The high quality of Gower's preserved manuscripts, which give his own revisions, and the fact that these revisions show important changes in his attitudes toward individuals and organizations or institutions, make a re-examination of all of them now available an essential part of this interpretation and raise again the unresolved problem of his ethical integrity. Gardiner Stillwell's able article, “John Gower and the Last Years of Edward III,” provides a suggestive introduction for the interested student. The title of the present article is John Gower, Mentor for Royalty: Richard II.

Anglo-norman literature represents an interesting and fairly rare phenomenon in western culture. For about three centuries an imported vernacular was widely current in England, though in varying degrees. This language, which was basically the Norman dialect of French, took on in England a character of its own, both because of its distance from its home ground and because of the influence of external events. At the same time it produced a considerable body of literature, in part reminiscent of its origin, in part determined by the Latin and English literature of its new home, in part influenced by new importations from France. Then—one might almost say abruptly—although the conquerors were never expelled, the imported language and literature ceased to have independent existence. Yet their influence remained forever in English language and literature, absorbed into the nation as were the conquerors and immigrants themselves.