This essay aims to define certain fundamental differences between two types of rhythmic patterning indigenous to English verse, and to suggest that full recognition of these differences can do much to clear up standard confusions in our prosodic terminology. A recent essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley went part way toward performing such a service by reinforcing a traditional distinction between non-syllable-counting “native” or “strong-stress” meter, patterned entirely on the accentual principle, and “syllable-stress” meters, patterned on the principle of an “interplay” of native accentual rhythms with syllable-counting techniques inherited originally from Romance-language prosody.1 It is my contention, however, that, valid as this distinction is, there is a more important one which is blurred by the tendency to emphasize regularization of the number of syllables in the verse line as the primary, if not the sole, factor differentiating the two chief metrical modes. I hope to show that, of the four so-called “syllable-stress” meters in English—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic—only the iambic has developed in a direction radically different from the native accentual tradition; that the other three, as characteristically used in English poetry, are simply variants of the strong-stress mode; and that the very term “syllable-stress” is misleading because syllable-counting techniques may occur in strong-stress verse and the stress-factor alone does not account for all rhythmic discriminations in iambic verse. The distinction with which this essay is concerned—between the entire iambic tradition and all English verse written in strong-stress meter, whether syllable-counting or not—is, I believe, the most basic one in English prosody, necessary not only in performing formal scansions but also in understanding and appreciating significant contrasts between two very different ways of hearing and composing a poetic line.

Der vater der Geschichtsschreibung, Herodot, berichtet uns in den Historien: Die Hellenen haben die Namen der Götter von den Pelasgern übernommen; woher aber jeder stammt und ob sie alle von Ewigkeit waren und von welcher Gestalt sie sind, das hat man sozusagen bis gestern nicht gewußt.1 Hesiod und Homer sind es, die den Hellenen ihr Göttergeschlecht geschaffen, den Göttern ihre Beinamen gegeben, Ehren und Künste unter sie verteilt und ihre Gestalten bezeichnet haben.2

Scholars and critics are wont to say that not even the editors of the First Folio knew what to make of Troilus and Cressida. Although the assertion has almost no validity, it is a comforting, protective one to repeat: comforting, for no play by Shakespeare has received such diverse interpretation; protective, for the statement absolves one from re-examining the basic bibliographical facts of the play. Diversity in Shakespearean interpretation is certainly desirable, yet that which surrounds Troilus and Cressida has become confusing and contradictory1 because the play is approached from assumptions of historical fact which are themselves widely diverse. Without a firm knowledge of origins, no critic—scholarly, literary, historical, or “new”—can generate the kind of imaginative assurance that is necessary in order to say something significant and lasting about the form and content of a Shakespearean play. Since so very little is known about Troilus and Cressida in its contemporary setting, an attempt to reconstruct the facts of its origins is all the more important. In this article, then, I shall initially review the known facts of the play on stage and in print, then propose that new facts be accepted along with the old in an account of origins which is conservative yet comprehensive. Generally I hope to establish a firm basis for further historical investigation and deeper critical understanding of Troilus and Cressida; specifically I hope in the last three sections to dispel three widely-held misconceptions: that the play failed or was not played publicly, that one of the Inns of Court commissioned the play, and that the editors of the First Folio were aesthetically uncertain concerning its place in that work.

Recent interpretations of Thyrsis' magic herb have usually employed one or more of several angles of approach: (1) the implications of its name, (2) its similarities with, or differences from, the herb moly, and (3) its function in a larger context—its relation to the theme, dramatic structure, and ethical allegory of Milton's masque. Though all three approaches are necessary for a valid solution of this crux, each has encountered certain inherent difficulties. The third has been especially vulnerable to subjective bias; reading into haemony whatever meaning has best fitted his own conception of the poem's overall structure and sense, the individual critic has been prone to find in the herb the particular concept he had wanted to find. The second has been complicated not only by the variety of meanings commentators have ascribed to moly, but also by critical disagreement as to how far the two plants represent similar or dissimilar ideas. The first approach has hitherto failed to establish a solid basis for the allegory. The only etymology on which scholars are agreed— Keightley's suggestion that haemony was named after “Haemonia or Thessaly, the land of magic”1—tells one very little about its allegorical significance. Possible clues to the allegory have been discovered in several alternative etymologies, but these have not yet won general acceptance.

Many of the critics of the heroic plays of the Restoration have had at least some passing comment to make about the concepts of love and honor embodied in these plays. L. N. Chase, for example, asserts that in the heroic play “virtue is often sneered at, reason and honor are brushed contemptuously aside.” Though he admits that love is usually justified and even glorified in these dramas, he denies that it is “a high and ennobling passion” for it “sanctions a violation of all moral laws wherever they are opposed to its free sweep and range.” Bonamy Dobrée also asserts that a “sound, guaranteed heroic love was excuse for any betrayal of friendship or dereliction of duty.” Nevertheless, he believes that in an age hungry for heroism and balked of it in real life, these plays provided on a superficial level the kind of heroism which satisfied the emotional needs of Restoration audiences. Allardyce Nicoll accepts essentially the same explanation for the popularity of heroic drama, yet he regards “flaunting honor” and “impossibly idealistic love passions” as typical of these plays.

Fielding's veiled aspersions of Walpole as the “Great Man” of his Tom Thumb (24 April 1730) is accepted as his first political satire on the stage, and his allusion in The Author's Farce (30 March 1730) to Cibber as “Mr. Keyber,” a nickname connected with anti-Walpole satire, has been taken only as evidence that Fielding wrote Shamela, with its “Keyber” on the title page. I myself have stated that political satire in The Author's Farce went no further than the single reference to “Keyber.” But innocence and the authorities have apparently conspired to hide a number of other political allusions in The Author's Farce, in the 1730 original (there were two 1730 “editions” of this, neither reprinted, not readily accessible) as well as in the 1734 revision—threads of the anti-Walpole satire that Fielding worked into his stage burlesques with increasing frequency. Some of this satire may also appear, rather unexpectedly, in The Mock Doctor (23 June 1732) and it is certainly evident in Tumble-Down Dick (29 April 1736), a play from Fielding's high “political” period that has strangely been left out of political account.

The Encyclopædia Britannica defines “song” as “the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third. The relation and balance of the two arts is a problem that has to be resolved anew in every song that is composed.” This critical relationship between poem and musical setting, as observed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German song, is the subject of the following. Goethe, whose interest in the song form was great, and whose life spanned the transformation of eighteenth-century into nineteenth-century song, is used as a convenient focus to center attention on the critical relationships which were introduced into the song form by the course of its development at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The question in the title is thus rhetorical. I do not propose to answer it; indeed, there can be no answer more decisive than a thorough examination of the implications of Goethe's views and the esthetic problems which he saw or sensed in the form.

Readers of Wordsworth are aware that the 1790's were years of excitement for the poet —his experiences in France during the Revolution, his love affair with Annette Vallon, his reunion with his sister Dorothy after long separation, and the heady months of talks on poetry with his new friend Coleridge—the only other first-rate poet of his generation. Equally plain is the fact that about 1805 a long decline in Wordsworth's career began: the revolutionary grew conservative, the poet often turned to mere versifying.

Despite reservations we may have about Emerson's theory of Compensation, it was fundamental to his philosophy. Nor was its truth or falsity settled by Stephen Whicher's assertion that “the notion of an automatic moral compensation ... is without question the most unacceptable of Emerson's truths, and a major cause of his present decline of reputation.” As Emerson himself said, “the great questions affecting our spiritual nature are not one of them decided. . . . The system of Compensations in moral and material nature, and a hundred other questions of primary concernment to the state of man, are all open to discussion.”

The marble faun frequently reads like a guide-book. Its characters and narrator describe many landscapes and ruins, comment interpretively on many works of art, and take every opportunity to make general pronouncements on aesthetics. Often at such points Hawthorne's Romance seems interrupted by bits of leftover essays, whose tenuous dramatic plausibility derives from the characters, three of whom are “artists, or connected with art,” and from the Italian setting, which is insistently presented as the home of the “antique, pictorial, and statuesque.”

The nature and degree of George Eliot's commitment to a deterministic world view have been the source of considerable difficulty in the criticism of her work. Critics who concern themselves with the subject take, for the most part, the view either that her belief in determinism seriously marred her art or, on the other hand, that despite appearances she was not a consistent determinist. In both cases, however, determinism evokes extraordinary intensity of feeling, almost everyone agreeing that a commitment to it tends to be detrimental to the artist because it forces a distortion of the facts of existence (or at least a depressing interpretation of them) and leads to an underestimation of man's capacity for action and of his potential dignity.

While chatting with Anthony Trollope one day, George Eliot lamented the occasional failure of her inspiration: “There are days together when I cannot write a line.” Trollope, in a rare moment of humility, replied: “Oh, well, with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry.” Perhaps it is unfair to accept Trollope's testimony against himself, but we do his workmanlike talents no disservice if we recognize that the same charge has often been brought against him by his critics, who allege a variety of “mechanical” practices. For example, A. O. J. Cockshut, discussing Trollope's handling of courtship, says, “His stock plot, much too often repeated, of the woman hesitating between two men, is perfunctory.” However, one “mechanical” technique which he repeatedly employed has never been noticed. If we trace the appearance of the two principal sources of conflict in his fiction, we discover not only that two themes are very common but also that they appear with almost predictable regularity. The symmetry of this pattern is, I feel, significant and illuminating in understanding Trollope's literary fecundity, in classifying his novels, and in appreciating the exact nature of his artistic maturity, a matter of special concern in recent Trollope criticism. Paradoxically, this same pattern also suggests that those novels which are most popular at the moment were “mechanically” produced.

Lionel trilling has remarked that “Arnold the poet first saw the problems Arnold the practical man tried to solve.” Arnold the poet, however, also saw the solutions to the problems that he posed, and the poet chiefly differs from the moralist in his greater sympathy for the perplexed man of his generation (a sympathy doubtless born of Arnold's own experience with “the damned times” in which he found himself). It is obvious enough that the essays are marked by an assurance in the face of mid-nineteenth-century anarchy which is generally lacking from the earlier poetry. Whether or not this assurance is adopted for the occasion, it seems probable that the reason for it was Arnold's growing conviction that the poetic record of a personal struggle (and even of a personal victory) was an inadequate contribution to his age.

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.

The american “international novel” derives its importance as a genre from a few outstanding practitioners—from the early Howells, above all from James and Edith Wharton. To say this is of course to suggest a definition which fits novels like A Foregone Conclusion, or The Ambassadors, or Madame de Treymes, the kind of definition Professor Cargill proposed recently in an article claiming the title of “The First International Novel” for James's The American. In such novels the conflict between different sets of manners and mores, “the mixture of manners,” as James called it in the preface to “Lady Barbarina,” is essential. Usually it leads to illumination, an illumination sometimes but not always shared by the hero. That depends on his intelligence and character.

Georg kaiser's work is often treated as the reflection of its author's unusual personality. Such a treatment, though valid, tends to obscure the fact that his writings, in their probing of existing values, their manifestation of Lebensangst, their quest for regeneration, and their hope for redemption, also reflect the intellectual and spiritual concerns of his period. That his visions were not, as has been often held, the phantasies of an extreme subjectivist, but that they accurately mirrored the age, is demonstrated by the fact that representative thinkers of the period, such as Bergson, Vaihinger, and Jaspers, voiced similar concerns, arrived at similar conclusions, sought similar solutions. There seems to exist a particularly strong affinity between the ideas of Walther Rathenau and those presented in Kaiser's social tetralogy (Die Koralle, 1917; Gas, 1918; Hölle Weg Erde, 1919; Gas, Zweiter Teil, 1920), which was written at a time when the impact of Rathenau's works (Zur Kritik der Zeit, 1912; Zur Mechanik des Geistes oder Vom Reich der Seele, 1913; Von kommenden Dingen, 1917) on the intellectual life of Germany was very strong. Even though explicit references by Kaiser to Rathenau could be found neither in Kaiser's published work nor inhis correspondence and other unpublished material, there is, I believe, enough circumstantial evidence to make a plausible case for Kaiser's indebtedness to Rathenau. To present this evidence and, by so doing, to contribute to a better understanding of Kaiser's social tetralogy, is the purpose of this study. I shall first briefly summarize Rathenau's ideas, then present the evidence for his influence on Kaiser, and, in conclusion, speculate very briefly on the nature of this influence.

Der Für thomas mann besonders in seiner Tetralogie wichtige Begriff der mythischen Identifikation, der mehr oder minder bewußten Ichverschmelzung mit einem Vorgänger, ist gleichbedeutend mit dem Spielen einer Rolle. Die ungewöhnlichen Menschen, wie Joseph, Kleopatra und Napoleon, sind sich “mit freudigem oder düsterem Stolze” ihrer mythischen Wiederkehr bewußt und “zelebrieren ihre Rolle auf Erden, sie führen ihre Charakterrolle weihevoll durch.” Die allermeisten aber spielen ihre Rolle, ohne ihre Vorgänger und Nachfahren in ihr zu kennen, sozusagen als erste und einzige, aber trotz der “Einfältigkeit illusionärer Einmaligkeit und Originalität spielen sie mit einer Würde und Sicherheit, die aus dem tieferen Bewußtsein kommt, etwas Gegründet-Rechtmäßiges, Zeitloses wieder vorzustellen” (GW, x, 515 f.; GF, x, 756; J, 1240).

Aldous huxley's Brave New World is generally recognized as one of the two most widely discussed English fantasies of this century. The other, of course, is Orwell's 1984. The two books seem to present the two plausible alternative directions totalitarianism may take, and for several years after the publication of Orwell's book in 1949 it was common to evaluate the one against the other. 1949 was also the year of publication of Huxley's Ape and Essence, an exploration of still other possibilities of the future. It may be profitable to sidestep the question of the credibility of Huxley's fantasies as projections—which is not, fundamentally, a literary question—and to examine them first in relation to some of the techniques employed in their construction, and secondly as satires of the real worlds they reflect.

Problems of collecting oral literature range from the purely technical to the esthetic. A top collector must be an engineer capable of operating and often repairing complicated recording machines; he must be a scholar and an historian, bringing a broad knowledge of the culture he is collecting; he must be a public relations man; he must have a sturdy stomach, capable of digesting all manner of food, and a good head to withstand all manner of drink; he must be physically in top shape, capable of hiking up lonesome mountains, of rowing a boat, even of taking a turn at cutting wood, haying, or butchering; he must have a reassuring bedside manner, able to soothe those who think he is planning to put their songs and stories on radio or record and make millions for himself.