The House of Fame is the most curiously constructed of Chaucer's works. Although the poem has all the trappings of a typical love-vision, it deals with a heterogeneous body of subject matter that often seems only remotely connected with love. Love is the dominant theme of the first book, which retells the story of Dido and Æneas, and the purpose of Chaucer's trip to the house of Fame is presumably to hear love tidings. Yet the second book is taken up with the scientific lessons of the eagle, while the third is concerned with Fame viewed first as the maker of reputations and secondly in her role as the disseminator of rumor. How is one to reconcile these themes and make sense out of the haphazard way in which Chaucer has strung them together? Of course, one can dismiss the problem as a case of poor artistry, and that is precisely what many critics have done. Dorothy Everett, for instance, writes of the poem, “As a whole it is not a success, and was perhaps left unfinished for that reason.” However, the poem is so very successful in part and so very nearly complete (the ending, for that matter, may have been suppressed) that it is at least worth speculating whether the failure to make sense out of the whole is our own instead of Chaucer's.

In Thorpe's 1609 Quarto there are signs of a “lost” Shakespeare poem in eleven sonnet stanzas, six still together (63–68) and five displaced (19, 21, 100–101, 105). An attempt to restore this poem ends, of course, in rearranging the Sonnets, a practice which has earned its questionable reputation. True, the “original” sonnet order itself is questionable, and modest revision of it, such as Tucker Brooke's, can be plausible. But we should not forget the free-ranging cryptographers whose persistent tampering with Thorpe's text has led to a defensive presumption in its favor. Whether my own efforts lessen this presumption, or simply justify it, is not for me to say. I have tried, however, to introduce some rather stiff standards for rearrangement which are hardly designed to stir up new activity. And so long as mischief does not threaten, perhaps we can afford to be a little more realistic about the 1609 edition, a text without authority for sequence except where the sonnet order clearly justifies itself. Certainly this text is not made authentic by notorious failure to improve it; Hyder Rollins, who did not suffer rearrangers gladly, was very clear on that point (Variorum edition, ii, 83).

According to fiction, the university in. sixteenth-century Wittenberg can lay claim to those two students whose lives and tragical deaths have since seemed to the Western mind to comprise all its longings and strivings, as well as to epitomize its utmost ideal of heroism. According to fact, of course, Hamlet had long been dead before the university there was founded; and this fact, whether they know it or not, is of great advantage to the Shakespeare scholars, for the historical Faust has been a problem child of the critics for centuries. The Faust Book states that he did study in Wittenberg. Melanchthon seems to have been acquainted with him and to have thought that he had studied black magic in Cracow, too. Documentary evidence may indicate that he graduated at Heidelberg. Now whether or not he ever attended any university—and he most likely did not—over three hundred years of research on the Faust Book has had to cope with the many reports, now authentic, now fantastic, and with the many tales now new and now second-hand which were widely circulated about a real contemporary of Luther who sometimes called himself Faust.

Most readers of the account of Raphael's visit to Eden in Book v of Paradise Lost center their interest on the exchange of greetings between Raphael and Adam, which illustrates the sense of order and hierarchy so significant in the poem. The importance for both theme and structure of the angel's address to Eve, which immediately follows, has, however, been overlooked. Eve rises to greet her heavenly guest, and the narration continues:

On whom the Angel Haile
Bestowd, the holy salutation us'd
Long after to blest Marie, second Eve.
(Paradise Lost v.385-387)

Scholars who deal with Italian letters generally recognize, although they may deplore, the overriding importance of literary academies in the intellectual life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, just as students of French literature know that the salons and academies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France had much to do with the refinement of taste and manners, with the evolution of critical standards, and with the vogue of the pastoral novel or of the vast historical romance such as Mile de Scudéry's Clélie. Students of Spanish seventeenth-century literature, however, have been remarkably incurious about literary academies, knowing at most, perhaps, that there was an Academia de los Nocturnos functioning in Valencia from 1591 to 1594, or that Lope wrote his much-debated Arte nuevo for an “Academia de Madrid,” and have seemed to regard them as no more than idle games through which the participants passed untouched. Few have asked how widespread the academies were, and even fewer have speculated on their connections with the literature of the time.

In his edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson Dr. R. W. Chapman gives Samuel Richardson as the addressee of nine letters (Nos. 31, 48, 49, 49.1, 49.2, 51.1, 58.1, 90, and 94), and in his “Further Addenda” (i, 430) he mentions another recorded letter to Richardson (36.1) as “not traced.” Chapman says in a footnote to 31 that he is “far from satisfied” with his elucidations of these letters; I believe that I can clarify some of the points which were doubtful to him, date one of the letters (49.2) more nearly accurately, show that one of the letters (49.1) is not to Richardson, and identify the untraced letter (36.1) as most likely 36, which Chapman prints as to the Earl of Orrery.

Everyone who knows the life of Johnson remembers his revelation to Boswell of what first set him “thinking in earnest of religion,” after a youth spent mostly in indifference toward it, and in lax talking against it. This laxity, he said, “lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford I took up ‘Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,‘ expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Everyone accepts this as a significant event in Johnson's life, and nearly every book written since either about Johnson or Law repeats it. There has been, however, a curious indifference among Johnsonian scholars toward examining its significance, or considering the possibility that Law's influence on him may have extended beyond this admittedly important event in his young manhood. Mrs. Thrale was the only person I know of in his own day who suspected a real debt to Law in his writings, and since his death, with the exception of those critics who have surmised an influence of Law's “portraits” on some of Johnson's character-sketches in the Rambler, there have been, I believe, only two who have seen Law's influence at work on the mature Johnson.

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.

Concerning Gérard de Nerval it has been said, of late, that the hour of synthesis is at hand. This is particularly true of “El Desdichado,” for most authors of the increasingly voluminous literature devoted to this sonnet have taken an extrinsic approach; that is, they have applied techniques of other fields, such as psychiatry, biography, astrology, and alchemy. At best they have helped to elucidate hitherto obscure symbols; at worst they have made of their thesis a kind of Procrustean bed on which the poem has been either stretched to death or decapitated.

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.

In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.

In the year of Huysmans' death, 1907, Léon Daudet wrote of him: “Il a jeté un pont entre le spiritualisme chrétien et le vocabulaire moderne.” In a brief panegyric paper, the critic merely defends Huysmans' continued use of a naturalistic style in his later Catholic novels, without analyzing the idea to any extent, either historically or stylistically.

As an appendix to Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Der Prozeß (The Trial) Max Brod has published a series of fragments more or less closely connected with the main body of the text. One of them, with the heading “Staatsanwalt” (“Prosecuting Attorney”), has lately caused considerable discussion, especially in view of the new order suggested for the entire novel by Professor H. Uyttersprot.

The retirement to Rye, which occurred in 1897, when James was fifty-four, distinguished between his life of experience and his life from ‘past accumulations’ (as he once called it). His peregrinations over, he set himself, masterwise, to producing a world compact of all he had been able, coherently, to think and feel.“ Despite the fact that The Ambassadors is one of the most original of all James's productions, no novel is so much the result of all his ”past accumulations“ as this one.

Hermann Broch was already in his forties when his first novel, part of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, appeared in 1931.1 One continuing result of the prominence which this work brought to Broch has been an almost complete neglect of his few earlier writings. Thus, Erich Kahler in his introductory remarks in the Gesammelte Werke merely indicates: “Die Anfange seiner Dichtung—Novellen und Gedichte—reichen … bis in die Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs zurück” (Gedichte, 1953, p. 8). He omits Broch's earliest published poem, Mathematisches Mysterium (1913) from his selection of poetry. The two volumes of essays of the collected works, Dichten und Erkennen, and Erkennen und Handeln, edited by Hannah Arendt (1955) also contain no writings prior to Die Schlafwandler. The volume of Briefe, edited by Robert Pick (1957), perhaps because of lack of material, follows this pattern, going back only to 1929.

The fact that the term “criticism” has now come to designate all commentary on textual meaning reflects a general acceptance of the doctrine that description and evaluation are inseparable in literary study. In any serious confrontation of literature it would be futile, of course, to attempt a rigorous banishment of all evaluative judgment, but this fact does not give us the license to misunderstand or misinterpret our texts. It does not entitle us to use the text as the basis for an exercise in “creativity” or to submit as serious textual commentary a disguised argument for a particular ethical, cultural, or aesthetic viewpoint. Nor is criticism's chief concern—the present relevance of a text—a strictly necessary aspect of textual commentary. That same kind of theory which argues the inseparability of description and evaluation also argues that a text's meaning is simply its meaning “to us, today.” Both kinds of argument support the idea that interpretation is criticism and vice versa. But there is clearly a sense in which we can neither evaluate a text nor determine what it means “to us, today” until we have correctly apprehended what it means. Understanding (and therefore interpretation, in the strict sense of the word) is both logically and psychologically prior to what is generally called criticism. It is true that this distinction between understanding and evaluation cannot always show itself in the finished work of criticism—nor, perhaps, should it—but a general grasp and acceptance of the distinction might help correct some of the most serious faults of current criticism (its subjectivism and relativism) and might even make it plausible to think of literary study as a corporate enterprise and a progressive discipline.