Among the various features of Anglo-Saxon verse technique, none has so successfully eluded explanation as the use of expanded verses. Impetus for a further investigation of the expanded verses is provided by certain conjectural remarks made by Magoun in his highly provocative initial article on Anglo-Saxon oral verse-making: “There is perhaps much that will never be known about the origin and special function, if any, of the expanded or hypermetric verses, but a casual survey suggests that, whereas the second measure of each verse seems to be formulaic and out of its context would form a complete verse, the organization of the first measure would appear to be somewhat different, perhaps somewhat less rigid in structure, thus perhaps allowing the singer certain freedoms not available in a normal verse.” This essay will follow up the suggestions made by Magoun and will re-examine the expanded verses from the point of view, not of their metrics, but rather of their formulaic structure. The evidence will show, I think, that the superior singers allow themselves far less freedom in the opening measure than may appear to be the case from a cursory analysis.

Until very recently the Merchant's Tale has been the least controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Several generations of critics have been united in scandalized astonishment over the un-Chaucerian qualities of the tale. Tatlock expressed the prevailing view in these often quoted words: “For unrelieved acidity the Merchant's Tale is approached nowhere in Chaucer's works. … Without a trace of warm-hearted tolerance or genial humor, expansive realism or even broadly smiling animalism, it is ruled by concentrated intelligence and unpitying analysis.” A generation earlier Kittredge had called the tale a “frenzy of contempt and hatred,” and a generation later Hugh Holman brought together all the old terms, “savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling,” and contributed his own “dark cynicism.”

Critical comment on the Nun's Priest's Tale often seems to be of two sorts. One is a straightforward response to the plain fact that the tale is funny. The other is a response to the somewhat less obvious fact that the tale is also serious, or at least that it makes a statement worthy of serious consideration. The second sort of comment may find the seriousness of the poem in an allegorical reading and it often seems a trifle defensive, as if written with an anxious or reproving eye on Matthew Arnold. However, even if one feels, as I do, that this defensiveness is a critical disadvantage, reluctance to read the poem as more than a simple joke would be equally disadvantageous. To identify Chauntecleer with Adam seems as mistaken as to take what looks like a fabular Moralitas for the final statement of the poem's import.

Donne's Wit has been linked to Caval-canti and Alciati, Marino and Ramus, Anacreon and St. Bonaventure. The variety of these analogues confronts scholars with a dilemma: for it suggests that The Songs and Sonets must be either a profound intellectual synthesis or a grotesque philosophical chaos; and yet in fact they are neither. The dilemma might be resolved, however, by the discovery that Donne's lyrics are in a tradition which accounts for both their sophisticated levity and their dramatic truth, both their epigrammatic neatness and their symbolic import. The work of the “presecentisti”—by which term I mean chiefly Serafino l'Aquilano, Torquato Tasso, and Guarino—forms such a tradition.

That vast distance from the muscle-bound Samson in the Book of Judges to the tragic figure of Samson Agonistes is to be traversed, as we now know, by means of Biblical commentary and its metamorphosis of a solar myth into a parable of faith. Yet one of the important stepping-stones along the way from Bible to Milton seems not to exist. Samson is emphatic in its references to wisdom, but the Samson of Christian tradition, even when a typological symbol for Christ, was but rarely noted for his strength of mind. Milton's unparalleled concern for wisdom is nevertheless no startling innovation, I think, but rather the inevitable consequence of a second tradition, equally valid and quite as long, which is within the poem. For this tradition the brief formula is “wisdom and fortitude”—sapienlia etfortiludo—a phrase descriptive of the heroic ideal and conventional to relevant background materials of at least three kinds. The first, surveyed some years ago by Ernst Curtius, begins with the heroic poems of Homer and Virgil and continues into the Renaissance. The second, considered more recently by R. E. Kaske, includes the Germanic and Old English literature of heroism, the important example being Beowulf. And the third, upon which I think Milton primarily relied and with which I shall be concerned, is a philosophy of courage, classical in origin but Christian in development. These backgrounds differ among themselves in significant ways. While the loftiest heroes—Odysseus, Aeneas—seem always to have been simultaneously wise and brave, heroic literature sometimes allows these virtues to be separable from one another. The classic illustration is summarized by Macrobius: “Nestor … helped the army quite as much with his prudence as all the youth with their might.” So, in the Song of Roland (l. 1093), “Rollant est proz e Oliver est sages.” Philosophic discussion, however, insists that these virtues cannot be divorced, that an unwise courage cannot exist. “If,” wrote Henry More, an unwise man should “light upon the doing of some brave Action, 'tis not Virtue, but Fortune, that must be applauded for such happy chance.” The interesting result of such a position is that fortitude undergoes a radical change in meaning; it refers no longer to the brute strength of an Ajax nor to the prowess in arms of Achilles but to what Milton calls “heroic magnitude of mind.” The extent of this profound alteration is first perceived in Plato and Aristotle, but for the comprehensive and systematic account, one turns to the Summa theologica of Aquinas.

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

The endeavor of the pioneer critics—in what has somewhat exaggeratedly been called the Trollope revival—was to define a Trollopian oneness, like the oneness which Geoffrey Tillotson discerns in Thackeray. The attempt was healthy and beneficial, and its impetus not unreasonable. The sheer bulk of the novels had hindered assessment, and, despite his charming frankness and efforts at objectivity “from the further shore,” Trollope's own attachment to everything he wrote only charms us to his sense of evenness. Moreover, the Trollope canon itself fosters assumptions of unity based on similarity. The pioneer critics, by defining a unity of Trollopian flow and direction, sought to lead us through a maze deceptively landmarked with clergymen, barristers, and MP's; Franks, Harrys, and Lucys; London, Barchester, and manor houses.

A father who is deserted by his wife and who sets out to rear his son according to a “scientific System” unconsciously founded on his distrust of women and his own wounded pride should be an ideal subject for comedy. The system, running, as it must, counter to common sense and human nature, is bound to fail. And its collapse, with the consequent exposure of the father's false pride and the reassertion of the collective wisdom of society, would provide the comic deflation and denouement. The laughter provoked by the discomfort of the father, underscored by a reaffirmation of the adequacy of common sense, would produce an appropriate comic catharsis. This same situation, of course, has its serious possibilities. The father may ruin his son's life. But not in comedy. Comedy says that the probabilities are that the son, common sense, and nature will overcome the false system of the father. And the comic artist, knowing well that the whole truth will spoil his comedy, is careful not to tell the whole truth—only the comic (probable) side of it. The dark spirit of tragedy always hovers just outside the bright circle drawn by comedy, but it must not be allowed to cross the line. In comedy, as in all art, what is ruled out is as important as what is included.

It is now generally agreed that in Dombey and Son, “the first masterpiece of Dickens' maturity,” Dickens solved the structural problems of the serial novel. There was, he discovered, “no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot’ as he had once felt that he must eschew.” Dickens' “artfully interwoven” plot structure, similarly, is now recognized to be founded on a highly ramified system of analogies, contrasts, and variations in action and character of what is essentially a single, simple thematic idea, supported and colored by a complex body of inter-related symbols.

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.

The name of Tristan Corbière has scarcely been mentioned in manuals or in histories of French versification. His prosody has been considered neither sufficiently skillful, in the traditional sense, nor sufficiently original to be a model for imitation or an example of innovation. Most biographers and critics who have written about Corbière have mentioned, at least in passing, the peculiarities of his versification, some disapproving of the construction of his lines, and others coming to his defense. Laforgue called Corbière “cassant, concis, cinglant le vers à la cravache,” but he was highly critical of what he described as “incurable indélicatesse d'oreille” and “strophes de tout le monde.” Léon Bocquet, on the other hand, wrote that Corbière possessed “l'oreille musicienne.” That these critics are in such disagreement shows how subjective their judgments of technique are. Laforgue undoubtedly missed in Les Amours jaunes his own kind of prosody, and Bocquet, defending Corbière from the injustices of earlier critics, overstated his case.

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.

La projection analytique d'un poème tel que Le Pont Mirabeau abstrait diverses sortes d'éléments sémantiques: tonalités affectives, attitudes, images, motifs intellectuels. Dans le cas du Pont Mirabeau, ce sont ces derniers qui peuvent fournir le plus commodément l'armature d'une analyse claire et distincte. Nous allons poser cette armature, avant de procéder à une analyse du détail. Nous aurons l'occasion de déceler et de placer les autres éléments au cours du développement.

The present reading of The Sacred Fount differs notably from existing interpretations of the novel. Yet it clearly places this book with others of James's experimental period, suggesting that it differs not in kind but in degree. The Sacred Fount is an intellectual detective story, as has often been observed, and part of its interest does consist in the investigation of a hypothetical problem: If it is true, as the narrator speculates, that a vampirish relationship exists between one couple, may an analogous relationship exist between another couple, and who is the second member of that second pair? But The Sacred Fount is not primarily a treatment of the vampire theme, as has frequently been claimed, nor is James concerned with picturing an intellectual Peeping Tom. Nor, I believe, is he primarily concerned with making a profound artistic, moral, or epistemological statement, though there are serious implications to be drawn from the narrator's behavior. Rather, the interest of the novel depends primarily on ironic effect, just as the interest of What Maisie Knew (1897) or In the Cage (1898), and again James's focus is on the observer rather than on the external scene he witnesses. The irony is again that arising from a discrepancy between the insight or knowledge of an intelligent but not infallible observer and the things he contemplates. Maisie has limited understanding because she is a child; the telegraphist is similarly restricted by poverty and her social class; and the narrator of The-Sacred Fount (1901), having both maturity and opportunity to his credit, is handicapped by certain qualities in his character. Perceptive but blinded by pride in his own ingenuity, he is too subtle to interpret accurately the social scene which he witnesses and too proud to admit his perplexities. Once the reader realizes the narrator's limitations, he is sustained by a constant sequence of ironies in a story which, like Maisie, is prevalently humorous in tone.

Arthur Schnitzler's non-fictional works have been sorely neglected in critical literature, even by those writers who have attempted to evaluate his “Weltanschauung.” His essays and aphorisms have thus on the whole remained almost completely unknown, although a few are readily accessible. One of these works, Über Krieg und Frieden, was published posthumously in 1939 and contains excerpts from Schnitzler's diaries during the years 1915–19. Another is the Buck der Sprücke und Bedenken, a collection of aphorisms published in 1927. Individual sections are not dated and, from the evidence of unpublished material in Schnitzler's “NachlaC,” may be assumed to span his entire creative life. Some of the ideas are fragmentary, often the result of momentary moods, and there are internal contradictions. Schnitzler himself was aware of this, and in the foreword he expressly warned that “dieses Buch will keine Système, keine Weltanschauungen, keine Erledi-gungen bringen,” and added: “Keineswegs hat dieses Buch den Ehrgeiz, für sich allein zu bestehen.” Nonetheless, certain thoughts occur with astonishing regularity—certain “ideas and questions” about “fate and free will,” about “responsibility and conscience,” about “relationships and loneliness,” to quote some of the chapter headings.

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).

Fin 1945 on vit paraître en France aux devantures des libraires un petit volume portant le titre modeste de Travaux. L'auteur, un authentique ouvrier manuel de quarante-un ans dont c‘était là le premier livre, nous parlait d'une façon très neuve des rapports, d'une richesse insoupçonnée, qu'il établissait avec le monde des choses à travers son travail. Navel se révélait en outre moraliste, préoccupé d'atteindre à plus de sensibilité, à plus de conscience, en dépit des obstacles redoutables que l'implacable rigueur de la condition ouvrière accumulait sur son chemin. Page après page on assistait à cette lutte tenace, malgré les accès de découragement et les retombées, d'un ouvrier qui ne voulait rien abdiquer de ses aspirations d'homme libre à vivre plus intensément, aussi bien par le cœur que par l'intelligence. Bientôt Navel, qui écrivait son livre à la première personne, nous expliquait comment il se rendit compte très jeune que son humanité était non seulement menacée mais contestée par l'ordre social existant. Pour tenter de sauver ce qui pouvait l‘être il oscille entre deux pôles. Tantôt il espère pouvoir faire son salut en même temps que tous les prolétaires, grâce à l'action politique, tantôt il essaye de se sauver tout seul en échappant à l'emprise de l'usine. Les récits que Navel donnait dans Travaux et plus tard dans Parcours et Sable et Limon de ce long combat qu'il devait livrer, entre 1919 et 1945, contre l'engloutissement qui le menaçait dans des tâches purement alimentaires, dressaient finalement, bien sÛr, un bilan de faillite. Mais d'une faillite qui n'avait rien d'une débâcle. Malgré l'inégalité de la lutte Navel avait connu des moments de bonheur et d'exaltation. Il avait préservé sa santé physique et aussi son juvénile appétit de beauté, de générosité et d'amitié. Il n'avait rien renié, rien trahi de ses aspirations de socialiste humaniste. En 1945 une telle attitude, qui illustrait en somme l'itinéraire de toute une génération passée par le Front populaire et la Résistance, valut à Navel de nombreuses sympathies. Son livre eut une excellente presse. Naval était lancé, promu écrivain, édité bientôt par Gallimard.