Many people on occasion prefer a textual error to an authentic reading. One mistake by a compositor of Melville's White-Jacket—setting “soiled fish of the sea” instead of “coiled fish of the sea”—achieved an adventitious fame some years ago. Various readers have since declared themselves in favor of the error, on the grounds that “soiled fish” makes a richer, more interesting passage than the ordinary “coiled fish of the sea.” In short, the error seems to them to create a better work.

Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick and the crocodile's pursuit of Captain Hook have attained almost mythic stature. Nearly everyone, from nursery child to scholar, has heard of the Great White Whale and of the Ticking Crocodile. Each aquatic monster has swallowed the amputated limb of a dark and terrible captain. Each captain has replaced his limb with an unusual but useful prosthetic device. Each brooding victim is at last destroyed by his nemesis after a relentless oceanic quest.

When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.

In writing the chapter on “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval” for Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Pierre Le Gentil shows that many questions remain unanswered for readers of the Metrical Joseph. Beyond the statements which we understand as the poet's—that at the time when he told the story of the graal he was with his lord Gautier de Montbéliard in peace, that no one had yet told the story, and that he intends to continue with stories of Alain, Petrus, Moyses, and Bron—we have been guided in our reading largely by conjecture. From the fragment of the Merlin which follows the Metrical Joseph in MS. fr. 20047 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, we can see that the poet places the two works within the concept of the struggle between Christ and Satan for the soul of man. Several of his sources have been pointed out; but beyond a few conclusions from the text itself, a reader wonders at the strange combination of Christian tradition and Celtic legend which Robert de Boron has effected in these two works. Discussions have been complicated by manuscripts of works related in various ways to the poems of MS. fr. 20047, and by the proliferation of stories of the Grail following Robert de Boron's Christianization of Celtic stories which had been circulating for about a hundred years before his time.

Similarities between the late medieval English mystery plays and late medieval religious art have often been pointed out; parallels in literature and painting to the dramatic scene in which Christ is stretched and nailed to the cross, for example, are numerous. So far, commentators have concentrated on the similarities which concern the way in which the sequence of events of the Christian story is presented—on the narrative details in the plays, paintings, carvings, narrative poems, and glass paintings. For example, the way Christ steps out of the tomb (that is, the dramatic narrative) in the Chester Resurrection has analogies in English alabaster carvings. Such a knowledge is valuable in that it helps demonstrate the popular religious context of much of the narrative detail of the plays (Plate I). I think, however, that the religious (and social) contexts of the performances (especially the rationale of the presence of the audience) can best be understood by considering a different kind of parallel between the plays and religious art—similarities in the static, non-narrative scenes. In particular, I wish to link Christ's monologues in the plays closely to some of the images (Plate II) of the Cult of Jesus of the late Middle Ages, which share with the plays and other religious arts of the period a certain sensational realism and impassioned emotionalism.

Whatever the play may have seemed to its immediate audience, to modern critics the Wakefield Mactacio Abel has generally seemed interesting for its realism but not especially successful either as drama or as dramatic sermon. Miss Eleanor Prosser goes so far as to say,

Doctrine remains in this play only by sufferance. But even apart from homiletic considerations, the play is unsuccessful. It has no unity: it leaps from farce to Scripture to farce with neither transition nor dramatic probability. The conflict is poorly established (witness the weakness of Abel and God); the characterization is one-dimensional; motivations are inconsistent (Cain's despair); much of the humor is pointless and simple-minded (Cain's striking Pykeharnes without motivation, just to keep his hand in, or the repeated obscenities that are comic solely by reason of their obscenity); the main interest in the play is irrelevant to the main plot action.

to Regard the Merchant's tale simply as a conventional piece of anti-feminist literature, exemplifying the faithlessness of married women, is to overlook the Merchant's simultaneous concern with the role of the husband in matrimony and with his joint responsibility for the success or failure of his marriage. That responsibility is brought out in the course of the argument which takes place between January and his brethren when the old knight announces his intention of wedding a young girl. The debate emphasizes the folly of the proposed step, as much through the sycophantic approval of Placebo as through the objective and wise warnings of Justinus. But it is more than a question of folly. The Merchant draws attention to the knight's lechery, his indifference to a young woman's feelings, and his jealousy; and these weaknesses are stressed as the counterparts to May's wantonness, her indifference to January's feelings, and her infidelity. If May does wrong in breaking her marriage vows, January is also at fault in marrying for completely selfish reasons; and from the medieval theological standpoint, he is clearly wrong in arguing (E 1836–41) that in wedlock his lechery is not sinful.

The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”

I propose that Hugh Brackenridge (1750–1816) wrote the anonymous “Cornwalliad” of 720 lines and some prose preliminaries that in 1779 appeared in his United States Magazine. To support this ascription I have a three-part argument: first, that a prose passage, in an unprinted manuscript play by Brackenridge, was put into verse for “The Cornwalliad”; second, that “The Cornwalliad” was edited for The United States Magazine as if it were by the editor and could not have been by anyone but the editor, who was Brackenridge; and third, that a life of its unnamed author sketched in a preliminary “Apology for the Cornwalliad” corresponds with a hitherto little-explored phase of Brackenridge's life. These textual, editorial, and biographical arguments seem to make it certain that Hugh Brackenridge wrote this excellent mock-heroic poem.

In a volume of miscellaneous manuscripts at the British Museum, placed at random and inconspicuously among larger folio leaves, is a set of notes headed “Sterne.” The notes were written by Joseph Hunter, the nineteenth-century antiquary and literary historian, and they came to the British Museum with Hunter's other papers shortly after his death in 1861. In view of the abundant information about Sterne's private life which the notes contain, it is surprising that this item has remained unindexed and that it is not mentioned in the catalogue description of the volume. In the absence of such references, very likely only an occasional reader who has happened upon them has seen these notes, and, since the major biographies of Laurence Sterne make no use of distinct details which Hunter provides, it is quite possible that none of Sterne's biographers have encountered Hunter's information during the past century. At present, our familiarity with the early years of Sterne's marriage and his residence at Sutton-on-the-Forest is rather limited, based as it is upon isolated public records, some letters, fugitive anecdotes, and the unflattering and sometimes vicious account written by John Croft. No impartial memoirs with any claim to authenticity or wealth of details have until now seemed available. Thus, the intimate account of Sterne which Hunter has given presents to modern scholars an unexpected and promising opportunity to gain new insight into the life and, perhaps, into the work of one of England's most unusual writers. A transcript of Hunter's notes appears below, followed by a brief evaluation of them according to our present knowledge of Laurence Sterne.

In 1835 Robert Browning, in search of a publisher for Paracelsus, wrote to the Reverend William Johnson Fox, “I have another affair on hand rather of a more popular nature, I conceive; but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two, so I decide on trying the question with this.” Since the “affair on hand” was Sordello, whose reputation for tortured syntax and obscure allusions still persists, one may well wonder what Browning meant by “popular.” The public found nothing difficult or strange in Paracelsus; although it did not appeal to the taste of the times, the praise of a few perceptive critics and readers showed that it was not totally ignored. Sordello, in contrast, struck a new note in the literature of the forties, a harsh dissonance which cut through the turgid harmonies of a decadent romanticism. Browning's poem, like Richard Wagner's music, sent the critics scurrying for shelter with their hands clapped over their ears. The notoriety of Sordello, which he conceived to be of “a more popular nature” than Paracelsus, haunted Browning for the rest of his life like that pungent, musky “after-gust” which he promised his readers in its concluding lines.

Walt Whitman's interest in epic poetry bespoke his intention to become the bard of the masses. Whereas Shakespeare and Goethe had been epic poets of the aristocracy, Whitman envisaged himself as the poet of democracy. His work was to be the epic of the common man, and its style must be determinedly subjective. In 1856 Whitman wrote, “Leaves of Grass must be called not objective, but altogether subjective—‘I know’ runs through them as a perpetual refrain. Yet the great Greek poems, also the Teutonic poems, also Shakespeare and all the great masters have been objective, epic—they have all described characters, wars, heroes, etc.”

For those interested in exploring the mysteries of artistic creation, the long section of Zola's manuscript notes for Germinal entitled the Ebauche can be an illuminating, yet, at the same time, tantalizing document. As we turn its pages, written in Zola's firm hand, it is tempting to succumb to the illusion that we are following the genesis of this great novel much as it actually took shape in Zola's mind. And, as we shall see, no other part of the notes can, in fact, tell so much about his method of composition, his objectives, his way of reasoning with himself on paper. Yet in the final analysis we shall also see that the Ebauche, instructive as it may be in these respects, reveals only a fraction of his thoughts during the period of creation. We shall be struck by the contrast between what the Ebauche shows about the novelist's methodical planning and what it fails to show of his creative genius.

Commentators have mentioned Auden's Marxism for so long now that his indebtedness to Marx threatens to become a critical commonplace through sheer repetition. Yet no one has ever shown that such indebtedness exists. In the 1930's merely to be young, socially conscious, and outspoken was enough to mark one as a Marxist, or at least a “leftist,” and Auden was all these things. But now that the 1930's have passed, and Auden has long since ceased to be either young or a “thirties poet,” the Marxist element in his work deserves a thorough investigation. I propose, therefore, to ask how much Marxism there is in Auden's poetry, where it is found, and what sort of thing it is. Since it is important to discover just how the pattern of his Marxist borrowings changes (if it does) through the years, the first question calls for a chronological examination of his work.

Seven years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury came Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Sound and the Fury dealt with the fall of a family, Absalom deals with the fall of a society. The Quentin Compson of Absalom is not quite the same as the earlier Quentin: his concern is social rather than personal and his role is identified for the most part with a central quest in the novel—the quest to discover the truth about the rise and fall of his South. In its search for the truth about a whole society, the novel circles and shuttles back and forth in time, its sentences twist and strain, and its narrators attempt to recreate a past on the basis of some fact and much conjecture. Sometimes the narrators mislead unintentionally, sometimes they contradict one another, and often they are carried away by their own bias, preoccupation, or imagination. Yes, it is hard to come by truth, but still one might question whether a novel whose pitch is too shrill, whose approach is emotional and poetic, whose perspective seems unclear and shifting—one might question whether such a work presents the best way of getting at historical truth. The method of narration apparently mirrors not only the difficulty in getting at truth but the struggle to face truth. For all its straining, its complexities and obscurities, Absalom, I would conclude, is Faulkner's most historical novel.

In “journey to consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger” (PMLA, lxxix, 321–328), William M. Manly points out in what ways the qualities of “whiteness” and “light” lend symbolic expression to Meursault's perceptions of a negative existence and of death itself (see pp. 322–324), and reaches the conclusion that “it would appear that not only the sun, but (as the white glare of the mortuary suggests) ‘lumière’ in general is employed by Camus in a recurrent pattern which in moments of crisis is highly symbolic (p. 324). Certainly, ”whiteness“ and ”light“ are qualities closely related in their effects on the perceiver, and which appear in L'Etranger as elements of the landscape.