I the extensive literature on Schiller of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century shows surprisingly little concern with his philosophy of history. To Körner, who had expressed his reservations concerning his friend's endeavors in this line of thought, Schiller complained: “Du willst mich im Philosophieren über Geschichte noch gar nicht gelten lassen. Meine Uebersicht macht bei vielen Sensation … Bekehre Dich also ja.” Could Schiller make this same complaint today? Until recently students seem to have followed Körner in their reluctance to recognize the value of Schiller's early contribution to the philosophy of history. The reaction of the romantics against the enlightenment's philosophy of history may well have delayed any whole-hearted reception of Schiller into the field. Signal acknowledgment of his historical thinking may have been retarded by the genuine distrust for all speculation on human evolution with which Ranke and Burckhardt have imbued generations of good historians. In our own time an awareness of crisis makes us both tolerant of present-day speculation upon history and its course, and interested in previous philosophies of history. Any efforts we make to grant Schiller's wish to be taken seriously as a philosopher of history (specifically as in his lectures and writings of the years 1789-90) may help us with our own problems. An examination of his ideas might also help to clarify our view of his Weltanschauung, which, as proof of its vitality, is now again being vigorously argued.

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.

I borrow metacriticism from J. H. Muirhead, who has described Coleridge as combining “a genius for criticism” with “the metacritical craving for a theory of aesthetic.” And I am aware that the framework of critical “modes” into which Coleridge is fitted in the essay that follows is quite an arbitrary one; how arbitrary is readily shown by a glance at a recent anthology of critical writing edited by Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie. Coleridge appears there alongside Aristotle as a critic who emphasizes the “form” of poetry rather than its “source” or “end.” I have used the same kind of triple relationship to define “poetry,” although I have called the relationship that of Poet, Poem, and Reader rather than Source, Form, and End. But I have preferred to treat Coleridge as a “romantic” critic who attempts a synthesis of Aristotelian form and Platonic end by placing his critical emphasis on the source of poetry in the poet's creative imagination.

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.

The “many movements” of a poet's mind are so various, the hiding-places of his power are so obscured, even to the poet himself, that any attempt to

parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square

is very dangerous. Nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to generalize about a poet's mental or temperamental habits, and, if such habits are basic enough, an understanding of them may throw new light on his work. In Wordsworth, a pattern of basic habits of thinking and feeling unfolds itself in a kind of dualism: Wordsworth had a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere, in nature, in individual man and in society, he saw a constant interplay of opposing forces. These contrarieties were a characteristic manifestation of his mind. They found expression spontaneously in hundreds of images which are too short, too obviously unpremeditated to have been the result of conscious thought. Such images are, rather, an unconscious expression of a habitual turn of mind.

Manuscript Arundel xxii in the College of Arms, London, contains two Middle English texts, The Seege or Batayle of Troye (fols. 1r-8r col. 2) and what has been described as a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (fols. 8r col. 2-80v col. 2). This text, which I call “History of the Kings of Britain” (HKofB), is in reality a translation of HRB from the Description of Britain to the wrestling match between Corineus and Gogmagog, and of Wace's Brut from that point on. Although it has been known since the late sixteenth century, it seems never to have been examined completely and in detail.

We are confronted today with a persistent tradition, whose veracity has been less questioned with the passing years, that Diderot not only contributed extensively to the thought and style, but also wrote many of the pages, of D'Holbach's works.

Three leaves of the Skeireins (III, IV, VIII) are in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where they have been incorporated into Cod. 5750. Like the Ambrosian fragments of the Skeireins document, they have been badly damaged in the course of the last fourteen centuries, all extant leaves having been torn from the codex binding, erased with pumice, written over with Latin, and stained with tincture of nut-gall. The remaining edges of some inner margins are badly tattered, and the Gothic text is frequently obscured by heavy smudges as well as by the superscribed Latin. On the whole, however, the leaves have suffered more from bleaching than from any other single factor. The effects of bleaching are most noticeable along page margins, where a steady penetration of light has nearly obliterated some parts of the text; the torn, extremely narrow inner margins have been especially vulnerable. Some marginal additions are no longer visible under ordinary lighting, and although interlinear corrections have been less subject to bleaching, they are often hidden by smudges or by superscribed Latin characters. Outlines of letters showing through the parchment, holes, blots, and flaking along inner margins also offer some difficulty but are generally less troublesome than bleaching and smudging. In the prefecture of Msgr. Achille Ratti (later Pius XI) the Vatican leaves were coated with gelatin in order to prevent their further deterioration, but the marks of age and prior damage are of course ineradicable.

In his “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’: Some Observations on his Imagery” Maynard Mack speaks of Pope's wide variety of patterns “that help supply the kind of unity which he is popularly not supposed to have.” An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot offers striking illustration of this conception : analysis reveals patterns of images running throughout, each one discrete yet all so related as to give to the whole a metaphoric value which helps to tie the poem together. I do not mean to suggest that Arbuthnot has no other kind of unity apart from that given to it by these patterns of imagery, or that this imagery functions autonomously.

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.

In den heutigen Geschichten der deutschen Literatur stoßen Musäus und seine Volksmärchen auf Gleichgültigkeit, Mangel an Interesse oder ausgesprochene Abneigung und Geringschätzung. Josef Nadler speist in seiner umfangreichen vierbändigen Literaturgeschichte Musäus mit einer kurzen Erwähnung ab. Alois Bernt berichtet in seinem Handbuch der deutschen Literaturgeschichte: “Musäus hat nichts von dem innigen Verhältnis zum Volkstum und seiner Überlieferung, wie es Herder empfand; hier werden eben bloß ältere Stoffe in unterhaltlicher Aufmachung einem größeren Publikum vorgeführt, darunter auch die fünf Legenden vom Rübezahl.” Karl Storck schreibt in der zehnten Auflage seiner Deutschen Literaturgeschichte: “Unter Wielands Nachahmern ragt Johann Karl August Musäus hervor. Er ist hauptsächlich bekannt durch seine ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen.’ Als echter Wielandschüler hat er kein Verständnis für die gläubige Naivität und Naturfrische dieser Volksdichtung.” Erstaunlicherweise erwähnt Ferdinand Joseph Schneider in seiner Deutschen Dichtung vom Ausgang des Barocks bis zum Beginn des Klassizismus 1700-1785 (Stuttgart, 1924), die als dritter Band der bekannten “Epochen der deutschen Literatur” erschienen ist, Musäus’ Märchen überhaupt nicht. Ebensowenig würdigt Hans Röhl in seiner verbreiteten, für Schule und Haus bestimmten Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 8. Auflage (Leipzig und Berlin, 1931), den armen Musäus auch nur eines einzigen Wortes. In seinem kleinen Wörterbuch zur deutschen Literatur (Leipzig und Berlin, 1921; 2. Aufl., ibid., 1931) verzeichnet Röhl Musäus als den “Herausgeber der ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen,’ in denen er allerdings Volkssagen wie die vom Grafen von Gleichen, von Libussa, von Rübezahl usw. gesammelt, aber mit satirisch-moralischer Tendenz in Wielands Art dargestellt hat.” Diese Erwähnung ist besonders bezeichnend, da Hans Röhl ja stets ein getreues Echo der traditionellen Bewertung von Literaturdenkmälern ist. Es ist seltsam, daß Röhl dem Verfasser der Volksmärchen moralische Tendenzen anhängt, wo doch gerade Musäus ein Unikum von moralischer Unbefangenheit darstellt. Ersichtlich hat sich Röhl ebensowenig wie die anderen genannten Verfasser in die Lektüre der Volksmärchen vertieft. Als Erich Schmidt-Schüler folgt er der herablassenden Bemerkung Wilhelm Scherers in der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: “… Musäus, ein Erzähler der Wielandschen Richtung, dessen ironisch vorgetragene altdeutsche Sagen, ‘Volksmärchen der Deutschen,’ wie er sie nannte, ihre Beliebtheit noch heute [1883] nicht ganz verloren haben.” Der bekannte Schopenhauer-Anhänger und -Herausgeber Eduard Grisebach schreibt in seiner Behandlung der Novelle von der treulosen Witwe nach einem kurzen Zitat aus der Erzählung “Liebestreue,” die Musäus im dritten Teil seiner Volksmärchen bringt: “In dieser unerträglich widerwärtigen, witzelnden, mit geschmacklos angewandten Fremdwörtern kokettierenden Manier verunstaltet dieser Weimarer Schullehrer die herrlichsten Märchenstoffe.” Musäus ist von den zeitgenössischen Literarhistorikern recht schlecht behandelt worden. Auch in einer Leipziger Doktor-Dissertation, die unter der Ägide von Albert Köster erschienen ist, äußert sich ihr Verfasser, Erwin Jahn, ungünstig über die Behandlung, die Musäus den Märchenstoffen hat angedeihen lassen: “Eine gänzliche Ahnungslosigkeit über den Sinn und die Bedeutung dessen, was wir im Märchen als wunderbar empfinden, spricht sich darin aus.” Selbst wenn wir hundert Jahre zurückgehen, wird das Urteil nicht günstiger. Der Märchenerzähler Ludwig Bechstein ist in seinem mit Recht vergessenen wissenschaftlichen Werk Mythe, Sage, Märe und Fabel im Jahre 1855 in seinem Urteil zwiespältig. Einigermaßen lobend schreibt er: “Durch und durch Gemütsmensch [dies ist übrigens das letzte, was man zu Musäus’ Gunsten anführen könnte], erschien er als der glückliche Finder der Wunderblume, der Wiederfinder und Wiedererwecker des verlorenen Märchens, wenn auch, was er Märchen nannte, nicht eigentlich Märchen sind.” Dann aber bemerkt er grimmig von der Erzählung “Richilde”: “Richilde, nach Brabant verlegt, ist das Märchen von Schneewittchen, widerwärtig modernisiert und der Anmut des einfachen Märchens völlig entkleidet.” Bechstein findet, man müsse sich von Musäus' Stil und seiner Behandlungsweise verletzt abwenden. Zu loben weiß er eigentlich nur die Verbindung von Märchen und Volk, wie sie sich schon in dem Titel Volksmärchen der Deutschen, den Musäus seinem Werk gegeben hat, ausdrückt. In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts vernehmen wir ein uneingeschränktes Lob unseres Musäus nur aus einem bedeutenden Munde. Der große Humorist Wilhelm Busch weiß die Kunst der Volksmärchen wohl zu schätzen. Er hat ein volles Verständnis für das “Zopfbild” ihres Stils und ist überzeugt, daß eine Erzählung wie “Stumme Liebe” noch gelesen werden wird, wenn die damals gerade im Vordergrund des Interesses stehende thüringische Erzählung Otto Ludwigs “Die Heiteretei” längst vergessen ist.

To judge from most criticism of Swift's Tale of a Tub, the work is a skillful and powerful failure, because the faults Swift parodies have distilled into his own pen. For though the Tale is clearly meant to be an exposé of the literary sins of formless, ephemeral, and subjective writing, critics find that the brilliance of the book results from Swift's being guilty of just those sins. One critic finds in the Tale both confusion and the intrusion of Swift's “insane egotism” and his “sense of insecurity,” while other critics find order but at the expense of the other qualities. Mrs. Miriam K. Starkman examines the intellectual background of the book thoroughly and concludes that the confusion is the reader's rather than Swift's but that the Tale is a learned work of merely biographical and historical interest, a “meaningful and prodigiously skillful espousal of a lost cause.” Ricardo Quintana and Robert C. Elliott find that the Tale has unity but only because Swift's point of view, that man is essentially irrational, informs all sections of the book. Most of the critics, then, find Swift expressing his subjective attitudes and lacking a subject upon which he could comment with any objectivity and universality. “So diverse is this subject matter,” says Elliott, “that one can not possibly find in it alone a principle of organization.”

J.M. Lappenberg in his collection of Briefe von und an Klopstock (Brunswick: Westermann, 1867) was able to include thirty-three unpublished letters to Klopstock through the generosity of Meta von Winthem, a descendent of the brother of the poet's second wife. The impression was given that these were all that she could supply, though it is now clear that she had made her selection solely from the letters of the more well-known literary figures. It was not until the 1920's that those interested in Klopstock became aware that other manuscript material was still to be found at this source, and the family was generous in acceding from time to time to specific requests from scholars. However, no general access to the originals was permitted. The full extent of Klopstock's literary remains only recently became apparent when the Hamburg Municipal Library acquired the whole collection by purchase.