FIVE LEAVES of the Skeireins (I, II, V, VI, VII) are in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, where they form Cod. E 147 parte superiore, 4° maj. Leaf VI, which bears the Arabic page numbers 309–310, disappeared from the codex at some time in the course of World War II, probably in 1943. In August of that year Milan underwent three successive nights of heavy bombing, in which thirteen halls of the Ambrosiana were destroyed, ten others damaged, and some 80,000 volumes burned beyond recognition. Fortunately, the Ambrosian Gothic palimpsests were rushed to safety and so escaped the fate of the Giessen document. In 1948 the Ambrosiana provided the writer with fluorescent type ultraviolet photographs of I, II, V, and VII but reported that VI was missing or misplaced. In 1950 a decipherment of I, II, V, and VII was published, followed in 1954 by a reading of the Vatican leaves (III, IV, VIII), but the absence of VI still precluded any attempt to complete the study of the manuscript. Finally, in 1955 it became possible to examine the Skeireins fragments in Vatican City and Milan, and, at the same time, to look for the missing leaf. Leaf VI proved to be misplaced in Cod. Ambros. A. How it came there is a matter for conjecture, but the haste and confusion produced by the 1943 bombing may well account for the misplacement.

If the well-known dictum that history repeats itself is sometimes open to controversy, its veracity can hardly be doubted when we turn to the history of Beowulf criticism. For it almost seems a law that in its broad outlines Beowulf criticism should follow the fortunes of Homeric criticism—this, of course, with the proper shift in time due to the still appreciable lead of classical philology.

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow; their ease is weariness and sweat; they have one good day after many bad; they are vowed to all manner of labour; they are for ever swallowing their fear; they expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death.… Great is the honour which knights deserve, and great the favour which kings should shew them, for all the reasons which I have told.… Of what profit is a good knight? I tell you that through good knights is the king and the kingdom honoured, protected, feared and defended.… I tell you that without good knights, the king is like a man who has neither feet nor hands.—Gutierre Díaz de Gámez

Cervantine criticism is divided on the question whether El curioso impertinente is relevant to the total context of Don Quixote. Américo Castro, writing in 1925, compiled a list—which he declared to be “not exhaustive”—of six critics who were opposed to the interpolation of the short story, and five who welcomed its inclusion. He himself created a tie by accepting El curioso impertinente as a further exemplification of the theme of error and its consequences; the tale, that is, was seen to reinforce the thematic structure of Don Quixote as Castro then interpreted it. Since the making of this classic summary of opinion a stalemate has reigned; no significant contribution to our understanding of the problem has been made. Some random examples from later commentators will establish this point.

WHEN Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.

Among the many poems doubtfully attributed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is a group of seven lyrics which challenges attention because it poses problems of authorship that have continued to baffle Rochester's editors and biographers. These lyrics are linked not only by rather evident stylistic similarities but, more importantly, by the fact that in various early texts all seven are said to be “by my Ld. R.” Their attribution to Rochester appears, indeed, to rest solely on the premise that he is this enigmatic “my Ld. R.,” a premise accepted both by contemporary observers and by twentieth-century scholars. Investigation of the available evidence reveals, however, that such an assumption is scarcely warranted. The poems in question, which I number for reference, include (1) “A Song” (“While in Divine Panthea's Charming Eyes”), (2) “A Song” (“Pity, Fair Sapho, one that dies”), (3) “A Psean, or Song of Triumph, on the Translation and Apotheosis of King Charles the Second” (“0 Muse, to whom the Glory does belong”), (4) “Out of Horace” (“While I was Monarch of your Heart”), (5) “Cornelius Gallus Imitated. A Lyrick” (“My Goddess, Lydia, Heav'nly Fair”), (6) “Apollo's Grief, For having Kill'd Hyacinth by Accident. In Imitation of Ovid” (“Sweet Hyacinth, my Life! my Joy”), and (7) “Song” (“Where is he gone whom I Adore”).

Le développement des théories de l'honnêteté en France au dix-septième siècle a fait l'objet d'une étude bien connue de Maurice Magendie. Cette excellente étude s'arrête aux environs de 1660. Or, l'expression “honnête homme” est restée d'un usage courant bien après cette date, et le concept de l'honnêteté n'a pas cessé d‘être analysé et discuté. Il nous semble done intéressant d'essayer de suivre l‘évolution des idées sur l'honnêteté, au moins pendant les quarante dernières années du siècle.

Astage history of The Cenci by Kenneth N. Cameron and Horst Frenz—“a first attempt at a task obviously long overdue” (p. 1081)—appeared in 1945 and, in uncovering some eleven productions in six countries over a fifty-year period, applied the first practical evidence to the long-debated contention that The Cenci is not an effective dramatic work. Although the history to this point was not an extensive one, the Cameron-Frenz study established that The Cenci could no longer be called a closet drama: it had, in fact, performed well as an acting play on more than one occasion. Hence, with skillful handling, it might be expected to do so in future presentations. It is unlikely that a more positive conclusion can be stated regarding The Cenci as a theatre piece. Nevertheless I feel, in the light of an impressive number of recent Cenci productions, that a continuing search of its stage history would be worthwhile, not only to substantiate the previous findings, but also (1) to indicate the interesting directions its record has taken since 1945, (2) to identify some of its limitations on the present-day stage, and (3) to bring it once again to the attention of scholars, directors, and producers who may still hold Edward Dowden's belief that Shelley, “unversed in the secrets of theatrical effect, [did not know] how to fit an acting play for the boards.”

It seems to me one of the most exciting and baffling characteristics of Eichendorff's art that, if I may use this paradox, his most profound insights are hidden on the surface. They travel, a strangely elusive contraband, in the full light of day, so that the last truths of his poetic vision, the whole web of his religious beliefs, his intellectual conceptions, his socio-ethical postulates transform themselves into the most deceptively simple folktunes, sung by his people with an ease and unconcern usually assigned in the secular psalter of a nation to that section which is headed “folk song, author unknown.” Goethe's solemn warning with regard to the ultimate secret and mystery of life, his injunction “Tell it no one but the sages,” was utterly lost on Eichendorff. He told it to every listening ear; and so it could happen that what in reality was an exploration and manifestation of truth, the poetic transmission of knowledge, was taken—or mistaken—as a bewitching play of lyrical mood and atmosphere. A comprehensive and integrated view of life thus turned in the public's hand into a picture book, lovely and self-contained, easy to peruse; and for the reader it was easy to absorb its sensuous refulgence without comprehending the meaning of design, color, and composition.

Literary genius in the nineteenth century was associated with “inspiration,” “spontaneity,” “emotion,” “imagination,” “the unconscious,” and other such indications of the nonratiocinative. Not all critics and writers of the century stressed all aspects of the nonratiocinative: some spoke of effect, using this cluster of words to denote the appearance of spontaneity, the freedom from classical or mechanical rules, the superiority of the mysterious, the individual, the unanalyzable in a work of art; others, especially those in that growing group whose concern was with the relationship between the writer and his work, stressed the irrational elements in the creation of literature. Among the latter there were differences in emphasis too: some stressed the whim of inspiration, its independence of the will; others stressed the frenzy, the ecstasy, the total unconsciousness of the act of literary creation. Among the latter there were those who further claimed that a passage created under the “spell” is never revised; for if this external or internal force is irrational because superior to reason, its results cannot then be submitted to the lesser pronouncements of rational judgment. Some even went so far as to combine all of the above into a single antiratiocinative aesthetic: the writer of true genius composes only when the whim of the muse dictates; he does not prepare himself for these moments of vision by planning or “calculating” his subject or approach; he is seized and illuminated, writing swiftly and effortlessly; he does not revise; the result gives the reader a comparable spontaneous, ecstatic, undefinable emotion.

More than any other critic of his day, Algernon Charles Swinburne judged poetry by its music, but, because Swinburne is so often ignored as a critic, much of what he had to say on this most elusive subject remains buried in his involved critical prose. Yet, what Swinburne had to say about the music of poetry is often instructive, for one so renowned for musical effects in his own poetry demands our attention when he discusses this subject.

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”

Despite an occasional reluctance to talk about his own poetry, Whitman has said a good deal about what he felt were its sources, methods and purposes, both in his conversations and in his Prefaces. However, if we try to apply any of his ideas we always have to contend with his theoretical vagueness and his antiaestheticism. Thus, though much has been revealed about the nature of Whitman's “art” by examinations of ideas he claimed as sources (e.g. the sea, the city, the Bible, even phrenology), one wants a closer analysis of his claims and of critics' applications of them, especially in relation to a reading of particular poems. An area of Whitman criticism in which one feels a special need for clarification is that which treats the influence of music on his poetry.

Bernard Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is generally presented by his critics as something to be ashamed of, often as an expression of his ignorance or perversity. Even to critics who find Shaw generally admirable, his attack upon Shakespeare is solecistic and blindspotted, and is either wholly condemned or halfheartedly defended. Hesketh Pearson dismisses the whole matter, contending that Shaw wrongly assumes that Shakespeare's characters speak for Shakespeare. Thus, the pessimism that Shaw finds pervasive in Shakespeare is explained by Pearson as a picture of reality by an objective artist. Archibald Henderson believes that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is either anachronistic thinking or an act of vengeance on the British critics who viciously attacked Ibsen. James Gibbons Huneker apologizes for Shaw's criticisms of Shakespeare, justifying them on the ground that Shakespeare was not hurt by them. None of these critics meets Shaw's criticisms head-on, and their reactions have little to recommend them above Henry Arthur Jones's angry denunciation of Shaw as a desecrator of graves and a traitor to England.

In the last weeks of World War II when the battle front swayed to and fro around Vienna, Ida Orloff died practically forgotten, in the nearby hamlet of Tullnerbach, in the fifty-seventh year of her life. Few among the villagers knew her as a once-famous star of the foremost theaters in Berlin and Vienna. In the confusion of those climactic days of the war when all newspapers had suspended publication, no notice was taken of her death and her biography has remained unwritten. Inasmuch as Gerhart Hauptmann patterned the heroines of a number of his works after the youthful actress, a brief documented account of her most unconventional life and of her relations with the great Silesian poet may be of some interest to students of the German theater of the first half of the twentieth century.

William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet has received less critical attention and, perhaps, less critical intelligence than any other of his major works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in 1940, Faulkner's only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from the novels of the “major phase,” 1929–1936. It comes at a point in the development of the Yoknapatawpha Cycle when the early conflict between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compson had been largely resolved, and it is concerned with themes that had earlier been of peripheral interest. It presents as protagonists a class of Yoknapatawphans who are relative newcomers to the cycle. These things together—the lessening of tension and the utilization of new material—are reflected in the unique tone of The Hamlet, which led Malcolm Cowley to entitle his review of the novel “Faulkner By Daylight.” Further, since the novel is leisurely in its narrative method and relatively lucid in its style, it does not at first glance seem to demand or merit the sort of exhaustive readings which have been given, say, to The Sound and the Fury. Finally, with the major exception of Robert Penn Warren, almost none of the critics has been willing to recognize the book as a novel at all. Cowley speaks of its structure as that of “beads on a string.” John Arthos calls the book Faulkner's “most remarkable writing” but adds that it “falls into at least four separate stories… there is no real unity.” O'Connor, Howe, Campbell and Foster have all dealt with and appreciated various aspects of the novel but it remains the chief enigma of the cycle.

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.

Efforts to establish the identity of Morgan Odoherty, the Irish adjutant whose coruscating wit shone so brightly from the early pages of William Blackwood's Maga, have for years proved fascinating but frustrating scholarly exercises. Some years ago, in PMLA (lviii, Sept. 1943, 716–727), Ralph Wardle posed the question “Who Was Morgan Odoherty?” and then supplied an accurate but incomplete answer. After meticulously sifting a mass of contradictory evidence, Wardle came to the conclusion that Odoherty was not William Maginn, as generally assumed, but was rather “the embodiment of the Irishness in several men's minds—and most of them were dyed-in-the-wool Scots.” On the strength of a statement by David Macbeth Moir's biographer that Moir's contributions to Blackwood's Magazine included “familiar letters and rhyming epistles from Odoherty; mockheroic specimens of translations from Horace; Christmas carols by the fancy contributors, Mullion and the rest; ironical imitations of living poets; Cockney love-songs; puns and parodies,” Wardle knew that Moir “took his turn as Odoherty.” Exactly which contributions were Moir's, though, he could only conjecture.