The unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.

Many years ago Morris W. Croll's studies of seventeenth-century prose demonstrated that the so-called anti-Ciceronian movement in prose style—which included in England such writers as Bacon, Jonson, Browne, Hall, and Burton—based itself not merely on a refusal to imitate Cicero, but on certain common philosophical attitudes, chiefly Stoic and libertine, and on common rhetorical models in Seneca and Tacitus. Croll, having sketched the intellectual tradition in which these writers worked, went on to examine their writings empirically. In a brilliant essay entitled “The Baroque Style in Prose,” he outlined their chief syntactic procedures and showed how these sprang from and reflected a common aesthetic. A more recent study, The Senecan Amble by George Williamson (London, 1951), has amplified Croll's historical researches, attempting to fix the anti-Ciceronian or Senecan movement more firmly amid its tangled antecedents and its numerous consequences. Both Croll and Williamson, however, have concerned themselves primarily with stylistic theory, and with large historical sequences in which individual authors appear as points on a complex graph. It still remains to study some of the writers in question more closely as individuals, both to verify their locations on the graph and also to explore the richness and multiplicity of individual accents that compose the common style. The purpose of the present essay is a simple one: to focus attention on a single author, Ben Jonson. The evidence will show, I think, that the case of Jonson bears out Croll's findings to a remarkable extent, and that although Croll fails to mention Jonson in his article on baroque prose, Jonson has some claim to be regarded as the baroque stylist par excellence, whose highly personal, highly inflected style realizes to their fullest extent the principles of the baroque rhetoric.

The dates assigned to Milton's two sonnets on his blindness have depended upon our dating of the time when blindness became “total.” It is the purpose of this essay to qualify this premise, to propose revision of all the dates now usually accepted, and, not incidentally, to urge a possibly new interpretation of a passage in one of the sonnets.

Moses Mendelssohn wrote to Lessing on 29 November 1770, informing him that he was finally sending him “the Ferguson” which Lessing had been so anxious to read. Before receiving an answer, Mendelssohn wrote Lessing a second time, in mid-December, apologizing for his failure to send “the Ferguson.” Gleim, who was to have brought the book to Wolfenbüttel, had slipped out of Berlin with J. G. Jacobi without a word to Mendelssohn, and now Moses was sending the book by mail. In a postscript Mendelssohn asks Lessing if he has seen in the Jenaische Zeitung von gelehrten Sachen what J. C. Lavater read from the diary of his travels before the Consistory in Zurich. Mendelssohn tells Lessing that he has been unable to pass the matter over in silence. He has asked Lavater for an explanation, and if this does not prove satisfactory, he will be obliged to say certain things which both parties will find unpleasant.

There are few scholars who have not despaired of settling the controversies that relate to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Well known during his lifetime, these disputes have become legends which obscure the real ambiguities of his existence and achievement. In this respect, Rousseau belongs to the family of Montaigne and Gide, whose lengthy confessions have rarely been judged in an unbiased manner. It is, to be sure, the very purpose of such avowals to preclude indifference, and, in the case of Rousseau, there is little sense in trying to evade the haunting and problematical implications of his autobiography. The man and artist must first be approached not only for the sake of their respective importance, but also because the Discourses, the Social Contract, and the Emile are transpositions and solutions of their inner conflicts. At present, there is agreement on at least this one point, and many philosophers and critics have sought to find the principle which would reveal the true motives of a man who swore to tell the truth. However, few of their commentaries on the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire envisage the fundamental question of the autobiographical genre itself, namely: How does the great autobiographer succeed in making credible and convincing the story of his life, and what are the stylistic means by which he imposes this vision on others?

In 1920, the Revue mondiale published an unedited dialogue of Diderot with the Abbé de Barthélemy from a manuscript which had been found, it was said, among the papers of Sainte-Beuve by his secretary, Jules Troubat. Albert Cim (Cimochowski), an occasional contributor to the review, wrote a brief note on the history of the dialogue and said that Troubat had very much wanted to see the text published. Troubat died, however, in 1914 before he could arrange for its publication. Cim, having made a copy of the manuscript, determined to carry out Troubat's intentions and, after the First World War, he enlisted the sympathies of Jean Finot, managing editor of the Revue mondiale. One year later, the publisher, Albert Messein, who had just published a collection of anecdotes on the life of Diderot (Historiettes, collected by Suzy Leparc), agreed with Cim that the dialogue deserved a more lasting format than the pages of a semimonthly review and brought out the thin volume of the dialogue's text.

Shelley's curious admiration for Francis Bacon has attracted enough attention to make references to Bacon fairly common in studies of Shelley, but a full study of the poet's interest in the philosopher has not yet appeared. In 1933 David Lee Clark published information on Shelley's marked copy of Bacon to supplement the list of marginalia in W. E. Peck's biography, but Clark disclaimed any attempt at a final study. Perhaps the best approach is not through source study as such, but through an attempt to reconstruct the effect his reading of Bacon had on Shelley's mind, with special attention to his changing attitude toward Bacon and his ultimate assessment of him. If, as Clark says, Shelley's debt to Bacon was mainly indirect, what we need is a study of Bacon's whole impact rather than a list of supposed parallel passages.

In the experimental period following the “Divinity School Address” Emerson worked out a dialectic in terms of myth as a way of combating skepticism with faith, and throughout his subsequent career, notably in “Song of Nature” and in the prose “Fate” and English Traits, he gave increasing scope to the mythic vision of man's cosmic and historical experience. In the verse of “The Skeptic,” written in 1842, he settled the question of sectarian religion in favor of disillusion and skepticism. But in a series of Journal entries from 1843 to 1845, in the dialectic confrontation of opposites—science and religion, skepticism and faith, evolution and emanation—he accepted skeptical science together with the religious impulse, but lifted both to a new level of occult insight and symbolically clairvoyant fable.

In the 1930's after Melville's vessels had begun to display their ample accommodations, R. P. Blackmur wrote in somewhat hostile fashion that Melville “made only the loosest efforts to tie his sermons into his novels: he was quite content to see that his novels illustrated his sermons and was reasonably content if they did not.” In the 1950's after the ship plans were better understood (albeit some specialized new quarters—particularly nurseries, bathrooms, and bedrooms complete with one-way glass—had been added from the outside), R. W. B. Lewis opined that “Melville understood the nature of plot, plot in general, better than any one else in his generation.”

It is more and more frequently said that we need a critical edition of Matthew Arnold's prose works. Not that a sense of this need is of recent origin. The late E. K. Brown made note of it more than twenty years ago in the Preface to his pioneering Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935); and before that, though with a considerably different emphasis, J. Dover Wilson, in the Editor's Preface to his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1932), had pointed up the “surprises” which lie in store for readers of the first edition of Arnold's “Essay in Political & Social Criticism” who have known the book only from texts which have incorporated the author's revisions for the second edition of 1875. We now have a fine critical edition of the poetry (ed. Tinker and Lowry, Oxford, 1950), and we are, I think, coming very near to the time when a critical and definitive edition of the prose will be possible. Unpublished letters are being turned up and printed, anonymous contributions are being identified, and we are learning more and more about the developmental history of Arnold's books. In the first part of this article, then, I wish to add some new information and a new speculation or two about the evolution and text of Arnold's major effort at social criticism, Culture and A narchy.

The comparatively recent appearance of a new edition of The Tragic Muse might in itself justify a re-examination of the novel with a view to a somewhat fuller understanding of its significance in the development of Henry James's literary career. We might recall two biographical facts that also encourage reinvestigation of the novel of 1890. First, James intended to write no more novels after The Tragic Muse. He wrote succinctly to his brother William: “The Tragic Muse is to be my last long novel. For the rest of my life I hope to do lots of short things with irresponsible spaces between them.” Thus, we might not unreasonably expect to find in this farewell to the large form a final expression of his ideas on the art, or at least something of an apologia for his life as a novelist. Second, James had decided while at work on this book to begin a career as a dramatist and thus realize what he had called “the most cherished of all my projects.” (In December 1888, Edward Compton urged him to dramatize The American.) We might then also look in the novel for an indication of James's real attitude to this new phase of his career as an artist. The expression of these two will, of course, take the form of metaphor, since The Tragic Muse is neither a literary essay nor an autobiography, but a novel.

Hermann Hesse's debt to the romantic tradition is a critical commonplace. It is perhaps less often recognized that he is also a distinctly modern novelist. Hesse's modernity is not confined to his period of preoccupation with Jungian psychoanalysis or to his brush with expressionism in Der Steppenwolf and elsewhere. Nor is it exclusively a negative principle: a rejection of contemporary reality and a search for new values, as in the monastery of Narziss or in the futuristic-medieval Kastalien of Das Glasperlenspiel. Rather, in aesthetic and moral terms, Hesse's modernity is found in his manner of formulating romantic thought and techniques. His aesthetic sensibility recalls Novalis and Jean Paul, but his way of implementing this sensibility is representative of a contemporary attitude.

In the introduction to his definitive edition of Chamber Music (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954) William York Tindall has shown us clearly that Joyce's poems are not so clear nor so “slight” as we once thought they were. One of the most enigmatic is “Tilly,” the opening poem of Pomes Penyeach. The best poem in that disappointing book, it has, like the rest of Joyce's work, one of its sources in Joyce's biography; and in part we can recover this source from Stephen Hero, the first attempt at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Ruminants,” a hitherto unprinted early version of the poem, provides interesting insights into Joyce's technique as a versifier, and a study of the meaning of “Tilly” in relation to the Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake is fascinating for the dim light it throws on Joyce's progressively indirect and intricate handling of his themes.

In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Education, Henry Adams describes with characteristic metaphoric violence his feelings about history. Trained to think that history had an ultimate meaning, that in the sequence of events there was some corresponding sequence of cause and effect, Adams discovers at the end of his researches that there is no understandable pattern; the best that Adams can tell us is that history is force: “and thus it happens that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”