The subject on which I propose to speak to you tonight is a large one. In a sense it covers almost the whole profession of which this Association is the organ—the teaching and the research in one large segment of the humanities. I shall start with the assumption that we are all teachers. This, I know, is not strictly true. But it is probably true of ninety percent, and of the other ten percent some have been teachers and many are preparing themselves for teaching careers. How many of our members are engaged in research I do not know, but the number interested in research or in its results is large, as any one can see from the size of our annual conventions and the attendance at group and sectional meetings. I shall address myself particularly to the job which we have to do as teachers, and I shall consider the part which research plays in that job. I shall even direct a few remarks at those who are so heretical as to think that the MLA and PMLA are not perfect! In the light of this modest preview I am sure of your unanimous agreement on one point, that I have set myself a sufficiently large task for fifty minutes.

Our meeting this morning is a memorable one, not because it is the first time that the Association has assembled on a Sunday morning, but because we are gathered here today to reassert the responsibility of this society of teachers and scholars for leadership in the intellectual life of our country and to accept that responsibility.

It is a privilege to join you in this annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, and to take a modest part in the discussions of certain problems connected with the teaching of modern foreign languages. This Association has for years been concerned with many academic activities and research in various fields of knowledge which have a very important contribution to make at this point in our national life. Though your organization is not concerned with the entire range of subjects or disciplines commonly included under the term “humane letters,” many of the fields represented here are at the very core of our liberal learning in the United States. It is of the utmost importance that the ideas and the ideals embodied in Western European culture should be reemphasized and revitalized in this day of materialism and confusion. At no time in our history has it been more necessary that concepts such as the dignity of the individual, the basic rights of free men, and the rational consideration of human problems be inculcated in the minds of American youth. You are the members of a large company of scholars and teachers who have much of the responsibility for passing on this liberal heritage to this and succeeding generations.

Teachers of foreign languages in the United States, it may be assumed, are convinced that foreign-language teaching is a good thing. But this conviction is not shared by all the people who do not teach foreign languages. Teachers of other subjects, principals, superintendents, school committees, and the general public do not always see eye to eye with us on this question. Their defective vision, this mote in our brother's eye, is of natural and paramount concern to us as we peer around the edge of our own smallish beam.

We are all aware, painfully aware I am sure, of the defensive position which the humanities have been forced to assume during the past fifty years. Enrollments in those subjects which have traditionally borne much of the burden of a liberal education have decreased to a point that now the classical studies are represented by no more than a dwindling rear guard, and the modern foreign languages are withering from the blasts of ill-advised and ill-informed attacks in the name of practicality.

My older hearers will recall that after the First World War a number of our state legislatures and our school boards prohibited the teaching of German in the public schools. Today, I think, most of us would consider such a prohibition with regard to Russian, for instance, absurd and self-defeating. Even the man in the street could be made to see that it would be as if a regiment in the trenches, knowing that the enemy was preparing for an offensive, were ordered to close its eyes, so that it couldn't see what direction the attack was to take.

As a professor of English, who also happens to be entrusted with the direction of this new MLA project, I hope that every foreign language teacher in this room realizes what a difficult problem of translation the preceding speeches pose. It is my job to translate them into 'action. If I do not do so, with your help, we shall merely have spent a morning congratulating or consoling ourselves. After what you have heard, I probably don't need to tell you that my acts of translation will inevitably lose much of the peculiar eloquence and overtone of the originals, but I do want to assure you that I shall try my best to preserve the spirit of what has been said today. Don't expect me, in other words, to be always literal; and don't expect me to do anything that will stir you as you have been stirred this morning. From now on, it is a workaday matter of files and figures, committees and conferences, interviews and press releases, and endless letters. We live, for better or for worse, in such a complex world. Our critics or detractors have long understood this, and have taken advantage of our otherworldliness. Let them take notice: we may betray our inexperience for a time, but the MLA is this morning outside the classroom and the study, speaking up for something it deeply believes in.

L'Espoir et Les Noyers de l'Altenburg, les deux derniers romans d'André Malraux, sont écrits dans un style qui présente avec celui des œuvres précédentes des différences importantes.

Le lecteur a l'impression que l'auteur hausse souvent le ton et qu'il vise a Vampleur la ou il se contentait naguere de violence. Gaetan Picon a remarque que Malraux ecrivait plus “grand” et plus “large” qu'auparavant. Le but du present article est de montrer que, loin de constituer des metaphores, ces remarques definissent le caractere essentiel de ce qu'on pourrait appeler le “style cosmique” de Malraux.

Gaston bachelard a montré que les éléments matériels pouvaient servir de catégories adéquates pour étudier la sensibilité et le tempérament de maint auteur. Les poètes lui ont évidemment fourni un terrain d'élection. Plus remarquable est le fait que la plus abstraite philosophie utilise d'une manière caractéristique des métaphores et des images tirées des quatre éléments matériels. Il s'agit d'ailleurs de quelque chose de plus essentiel que ce qu'on entend d'ordinaire par “image” et “métaphore”. En regard de la pensée abstraite, ces deux termes sont compris à titre d'ornements grâce auxquels le philosophe égaie son exposé aride et le rend plus frappant. Mais le fait que “l'image” nous aide à fixer une théorie en notre esprit tendrait déjà à montrer qu'il s'agit là non d'un ornement, mais d'une pénétration intuitive que ne saurait remplacer totalement une suite d'abstractions sans relation visible à la vie. On objectera qu'une telle attitude est le plus sûr moyen de mal interpréter une doctrine: La faute en est alors à l'auteur, et non au lecteur. C'est l'auteur qui a mal interprété sa propre doctrine en se laissant aller à des “images” superficielles et ornementales.

The vital statistics on Tomás Carrasquilla have hitherto baffled not only scholars and librarians, but even the members of his own family. One authority suggests 1865 as the year of his birth; another, 1851. The most conservative estimate, which “splits the difference,” as it were, favors 19 January 1858, the date accepted by Carrasquilla's family. In Santo Domingo, Colombia, I discovered on a baptismal certificate that “en la iglesia parroquial de Santo Domingo a veinticuatro de enero de mil ochocientos cincuenta y ocho, yo el cura interino que suscribo, bauticé solemnemente a un niño de un día de nacido a quien nombré Tomás María hijo legítimo de Rafael Carrasquilla y Ecilda Naranjo vecinos de esta parroquia,” so that, on the strength of this document, the actual date of Carrasquilla's birth appears to have been 23 January 1858.

What did Lytton Strachey mean when he insisted in the Preface to Eminent Victorians and elsewhere that the biographer should have a clear and definite point of view? When we have answered this question, we are certain to encounter another: Was Strachey right? Should biography be written from a fixed point of view? Is there a danger that the biographer with a rigid point of view will treat his subject as a victim forced to lie upon the bed of Procrustes?

One of the most powerful stories in James Joyce's Dubliners is “A Painful Case.” Much of its strength lies in its deep concern with two basic human experiences, love and death. Yet Joyce seems somehow less concerned with these in themselves than with the personality of his main character, James Duffy. The author's intense analysis of the intellectual and emotional life of this protagonist has made possible the assumption that Joyce himself is Mr. Duffy. Events in the author's life are seemingly paralleled by occurrences in Duffy's life. Both men enjoy, and yet suffer from, the exile which they have imposed upon themselves: “Duffy … wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen.”

Resolve as one may to keep to the main road,” Melville wrote in Billy Budd, “some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson, knowingly, I am going to err in such a bypath.” With these words of caution to the reader who might object to the “literary sin” of digression, the author of Moby Dick launched into a spirited encomium upon the heroism of Lord Nelson, defending the Admiral against any “martial utilitarians” and “Benthamites of war” who might interpret his acts of “bravado” at Trafalgar which had resulted in his death to have been foolhardy and vain. For what reason, the question arises, did Melville feel that the eulogy on Nelson could justifiably be included in Billy Budd? What is the meaning of the attack upon Benthamites and utilitarians? This was no pot-boiler which required padding; surely his inclusion of the highly emotional defense of Nelson is significant for other reasons than that the chapter makes “more understandable Melville's hearty interest in martial exploits, sayings, and songs.”

This paper is a continuation of two earlier articles on Nietzsche's attitude toward Luther. In his first creative period ending with Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche had sung the praises of Luther and the Reformation. Martin Luther was one of his proudly acknowledged heroes, together with such men as Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche chose to see in Luther one of his spiritual forebears and in the Reformation a definite harbinger of modern culture. Strongly opposed to Roman Catholicism, young Nietzsche let all the light fall on Protestantism and especially upon its fountainhead, Martin Luther. He was convinced that a progressive spirit manifested itself in sixteenth-century Protestant Germany. He thoroughly approved of it and admonished his contemporaries to ally themselves with the mind that was in Martin Luther and to hold fast to the heritage of the German Reformation.

Robert browning'S Love Among the Ruins (1855) is comprised chiefly of descriptions of a once-great capital city—its present desolate site as contrasted with the city's magnificence in the ancient days of its splendor. William C. DeVane suggests that the poem is “a vivid recollection of the Italian scene, or perhaps of some picture which Browning had recently seen in the Louvre.” Three critics maintain the Roman Campagna to be the scene which Browning had in mind, but cite no descriptions of this area pertinent to the poem. Bernhard Fehr shows that the city of the poem resembles the description of Babylon given in the History of Herodotus and the Apocalypse of St. John. Robert A. Law suggests that Browning drew upon i Chronicles for two images and thus had in mind Jerusalem. A recent commentator proposes that the poem was suggested by some remarks on the transience of great cities in Letter cxvii of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World.

Some of the most fruitful modern Hawthorne criticism is that which endeavors to correct and supplement the older, somewhat distorted picture of a solitary Puritan anachronism living in an “owl's nest” by recognizing Hawthorne's immediate connection with the fundamental issues of his own day. What Hawthorne owed to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries cannot be adequately evaluated in terms of “influence” or parallel passages. A more rewarding approach to the problem would be to examine part of the climate of opinion in Hawthorne's time in connection with a detailed study of his work. The present paper, intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, is an attempt to reveal some of the possibilities of this approach.

We have long since rejected the idea that Madame de Staël brought romanticism to France from Germany. We are also quite aware, in spite of Lasserre and Irving Babbitt, that there is a great deal in romanticism that is not in Rousseau, and a great deal in Rousseau that is not in romanticism. It now remains for us to look for some truth between these extremes. Categorical answers to questions regarding Rousseau's influence on this period in literary history will probably never be found, but esthetic insights into the matter may be gained by a study of the relationships between Jean-Jacques and the outstanding poets of the movement.

After Otto Heller published the results of his investigations into the question of Charles Sealsfield's claimed editorship of the Courrier des Etats-Unis in the Euphorion in 1907 (xiv, 718-724), he was convinced that he had disproved “the biographical fable that makes Sealsfield editor of the Courrier des États-Unis.” This assertion was repeated in 1939 in the important Heller-Leon Sealsfield Bibliography and more recently in an article published by the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, to which Professor Eduard Castle of the University of Vienna then made an enlightening but inconclusive reply because he did not have access to copies of the Courrier. In view of the fact that to date Otto Heller's study remains the only one based on an actual examination of the Courrier itself, the weight of evidence must remain in favor of his published conclusions unless these are disproved by more valid evidence from the same source. On the basis of a more complete study of the record it is believed that the following pages will bring such evidence and thus reestablish and confirm Sealsfield's original claim made in his biographical letter to Brockhaus asserting that from 1829-30 he was editor of the Courrier and that he resigned several weeks after news of the French Revolution of 1830 reached America. This will not only correct an unfortunate error in Sealsfield scholarship, but also clear Sealsfield against a charge of untruthfulness.