Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.

You have asked me, as Chairman of the Commission on the Humanities, to speak about support of the humanities and the arts and, presumably, about the views of the Commission. This I cannot do, for the Commission has not completed its work and would, in any case, present its report to the bodies that have sponsored it.

The conferences on which this report is based were financed by a contract between the MLA and the U. S. Office of Education. The Advisory Committee of the FL Program, at its November 1963 meeting, recommended that the report be published in PMLA as a thoughtful consideration of an important problem.

Men create institutions to do those things together which they cannot do satisfactorily alone. This of course is why there are learned societies. It must be a matter of particular pride to President Nicolson that the Modern Language Association of America, from its beginnings in a group of forty scholars on the Columbia campus more than eighty years ago, has grown to approximately 15,000 members. In its growth, it has performed a service for scholarship and education in foreign languages and in English which leaves the Nation in its debt.

I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain uncoordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles. At one end there are the techniques for teaching children to read, which are said to be very efficient when they work, and at the other there are the survey courses of the first year in university, designed to give a student some notion of the chronological order in which the great classics got written. I think it should be possible to work out a curriculum for the intervening stages which will treat literature as a progressive and systematic study, and which will furnish the student with something of tangible and permanent value at whatever stage he drops out of it. It seems to me that, as with mathematics, the first procedure is to make sure that the literary sequence makes sense in itself, regardless of its relations with other subjects, even in elementary school. The relation with other subjects is certainly important and essential, but must come later in consideration.

It is self-evident that teacher training is the heart of the matter in any consideration of trends in any area of the curriculum. As the anthropologist regards the practices of childrearing as both a segment of the culture and the surest index to its value system of today and tomorrow, so we may look at our procedures of training teachers as a part of our own professional folkways and at the same time a revelation of which things are to be prized now and in the future. But to think of trends is necessarily to think of the historic conflict of change with continuity, and to think of change raises the question, With reference to what? I therefore want to comment on the themes of change versus continuity (better known as inertia), of relevance, and of the preparation of teachers of modern foreign languages.

Unless and until the Modern Language Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.

Like Hofmannsthal's youthful works, which were first regarded as typically beautiful but unsubstantial products of Neo-Romanticism, only to be later widely extolled for their depth of significance, Der Schwierige has been the object of an evolving critical evaluation. This comedy, published in 1920 and first performed in 1921, has often been pictured as a basically precious comedy of manners anachronistically glorifying the Austrian aristocracy after its demise in 1918. Such an interpretation seems at least partially supported by Hofmannsthal's own words: “Vielleicht hätte ich die Gesellschaft, die es [Der Schwierige] darstellt, die österreichische aristokratische Gesellschaft, nie mit so viel Liebe in ihrem charme und ihrer Qualität darstellen können als in dem historischen Augenblick wo sie, die bis vor kurzem eine Gegebenheit, ja eine Macht war, sich leise und geisterhaft ins Nichts auflöst, wie ein übriggebliebenes Nebelwölkchen am Morgen.” Yet, at another time, he suggests a more profound aim when he says in a letter to Wildgans: “Sie werden finden, daß ich darin das eigentlich Seelenhafte, das persönlich Metaphysische . . . versteckt habe unter der Ironie der Gestaltung . . . und doch ist dieser individuell-metaphysische Kern sehr stark.” In recent years increased attention has been given to the critical exploration of this serious core, which reveals Der Schwierige in its essence as a universally valid character study in the high-comedy tradition of Minna von Barnhelm and Weh dem, der lügt rather than in any sense either an anachronism or a period piece. The discovery in Hofmannsthal's Nachlaß of a number of early plans and sketches promises to extend still further our understanding of Der Schwierige. This material, previously unpublished for the most part, makes it possible to clarify both the author's basic intentions and his application of them to the finished work.

The Nietzschean presence in Spain between 1890 and 1910 needs more ample documentation even though Nietzsche is already considered the spiritual leader of the Generation of '98. Critics have overlooked his effect on other intellectuals who were not members of the '98 group but whose attitudes constitute an important chapter in Spain's history of ideas. At least three different generations affect a given historical reality by a process of conflicting rhythms that Ortega has called “el anacronismo esencial de la historia” (En torno a Galileo). It would be useful, therefore, to isolate the intellectual background against which the Generation of '98 acted in order to see how the former differed in its position toward Nietzsche. I have tried to do this by excluding from this study members of the Generation of '98 whose positive orientation to the philosopher is known. Since periodical literature is, because of its rapid gestation, the most accurate reflection of evolving ideological positions, I have relied a good deal on such material here, although in several cases I was unable to consult complete sets (Juventud, Mercurio, Revista Blanca, Revista Ibérica, Vida y Arte). This essay is descriptive and synthetic rather than analytic. It begins with the reception given Nietzsche in Spain, tracing the extent to which he was read and discussed (I). Next is an account of the diffusion of his ideas and their influence upon young intellectuals (II). Then follow sections dealing with specific topics: critical reaction to Nietzsche's method (III), the Superman and his sociological relevance (IV), ethics and will (V), art (VI). The final section attempts to focus the Nietzschean phenomenon historically, and weighs the importance of the German's biographical image in Spain (VII).

The best parts of Robert Y. Turner's article “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well (PMLA, lxxv, Dec. 1960) concern the denouement of that play. He acutely points out that it is Bertram, with his agonies and perplexities, not Diana, who ”holds the center of the stage“ during her long series of paradoxes; he shows how Shakespeare has added details to his source which prolong and intensify Bertram's distress; and he relates this distress to that of other similar heroes as well as to that of earlier comic butts. I should like, however, to question a number of other points in this article and thereby to challenge as unproved what I take to be its main thesis: that in All's Well Shakespeare ”produced a comedy more of an age than for all time“ because he chose there to follow a contemporary vogue for ”prodigal son comedies“ whose conventions ”have lost their savor.“

The use of color by Galdós has so far failed to attract the detailed attention of literary scholars. This lack of attention may perhaps be explained by the fact that Galdós is so well known and so esteemed for his external and psychological realism that scholars have not been inclined to seek special connotative values, nuances, and interest for particular colors in his literary creativity. Galdós' penchant for drawing black-and-white sketches and two recent, very careful, and highly regarded studies—which only mention in passing specific instances of Galdós' lack of concentration regarding color—likewise fail to hint at its importance in his novels. That Galdós was interested in color, however, may be seen in his perennial use of yellow—an especially important chroma which occurs not only prominently at critical junctures in certain novels but also as the surname of an important character: Juan Amarillo in Gloria.