Mr. Chairman, President Fred, President Starck, ladies and gentlemen of the Modern Language Association: I suppose on this occasion, as a member of the American Philological Association, I should be tempted to reflect upon the event in the year of the great schism, 1883, when forty youthful modern linguists, smarting under the tyranny of classical philology, struck their historic blow for freedom, and formed the Modern Language Association. Suffice it to say that after years of rivalry, we have all come to the realization that we are allies in a common cause, not only within the conventional humanities but also with our colleagues in the other areas of learning. No doubt the sense of kinship between classicists and scholars in the modern foreign languages has been enhanced by the experience of adversity. Certainly a classicist has had to learn to live with, and ultimately profit from, a perpetual “bear” market. But, happily, in recent years, the whole strategy of fighting defensive rear-guard actions has been abandoned, and a new spirit of confidence has appeared. A case in point is William R. Parker's excellent piece entitled “Why a Foreign Language Requirement?” There are also the many classicists who have sworn a mighty oath never again to utter a word of apology for the classics, but rather to start from the assumption that any intelligent and sensible man knows how important they are.

The Scandinavian names in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were part of the material collected some forty years ago by Erik Björkman and Johannes Köpke and included in their studies of Scandinavian names in England. The main object of these studies was to establish the Scandinavian origin of a given name, and incidentally to establish certain criteria by which a name might be recognized as Scandinavian. Certain other questions, however, regarding, for instance, the development of a name form over a number of years and the relative frequency of the various name forms, can hardly be answered from the collection of data accumulated by Björkman and Köpke. The purpose of the present paper is to pursue the studies of Björkman and Köpke somewhat further, and to evaluate the results derived from some newly collected data.

The literary register of the German-speaking peoples begins with awkward eighth-century attempts at glossing Latin texts and dictionaries, followed by sundry pieces of translation of mostly catechumenal character, culminating toward the end of the century in the OHG Isidor. For previous generations of German philologists these earliest writing efforts in the German vernacular were of interest and value primarily as attestations of an early period of the language. Twentieth-century research, however, under the vigorous leadership of Georg Baesecke, has tried to assess their import for the history of German literature as the first manifestations of an indigenous literary culture, modest in its beginnings, tortuous in its course, but of a potential vitality that failed of realization only because of unfavorable external circumstances.

There have been two different interpretations of Dryden's attitude toward church and state in his writings after the Revolution of 1688–89. Some have held that he would gladly have changed with the times but was unacceptable to the new regime because he was too notorious an offender; others, that he chose with silent dignity a relatively obscure place among the defeated minority.

The struldbrugg incident in Gulliver's Travels has been relatively neglected. Scholars either allude to the Struldbruggs only in passing or omit the incident entirely from their comments on Book iii. The last sustained treatment is that in the notes of Emil Pons's edition of twenty-seven years ago. Pons's comments, however, attempting as they do to connect the hideous Struldbruggs with Swift's possible fear of old age, reflect a manner of approaching Swift which has become rather out of date. The purpose of this article is to consider three aspects of the Struldbrugg episode: (1) old age and the fear of death as conventional subjects for moral reflection and satire; (2) a desire for immortality in the light of the homiletic tradition; (3) the significance of Gulliver's conversations with his host. Such a study will attempt to show that Swift's treatment of the Struldbruggs conforms to a traditional background as regards both his literary method and his intellectual milieu.

Seventeen years ago, in a highly provocative article in this journal, E. C. Mossner rose to the defense of David Hume's historical writings, which had been treated with considerable severity by scholars such as J. B. Black, who, in his Art of History, had compared them unfavorably with those of his contemporaries, in particular Voltaire. Mossner, however, in trying to bring out the qualities of Hume's History of England, confronted it almost exclusively with Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, and in this instance it must be admitted that Hume labored under a grave disadvantage, since his far more comprehensive subject was harder to master from the artistic as well as the scientific point of view than Voltaire's. In the present article we shall transfer the comparison from the Siècle to Voltaire's longest and most mature historical effort, the Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, and this considerably changes our perspective, for here Voltaire is dealing with a similar and, if anything, more difficult theme. In this way a parallel may prove highly instructive in bringing out the excellences and weaknesses of the two historians respectively in their approach to comparable subjects and in the formulation of their philosophy of history. What makes comparisons particularly inviting is the circumstance that Voltaire's topic also includes Hume's, so that in numerous instances it is possible to examine the reaction of both writers to the same events and personalities. While our investigation of the resemblances and differences in the thought of these two outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment will stress some of the traits shared by most historians of their age, we shall also attempt to underline the more individual elements that emerge from their works.

Except for several lengthy essays by certain of Arnold's worried contemporaries and scattered comments in out-of-the-way essays by later critics, no careful examination has ever been made of Arnold's religious views. It was not until 1930, when T. S. Eliot turned his attention to Arnold in an essay significantly treating Arnold's religious and aesthetic ideas together, that the long-neglected theological bearings of modern criticism were brought out into the open. Subsequently, Lionel Trilling made a more exhaustive criticism of Arnold's religious experience, but without clearly establishing its relation to Arnold's literary experience. In an effort to treat in detail what Eliot briefly touched on in his essay, I have tried elsewhere to show that Arnold's religious ideas changed in important ways during his life and that these changes affected his literary theory and practice. Religious and poetic ideas, which to later and more logical minds seemed hardly consistent with one another hung together in suspension in Arnold's mind, and as a result his work, taken as a whole, contains both Christian and non-Christian, romantic and nonromantic notions that have since his death been set against one another in the divided tradition which underlies modern English criticism.

Generally speaking, we take Wordsworth too seriously. Perhaps we have been unconsciously conditioned by the equine solemnity of portraits of the aged poet and need to remind ourselves that Hazlitt, who himself painted a lugubrious portrait, described Wordsworth as “grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour,” and noted “a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth”—a hint of which appears in Shuter's 1798 likeness. Wordsworth's humor may be “slight” and “sly,” but it is pervasive; it crops out in mirth, gaiety, gamboling playfulness, and quirkish wit. Humor, wrote Landor, may be distinguished from wit in that it “indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point.” This breadth of drollery is particularly Wordsworth's vein. He is not devoid of wit, but he supposedly said that he did not consider himself a witty poet, and specifically asserted in “The Waggoner” that he made “no pretense / To wit that deals in double sense.” He is characteristically droll.

Fagin, the first of Dickens' great villains, is a Jew. In making Fagin a Jew, Dickens drew on a tradition of villainy that had been in English literature from the beginning. Only in our own time has there been a widespread reaction against this literary injustice. One effect of this reaction has been to introduce into our response to characters such as Barabbas, Shylock, and Fagin problems that are not only insoluble but perhaps irrelevant. No responsible critic has, to my knowledge, ever called Dickens an anti-Semite. If the character of Fagin arouses racial hostility in the reader of Oliver Twist, as some overzealous guardians of the public weal would have us think, it is more because this character, by its archetypal nature, appeals to emotions and prejudices already firmly set by custom and tradition. The main fault is not in Dickens but in his readers. Dickens' only sin was that writing at a very early age his first real novel and writing rapidly under the pressure of serial publication, he drew on a tradition already widespread in English literature and, with Fagin at least, made it powerfully and uniquely his own.

In the literature on Notes from the Underground the protagonist is always called “the underground man” (podpol'nyj chelovek), as if he were an archetypal entity, rather than “the narrator,” an accepted literary convention of the Icherzählung. The nomenclature is significant, for critics have treated the work as the turning point in Dostoevsky's development, ransacked it for philosophical, political, and sociological formulas, noted the profound psychology, but have never analyzed the Notes in detail as an artifact. By so doing critics distort the Notes structurally and substantively, because they concentrate on and overemphasize the first part of the work almost to the exclusion of the second, and because they accept and discuss the narrator's formulations in this part without analyzing them as the expression of a literary creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the unity of the Notes: to ascertain the relationships of its two parts; to indicate the thematic function of ordering episodes in a particular sequence; to note the recurrence of certain objects, the symbolism involved therein, and its effect on the unity of the Notes; finally, to assess the effect of artful integration on the apparent “meaning” of the work.

In the summer of 1896 or ‘97 Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his father, Dr. Hugo Hofmannsthal, were sitting in a train bound for Bad Fusch, a small resort in the Austrian Alps and the favorite vacation spot of the Hofmannsthals. Sitting in the same compartment with them were four attractive young ladies whose pleasing demeanor prompted the poet's father to exclaim, in English: “Nice girls!” “Yes,” answered the poet, “but there are too many of them!” The Hofmannsthals’ attempt to be discreet was unsuccessful; the girls' blushes and giggles attested to their proficiency in English. Introductions and a lengthy conversation followed; they marked the beginning of a long acquaintance between the Hofmannsthal family and the four daughters of Hofrat Dr. Albert Speyer.

The long-standing Daudet-Arène controversy, concerning the authorship of Les lettres de mon moulin, has produced the inevitable quantity of spilled ink since the first public charges in 1883. But as yet the debate has yielded no firm conclusions on the questions at issue. While the statements of both Paul Arène and Alphonse Daudet make it plain that there was some form of collaboration in the writing of those stories, we are still a long way from certainty as to the exact contribution of each. Moreover, the almost total lack of primary documents in the case makes it unlikely that any irrefutable certainty can ever be attained in the matter.

When Oscar Cargill suggested thatweshould re-examine Henry James's The Princess Casamassima in terms of the parallels its protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, has with both Anglo-American and continental attitudes toward Hamlet, he partly opened the door on another critical problem—the relation of James to all of Shakespeare. I propose to open that door a good deal wider without presuming to have opened it all the way or to have explored every aspect of the relationship. The novelist, it turns out, has much to say explicitly about the poet. His autobiographical memoirs, his published letters, his critical prefaces, his notebooks, and his literary and dramatic criticism, when taken collectively, reveal a surprisingly large body of both casual and critical comment on Shakespeare. More importantly, James wrote a longish but apparently little-known introduction to one of the poet's plays, which in effect is an interpretation and evaluation of the whole Shakespeare. And, of course, he wrote “The Birthplace,” that amusing but provocative tale of the caretakers of Shakespeare's home in Stratford. If a survey of this material does not throw much new light on the poet, it does, I think, importantly illuminate a significant aspect of Henry James—his critical attitude toward literary genius; in addition, it sharpens our understanding of “The Birthplace.”

Ce titre doit être expliqué. Notre intention, en premier lieu, n'est pas de parler d'influences possibles, mais de comparer les conceptions de Proust avec celles de certains philosophes. En second lieu, notre exposé sera centré sur la question du temps. Nous ne ferons intervenir d'autres questions (sur l'art, la connaissance, la morale) qu'en tant qu'elles surgissent dans cette perspective.

Although it has often been described as a work of destruction, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was designed to be a triumphant reconstruction. It was in reference to this characteristic of his last book that Joyce is reported to have remarked during a visit to Stonehenge, “I am fourteen years trying to get here.” The task of reproducing with words the aesthetic unity of the past was an arduous one. For seventeen years Joyce, having at his disposal all the means of knowing and all the methods of expressing, labored to resolve the “proteaform” mass of modern learning in a “faustian fustian” of words. Such a process, the mixing and blending, the ordering and composing, the choosing and discarding, was necessarily a lengthy one entailing numberless revisions which bear “hermetic” testimony to the nature of the creative act while recording the artistic mind in a state of flux. It is self-evident that Joyce's manuscripts for Finnegans Wake are of immense importance to the scholar and that the French critic Louis Gillet, intimate though he was with Joyce's creative process, expressed a very limited view when he stated: “On ne comprendra vraiment la pensée de Joyce que le jour où nous l'aurons dans son premier état, avant toutes les retouches dont il l'a compliquée ... .” As material for the study of Joyce's intentions, as a “key” to the Wake, the primitive (first-draft) manuscripts to which Gillet refers are of surprisingly little value; for they generally expose little more than the armature of the work, the fundamental action which the reader might otherwise discern for himself after a brief syntactical search. On the other hand, as an aid to exegesis, the complete manuscripts are invaluable. They provide a basis for study of Joyce's method, his progressive elaboration upon a theme. They furnish material for a close examination of the mental process behind this style and of the organization which enabled Joyce to control the chaos from which he drew his inspiration. To this end, I believe a word-byword study which questions each aspect of a single sentence in progress would be of greater value than a more generalized discussion of a longer passage. If feasible, a series of such exegetic analyses might aid in more thoroughly illuminating the total stylistic of the book.

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.