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.

If Shakespeare belonged to the United States by birth instead of by inheritance, the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth could not have been celebrated more widely or enthusiastically. It is not irrelevant to consider what his works have contributed to American culture, and what Americans have contributed to Shakespeare in the library and on the stage. To dispose first of some of the fringe benefits, it may be suggested that much innocent pleasure has accrued from the cultivation of Shakespeare gardens containing all the herbs, flowers, and trees named by the poet. An attempt to naturalize all the birds he mentions has had less happy results, though it must be acknowledged that the starlings imported by Eugene Schieffelin in 1880 have taken literally the injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.

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.

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.

I have always pictured Meursault as a stranger to the sentiments of other men. Love and hatred, ambition and envy, greed and jealousy are equally foreign to him. He attends the funeral of his mother as impassively as he watches, on the following day, a Fernandel movie. Eventually, Meursault kills a man, but how could I feel that he is a real criminal? How could this man have any motive for murder?

In the “good old days” in the United States, as in Europe, which supplied the model, anyone who went to a secondary school and college studied Latin as a matter of course. Even in the first years of this century, when a half million students were enrolled in all our public high schools, fully half of them were still studying Latin. Those days are gone, and will never return. To regret their passing is to regret both mass education and mankind's phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, our world has shrunk while America's role in it has grown, and lately our society has recognized the increasing relevance of studying modern foreign languages. What, then, is the future place of Latin in American education? As one who long ago was taught both Latin and Greek, I want to try to answer this question as candidly and as objectively as I can.

After pointing out to Dante the bodies of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius hanging from the mouths of Lucifer, Virgil gives his disciple to understand that it is time for them to make their way out of Hell:

These Remarks are written on a hotel balcony overlooking the last of the plains of Lombardy and the beginning of the Alps. The first snowfall of the season covers the distant heights and outlines clearly the great barrier between Italy and the rest of Europe. Just here two thousand years ago was the edge of the ancient classical world. Beyond the Alps were the hordes that threatened that world, that were to conquer much of it, and that in turn were to absorb its culture and carry it to lands then undreamed of. Through all the changes of the millennia these mountains have looked down on this spot. The snows of early autumn with which they are powdered today are no doubt much the same as those surveyed by Hannibal with his elephants, by Caesar on his way to Helvetia and Gaul, by Napoleon, and in these latter days so tragically by Mussolini and Hitler.

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.

The old english poem Deor is preserved only in the Exeter Book (ff. 100a-100b) and its obscurities have given rise to a goodly number of speculations and emendations. As is proper, the main concern of scholarship has been to establish the literal meaning of its lines and the identity of the historical and semi-mythical characters to which direct allusion is made. Less attention has been paid for various reasons—at least in this century—to its overall signification: our ignorance of Germanic literary genres, our hesitancy to speculate until the certainty of the literal meaning can be established, positivistic biases, a lack of interest in this subject, a tendency to assume that there is no difficulty about understanding the poem's general aim or purpose.

The middle english poem King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is at one and the same time a metrical romance and an exemplum on the theme that the proud and mighty are brought low. The pious tale relates how a king, arrogant and boastful, is displaced from his throne by an Angel-usurper until the debased and beggared king learns proper humility. The story was widely known in the Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the vernacular tongues. Curiously enough, the poem has aroused almost no interest among English scholars, although the medieval English version achieved a well-merited popularity in its own day. It is indeed an affecting and carefully wrought narrative, sensitive to the tragic ironies of the pious “reversal.” Further study of this poem and its close analogues reveals the superiority of the English version; and its skillful synthesis of themes from folklore, Biblical commentary, and history not only encompasses a discriminating artistry, but provides fresh evidence of the process by which Biblical exegesis was transmuted into legend and into romance.

DURING the summer of 1963, NDEA Title VI supported seventy-nine institutes for teachers of foreign languages. Of this number, it was my pleasure to visit six, in my temporary capacity as one of twenty evaluators cooperating with the MLA, which for the first time was under contract to the Office of Education for evaluating these programs. By now all official reports have been submitted. As an erstwhile evaluator, this writer has no further connection with the Office of Education, and my present relationship to the MLA is merely that of an individual member. Although few of them are original with me, the views expressed here on the over-all future of the institute programs are, therefore, my own. They do not represent those of the Office of Education, nor do they necessarily reflect the MLA's.

Dominant among the effects of some Old English meditative and elegiac poems is the paradox of simplicity. The premise might be advanced that the source of our wonder at, often mystification about, such poems as The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife's Lament is the fact that we are too far separated from the poetic consciousness which gave them being. But surely this would be a profitless premise to begin with, especially since our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture and society and learning is not uninformed. Yet our approach to these poems seems to be one of continual amazement and puzzlement, as the now numerous published critical, interpretive studies so well attest. And this is what I mean by the paradox: most of these poems are, in their essential statements, simple and direct; their themes of exile and transience, of resoluteness in the face of flux, of sorrow and hardship and deprivation are staple and often expressed in identical terms, such as the recurrent use of gnomic dicta and the catalogue of misfortunes or joys. Likewise, the vocabulary as vocabulary is static and conventional; the limited, insular hoard of commonplace simplices finds extension only in the native habits characteristic of bothpoetic and non-poetic composition, of affixation, derivation (e.g., anga, engu, langoð), and compounding, and the compounds themselves are more frequently than not transparent and, quite apart from their use in context, unexceptional.

Scholars are generally agreed that the three main extant manuscripts of the Libro de buen amor represent two redactions of the poem: MSS.G and T are derived from the original version of 1330, and MS.S from the author's revised version of 1343. Evidently the revision effected in 1343 consisted of adding considerable material to the original version and eliminating a lesser amount. However, because the extant MSS are incomplete, it is impossible to ascertain precisely what material was eliminated and what was added in the revision. This revised text of 1343 can indeed be established with almost complete accuracy by taking the whole of S and supplying the contents of pages torn out of S or its ancestors, by means of G and T, which fortunately preserve substantially all the missing material. But unfortunately this procedure cannot be reversed to establish the contents of the 1330 version. To be sure, the lacunae in G-T can be identified, partly by the examination of the MSS and partly by comparison with S; and in certain cases, where material identifiable as a fraction of an episode is wanting, we can safely restore the gap with the text of S. But this procedure is not reliable where there is a major lacuna in G–T. One of these is the gap from st. 139b to st.329. In this paper I hope to shed possible light on the problem by putting forth the hypothesis that, where this gap occurs in MS.G, eleven stanzas from S (140–150) could not have figured in the 1330 version, but are rather an interpolation of the 1343 revision.

Jusqu‘à présent la plupart des études consacrées au sentiment de la nature au XVIIe siècle ont eu pour but d'infirmer les thèses de Lanson et de Brunetière en s'efforçant de prouver par des exemples précis l'existence de ce sentiment à une époque réputée pour sa peinture exclusive de l'homme. Mais ce grand pas étant accompli, d'autres questions se posent. Il conviendrait de déterminer dans quelle mesure le sentiment de la nature affecte certains courants de la philosophie, de la morale ou de l'esthétique au XVIIe siècle. Il importerait aussi de se demander comment l'homme sensible au spectacle du monde pense l'homme. Peu d‘écrivains de cette époque furent plus sensibles à ce spectacle que le chevalier de Méré. En même temps personne ne contribua plus que lui à définir l'idéal de “L'Honnête Homme.”

Modern criticism has given increasing recognition to the functional, as distinguished from the decorative, aspect of rhetorical figures in the poetry of the English Renaissance. The continuance of this emphasis is particularly appropriate to Spenser's pastoral, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), where the relevance of the figures to the larger considerations of style—indeed, to the total discourse—is so cardinal. The importance of the figures is enhanced by the natural use of rhetorical arts by characters, set in a kind of mise en scène, whose suasory speeches largely comprise the poem. Stress of the functional side of the rhetorical elements in the poem need not deny or denigrate the role of the figures in conferring upon the verse an aura of conspicuous beauty. The office of the figures in this respect is simply another manifestation of the same taste for elegance which reflected itself in Renaissance dress, manners, ceremonial processions, and décor. The beautifying characteristics of the numerous word orders, comprised of tropes and schemes, were recognized and frankly accepted by literati of the Tudor period. In their eyes, figures possessed value as ornament by reason of their constituting departures from everyday speech patterns. The idea is conventionally phrased by Abraham Fraunce, whom many believe to be the Corydon praised in lines 383–384 of the poem: “A figure is a certeine decking of speach, whereby the vsual and simple fashion thereof is altered and changed to that which is more elegant and conceipted.”