The Modern Language Association and Humane Scholarship

Extract

When, in December, 1883, forty teachers met in New York and organized this Association, Victoria was still on the throne; Tennyson, Ruskin, and Arnold, Holmes, Aldrich, and Louisa Alcott were all blamelessly writing; and great scholars like Kittredge, Lounsbury, Grandgent, March, Hemple, Garnett, and Todd had heretically attained preëminence without the doctorate. It was an unsophisticated, safe, and comfortable world. Today it has undergone disintegration. And we, to a certain degree, have disintegrated with it. Never before, unless I mistake, has it been so important as now, at the close of our first half-century, to take stock. In what direction are we moving, and to what end?