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 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Struldbruggs with Swift's possible fear of old age, reflect a manner of approaching Swift which has become rather out of date.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.

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

The Chronicle of the Monastery of Hales (in Gloucestershire) occupies the first fifty-six folios of ms. Cotton Cleopatra D. iii, a manuscript written in or soon after the year 1301, with which it originally ended. As is the case with scores of other Latin Chronicles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its first part, the “Gesta Britonum,” consists essentially of a condensation of Geoffry of Monmouth's Historia, with a few divergences. It has no notable feature before the reign of Arthur.

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

There is nothing surprising in finding that a part of Edmund Burke's life still remains obscure. With the exception of his political activities within the walls of the House of Commons, almost all of his life is obscure. Such simple vital facts as the date of his birth, the place of his marriage, even the exact place of his burial, are still subjects of doubt. (See N. & Q.,clxxii, 441; 6th ser., v, 274 f.; cxlix, 80).) Almost nothing is known about his first ten years in London. Mr. Dixon Wecter's recent article entitled “The Missing Years in Edmund Burke's Biog-graphy,” PMLA (December, 1938), shows clearly how little is yet known about this period. There are uncertainties as to the times of writing, dates of publication, and even the authorship of works generally considered his. There are uncertainties as to the part he may have taken in several works ascribed to other people. There is a most embarrassing mystery surrounding the sources of his income. Indeed, almost anywhere one looks in his private life, there is some element of mystery.

A great deal has been said about the failure of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I should like here to add a note upon an aspect of The Bridge which, as far as I know, has not been more than mentioned, probably because the finality of the usual criticism of the poem tends to obscure it. Perhaps the shortest way to what I propose is through Ezra Pound's definition of the Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” As symbol providing a logical meaning for the poem, the Bridge has been examined and judgment delivered; but the pattern of language through which Crane hoped to make his symbol effective as intellectual and emotional complex, or, to use his terminology, a “new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate”, has been left almost untouched.

Ernest Hemingway said it:—“A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts. ... A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever.” But works of literature endure in printed texts that become cumulatively corrupt. The definitive editions of the Center for Editions of American Authors restore and preserve the purity of the author's work.

Mallarmé constructs a “crisis of verse” that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation to produce his celebrated poetic purity. Indeed, he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on ambiguity. The significance of this defilement spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé‘s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Third Republic, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Moreover, because defilement is at once material and symbolic and because that “symbolism” is an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality, Mallarmé‘s cultivation of defilement is a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.

Absalom! Absalom! is a unique fictional experiment—unique in relation to Faulkner's other novels and to modern fiction generally. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that in point of technique it constitutes the last radical innovation in fictional method since Joyce. A “difficult” work, its difficulties do not inhere in verbal subtleties or in excessive refinement of perception, but in the strain imposed upon attention and sensibility in comprehending its monumental design.

In the twenty-fifth stanza of the first book of the Troilus occurs a passage which is puzzling in more respects than one. The stanza is as follows:

Among thise othere folk was Criseyda,
In widewes habite blak; but nathelees,
Right as our firste lettre is now an A,
In beautee first so stood she, malcelees;
Hir godly looking gladede al the prees.
Nas never seyn thing to ben preysed derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre.

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

The Canzoniere of Petrarch contains poems written at various times through the long years of the poet's life. It is not a collection made toward the end of his life in a single editorial effort, nor is it a mere gradual accumulation of poems: it is a selective and ordered collection, the fashioning of which, begun in Petrarch's youth, continued to the day of his death. In the present study I am trying to trace the whole course of the evolution of the collection. Much work has been done hitherto, by many scholars, with reference to particular stages or phases of that evolution; but the present study is, I believe, the first to undertake to reconstruct the entire process. Some of the material herein contained is derived from earlier studies, and some of it is new.

It is not Eve's reconciling gesture of “love” in Book x of Paradise Lost that leads Adam back to God. Instead, Adam is restored by a mysterious “literary” insight as he suddenly perceives his sentence as a promise. Adam's “opening” is the sacramental moment toward which the action of Paradise Lost is leading and reflects the Reformers' understanding that the first promise (protevangelium), like other promises in the Bible, constitutes an inner scripture that equalizes all ages. Thus, in the main, the Reformers appropriate Old Testament stories without resorting to typology, for they treat the patriarchs as the first Christians who embraced the word. They see the Old Testament narratives as a sacramental vessel through which the viva vox Christi can speak to the reader of any age as he identifies with the patriarch in the story.

We are confronted today with a persistent tradition, whose veracity has been less questioned with the passing years, that Diderot not only contributed extensively to the thought and style, but also wrote many of the pages, of D'Holbach's works.

Das schwache Priteritum ist hinsichtlich seines Ursprungs und seiner Entwicklung in vorhistorischer Zeit vielleicht die am heissesten umstrittene Formengruppe der gennanischen Grammatik. Dass es den Forschern schwer fällt sich vollig miteinander zu verstandigen, daran sind wir ja auch sonst gewohnt. Aber beim schwachen Prateritum scheint der Gegensatz der Ansichten grösser und die Einigung demgemass schwieriger als bei anderen Problemen. Was hilft es, hier von einem dentalen Präteritum zu sprechen, wenn der eine in dem Dental eine idg. Tenuis, der andere darin eine idg. Aspirate oder Spirans sieht? Und wie konnen wir auf Einigung hoffen, wenn wir die Wahl haben, dieses Präteritum mit dem griechischen Passiv-Aorist, dem idg. PassivPartizipium, dem idg. Aktiv-Aorist oder medialen Aorist, dem idg. medialen Perfekt oder gar dem Prasens lateinischer Factitiva zu verbinden? Es wird nicht notig sein, diese Vorschläge bier des Nilhcren vorzuführen und zu priifen. Man findet die Erklärungsversuche, welche bis dahin gemacbt waren, einigermassen vollständig in meiner Monographic Das schwache. Präteritum und seine Berkunft aufgezählt. Das Verzeichnis ist bis auf die Gegenwart weitergeführt von A. W. M. O&t in der Abhandlung “Das schwache Präteritum in den Genmanischen; Sprachen.” Ich kann mir Odé's Urteil über die neueren Theorien in vielen Fallen zu eigen machen. Auch trifft der neue Erklärungsversuch, den er vorlegt, meiner Meinung nach wenigstens bis zu elnem gewissen Grade das Richtige. Aber es bleibt doch ein beträchtlicher Rest von Meinungsverschiedenheit, der zu dem Versuche weiterer Verständigung cintädt.

The question has recently been raised as to whether or not the order of the publication of the Waverley Novels is also, as Lockhart implies, the order of writing. Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, writing in the New York Saturday Review of Literature for April 23, 1932, (p. 686), appeals to lovers of Scott for help in the solution of the problem of the chronology of his novels. She states her reasons for believing that St. Ronan's Well, though later revised, was written seventeen years before Waverley. In a similar communication published in the London Times Literary Supplement for April 28, 1932, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy outlines the genesis of her skepticism as to the usually accepted chronology of Scott's novels:

In his prose writings Dante refers to the Politics of Aristotle in such a way as to make natural the assumption that he was well-acquainted with the work. Further examination, however, suggests that this opinion has but a slight foundation; in fact, it is not impossible that Dante never saw a manuscript of the Politics.