Of books and things—east. David Erdman describes a recent installation of “books in parts” in the room adjoining the Arents Tobacco Collection in the New York Public Library. So far as is known, this is the only collection in which the principle of selection is that the work must have appeared piecemeal over a period of time and should still be preserved in its original paper wrappers or board covers. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Trollope first appeared in this way, and the vogue even extended to the entire field of belles lettres, including poetry, essays, biography, and took in such philosophical authors as Herbert Spencer. Famous bird and flower books with their beautiful color plates appeared thus in separate portions. The collection numbering about a thousand pieces, housed in a room decorated in the manner of a collector's treasure house, includes holograph manuscripts of some of the books, original drawings of illustrators and autograph letters relating to the books and their illustrators. Have a look next time you're in New York.

We venture to reaffirm the policy which has guided the selection of articles during the past decade, namely, that PMLA should reflect the most distinguished American scholarship in the modern languages and literatures. It is not a place for beginners to try their wings, unless those wings are used for sure and significant flight; and it is not a place for established scholars to publish their incidental writings, unless those writings compare in excellence and value with those of younger men. As the official Publications of the Modern Language Association of America PMLA should publish to the learned world the most important work of members of the Association.

At a meeting held on 26 April 1886, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, spoke some words that have with slight variations been more recently applied to the study of modern languages, and indeed to other disciplines. Gildersleeve said in part:

FIVE LEAVES of the Skeireins (I, II, V, VI, VII) are in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, where they form Cod. E 147 parte superiore, 4° maj. Leaf VI, which bears the Arabic page numbers 309–310, disappeared from the codex at some time in the course of World War II, probably in 1943. In August of that year Milan underwent three successive nights of heavy bombing, in which thirteen halls of the Ambrosiana were destroyed, ten others damaged, and some 80,000 volumes burned beyond recognition. Fortunately, the Ambrosian Gothic palimpsests were rushed to safety and so escaped the fate of the Giessen document. In 1948 the Ambrosiana provided the writer with fluorescent type ultraviolet photographs of I, II, V, and VII but reported that VI was missing or misplaced. In 1950 a decipherment of I, II, V, and VII was published, followed in 1954 by a reading of the Vatican leaves (III, IV, VIII), but the absence of VI still precluded any attempt to complete the study of the manuscript. Finally, in 1955 it became possible to examine the Skeireins fragments in Vatican City and Milan, and, at the same time, to look for the missing leaf. Leaf VI proved to be misplaced in Cod. Ambros. A. How it came there is a matter for conjecture, but the haste and confusion produced by the 1943 bombing may well account for the misplacement.

This essay concerns a situation in more than 800 liberal arts colleges, though some of its points apply elsewhere in American education. The question posed—why a foreign language requirement?—has fresh relevance because the 1930–1950 trend of dropping this requirement for the Bachelor of Arts degree has very recently been reversed.

The story of languages at Maine since 1946 when the Departments of Romance Languages, German, and Classics were combined as the Department of Foreign Languages and Classics is very likely short on the dramatic side. There are no great experiments to report, no application of special funds or subsidies to bolster our efforts. It is, rather, a story of hard work, steady progress, gradual and continuing evolution in an institution of modest resources and primarily local influence. If the account be worth the telling it is because it has not drama and distinction to its credit but a certain significance in that it represents the type of accomplishment possible in an institution of modest and limited proportions, yet one which, for these same reasons, is typical of a large segment of American education. The numbers of students studying languages at Maine and in institutions of similar compass undoubtedly make their impact upon national life and certainly account for an appreciable portion of those students who eventually find their way into the profession of language teaching at all levels.

College-bound majority. According to figures released by the U. S. Office of Education, the majority of high school graduates now enter college. There were 1,318,700 graduates of public and private secondary schools in the continental United States in 1956 and 714,966 first-time college freshmen. The percentage is 54.2. (A revised system of classification by the Office of Education reveals that the corresponding figures for 1955 were 1,281,400 graduates and 668,064 first-time freshmen, for a percentage of 52.1. In 1954 it was 49.8%, and in 1952, 44.7%; skipping back before the war, in 1940 it was 34.1%.) It seems clear that high school administrators must recognize that an increasing majority of their students do not terminate education in the high school—that college preparation is now a major concern of secondary education. Take FL preparation. About 60% of the first-time students in 1956 were in liberal arts colleges and in universities, many seeking the B.A. degree. Of the 830 accredited institutions in the U. S. offering the B.A. degree, 254 (30.6%) require FL study for entrance and 694 (83.6%) require FL study for the degree. Spread the word.

If the well-known dictum that history repeats itself is sometimes open to controversy, its veracity can hardly be doubted when we turn to the history of Beowulf criticism. For it almost seems a law that in its broad outlines Beowulf criticism should follow the fortunes of Homeric criticism—this, of course, with the proper shift in time due to the still appreciable lead of classical philology.

As every schoolboy knows, Dante classified the sins punished in the Inferno in descending order, going from transgressions caused by the abuse of our normal instincts down to the graver violations involving perfidy and malice, which both deface the nobility of the human soul and sever us from our fellow men. So, even before crossing the passage from the first to the second circle, we know that there we shall find damned souls worthy still of tears of pity. The damned of the second circle, carnal sinners, are men and women who have subjected their nobler impulses to the animal urges of the flesh. Foremost in the ranks of these stand Paolo and Francesca, and their story is in a certain sense the first truly infernal episode.

Purely Literary rather than historical evidence should not be excluded if it helps to solve a problem, or even if it merely sharpens the sense of such a problem as the meaning of the dragon in Beowulf.

Some difficulty has probably been caused by thinking of the dragon as a symbol rather than as some other kind of image although, to be sure, a hard-and-fast distinction may not always be possible. To me the meaning of a symbol is more or less arbitrary, especially because the symbol represents something, or means something, usually quite unlike itself–as the eagle is physically unlike the United States. This meaning is imposed outside the work of art rather than within it. Such meaning has to be agreed upon, either by authors like Blake or Yeats in contracts with themselves which must sooner or later be registered with the people, or else by the folk in some other manner, as when they agree in a ‘religious’ community that, say, Ceres shall represent corn and harvesting. Once agreed upon, the meaning of the symbol must remain fixed, at least in the community; otherwise, communication will be confused. Of course, the determination of a symbol's meaning can only be by external evidence. Such meaning probably depends upon remote associations which are certainly not immediately available to the reader and which are, possibly, not always exactly available even to the writer, as in surrealism. These associations can often be recovered, no doubt, and the reason for the meaning can then be understood. But at least until one examines the creative processes behind the evolution of the symbol, its meaning must seem artificial.

My Sense of gratitude—of indebtedness—has often propelled me into difficult situations but none more difficult than the one in which I find myself tonight. I accepted the invitation of your Executive Secretary, Mr. George Winchester Stone, Jr., to address this formidable assemblage because such knowledge of foreign languages as I possess has been and still is one of the most formative influences on my whole life and my concept of the meaning of life.

On 19–20 May 1956 the Foreign Language Program sponsored a Conference on Criteria for a College Textbook in Beginning Spanish, held at MLA headquarters. Nearly all of the seventeen participants had considerable experience in teaching the Spanish language to beginners at the college level, and most were authors of beginning texts. They represented in their theory and practice of language teaching a wide variety of views in both the academic field and the field of linguistic science.

It is unnecessary to remind this learned audience that the title of this paper was borrowed from the eloquent sermon of Bossuet, delivered almost three hundred years ago, on “The Eminent Dignity of the Poor in the Church.” My feeble voice cannot emulate the majestic periods of the great orator. My only ambition is, in a familiar sermon, to define the position granted to our studies in modern society,—a position somewhat similar to that of the poor in the aristocratic society of the seventeenth century. My purpose is to claim for them the eminent dignity which belongs to them, and to justify the recognition they should obtain at least in academic circles.

Efforts to make paradigms for the verbs of contemporary English run into difficult problems. It is not easy to decide what forms we will recognize, and if we do reach a decision we may still find it hard to group our forms satisfactorily. The kind of paradigms school grammars have contained are severely criticized by the new linguists, who hold Latin grammar and “meaning syntax” responsible. The new linguists have not as yet produced any paradigms with the finished symmetry that characterizes some of their tables of vowel sounds, but they have been giving thought to the matter. It is in order to note what has been done with verb forms in their two principal works of the present decade, the Trager and Smith Outline of English Structure and the Fries Structure of English. Perhaps still another effort at paradigm making can be excused too.

Adult education is a very complex phase of American education, ranging from organized evening colleges to informal classes held at a YMCA or public library. This survey is restricted to the quantitative evaluation of foreign language teaching during the fall term of 1956 in adult education and correspondence programs sponsored by institutions of higher education. The results of the survey are based on 1,127 usable replies.