It is a humbling experience to realize, as I speak to you this evening, that I have said many times before the things that are on my mind to say. It is even more humbling to know that all that I can say has been better said by other men before me. But I make no apology for reaffirming my faith that the study of man is the heart of a liberal education, that the understanding of man's spiritual power is our last, best hope in a world distraught. And so tonight I shall try to define what I believe to be the proper scope of that study.

Not so long ago ours was a country of many languages and dialects. Today it is, no doubt, on the verge of becoming, at least in its ceaselessly expanding urban areas, the most linguistically monolithic part of the civilized world. A dwindling microscopic minority still study the classical tongues. Were it not for the religious seminaries, Greek studies would long since have vanished to the point of extinction. The fate of Latin is only somewhat less dire. And what shall we say about the modern languages other than English? Fortunately, scholarly concern with and proficiency in them are widespread and notable. But so far as one is able to make out, the amount which in practical life sticks to the ribs of high school and college students is about as slight as is the aroma of a cup of Ersatzkaffee. Certainly when our people get scattered about the wide world, with which they are now perforce concerned in multifarious ways, they are like nothing so much as Missouri farmers after an ice storm that has snapped all the telephone wires and coated all the roads.

Ramón sender, perhaps the most gifted of living Spanish novelists, has been, since 1946, an American citizen. Since 1947 he has been Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico. Nine of his fourteen published novels have been translated into English, and have appeared in both American and British editions.

Most contemporary students of the subject seem to agree with Wellek and Warren's view that “the meaning of verse simply cannot be ignored in a theory of metrics,” and that “sound and meter must be studied as elements of the totality of a work of art, not in isolation from meaning.” The notorious exception is no doubt John Crowe Ransom's forthright theory which makes of the meters simply sound textures irrelevant to the meaning. Yvor Winters's well-known critique of Ransom's argument disposes of the latter's general thesis convincingly, it seems to me. The story does not, however, end there.

La préface de Paul Valéry au Lucien Leuwen des Œuvres complètes de Stendhal est trop riche pour qu'une première lecture suffise à l'épuiser. Elle en exige au moins trois. La première révèle un Stendhal que les confidences de Henri Brulard nous laissaient à peine soupçonner. A la seconde, on retrouve le Valéry de toujours et son cortège de thèmes favoris. Derrière l'apparence de sérénité et de détachement, on croit déceler un autre ton, âpre, et intense, bien fait pour réveiller une curiosité qui se croyait satisfaite. Une troisième lecture est donc requise si l'on veut poser le problème des rapports entre Stendhal et Valéry. Les réflexions qu'elle nous a suggérées sont réunies dans le présent article.

There are fords in the scholar's stream of consciousness and I can prove it. For the benefit of future historians I report to you a phenomenon of our time. Last year the Rockefeller Foundation made a grant of $120,000 to this Association and I have ever since been getting letters from people referring to our Ford Foundation grant of $200,000 or $250,000 (the sum is always larger than what we got). Several times I have even seen the Ford generosity to us mentioned in print. Only once has anybody congratulated me on shaking down the Carnegie Corporation. It is all very confusing, and I wouldn't mention the matter at all if it did not seem to me significant. From the moment the Ford Foundation started giving away millions like crazy, the whole teaching profession has been smiling in its sleep, dreaming of plump subsidies or fellowships with few strings attached. Today there is only one Maecenas in the scholar's mind. It makes me feel rather sad for our good friend the Rockeford Foundation. I want to take this occasion publicly to assure our benefactors that they are still our favorite Fordation.

This paper is in the nature of a caveat entered against one mode of interpretation to which Joyce's work has been subjected. Many literary works in our time have been hitched onto mythopoeic horses, but Ulysses has been rather worse handled than most, in this regard. My comments are directed against the uses to which have been put, by certain critics, mythopoeic references and allusions in Joyce's novel. The problem has not to do with whether Ulysses employs symbols, for it obviously does, but rather with the character of their employment.

The imagination is the great discovery of modern self-consciousness. We have come to suppose that supreme moments of vision—whether these be the “shewings” of Dame Julian of Norwich or the “résurrections de la mémoire” of Marcel Proust—are the fruit merely of a human power to transform the ordinary appearances of daily life into transparent images on which the mind can rest. It could follow that all spiritual clarifications of reality, like great works of art, reveal no more than successful conjunctions of matter and consciousness.

When A. E. Housman late one afternoon in May 1933 was delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” there may have been some nodding heads in the Senate House audience, but only up to the moment he began to speak of his own methods of composition. He had over the years earned a reputation for the obduracy with which he repelled inquiry into this forbidden subject, but on this occasion he ended with a personal confession which his hearers debated long after they forgot his definition of poetry.

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway prophesied: “The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.” Since then many critics have analyzed the symbols and mythical meanings of Hemingway's prose. A few have tried to imagine what he meant by “a fourth and fifth dimension.” But most have agreed that the phrase is pretty vague.

Since its organization fifteen years ago, the Commission on Trends in Education, a standing committee of the Modern Language Association of America, has been concerned about the increasingly unfortunate consequences of the monolingualism of most American college graduates. Mastery of the English language and of English or American literary studies must remain forever provincial to those lacking a knowledge of foreign languages, and it is surely important, in peace as in war, to be able to communicate directly with other peoples. The Commission on Trends in Education is therefore enthusiastically supporting the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association in its study of our linguistic inadequacies and its attempt to remedy them.

Bringing together the names of Sherwood Anderson and Eduardo Mallea at first only emphasizes differences between the writers—differences that appear in common beliefs about them and their respective countries. Place, time, and critical tradition set them apart. In the first instance, geographical separation would appear still important despite easy modern communications; and cultural variance is, of course, even more to be considered than spatial distance. Such matters as the quite different colonial impulses creating the present-day United States and Argentina, the “Anglic” tradition as opposed to the Hispanic, Protestantism to Catholicism, and pragmatism to idealism lead one to expect that if Anderson and Mallea conform to the general patterns of their native areas they will have little in common.

A proper evaluation of the work of Ramiro de Maeztu at this point is hampered primarily by two factors: an almost frenetic admiration on the part of those who exalt him as a martyr to the cause of Falangism, and the emotional charge implicit in the mantle of oblivion thrown over his memory by those who consider him a lost leader and turncoat. Recently an entire issue of a review published in Madrid was dedicated to apotheosizing the writer who was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War; throughout the four hundred pages comprising the issue it would be impossible to glean a single word of refutation, a single adverse critique of Maeztu's thought. In another issue of the same review, Dionisio Gamallo Fierros announces that 13,000 articles written by Maeztu would be collected in an Obras Completas of 76 volumes. Such a project, we are forced to conjecture, would put far too much emphasis upon much that is topical, hasty, and obsolete in journalistic work covering a span of almost forty years. Yet it is undeniable that Maeztu's spiritual and ideological evolution is one of the most dramatic and characteristic of our times. Although we cannot place him among those who worshipped and later turned away from “The God that Failed,” he is a true enfant du siècle in so far as we can trace the metamorphosis of his enthusiasms from the cause of liberalism and progressivism to a denial of the validity of these attitudes in favor of reaction, tradition, obedience, hierarchy, and clericalism. It is tempting—and perhaps even justifiable —to allow an objective consideration of Maeztu's contributions to literature and thought to be influenced by a natural aversion for his later anti-Semitism, his approval of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, his admiration of Hitler and Mussolini, his dire predictions of the collapse of democratic Europe and America. But perhaps for that very reason we should focus our attention on the phenomenon of yet another man whose enlightenment provided no inoculation against forces of darkness, whose disappointment with the cult of progress led him to wish ardently for the suppression of even the best aspects of modernity, whose religion crowded out all tolerance and left room only for submission. Furthermore, we cannot dispute the fact that Maeztu was sincerely convinced he had found the right formula for the salvation of mankind, that his convictions were rooted in religious faith and the ardent belief that not only Spain and Hispanic America, but all of humanity, could be saved if the lessons of his country's history were correctly interpreted. Lastly, we must concede that Maeztu's voice was raised in denunciation of Communism, that he warned his readers that the materialism of an over-materialistic age would atomize and dehumanize a society bereft of absolute values.