When most successful, the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875–1910) wrote within the aesthetic assumptions of the French Symbolists and Decadents. He followed them in their revolt against reason, which was of course the continuation of a Romantic attitude. Because it tries to avoid logical discourse, his poetry, as well as that of his predecessors, tends to an excessive dependence on the use of sensorial representations. Through images, which in themselves carry no meaning, the Symbolist poet transmits his emotional state and conveys his understanding of nature. It is his task to create a system of coordinates with a complete existence of its own. The third dimension—the one which is to awaken in the reader a response parallel to the poet's experience—is the power of suggestion which supplies the depth in an otherwise two-dimensional world. The suggestive power of an image, when incorporated into a context, can radiate and penetrate the several spheres of meaning necessary in the creation of a symbol. This system of coordinates may become an explication of the significance of natural phenomena—a myth—when it is considered as the relation of its own individuality and the reality to which it refers by indirection.

Heartbreak house, begun in 1913 and completed In 1916, is one of Bernard Shaw's most provocative plays and merits fuller aesthetic analysis than his critics have yet given it. Distinctive both for its architectonic firmness and its elusive symbolism, Heartbreak House is one of Shaw's major accomplishments as artist. It summarizes, furthermore, the themes and attitudes of his previous work, in particular the ideas broached in “The Revolutionist's Handbook” appended to Man and Superman (1903). It also holds in embryo Shaw's departures in doctrine and technique in the plays beginning with The Apple Cart (1929).

A great deal of attention has been given to the surge of critical interest in metaphysical poetry that followed the publication of Herbert Grierson's edition of John Donne's poems in 1912. Theodore Spencer and Mark Van Doren, for instance, have examined the revival of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets from 1912 to 1938. The achievement of these and of other recent critics has tended to obscure the earlier phase of the metaphysical revival. It has been assumed frequently that the revival began with Grierson's edition and that current theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were first presented in some essays by T. S. Eliot that appeared in the early 1920's. In reality, however, Grierson's edition and the reviews that acclaimed it marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival. His edition was no doubt in part the cause of the enthusiasm about Donne that reached a scholarly climax in 1931 with the observance of the tercentenary of the poet's death. It was also the result of the increased interest in Donne's poetry and personality that began during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Eliot's essays were not so much a new note as a sensitive formulation of ideas that had become familiar by 1912.

Admiration for the best qualities of W. H. Hudson it not inconsistent with a lively distaste for Rima, the bird-maiden of Green Mansions. One cannot believe in her as anything. Too avian to be human and too human to be preternatural, too unearthly to be a woman and too womanly to be a bird, she is the most striking example of the truth of Robert Hamilton's statement that the erotic element in Hudson's romances is “quite extraordinarily unconvincing.”

It is a privilege to join you in this annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, and to take a modest part in the discussions of certain problems connected with the teaching of modern foreign languages. This Association has for years been concerned with many academic activities and research in various fields of knowledge which have a very important contribution to make at this point in our national life. Though your organization is not concerned with the entire range of subjects or disciplines commonly included under the term “humane letters,” many of the fields represented here are at the very core of our liberal learning in the United States. It is of the utmost importance that the ideas and the ideals embodied in Western European culture should be reemphasized and revitalized in this day of materialism and confusion. At no time in our history has it been more necessary that concepts such as the dignity of the individual, the basic rights of free men, and the rational consideration of human problems be inculcated in the minds of American youth. You are the members of a large company of scholars and teachers who have much of the responsibility for passing on this liberal heritage to this and succeeding generations.

In Henry James's story, An International Episode, two English-men visit America. One of the visitors is Lord Lambeth, son of the Duke of Bayswater and brother of the Countess of Pimlico. In New York City and in Newport, the Englishmen are hospitably entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Westgate, not because the Americans are in any way obligated to the visitors but solely because of their open-hearted habits of hospitality and friendliness. After the Englishmen have returned to Great Britain, Mrs. Westgate and a Boston friend, Miss Bessie Alden, go to London; but on their arrival there, they find Lord Lambeth's family very slow in returning the courtesies he had been shown in America. Henry James remarks that “Bessie Alden . . . saw something of . . . English society . . . and . . . especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated . . . authors and artists,”' but of the Duchess of Bayswater and the Countess of Pimlico she and Mrs. Westgate saw very little. At first they saw them not at all. And after the haughty English ladies had at last made a reluctant call on the visitors from America, Mrs. Westgate remarked: “They meant to overawe us. . . . They meant to snub us.” Bessie Alden observed that “their manners were not fine.” And Mrs. Westgate replied: “They were not even good!” Shortly after being snubbed in London, the Americans departed for the continent, leaving the reader with the impression that they were far greater ladies than the titled representatives of British ladyhood who had tried to overawe them in London.

The American Council of Learned Societies, through its Committee on the language Program, is directly or indirectly responsible for encouraging, planning, and directing many of the projects in which American linguists are currently engaged. The members of this Committee are appointed by the Board of Directors of the ACLS; at present they are Norman A. McQuown (Chicago, Chairman), John B. Carroll (Harvard, Secretary), Bernard Bloch (Yale), Stephen Freeman (Middlebury), Archibald A. Hill (Virginia), Martin Joos (Wisconsin), Albert H Marckwardt (Michigan), and Henry Lee Smith, Jr. (U. S. Department of State), with Mortimer Graves as ACLS liaison officer and John Kepke as business manager. The following statement sets forth the Committee's view of the situation in which it works and of its own specific duties.

Mindful of Josephine Miles's question: “If the problem [of imagery] is subjective, how can it result in tables and charts?” I shall offer here only the simplest classifications, for the sake of imposing a surface neatness upon the presentation of protean material. After some introductory generalizations about James's imagery, I shall appear to be discussing the whole subject in terms of the areas of existence or experience most used by James as sources for his imagery. The problem is that one cannot draw close to James's vital imagery of any single sort without knowing something about the other sorts, so cooperatively do the major images-areas complement each other; but we must star somewhere. In my second division I shall discuss images-areas used throughout the later works, but not independently thematic in any given work. In the last division I shall treat image-areas found unusually concentrated within given works; and here the given work itself will help to hold the materials together.

Teachers of foreign languages in the United States, it may be assumed, are convinced that foreign-language teaching is a good thing. But this conviction is not shared by all the people who do not teach foreign languages. Teachers of other subjects, principals, superintendents, school committees, and the general public do not always see eye to eye with us on this question. Their defective vision, this mote in our brother's eye, is of natural and paramount concern to us as we peer around the edge of our own smallish beam.

Sainte-Beuve rétablit Pascal dans son vrai temps. Il situe le cadre social et intellectuel où agissent l'homme et sa foi. Il élargit l'univers de Pascal et l‘étend plus qu'il ne le creuse; mais en l‘étendant il accuse toujours un goût exact des proportions, il reste maitre de la perspective qu'il suscite.

It has been observed that Henry James's prefaces for the New York Edition arc often unreliable as guides to the finished stories because they are so concerned with the germinations of his ideas. The very emphasis upon beginnings is presumably James's way of insisting upon the distance and the labor between the germ and the maturity of a work, a point which he explicitly invites us to ponder in the Preface to The Wings of the Dove:

... some acute mind ought surely to have worked out by this time the “law” of the degree in which the artist's energy fairly depends upon his fallibility. How much and how often, and in what connexions and with what almost infinite variety, must he be a dupe, that of his prime object, to be at all measurably a master, that of his actual substitute for it-or in other words at all appreciably to exist? He places, after an earnest survey, the piers of his bridge-he has at least sounded deep enough, heaven knows, for their brave position; yet the bridge spans the stream, after the fact, in apparently complete independence of these properties, the principal grace of the original design.

During the past twenty or thirty years there has occurred in the world of scholarship a revolution, the full significance of which has perhaps not been adequately appreciated. We all know about microfilms and microprint; many of us have made use of these for special purposes; but only a few among us have had the opportunity of considering how the development of photographic processes has already transformed our work and how it is creating entirely new conditions for future scholarly research.

We are all aware, painfully aware I am sure, of the defensive position which the humanities have been forced to assume during the past fifty years. Enrollments in those subjects which have traditionally borne much of the burden of a liberal education have decreased to a point that now the classical studies are represented by no more than a dwindling rear guard, and the modern foreign languages are withering from the blasts of ill-advised and ill-informed attacks in the name of practicality.

In Hawthorne's “Ethan Brand,” the incident in which the old dog suddenly begins to chase his own tail occupies only a few lines, but a close reading of this brief passage in conjunction with its original in The American Notebooks throws considerable light on the story as a whole and on Hawthorne's creative processes: it shows his keen perception of the exact effect he wished to produce in this tale as well as the painstaking artistry with which he adapted his Notebooks material to that end.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the mind of a large number of Spanish American intellectuals during the nineteenth century Spain symbolized the origin of many of the cultural, social, and political ills which afflicted the Iberian New World. And this in spite of the admitted influence of the advocates of Spain and the defenders of her official policies, neither of whom have ever been lacking in Spanish America. From the earliest stages of the Conquest the criollo (Spanish American Creole) and mestizo were treated as the inferiors of the native-born Span-iards, or peninsulares, and felt themselves to be different from the Iberian conquistador. In the course of time this feeling of social separatism deepened. In addition to the Indian and Creole uprisings against the peninsulares, which persisted sporadically throughout the Colonial period and frequently were motivated more by political convenience than by ideological differences, another type of rebellion developed during the latter part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries. And it was the latter—promoted in its intellectual aspects by such figures as Rodríguez, Miranda, Nariño, and Bello—in which were established the ideological bases of the liberation carried out by San Martín, Bolívar, and the Mexican patriots.