This 1967 MLA presidential address summarizes the development of the Association and American scholarship during the eight years of the Executive Secretaryship of George Winchester Stone, Jr.: the production of floods of scholarship, the entrance of the MLA into national politics through the Foreign Language Program and NDEA, the development of the International Bibliography, production of endless professional pamphlets and policy statements. These scholarly and professional tasks resemble the unending labors of Sisyphus. The humanistic achievements of the scholar are still the most important. Each generation of humanistic scholars must redefine for itself and try to explain to a wider audience the values of literary and linguistic study. Despite the loss of purpose, floundering, sense of apathy and protest evident in post-war creative literature, American scholarship in all languages and of all periods is now at a peak. Americans have given back to Europe its greatest literary products of the past enriched by modern principles of editing, annotation, criticism, and analysis. American scholars move into the next century hand in hand with mechanical aids of tremendous value to liberate rather than enslave them. The one stone that Sisyphus had to roll has exploded and fragmented. The task devolving upon us is now tenfold. In our pursuit of minutiae in scholarship we will demolish all humanistic values unless we keep in the forefront of our consciousness the ten huge stones which challenge us: the new ignorance, muddleheadedness, bigness, crassness, rapidity of change, salvation of the good results of years of permissiveness, repossession of broad scholarship, realignment of new knowledge, pursuit of excellence, and above all assurance of relevance.

With Selected Poems, 1963, Ransom's canon of “authorized” poems stands at fifty-three. Comparison of this latest collection with his 1945 and 1955 collections reveals minor and major changes of the 1945 and 1955 collections, particularly in his lesser-known poems, and inclusion of revised versions of earlier poems. Most changes show Ransom simplifying diction, smoothing meter, or removing obscurities. Minor changes (word and punctuation changes) occur in eight poems. Major changes (revisions of whole lines, addition or deletion of material longer than one line, and complete revision) occur in fourteen poems (“Agitato ma non troppo,” “First Travels of Max,” “Armageddon,” “Prometheus in Straits,” “Eclogue,” “Hilda,” “What Ducks Require,” “Master's in the Garden Again,” and others). “Old Man Pondered,” reprinted without change from the Saturday Review of Literature, is considered a major change since it did not appear in the 1945 or 1955 collections.

The Coventry MS, which contains writings by Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Mandeville, and others, belonged to the Grammar School at Coventry from shortly after 1602 until the early years of the present century, when it disappeared. The volume reappeared, in private hands, in the 1950's and was bought by the Coventry City Council. Virtually nothing has been known of the contents of the MS. The Chaucerian texts (transcriptions printed in the article) are A B C, Bukton, Purse, Gentilesse, Lak of Sledfastnesse, Truth. These texts generally represent a good tradition (Brusendorff's “Bradshaw group”) and exhibit an interesting relationship with the important Canterbury Tales MS, Cambridge University Library Gg. 4. 27. The Coventry MS was written in the middle or third quarter of the fifteenth century. Its Chaucerian texts mark it as the fourth largest anthology of Chaucer's Short Poems known from medieval times.

Drayton's Epistles are imitations of Ovid's Heroides only in a limited sense, for they were strongly influenced by the vogue of complaint poems (like Daniel's Rosamond), popular during the 1590's. The Epistles resemble both the Heroides and the complaint poems in their rhetorical embellishment and their moral sententiousness. In a few cases, Drayton clearly intended some parallels between Ovid's characters and his own (Hero and Leander-Queen Mary and Charles Brandon; Paris and Helen-Edward IV and Jane Shore). However, unlike Ovid, he informed his poems with a unifying purpose: to show how Providence had guided England through its turbulent past into the glorious age of Queen Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth does not appear in the Epistles, it is clear that Drayton selected his historical events so as to anticipate the greatness of her reign. The patriotic tone of these poems is typical of much historical literature of the 1590's; their concern with Providence evolves from the concept of Fortune in the Mirror for Magistrates. The Epistles, then, are far more Elizabethan than Ovidian, and contemporary praise of Drayton as “the English Ovid” can be misleading.

Samuel Richardson used in his novels character types and plots already developed in the English drama. Playwrights such as Charles Johnson, George Lillo, and even Henry Fielding had presented the same story as Pamela—the attempted seduction of a poor but innocent maiden by a well-born rake— and characters similar to the novel's virgin heroine and libertine hero. In the first part of Clarissa Richardson handled a theme common in the drama, that of enforced betrothal, and developed this theme with characterizations, character relationships, and dramatic confrontations already used by playwrights. Throughout the novel Clarissa resembles a type of suffering heroine and Lovelace a type of rakish villain popular in the drama, and the second part of the novel strikingly resembles Charles Johnson's play Caelia. The characters of Sir Charles Grandison also have their dramatic counterparts, especially the hero, who is clearly a product of the theater's men of sense.

A dramatic incident in the literary warfare between England and America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was Tom Moore's indictment of the American character in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), inspired by a tour through the United States in the summer of 1804. Four Juvenalian “epistles” developed the contrast in America between man's humanitarian dreams and his actual moral and political performance. Because of the poet's popularity, his diatribe, which included slanderous portraits of Jefferson and Washington, was widely discussed and deeply resented even by Moore's American friends. The most substantial rebuttals came in a lengthy critique of Moore's work offered as prefatory material to an American edition of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1806); in a serial review by William Coleman in the New-York Evening Post (October-November 1806); and in an anonymous poem entitled An Attempt to Vindicate the American Character (Philadelphia, 1806). So violent was the reaction that not until the publication of Lalla Rookh in 1817 did “Anacreon” Moore regain favor among Columbian readers, and by that time he had come to regret what he called his “crude and boyish tirades against the Americans.”

Laughter in Oliver Twist is used as a weapon against the reader's conventional social identifications, forcing him to recognize in himself the social brutality which threatens Oliver. Repeatedly, Dickens evokes laughter at one of the novel's social outcasts and then shows that laughter to be cold and inadequate by echoing it in a demonstrably evil character. By means of this process of subversion, the reader is forced away from the bright social world of the Maylie-Brownlow group into an intense association with the orphans and the victims: Oliver, Fagin and his associates, and Mr. Bumble.

The usual interpretations of Major Barbara, which focus on Barbara and align Undershaft's views with those of Shaw, lead to a distorted estimate of the play. Shaw is concerned less with Barbara's religious experience than with the character of Undershaft and the social implications of a philosophy of money and gunpowder. He admires Undershaft's vital genius, but maintains esthetic distance by revealing the arms maker as psychologically conditioned by the experience of his rise to power, his idealism being debilitated by cynicism. In clarifying the social, political, and economic fact of society's dependence on money and gunpowder, Undershaft provides dramatically viable social criticism and suggests a basis for reform. But he is too ensnared in his profession to effect reform himself. Poetically, dramaturgically, and dialectically he plays a devil's role, part social and part Blakean, imposing his diabolism on the well-meaning but misdirected angelicalness of Barbara. Barbara's more sympathetic role offers the audience a spiritual bridge between the simplicity of Stephen and the complexity of Undershaft. As she comes to understand the devil's realities, she provides for the future a hope which Undershaft, with his entanglements, cannot fulfil.

Most Augustan poetry in America remains unattributed and unstudied. However, a critical study of the poems by Richard Lewis (1700?-34) reveals that he was not only the best Augustan American poet but also the first and most successful American nature poet before Bryant. His “To Mr. Samuel Hastings,” a progress piece on shipbuilding, is the earliest poem on an American industry. “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis,” a Thomsonian nature poem, and “Food for Clitics,” which anticipates Freneau, both contain the best elements of Lewis' poetry: a philosophy of scientific deism, praise of nature and the Creator, extended descriptions and catalogues of flowers, wildlife, and rivers presented in fine images which show his exact powers of observation, and the themes of the superiority of American nature, the wilderness as Eden, and the lost innocence of America. Pope refers to Lewis' “A Journey” in the Dunciad. His occasional verses, such as the one in honor of Lord Baltimore which shows Lewis' sense of history and patriotism, and his poems on Governor B. L. Calvert also reveal his merit. His reflection of contemporary poets and philosophers, his anticipation of significant American themes, and the excellence of his poetry all suggest that Lewis was an important poet.

In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.

In Augie March, Henderson, and Herzog, Bellow has created an open style of ideological comedy that relates him to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce, earlier masters of an encyclopedic comedy of knowledge. The lively voice and intellectual probing in Augie March can be more fully valued when the book is related to such predecessors rather than to the picaresque tradition. Bellow's comic characters have an individual idiom, voice, and range of concern that unobtrusively unify his apparently formless books. What emerges in Augie March and Herzog—the comedy, suffering, and encyclopedic speculation; the concern for personal fates, social facts, and cosmic issues; the interest in observed actuality and abstract symbol; the tension between a cruel, deterministic reality and the impulse toward creative freedom and joy; the precarious reliance on metaphoric probing and an open form—all suggest that against great odds, both public and personal, Bellow has succeeded in reanimating a style of intellectual comedy that illuminates and celebrates the present even as it connects us and Bellow with some of the most powerful imaginations of the past.

Molierè's reworking of lines from Dom Garde de Navarre in Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Amphitryon points to a common theme in the four plays: the interplay of the ideal of faith and the ideal of integrity (authenticité). In Dom Garcie the hero is too much in love to bow to the convention that his beloved is by definition above reproach when he discovers her in the arms of another man. The demands of a faith grounded in self-deception clash with the exigencies of integrity. Tartuffe shuns both the artificiality and the highmindedness of the ideal. In a realistic setting shorn of all moral embellishment, integrity is made hollow by fraud; faith is maintained toward none; being is successfully undermined by nothingness. Le Misanthrope emerges as the third stage in a dialectic: the idealism of Dom Garcie, having been brought down to earth, no longer focuses exclusively on the ideal virtues of the beloved. Alceste, in fact, demands only one thing: let a man be a man. This seemingly modest desire for integrity bespeaks a faith in mankind which everyone in the play betrays. A heavenly reconciliation is achieved in Amphitryon. Impossible demands are relegated to Mount Olympus. Mortals are taught to place their faith in the only kind of integrity to which they dare aspire: a reciprocated love that fuses reason and passion so well that not even a god can prevail against it.

Lazarillo de Tormes cannot be considered simply as a story of the moral degeneration of a potentially good boy who, under the influence of his pitiless masters, becomes a selfish and cynical cuckold, utterly blind to his moral degradation. The episode with the Squire reveals that the mature Lazaro (as he declares it himself) still has deep feelings of pity and charity for the Squire and those like him, just as he did when he was still a boy. Thus, this most important of Christian virtues has not been lost in the adult picaro. The capacity for human compassion and sympathy which is clearly revealed in the style of the autobiography must also be assigned to Lazaro and not merely to the anonymous author. And it is Lazaro, in his own moral judgments, who tends to condemn those who are selfish and without charity but is sympathetic to those who are generous and weak, regardless of their social sins; e.g., Zaide steals for love, the priest and friar for lust and for themselves (“para sus devotas y para ayuda de otro tanto”). Lazaro's final situation contributes to the ironic twist: From an external or social point of view, he is at the bottom of the moral scale, but his capacity for charity elevates him when compared with his selfish and lecherous masters. It is this subtle irony, of which the author was probably conscious, both as an artist and as a satirist, that lends moral ambiguity, as well as artistic complexity, to the main character and to the total conception of the work.

L'umorismo, not merely a theoretical treatise on humor, is also Pirandello's introspective clarification and confession of the genesis and motives of his art. As such, it provides the best approach to his creative writings. Shortly after the publication of this essay in 1908 began the long dispute with Croce, whose negative attitude toward Pirandello was to influence many followers of aesthetic criticism. Although Croce's opposition cannot be attributed to preconceived hostility, he issued a sharply dialectical dissection of the essay and failed to recognize that Pirandello's theory cannot be dealt with in terms of logic and philosophical exegesis alone. The style, too, is significant, and for the very reasons that motivated Croce's disapproval, namely because Pirandello makes use of imagery as well as of philosophical definitions—a dichotomy that reflects the author's complex temperament. Tilgher, on the other hand, understood the anti-intellectualistic nature of Pirandello's art and published a stimulating interpretation of his theatre, one that was at first recognized as valid by the playwright himself. Often regarded as a “revelation” of Pirandello to the world and to himself, this interpretation should be more properly viewed in the light of Tilgher's own theory of the critic's preeminence and farsighted leadership in literature. In fact, after a period of “complicity,” Pirandello firmly reasserted his autonomy and rejected all implications of the critic's insistent patronage.

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the “sympathetic imagination.” In his opening sentence J. D. O'Hara (“Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination,” PMLA, LXXXI, December 1966, 552–562) intends, I think, to use the term “sympathetic imagination” in a broad sense—broader than in his second paragraph, where, in order to disclose “the limitations of sympathy in the creation of art,” Mr. O'Hara seems to confine “sympathy” to the poet's identification with character. He proceeds, then, to designate “associational theory” rather than “sympathy” as grounds for Hazlitt's objection to egotistical poetry—like Wordsworth's—and to describe this objection as “basically not aesthetic but moral” (p. 553). Mr. O'Hara has written a closely reasoned and useful article; but when, later in the article, he describes the “formative imagination” (p. 561), he again separates elements in Hazlitt's aesthetic which, I think, are not as readily separable as he implies.