In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer as commentator occupies an unusual role. It is indeed common for authors to enter their own works in many ways. Writers as diverse as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Fielding, Thackeray, and George Eliot all do so. Sometimes, as with Fielding, the author may keep a distance between himself and his story; sometimes, as with Dante, he may penetrate into his story as a major or the major character; and sometimes, as with Homer, he may both enter and withdraw at will. When Homer directly addresses one of his characters, he is deliberately breaking down, for artistic reasons, the aloofness to which he generally holds.

In two previous articles I have examined the origin and semantic evolution of the French word nuance and of the word matiz, used today in the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula to express the concept “nuance,” ‘a barely perceptible degree of difference (in a color, various kinds of human expression, the forms of nature, etc.).’ The present article will treat the origin of the word sfumatura, which, since the latter half of the eighteenth century, has served as the Italian means for expressing the “nuance” concept.

First of all I should like to express my deepest appreciation for your invitation to participate in the discussions at this Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association. It is indeed a great honor you have extended to my country in inviting me to speak to such a distinguished gathering. It is, however, an honor which I have accepted with some hesitancy. As a layman in the field of linguistics I know that I am not the right person to address an association of scholars. Moreover, my desire to make a somewhat valuable contribution to these discussions has been greatly handicapped by the lack of source material and reference books which I wished to consult but which are not presently available in Washington.

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow; their ease is weariness and sweat; they have one good day after many bad; they are vowed to all manner of labour; they are for ever swallowing their fear; they expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death.… Great is the honour which knights deserve, and great the favour which kings should shew them, for all the reasons which I have told.… Of what profit is a good knight? I tell you that through good knights is the king and the kingdom honoured, protected, feared and defended.… I tell you that without good knights, the king is like a man who has neither feet nor hands.—Gutierre Díaz de Gámez

During the eighteenth century it was generally assumed that Addison's marriage to the Countess of Warwick had been an unhappy one. Pope's caustic words in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnol (1. 393) about “marrying discord in a noble wife” were supposed to refer to Addison and his countess. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on hearing of Addison's appointment as Secretary of State, had sarcastically remarked: “Such a post as that, and such a wife as the Countess, do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that is asthmatick, and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both.” The tradition came to full flower in Johnson's Lives of the English Poets: “... at last the lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, ‘Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.‘ The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness: it neither found them nor made them equal. She always remembered her own rank, and thought herself entitled to treat with very little ceremony the tutor of her son.” Johnson gave no authority for his “uncontradicted report,” and it seems likely that the Great Cham was supplementing the available evidence with a liberal use of imagination—a faculty which he elsewhere so strongly deprecated. Still the tradition continued, and at the beginning of the next century, Richard Phillips, in Addisoniana, related as a current anecdote, “that though Holland-house was so large a mansion, yet it could not contain Mr. Addison, the Countess of Warwick, and one guest, Peace.”

Cervantine criticism is divided on the question whether El curioso impertinente is relevant to the total context of Don Quixote. Américo Castro, writing in 1925, compiled a list—which he declared to be “not exhaustive”—of six critics who were opposed to the interpolation of the short story, and five who welcomed its inclusion. He himself created a tie by accepting El curioso impertinente as a further exemplification of the theme of error and its consequences; the tale, that is, was seen to reinforce the thematic structure of Don Quixote as Castro then interpreted it. Since the making of this classic summary of opinion a stalemate has reigned; no significant contribution to our understanding of the problem has been made. Some random examples from later commentators will establish this point.

The Map of the world conveys to us the fact that political boundaries are very often identical with linguistic boundaries. This is particularly the case in Europe. Each people there has its own language and this language is also the primary element of its particular culture. This is true of the larger countries like England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia and Poland, and is almost true of France, whose linguistic domain on the European continent overlaps part of only Belgium and Switzerland. This statement applies also to the smaller countries: Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Balkan States. For all these peoples, and for many others, unity of language is one of the features contributing to political unity.

The most pretentious treatise on Castilian versification before the Golden Age is the “Libro segundo en que trata de la prosodia i sîlaba” of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramdtica castellana, first published in 1492. It is written by a scholar—not a poet, though Nebrija, Spain's first great humanist, did write some verses—a scholar whose classic learning determined his approach to the study of the vernacular in matters of versification. Nebrija's learning, however, did not blind him to the fundamental facts of Castilian practice in verse, though it may have slightly obscured his vision at times and warped his interpretation of certain phases of Spanish metrics. And it did cause him to discover in Castilian verse certain fundamental principles hidden from many theorists and prosodists even to the present day, yet for centuries instinctively practiced by poets. Nebrija studied and analyzed the nature of Castilian verse “en el buen uso” (Cap. viii) as it existed shortly before the introduction of Italianate meters in Spanish. The time is significant, as En-cina explains in the introduction to his Arte de poesia castellana (p. ii):

This is the first attempt on the part of the FL Program to investigate the foreign language requirements in graduate schools throughout the United States. To keep the problem within manageable limits it was restricted to three advanced degrees, the M.A., the M.S., and the Ph.D., and to requirements in fields of study other than foreign languages. No effort was made to gain information from graduate schools which are clearly and strictly professional, such as schools of law, music, theology, medicine, and education. We used as the basis of our mailing list the USOE Circular No. 418, Earned Degrees Conferred by Higher Educational Institutions, 1953–1954, and sent a lengthy questionnaire to two kinds of institutions: (1) all graduate schools which granted any Ph.D. degrees, and (2) all schools listed in the Circular which granted 30 or more master's degrees. This arbitrary figure was chosen because it seemed necessary to eliminate from consideration several hundred small colleges which each year award a handful of master's degrees; most of these, presumably, have no language requirement.

The letters of Dr. Gui Patin (1601–72) are deservedly famous as a source for seventeenth-century medical matters and other contemporary comment. In a letter dated 23 November 1669 to Dr. André Falconet (1612–91) of Lyon, Patin writes that it is rumored Molière wants to do a comedy about a certain Dr. Cressé and his pending court trial. A month later, 25 December 1669, having given details of the affair in previous letters, Patin writes more specifically: “Le procès de M. Cressé est sur le bureau, mais je n'entends point dire qu'il avance; on m'a dit que M. de Molière prétend en faire une comédie ridicule sous le titre du Médecin fouetté et du barbier cocu” (iii, 728). As far as I know, the outcome of this affair has never yet been presented. The Commentaires de la faculté de médecine for 1669–70 (Vol. xv) which gave more exact data led me to discover in the Archives Nationales the hitherto unmentioned final court settlement, dated 4 February 1670.

WHEN Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.

Every reader of Dryden's critical essays must recall his concern with the sound as well as the sense of poetry. In the “Original and Progress of Satire,” for example, he says that “versification and meter are the greatest pleasures of poetry. … When there is anything deficient in numbers, and sound, the reader is uneasy, and dissatisfied; he wants something of his complement; desires somewhat which he finds not.” We can be sure, therefore, that Dryden more than some other poets paid close attention to the fabric of his verse. But it is another question whether the regularity or “correctness” which he aimed at, and which he achieved for his translation of Virgil, is generally admired today. If it is admired, it is admired only as one admires an antique. The taste of most modern poets is not for regularity but for liberty bordering on license. In this respect they are like the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans who wrote—to use the phrase which Dryden took from the French —prose mesurée.

The question of the dignity of man and his place in the universe was much discussed in the Renaissance. With an inflated idea of their departure from medieval tradition, the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tried hard to arrive at a new, “humanistic,” evaluation of man. We know now, of course, that their departure was not as sharp as they thought and that certain traditional arguments persisted in one form or another. Herschel Baker, in his study, The Dignity of Man, published in 1947, showed the persistence of some themes and the introduction of others, especially in the Neoplatonic and Protestant thinkers. It is the purpose of this article to examine the way in which the question was handled by Montaigne, who was up to date in his readings on the subject and who had the advantage of coming at the end of the Continental Renaissance; to determine the extent of his departure from tradition, the paths which he followed in his thinking, and the degree of independence which he exercised. Since man is the central subject of the Essais, Montaigne's opinions are likely to be well thought out and carefully formulated. The material presented here can hardly be new; it is the sweep and originality of Montaigne's views that need to be pointed out.'

This is a fifth revision of statistics first published in the Supplement A to the September 1953 number of PMLA. The original listing was based on institutions offering the B.A. degree and listed as accredited in the American Council on Education's American Universities and Colleges, 1952. At that time, questionnaires were sent to the registrars of 767 colleges and universities granting the B.A., and replies were received from all.

While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.

It is, Indeed, a privilege for me to discuss before this gathering of distinguished scholars the subject of “The Role of Languages in the Development of National Consciousness in India.” It is a subject of the greatest importance for the stability and progress of our country. It is also one of the toughest subjects ever confronted by a new nation. Efforts to resolve it constitute a most significant case history and experiment in democratic ideology. In fact, on the result of this experiment may well depend the success of democracy in India and other Asian countries which have similar language problems.

Aprominent verbal characteristic of Henry Fielding's The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great is the excessive use of the words “great” and “greatness.” That this serves certain specific purposes in the political and moral satire of the work has long been recognized. That it may owe something to the writings of Machiavelli is nowadays likely to pass unnoticed by readers who are not acquainted with the particular translation from which Fielding derived his surprisingly detailed and extensive knowledge of that author. Actually, Jonathan Wild contains numerous echoes of passages in the writings of Machiavelli. In addition to resemblances involving portions of the Prince and Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, there are numerous parallels in content, structure, and diction with the Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca There is visible adaptation of Machiavelli's method in the Life of Castruccio in that Fielding plays with the conventions of classical imaginative biography. There is also burlesque of Machiavelli's historical method. In sum, Jonathan Wild is at once an imitation, a parody, and a criticism of Machiavelli.

Aune epoque où maints artistes de talent pratiquaient exclusivement des genres qui pussent plaire aux riches aristocrates ainsi qu'aux maîtresses de Louis XV—en particulier Boucher et son élève Fragonard, virtuoses de ce que Malraux appellera “l'art d'assouvissement”—un peintre, de nature modeste, avait courageusement résolu de faire uniquement œuvre de peintre et d'approfondir sa vision personnelle et irréductible du monde. Au cours de sa longue et laborieuse carrière, Chardin n'exploita que quelques genres mineurs: la scène d'intérieur et de vie domestique, la nature morte, et le portrait. Mais l'excellence et le charme discret de ses compositions sans prétention devaient lui attirer l'admiration, non seulement des amateurs d'art du dix-huitième siècle et de connaisseurs tels que Diderot, mais aussi des artistes contemporains, espèce particulièrement envieuse et difficile à contenter. Mais si son talent ne fut jamais contesté de son vivant, à l'encontre des décorateurs en vogue, Chardin ne s'enrichit jamais de la vente de ses tableaux qui, si admirés fussent-ils, n'en n'étaient pas moins considérés comme appartenant à un genre inférieur à “la grande peinture.” Il est cependant intéressant de noter que les lièvres, les chaudrons, et les pêches de Chardin exerceront une plus grande influence sur les chercheurs et les innovateurs du dix-neuvième siècle que les “machines” allégoriques et historiques de Carle Van Loo ou les scènes mélodramatiques et théâtrales de Greuze. Parmi les admirateurs de Chardin l'on peut compter notamment: Delacroix, Fantin-Latour, Pissarro, Cézanne, et Manet.

In the discussion we must start with two really striking facts, both very little known even among scholars close to Modern Hebrew; at least these scholars are not aware of their importance. In the first place you may have heard that Hebrew is a revived language, the language of the Bible come to life again in Israel. This is only partly true. Modern Hebrew—I know of no parallel in this respect—is a recreated language, a new Hebrew dialect, made of several ingredients. Most of them go back to the various layers of Hebrew in the past. Still, it is—and I am exaggerating deliberately—a kind of invented language, a kind of Hebrew Esperanto.