When “Six Cultures” appeared as part of the MLA Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in 1961, we planned to make periodic revisions and we here publish revised and updated versions of the lists in four languages. Readers interested in French and Luso-Brazilian cultures may consult the original lists in the Appendix to the MLA Selective List of Materials (New York: MLA, 1962. $1.00) or they may obtain a reprint of the “Six Cultures” article by sending 50 cents to the MLA Materials Center. We reprint here the general introduction by Lawrence Wylie, Chairman of the original committee.

Jusqu‘à présent la plupart des études consacrées au sentiment de la nature au XVIIe siècle ont eu pour but d'infirmer les thèses de Lanson et de Brunetière en s'efforçant de prouver par des exemples précis l'existence de ce sentiment à une époque réputée pour sa peinture exclusive de l'homme. Mais ce grand pas étant accompli, d'autres questions se posent. Il conviendrait de déterminer dans quelle mesure le sentiment de la nature affecte certains courants de la philosophie, de la morale ou de l'esthétique au XVIIe siècle. Il importerait aussi de se demander comment l'homme sensible au spectacle du monde pense l'homme. Peu d‘écrivains de cette époque furent plus sensibles à ce spectacle que le chevalier de Méré. En même temps personne ne contribua plus que lui à définir l'idéal de “L'Honnête Homme.”

On the evidence available, it is possible to arrive at a considerable variety of views on the artistic technique of the author of Beowulf. Even so, it is doubtful whether we should attribute to him the subtlety of a Sartre, as, apparently, does J. L. Rosier in his “A Design for Treachery: The Unferth Intrigue.”

It is self-evident that teacher training is the heart of the matter in any consideration of trends in any area of the curriculum. As the anthropologist regards the practices of childrearing as both a segment of the culture and the surest index to its value system of today and tomorrow, so we may look at our procedures of training teachers as a part of our own professional folkways and at the same time a revelation of which things are to be prized now and in the future. But to think of trends is necessarily to think of the historic conflict of change with continuity, and to think of change raises the question, With reference to what? I therefore want to comment on the themes of change versus continuity (better known as inertia), of relevance, and of the preparation of teachers of modern foreign languages.

Last September, PMLA carried a report by J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator of Project English, on “Project English: The First Year.”1 It is now time for a report from the second Coordinator, even as the third, John C. Gerber, assumes responsibility for the still evolving program. The Original Program Project English is a little more than two and a half years old. It is considerably different now, however, from what it was when we first heard of it in the late fall of 1961. Then, for example, we were warned that one should stress reading and writing when presenting a proposal. Literature, somehow, was suspect.

The complex and haunting strangeness of Britomart's night at Isis Church in Spenser's Faerie Queene v.vii guarantees that we take no stingy monistic view of its allegorical possibilities. Of these possibilities, however, the historical allegory has been neglected lately, surprisingly in view of the topical allusiveness of much of Book v. Possibly the justice and equity allegorized in the episode have seemed to be too obviously relevant to Queen Elizabeth's rule for anyone to give them an exact point of reference in contemporary affairs. I believe, however, that particularity of historical reference was intended by Spenser. Contemporaries tended to treat dreams as fairly precise communications.

Although the years 1701 through 1703 saw the number of Collierite publications markedly diminish, the zeal of the reformers and the consequent distress of the theatres seems hardly to have abated. It was in this perilous atmosphere that Farquhar attempted perhaps the most ambitious and potentially telling attack upon Collier's abolitionist demands: the publications, in February and December 1702 respectively, of the Discourse upon Comedy and The Twin-Rivals. The relativism of the Discourse strikes at Collier's aesthetic position both by denying the validity of his classical authorities and by affirming that of popular consensus. The Twin-Rivals rebuts the force of Collier's moral invective by presenting, concretely, the kind of moral comedy that Collier himself claimed to favor and that the various apologies for comedy had presented, verbally, as a justifying ideal. In demonstrating the value of comedy, Farquhar meant to confound the abolitionists and make the stage flourish. The Twin-Rivals failed and thus accomplished neither. I would suggest, however, that its ethos and its structure make it an extremely interesting document as well as a skillful play. I should like to discuss its purposeful novelty and its relationship both to Farquhar's canon and to the development of the stage at the beginning of the eighteenth century, drawing an eventual moral.

Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.

Rabelais's book opens with a cryptic allusion to a “sustantificque mouelle” hidden under the surface hilarity of his story and ends (if it was he who ended it) with an equally cryptic pronouncement by an oracular bottle. The penetration which is urged at the beginning—through fiber and bone to the marrow of truth which they protect—is evidently consummated at the end, the physiological turning into a geological image as Pantagruel and his friends penetrate the underground sanctuary where, in a flood of miraculous light, one may hear the word of truth, which is Trinch. The opinions of critics on this pronouncement range from considering it an absurd joke to a grave and specific allegory of one thing or another. Similarly, the substantific marrow which Rabelais promises us at the beginning is taken by some as a joke which hides a truth and by others as a joke that hides nothing but another joke. Most agree that there is a mixture of joke and seriousness in Rabelais's book, but some insist on a complete disjunction between the comic and the serious, while others argue for a close interpenetration.

Ronsard's last considered observation on . the relationship between philosophy and lyric poetry in the preface to the Odes (1587) is implicitly a reaffirmation of Du Bellay's confidence in the philosophic capacities of the French language,1 though expressed in a less exuberant manner: “Tu dois sçavoir que toute sorte de Poesie a l'argument propre & convenable à son subject: ... la Lyrique, l'amour, le vin, les banquets dissolus, les danses, masques, chevaux victorieux, escrime, joustes & tournois, & peu souvent quelque argument de Philosophie” (i, 59). This retrospective program, if one may be forgiven the incongruity of the phrase, had been abundantly realized by Ronsard, in so far as “quelque argument de Philosophie” was concerned, and not only in his lyric poetry. For a moment, it is true, in a variant of 1578 of the ode Du retour de Maclou de la Haie (1550), the poet utters a gay disapproval of philosophers: “Les Philosophes je n'appreuve” (i, 208). But it is clear that Ronsard's intention is to celebrate the return of his friend with brimming cup, and the apparent condemnation of philosophers is nothing more than a warning to the enemies of good wine that their presence at the festivities would be superfluous. In the following edition, that of 1584, “Les Philosophes” became “Ces vieux Medecins.”

The conferences on which this report is based were financed by a contract between the MLA and the U. S. Office of Education. The Advisory Committee of the FL Program, at its November 1963 meeting, recommended that the report be published in PMLA as a thoughtful consideration of an important problem.

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon Spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:

Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
Then dy the Same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill
My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
Then mine appareil shall display before yee
That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

To flourish, scholarship must have at hand in copious supply the recorded materials which advance its studies. The history of scholarship is consequently in large measure a history of the diffusion of the materials for scholarly research.

The invention of printing is of course the event which most dramatically accelerated this diffusion. But in our own day microphotography has had an effect of comparable importance. Because of microfilm and the related microphotographic processes any scholar or scholarly community may now have at hand at moderate expense what was previously reserved to a few, or—even more significant—what until recently was not conveniently accessible to any scholar no matter how great his independent means nor how ancient and rich his institution. Unpublished manuscripts scattered in dozens of repositories; printed works long out of print, unprocurable and dispersed; other sources so impermanent that deterioration erases them within a generation—for all of these microphotography has provided a means of diffusion for scholarly purposes where even printing has failed, and which is in some respects even superior to printing.

The drunken porter in Macbeth says: “Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (ii.iii). The speech has often been used as one of the means of dating the play because “equivocation” became notorious at the trial and execution of Father Henry Garnett that followed the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. Also, it has been well recognized that equivocation is a major theme in the play, both in the narrow sense of common duplicity and in the larger sense of a blur between appearance and reality. There is equivocation between Macbeth as a man and Macbeth as a woman, and it is Lady Macbeth who cries out to become unsexed. The play is filled with equivocal appearances—women with beards, Macbeth in “borrowed robes,” day turned into night, a peaceful castle without and a burning cauldron of evil within. “All nature's germens” tumble together, and “the whole frame of things” becomes “disjoint.” This paper does not deny these usual interpretations of equivocation.

The best remembered aphorists have contrived to state new truths in brief and telling ways. Less fascinated than most authors with leaf, twig, and branch, they strike immediately for the pith. Almost every reader of their work first pays tribute to this concentration of effort with the repeated shock of joy and enlightenment that marks his response. It seems likely that such writers try to achieve a compression of statement that corresponds to the instantaneous character of their insights. Like Dante, they are stirred by the hope of economizing glimpses of eternity into single-worded statements; unlike him, they never quite despair of doing so. Anyone who has responded to the success of their efforts can appreciate the temptation to discover something about the means by which these paradoxical compositions achieve their effects, particularly those that time and again tumble their reader's complacency. It is with the ways in which those effects derive from the structural patterns of the aphorism that this essay is concerned. The method will be first to classify aphorisms according to structure and then to examine the ways in which each class affects the reader.

Shakespeare's selectivity in adapting a novella from Giraldi Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi into his own Othello has long been apparent; students of Shakespeare's play have stressed his transformation of the source by speeding up the action, condensing the plot, reassessing the characterization, and transfiguring the commonplace attitudes toward an interracial marriage presented in the source into a tragedy of love. But no one has demonstrated how a close comparison of single words and phrases in Othello and in the novella can help us to understand how the transformation took place, how words and phrases such as vedere cogl' occhi, vendetta, satio, and la giustizia divina are translated imaginatively into the thematic imagery of ocular proof, the configuration of revenge, satisfaction, and satiation, and the movement from justice to mercy which Desdemona offers to Othello. Clearly, such a comparison of the play and its source affords a critical perspective upon the verbal drama especially. But studies of the imagery in Othello neglect its source entirely, and source studies, merely footnoting the verbal parallels as they appear, seem to maintain the critical view that marvels how Shakespeare could have created so much out of so little. It is as if Shakespeare's characteristic ingredient, the poetic interplay of words and images in the verbal fund of his drama, had no parallel in the verbal fund of his source.

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”

Und wollen andeuten ... wie Böses und Gutes aus
einem einigen Grunde urstände, als Licht und
Finsterniß, Leben und Tod, Freude und Leyd; und
wie das in seinem Grunde sey. (Mysterium Magnum, Vorrede, 11).

BÖHMES Philosophieren trägt den Charakter einer leidenschaftlichen Theodizee. Gott ist das unbedingte und uneingeschränkte Gute; von dieser Prämisse will der Christ Böhme nicht abweichen. Aber er ist ebenso weit davon entfernt, das Böse in einer Welt zu übersehen, die das summum bonum geschaffen hat. Für den mit der christlichen Tradition Vertrauten ergibt sich damit die Notwendigkeit, die souveräne Willkür Jehovas, die Existenz von Tod, Teufel und Hölle, die Lehre von der Verstocktheit der Bösen und ihrer ewigen Verdammnis vor sich selber zu rechtfertigen und mit dem oben angeführten Gottesbegriff in Einklang zu bringen. Böhme wehrt sich energisch gegen die Idee der Prädestination, die das theologische Dilemma rational auflöst, indem sie das Bild eines gleichzeitig guten und grausamen Gottes entwirft, der sein Recht zur Willkür in der Verteilung von Gnade und Ungnade aus der Erhabenheit des Schöpfers bezieht, der nur sich selber Rechenschaft schuldet. Zwar wird das doppelte Gesicht Gottes zum Kernstück seiner Emanationsphilosophie, die absichtliche Vorherbestimmung zum Bösen seitens Jehovas hingegen ist derjenige Aspekt der Prädestinationslehre, den Böhme nicht hinnehmen kann.

The success of smollett's Humphry Clinker has been attributed largely to the novel's central character, the misanthropic sentimentalist from Wales, Matthew Bramble. In Matt Bramble, Smollett finally created an acceptable, nonmalicious satirist who could express benevolently and yet virulently the satire he had been striving to write in his earlier novels. Matt's misanthropy, which evokes from him the invective of the traditional railing satirist, derives from several interrelated causes. In the first place, Matt is a valetudinarian who has not dwelt in the busy haunts of men “within these last thirty years.” Matt often appears as somewhat of a querulus laudator temporis acti, even though he wishes to deny it. He admits that the “rotten parts of human nature” have probably always existed, but his sudden reappearance into the world suggests to him that mankind has “contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity” since his youth. In the second place, Matt suffers physically from the gout and the spleen, so that, as his nephew, Jery, writes, “his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility” (xi, 20). Matt is, then, in part an eighteenth-century splenetic humorist whose misanthropy can be traced medically to the humorous melancholy cynics and misanthropes of the Renaissance character-books and Stuart drama. In Con-greve's words, the “character of a splenetic and peevish Humour” displays itself in a “satirical wit.”