The Forgotten Man in the Purdue undergraduate language program was, as in most such programs, the non-major. Required to “pass off” four semesters of a foreign language, he endured (and we endured him) for two years of grammar and translation, usually interlinear, of the classics. Meanwhile our attention was primarily devoted to the dwindling minority of majors and minors. But the forgotten man did not forget us. Every June, as seniors became graduates, there was an increase in the ranks of the more or less influential citizens who remembered without enthusiasm their deadening experience with a presumably living language. It seems likely that a considerable portion of American isolationism and apathy to the national need for foreign languages can be traced to this experience on the part of our former students.

For the thirty years since its publication, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India has enjoyed the somewhat paradoxical status of being valued without being understood. It is generally recognized as one of the finest literary productions of this century; it is also commonly thought to be one of the most puzzling. No doubt, part of the reason for our difficulty in interpreting it is that the literary problems it raises are continuous with its philosophical problems, or, to put it another way, that the obscurities of the novel duplicate or disappear into the obscurities of life itself. We cannot, of course, expect to explain the latter mystery before attempting to explain the former, nor need it be necessary; yet, if we are to succeed in interpretation, we must guard against that most common critical error of assuming that our own philosophical predilections must apply universally. As Earl R. Wasserman recently observed, “Our failure to grasp as total and integrated experiences such works as … E. M. Forster's A Passage to India results from our not having succeeded as yet in bringing to these works the proper controlling cosmos, for each cosmos is the creation of the author.” Discovering the nature of this “cosmos” and relating it to structure, symbol, and theme of the novel will be the concern of the following pages.

If I undertake to describe the language program of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Princeton (as distinguished from work in non-European languages done there under other auspices) it is not in the belief that it embodies anything revolutionary or radically different in organization from that of any similar institution. If there is any virtue in such a description it lies rather in our having been able, with only a moderate degree of additional expense and dislocation, to adapt the traditional pattern to meet a reasonable modern standard.

The studies of Melville's poetry have been singularly few. Certainly we could rightfully have expected more in the light of contemporary interest in his prose, and few critics would have been more likely to encourage others to further and fuller studies than those who have discussed these poems in print.

It is Vitally important that teachers of modern foreign languages be adequately prepared for a task which more and more Americans are declaring essential to the national welfare. Though a majority of the language teachers in our schools are well trained, many have been poorly or inadequately prepared, often through no fault of their own. The undersigned therefore present this statement of what they consider the minimal, good, and superior qualifications of a secondary school teacher of a modern foreign language.

The increasing triumph of man over matter has come about through an understanding facilitated by the awakening of the scientific spirit. At the same time, the application of the scientific method to the study of man and his activities has been slower. Probably all humanists agree with Alexander Pope that “the proper study of mankind is man,” but there is less unanimity as to the proper method to be followed in such study. Still, the social sciences are gradually developing scientific methods of their own, based like nuclear science on statistics and probability.

Coinciding roughly with the establishment of the Third Republic, there developed in France a wave of anti-Semitism that was to lead ultimately to the Dreyfus affair. Thousands of Jews had moved to Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons after Germany took Alsace and Lorraine, bringing with them competition in finance, as well as a thick accent and coarse manners. It was also at this time (1882) that the great Catholic bank, the Union Générale, failed, ruining thousands of small investors. The action of the government in suddenly arresting for fraud the President and the Director of the firm just as they were attempting to rebuild their bank, and the subsequent accusation by the President, Eugène Bontoux, that the Jews, in league with the “Freemason” government, were responsible for having ruined him because he was a Christian, gave rise to one of the great anti-Semitic myths of the age. It was fully exploited by Edouard Drumont in La France juive (1886), a book that was widely sold and passionately discussed.

In Democratic Vistas Whitman defined a poem as an “image-making work.” If we are to judge by what he says in the prefaces about the function of poetry, the image to which he referred would be, in very general terms, the Ideal by which a nation is enabled to realize itself (as individuals and en masse), or, more particularly, the self of the individual poet, which is presented as archetype. The drift of the interpretation, in either case, is away from the esthetic; it moves instead toward areas that may be variously described as psychological, religious, or metaphysical. The tendency toward the esthetic is there, however; present in such a definition is a basis for speculating upon the kinds of imagery Whitman uses and the extent to which he relies upon the expressive possibilities of this traditional device of the poet—the relation between images and the final, single image.

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.

On sait que Sartre a placé son activité littéraire sous le signe de l'ethique. Il ne maintient que la poésie dans le domaine purement esthétique. Cette profession de foi n'a toutefois eu lieu qu'au lendemain de la guerre. Elle laisse derrière elle un premier groupe d'œuvres. Maintenant que ce premier stade de l'œuvre de Sartre est clos, on peut revenir sur l'étude des morceaux dont il se compose sans risquer les jugements prématurés que certains appliquent à la seconde phase, ou qu'on appliqua jadis à la première phase. C'est à l'examen de La Nausée que nous reviendrons dans cet article.

The task I have set myself is not the discovery of new meanings in Hopkins' poem—it has been so widely studied that we rather suffer from a plethora than a paucity of interpretations. I shall try instead to work out some principles which will enable me to choose between alternatives in a fashion which will be systematic. My interest is double: first, in such principles of method as may emerge; and, second, in their contribution to the elucidation of the poem by presenting a unified and logical whole.

Students of Spanish literature of the first half of the 19th century still stand indebted to Georges Le Gentil for his partial analysis of and index to thirty-one literary journals published in Madrid between 1803 and 1849. More recently additional light has been thrown on this period through the publication of complete indices for a number of reviews not covered by Le Gentil as well as for several included in his survey. Thus far, however, there has been no planned approach to duplicate the above efforts for the critical transition years, roughly 1850–70, from the decline of romanticism to the triumph of realism. The CSIC series to date includes only two reviews that afford but partial coverage for these years: the above-cited Semanario pintoresco espan̄ol (1836–57) and Educación pintoresca (1857–59). The latter, moreover, is of scant literary significance.

Whitman's “Song of Myself” has long been considered a loosely organized, perhaps even chaotic poem which is held together, if at all, by his own robust personality. He himself may have contributed to this concept of the poem. Untitled when it appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the 1856 edition; “Walt Whitman” in the 1860 edition, and was given the present title in the 1881 edition. This frequent change of title together with the many revisions made in the numbering of the sections and in the text itself suggests one of two possibilities: either Whitman was uncertain, perhaps confused as to the basic nature of what he was writing; or he was struggling to perfect a work of art the execution of which had fallen short of the conception. Too frequently the critics have assumed as self-evident the first of these possibilities. Inability to find a structure in “Song of Myself” has resulted, I believe, from a failure to find a center of relevancy, an “informing idea,” to which the parts of the poem may be related. It is the purpose of this paper to propose such a center, to show how it gives structure to the poem, and to examine the parts of the poem in detail to test their relevancy to this central “informing idea.”

To Remember the literary criticism of John Middleton Murry only as the “Inner Voice” praising the effort to “Muddle Through,” as T. S. Eliot has characterized it, is to ignore the comprehensive, largely concrete system of literary evaluation which preceded the later doctrine of romanticism. Unfortunately for contemporary literary criticism, most critics of Murry have seen fit to concentrate on what Murry wrote after he began to apply an externally-formulated religious or philosophical theory to literature, or have interpreted the early work in the light of that which followed. Too many who have remembered The Mystery of Keats and Heroes of Thought have forgotten the positive virtues of The Problem of Style and Countries of the Mind. And very few remember that Murry, developing an aesthetic theory similar to Eliot's “objective correlative,” used such a concept as the basic assumption in a consistent system of practical literary criticism. By making a more or less arbitrary distinction between the work primarily concerned with literature per se and that which followed, I believe that it is possible to discover many valuable insights and concepts which can have, or have had, validity for literary criticism today.

In the Spring of 1955, questionnaires were sent to one or more of the foreign language chairmen in each institution in the PMLA listing of department chairmen. Of 1,003 questionnaires sent to 953 institutions, 726 were filled in and returned by 678 institutions. The 277 chairmen in the other 275 institutions ignored or mislaid the original questionnaire and a duplicate reminder mailed in May. In assessing the summary of the returns, one should bear in mind the probability that many of these 275 chairmen laid aside the questionnaire because they had little to report. The returns may therefore present a somewhat rosy picture of foreign language teaching in American and Canadian colleges and universities in 1954–55.

During recent years language teachers have heard a great many claims about the importance of linguistics in language teaching. It is true that, during the last thirty years or so, many useful and rather exact techniques have been developed for the analysis and description of languages, and along with them have come many new attitudes toward language in general. Some of this must obviously have a bearing on language teaching. Yet when the hard pressed language teacher tries to learn something about this new science of linguistics, he finds it exasperatingly hard to do so. If he asks a linguistics colleague for an opinion on the recent popular books on language (some of which have been real best sellers), he is told that they will give him no idea whatever of what has really been going on in the science. If he asks whether he should read one of the classic books by a linguist, such as Leonard Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), he is told that in parts it is excruciatingly hard to read, and that it is out of date anyhow. Having been rebuffed on both points, all but the most heroic language teachers will give the matter up then and there. Linguists will then go on muttering about people who don't want to learn about what they are teaching, and language teachers will go on muttering about people who have a science so extraordinary that it can't be explained to outsiders.

Thomas de quincey, who professed a hearty dislike for “the assumption of judicial functions and authority over … brother authors,” published only one review of a novel. But he yielded to the digressive spirit and frequently discussed throughout his writings both the genre and the novelists he read during his long life (1785–1859). These included Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Le Sage, Marivaux, Rousseau, Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Maturin, Godwin, Captain Marryat, Scott, Galt, Miss Ferrier, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. His favorites were Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Hawthorne. Years after De Quincey's death his daughter Emily wrote: “No one will ever make much out of my father that does not take in [to account] the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs. Radcliffe order full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. … He never got beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel. He could make nothing of the modern novel with its pictures of real life.”

One of the things which mark Carlyle as a Romantic is the way he had of seeing the world in his own magnified image. When dyspepsia tormented him, he suffered like Prometheus, for all mankind. In the face of religious doubts he first complained bitterly, then fought like a panther, and the struggle, as fold in Sartor Resartus, was magnificent. Everywhere in Carlyle's writings, in his published works, his notebooks, and his letters, there is a playing-up of the specific to the general, the immediately personal to the universal. Small wonder if the student of his writings grows suspicious of Matilda crying Fire! And wonders whether many of the things which look autobiographical may not be, after all, largely imaginary, the products of a fertile romantic imagination. Consequently, against his steady complaints of ill health it has been observed, by Norwood Young, that Carlyle “never had a day's serious illness in his life.” And against the autobiographic character of Teufelsdroeckh's religious and moral crisis, described in Sartor, it was argued by Frederick W. Roe that Carlyle's “religious life underwent no convulsive transformation” at Leith-Walk. Finally, despite, the three chapters in Sartor and despite what Carlyle said on the subject, “The Everlasting Yea” itself may be denied, as when Sir Herbert Grierson declared in 1940 that Carlyle never really got beyond “The Everlasting No.”

It may seem paradoxical to claim that critics have not sufficiently concerned themselves with Dostoevsky's attack against rationalism in Crime and Punishment; yet this aspect of the novel has frequently failed to receive adequate attention, not because it has been overlooked, but because often it has been immediately noticed, perfunctorily mentioned, and then put out of mind as something obvious. Few writers have examined the consequence of the anti-rationalistic tenor of the novel: the extent to which it is paralleled by the structural devices incorporated in the work.