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.

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group—Pope, Swift, and others—in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote Part i of Gulliver in about 1721–22, Part ii around 1722–23, Part iv in 1723, and Part iii (after Pt. iv) in 1724–25. Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.

We Felt honoured and pleased at the Canadian Embassy to have been asked to participate in this annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. We welcomed this opportunity to register our interest in your important and useful field of work, and thereby to add still another point of contact in the friendly relations between our two countries.

It is not surprising that André Chénier's poem L'Invention has been much discussed, and that the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively along the lines of literary history. To begin with, this poem excited the greatest attention on the part of critics and scholars in the heyday of the historical method. Secondly, it is, or seems to be, a poetic manifesto, containing doctrines and ideas which lend themselves to consideration in abslraclo. Thirdly, this manifesto is uniquely provocative of historical and comparative analyses since it appears to mark a turning away of the poet from the aesthetic which characterizes the bulk of his extant work, and to herald the composition of important new works which exist only in disappointing fragments. Thus, the reader who follows the tortuous course of Chénier criticism plotted by Paul Glachant and who has read Paul Dimoff's more recent study, finds raised over and over again, in connection with L'Invention, questions which have little to do with the poem considered as a poem. Was Chénier the last of the classicists, the critics and scholars ask, or was he the first of the romanticists? Did he have two manières, or three, or one which could be pulled inside out and only appear different, like a reversible garment? If Hermès and L'Amérique, the poems which L'Invention seems to foreshadow, had been completed, would they have been masterful epics, or epic failures? These questions, and others like them, are discussed at length, but only rarely and negligently do the students of L'Invention hint that it is itself a poem and not merely a discursive recipe for the writing of poetry. Yet, L'Invention obviously is a poem in spite of its doctrinal “message,” and as such must be read with an eye for those poetic principles which should inform it, which should guarantee its organic unity, its formal autonomy. Such a literary reading must be the basis for any discussion of the ideas contained in the poem.

Die einheit von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren und ihrer Fortsetzung, betitelt Wilhelm Meisiers Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, wird von der neueren Goethe-Forschung fast einstimmig bejaht. Die Verbindung zwischen den beiden Romanen wird einmal durch die vielen Personen hergestellt, die zuerst in den Lehrjahren und dann wieder in den Wanderjahren auftreten. Unter diesen Personen stent natiirlich an erster Stelle der Titelheld selbst, der in beiden Romanen den Mittel-punkt einnimmt. In den Wander jahren werden ferner pädagogische und bevölkerungspolitische Plane, auf die in den Lehrjahren schon hinge-wiesen wird, fortgesetzt und vertieft. Die Forschung hat diese Verbin-dungspunkte geniïgend hervorgehoben. Bisher ist es jedoch nicht gelun-gen, ein Motiv im Wilhelm Meister selbst zu finden, mit dem Goethe diese Einheit zwischen den Lehrjahren und den Wanderjahren auch dichterisch zum Ausdruck bringt. Das Bild vom kranken Königssohn, das an mehreren wichtigen Stellen der Lehrjahre erwähnt wird, bildet ein solches Motiv, das von einem zum anderen Roman weist. Ein beträcht-licher Teil dessen, was in den Wander jahren vor sich geht, wird in dem Geschehen, das auf dem Bild vom kranken Königssohn seine Darstellung gefunden hat, schon vorgedeutet. Andererseits lassen sich einige Szenen der Wanderjahre erst dann völlig deuten, wenn man sie im Zusammen-hang mit diesem Bilde betrachtet. Dieser Gesichtspunkt erweist sich als besonders wertvoll bei einer Analyse des Schlufibildes der Wanderjahre, dessen tiefe Bedeutung für den gesamten Wilhelm Meister sich so zum ersten Mal offenbart.

Le développement des théories de l'honnêteté en France au dix-septième siècle a fait l'objet d'une étude bien connue de Maurice Magendie. Cette excellente étude s'arrête aux environs de 1660. Or, l'expression “honnête homme” est restée d'un usage courant bien après cette date, et le concept de l'honnêteté n'a pas cessé d‘être analysé et discuté. Il nous semble done intéressant d'essayer de suivre l‘évolution des idées sur l'honnêteté, au moins pendant les quarante dernières années du siècle.

Presque tous lës érudits français de la Renaissance qui ont étudié les origines lointaines de leur pays sont venus buter sur ce problème ardu: d'où vient le mot France? que signifie le nom de Franci porté par une obscure tribu germanique avant de désigner le peuple français? La légende de Francus ne constitue pas le seul essai de réponse à ces difficiles questions. A côté des textes qui, avant Lemaire de Belges, développent le thème des origines troyennes de la France, il en est bien d'autres qui proposent du terme Franci des explications différentes: francus est un adjectif synonyme de féroce, ou une épithète signifiant ‘franc’ ou ‘libre.’ En outre, un nouveau cycle de légendes étymologiques fondé sur le mot Galli fait son apparition à la fin du quinzième siècle, lorsque des humanistes épris de bonne latinité affectent d'appeler “Gaulois” les habitants de la France. Le but de cette étude est de montrer l'incidence de ces problèmes étymologiques, non seulement sur l'œuvre de poètes comme Lemaire de Belges et Ronsard, mais aussi sur les écrits de plusieurs historiens, philosophes et théoriciens politiques entre les Illustrations de Gaule (1510) et la Franciade (1572).

It Has Been a rare privilege this afternoon to hear these excellent papers describing widely divergent linguistic situations in neighbor nations stretching from the South Seas to the Canadian Rockies in the Far Northwest. The distinguished speakers have given our own Program a new perspective; and their contributions are a generous response to an FL Communiqué which we sent last August to some 160 persons in thirty-five countries, in an effort to tell our foreign colleagues the story of what is happening to languages in the United States. Our situation is of course different from any of those described, but this very diversity can suggest to us valuable lessons.

Astage history of The Cenci by Kenneth N. Cameron and Horst Frenz—“a first attempt at a task obviously long overdue” (p. 1081)—appeared in 1945 and, in uncovering some eleven productions in six countries over a fifty-year period, applied the first practical evidence to the long-debated contention that The Cenci is not an effective dramatic work. Although the history to this point was not an extensive one, the Cameron-Frenz study established that The Cenci could no longer be called a closet drama: it had, in fact, performed well as an acting play on more than one occasion. Hence, with skillful handling, it might be expected to do so in future presentations. It is unlikely that a more positive conclusion can be stated regarding The Cenci as a theatre piece. Nevertheless I feel, in the light of an impressive number of recent Cenci productions, that a continuing search of its stage history would be worthwhile, not only to substantiate the previous findings, but also (1) to indicate the interesting directions its record has taken since 1945, (2) to identify some of its limitations on the present-day stage, and (3) to bring it once again to the attention of scholars, directors, and producers who may still hold Edward Dowden's belief that Shelley, “unversed in the secrets of theatrical effect, [did not know] how to fit an acting play for the boards.”

When coleridge, in the famous Chapter xxii of his Biographia Literaria, used the “uncouth and new-coined word” matter-of-faclness to describe one of Wordsworth's “defects,” he was accurately putting his finger on a strain of prosaic prolixity that is all too evident in Wordsworth's poetry. But when he went on to find the principal cause of this matter-of-factness in “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself,” was he equally accurate? There is no question that Wordsworth, for all that the earth could be to him “an unsubstantial faery place,” was a hardheaded hillsman with an eye to a shilling and a fact; Raymond D. Havens well pointed out that “it was in the man as well as in the poetry that Coleridge lamented a deficiency.” Coleridge's complaint of “minuteness and fidelity” amounts, however, almost to a charge of unselective, photographic detail, of scrupulous concern for factual accuracy for its own sake. And this charge has been and is still being echoed: Emile Legouis writes of “Wordsworth's veneration for accurate facts and minute details” and John Jones, of Wordsworth's “delusion that he had done what was required of him if he stuck closely to the facts.”

L'espion du Grand-Seigneur or Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, perhaps best known as the work which inspired Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, is usually considered the beginning of the “foreign spy” convention in English literature. Modern readers of the six French (or eight English) duodecimo volumes may be puzzled to discover its appeal. When the collection of letters first appeared, however, it was immediately termed “un tour d'esprit … & une fiction ingénieuse”; the eighteenth-century reading public welcomed it as written with “beaucoup d'agrément, & d'une variété fort amusante,” and “as instructive and delightful, as the Manner of finding it was strange and surprizing.”

An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.

Despite all the vast amount of paper and ink devoted to the topic headed “Goethe and Music,”—and students of the subject may well be impressed to learn that Calvin Brown, after checking the extensive bibliography of this field recently issued in book form by Frederick Sternfeld, found some seventy titles in his own file which were not in Sternfeld's list—despite all this erudition and toil, there is one little angle of the subject which appears to have been overlooked. And yet it seems to me more eloquent of Goethe's originality of mind than most of what has been printed regarding his relation to music.

It seems to me one of the most exciting and baffling characteristics of Eichendorff's art that, if I may use this paradox, his most profound insights are hidden on the surface. They travel, a strangely elusive contraband, in the full light of day, so that the last truths of his poetic vision, the whole web of his religious beliefs, his intellectual conceptions, his socio-ethical postulates transform themselves into the most deceptively simple folktunes, sung by his people with an ease and unconcern usually assigned in the secular psalter of a nation to that section which is headed “folk song, author unknown.” Goethe's solemn warning with regard to the ultimate secret and mystery of life, his injunction “Tell it no one but the sages,” was utterly lost on Eichendorff. He told it to every listening ear; and so it could happen that what in reality was an exploration and manifestation of truth, the poetic transmission of knowledge, was taken—or mistaken—as a bewitching play of lyrical mood and atmosphere. A comprehensive and integrated view of life thus turned in the public's hand into a picture book, lovely and self-contained, easy to peruse; and for the reader it was easy to absorb its sensuous refulgence without comprehending the meaning of design, color, and composition.

Freud, der Philosoph, lebte von früh auf in Hader mit den Philoso-phen. Die Religionen behandelte er wie irgendein Aufklärer des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts—doch subtiler, mit den Waffen einer Psychologie, die sie noch nicht ahnten. Mit den Kunsten lebte er in Frieden ... man könnte fast sagen: in sehnsuchtiger Bewunderung.

In his admirable lectures, The Problem of Style, J. Middleton Murry illustrates one of the most common meanings of the word “style” by this remark: “I know who wrote the article in last week's Saturday Review—Mr. Saintsbury. You couldn't mistake his style.” Here, according to Mr. Murry, “‘style’ means that personal idiosyncrasy of expression by which we recognize a writer.” This is a limited conception of style, but it is useful in studying the style of certain writers. Murry mentions Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Meredith, and Henry James as appropriate subjects for this approach. We may add, with the authority of precedent, Thomas Carlyle.