This report on the study of neglected languages in United States colleges and universities in 1962–63 shows that the neglect is diminishing, with enrollments of some 17,000 in foreign languages except the “big five”: French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In 168 colleges and universities in the United States, 68 “neglected” foreign languages are being taught in 270 departments by over a thousand teachers to more than eleven thousand students, a figure we reach by estimating that each student is enrolled in about one and a half courses in the language. The five languages in which the largest enrollments were reported are Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

Upon the basis of evidence never sufficiently examined, a number of statements concerning the seventeenth-century publication history of John Denham's Coopers Hill have acquired wide and authoritative circulation, and all the circumstantiality of established fact. Three chief of these statements, closely interrelated, are to be the subject of this discussion. The first of these is that all the editions of Coopers Hill prior to that of 1655 are “piracies.” The second, a corollary to the first, is that the edition of 1655 constitutes the “first authorized edition” of the poem. The third, somewhat independent of the other two, is to the effect that two editions of the poem—both “pirated”—have certainly been lost. Implicit in evidence equally cogent, however, is the assumption of a third lost edition, the authorization of which is never discussed. The purpose of this investigation is to scrutinize the evidence upon which these commonplace assertions are based, to show how far each is from being demonstrably true, and to advance arguments to prove that all three are false.

In 1948, approximately one student out of seven in the public high schools was studying a modern foreign language; in 1962 the ratio was one to every four—2.4 million MFL enrollments in a total high school population of 9.8 million.1 Contrary to popular belief, this gain began long before the launching of the first Sputnik startled the nation into a searching examination of its educational system, particularly in science and foreign language. There has, in fact, been an annual increase in the ratio of language enrollments to total high-school enrollment from 1948 to the present day, though the rate of increase rose sharply in 1959, after Sputnik and after the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

It is conventional to take Byron as a veritable Janus of the romantic period, looking toward the classicism of the past even while facing away from it as an authentic figure of his time. The classical Byron himself is seen under two aspects, satirical and dramatic, and these are distinguished from each other on the following grounds: Byron's classical satires, such as English Bards, are traced back to Pope, but his classical dramas, such as Sardanapalus, are supposed to reflect Greek, French, or Italian antecedents; and the classical satires belong essentially to Byron's earlier career, the classical dramas to his later career. This paper focuses on the peculiar classicism of Byron's drama, the classicism of his maturer work, and that which, as far as his total work is concerned, he most stoutly defended.

Hooker's eloquent and persuasive argument that Annus Mirabilis was written as an antidote to several poisonous tracts of the time has been accepted by nearly all of Dryden's critics, but I believe that he has underestimated Dryden by calling the poem “simple and lucid” (p. 49). Simple Dryden rarely was, and if we find the poem lucid, it may be because we overlook an intricate, yet unified system of alchemical and astrological metaphors. As the practice of alchemy and its peculiar jargon has lapsed into obscurity, so have Dryden's allusions to it. Though the explicit reference to “Chymick flame” in stanza 293 has been noticed, it is thought to be an isolated allusion with no relation to the frequent images of the phoenix, the apostrophe to the King, the mention of Jove, the allusion to the New Jerusalem, and, most significantly, to the fact that the poem's entire action concerns either fire or water.

The presence of features of recurrence in works of art is both an acknowledged empirical fact and—in proper relevance and proportion—a source of esthetic excellence. Meaningful recurrence is one of the factors that distinguish the art work from undifferentiated reality. In literature it is everywhere, in rhyme and alliteration, in the standing epithet, in the significant detail of Dickens or Mann, in motif, theme, and symbol. Repetitions of this sort can make a substantial contribution to the unity of a literary work, and it is one purpose of the following pages to establish areas and kinds of recurrence in a play generally regarded as chaotic (by its detractors) or variegated (by its defenders). The play is Goethe's Götz. There is an important second purpose: to see what support these stylistic and structural features give to the reading of Götz as a drama of character, displaying inner tension, conflict, and ironic depth.

References to animals, epithets that reduce men to the level of animals, anecdotes, proverbs, and allusions which assume that men and animals are in all respects alike, and appearances on stage of animals or of men disguised as animals have been staple ingredients of comedy from Aristophanes to Ionesco. Comedy rarely loses sight of the fact that human behavior has its animal aspects; farce uses it as a cornerstone of its madhouse. It is therefore only natural that the animal world should be represented in Molière comedy. It is not as generously represented, either in incident or in imagery, as it is in Shakespeare; no one is metamorphosed into a donkey from the shoulders up like Bottom, or dons a stag's horns like Falstaff; nor does any animal play a part as important as Citron in Racine's Les Plaideurs, the dog who is tried for stealing a roast and whose puppies, deposited in the lap of the judge in a desperate appeal to compassion, break up the proceedings by an ill-timed response to the call of nature. No animals make their presence felt so palpably in Molière. In fact, animals appear on stage only in his pastoral plays. But their frequent appearances in the dialogue illustrate the richness and variety of the resources which Molière brought to the task of writing comedy.

During the reconsideration of English Romanticism that has been going on for more than a decade, repeated attention has been given to individual poems, to the myths and “systems” of individual poets, to common images and themes, but oddly not to common forms. One of the most important of these is the ode, in which many of the best known and most often examined Romantic poems were written. Although today we have a better understanding of the major Romantic odes as poems, the general notion of the form remains much as it was a generation ago. What is obviously needed is a method of reassessment that will go beyond the older exclusive and now inadequate concern with prosody, stanzaic structure, and conformity to classical models. The approach in the present study, which is offered as a tentative beginning, has been suggested in large part by an essay published several years ago by Norman Maclean, who led up to but did not carry his investigations into the Romantic period. According to Maclean's thesis, in brief, the English ode in the seventeenth century was constructed as a fragmentary “plot,” with the poet's conception embodied in an “agent” and his “actions,” as in “Alexander's Feast” by Dryden. In the eighteenth-century ode, on the other hand, the primary emphasis was on the devices of language—allegorical personification, metaphor, static descriptive imagery—as in the odes of Collins and Gray. While it is possible to question Maclean's distinction in particular instances, the concepts and terminology he borrows in light disguise from Aristotle's Poetics have the advantage of making the ode available to critical as well as historical discussion. In the present study, the Poetics will be drawn on more directly but in somewhat different fashion. Modifying Maclean's conception, I have chosen the terms “rhetoric” and “drama” to express a relation between language and inner structure which makes the Romantic ode as distinctive as its Neoclassical and Preromantic predecessors, at the same time that it carries forward tendencies latent in both.

Since The Way of the World was first presented in 1700, almost every conceivable issue involving this comedy has been subject to critical discussion. For some time, there has been nearly unanimous agreement that the play is a masterpiece of its kind. Yet a notable misunderstanding of what Congreve intended in his portraiture of Mirabell continues to be expressed. Mirabell is commonly but mistakenly regarded as a rake and a cad, who, in spite of his polished manners, is guilty of reprehensible behavior.

Many critics of James Fenimore Cooper's early novel The Pioneers (1823) have called attention to the excellence of various individual aspects of its manner and matter, but few have been willing to accord the book the coherence and unity that are the first measure of a genuine work of art. The orthodox critical view insists on Cooper's failure to integrate the three major elements of his novel: the lengthy descriptions of natural scenery and of village habits and occupations; the conflict between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple, usually regarded as the thematic center of the narrative; and the main plot, the discovery of Oliver Effingham as the true heir to Judge Temple's huge land holdings. Customarily this approach first stresses the divergent origins of Cooper's materials as the basis of their discordance. Since the novel draws both on the real world of personal recollection and family tradition and on the powers of pure imagination, it somehow must lack unity. “Incongruously,” writes Alexander Cowie, Cooper tied his “warm boyhood memories to a superannuated plot involving the temporary dispossession of an estate.” Consequently, “there is in The Pioneers a more definite disjunction of the action from the illustrative material than in any of Cooper's tales of the frontier.” Professor Cowie invites us to set aside the action of the novel so that “the setting and characterization may be enjoyed for their own sake.”

Della cruscanism has been primarily associated in literary history with a rash of bad taste which broke out in English poetry between 1787 and 1791 and for which Robert Merry was held responsible. It took its name from the pseudonym “Della Crusca” which Merry used in a poetical correspondence carried on in the World between 1787 and 1789 with Mrs. Hannah Cowley, who signed herself “Anna Matilda,” and other ladies. It was a compound of amorous superlatives, dithyrambic apostrophes, pretentious ornament overflowing in flowery epithets, and a heady romanticism completely lacking the comparatively disciplined artistry which Byron and Shelley were later to achieve in Romantic poetry dealing with similar themes. This flood of bombastic sentiment was stemmed in England by William Gifford, whose satirical onslaughts in the Baviad (1791) and the Maeviad (1795) have left Merry branded as a mere poetaster ever since.

Schillers Verhältnis zur Ästhetik ist bisher fast ausschließlich unter der Perspektive seiner Kant-Rezeption betrachtet worden. Was sich darüber hinaus an Hinweisen auf Vorkantisches, vor allem auf die sogenannte “Popularphilosophie” des 18. Jahrhunderts findet, erschöpft sich meist in bloßen Titelangaben oder übernommenen Zitaten. So tauchen Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Garve oder Sulzer, um nur die wichtigsten Anreger zu nennen, lediglich in den Anmerkungen der historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgaben oder in kleinen, wenig beachteten Spezialuntersuchungen auf, während sie in zusammenfassenden Darstellungen häufig übergangen werden, um Schillers ästhetische Anschauungen nicht in den Bereich des “Obskuren” herabziehen zu müssen. Besonders in der Zeit um 1900, die im Zeichen eines blühenden Neukantianismus stand, herrschte fast durchweg die Meinung von Udo Gaede: “Von einem positiven Einfluß dieser Studien [gemeint sind die Popularphilosophen] auf Schillers Schriften wird man im allgemeinen kaum sprechen können. Ihre Theorien waren durch Kants Begründung der Ästhetik überwunden, und Schillers Ideen beruhten zu sehr auf Kant, als daß er sich anders als ablehnend gegen sie hätte verhalten können.”

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.

The Nietzschean presence in Spain between 1890 and 1910 needs more ample documentation even though Nietzsche is already considered the spiritual leader of the Generation of '98. Critics have overlooked his effect on other intellectuals who were not members of the '98 group but whose attitudes constitute an important chapter in Spain's history of ideas. At least three different generations affect a given historical reality by a process of conflicting rhythms that Ortega has called “el anacronismo esencial de la historia” (En torno a Galileo). It would be useful, therefore, to isolate the intellectual background against which the Generation of '98 acted in order to see how the former differed in its position toward Nietzsche. I have tried to do this by excluding from this study members of the Generation of '98 whose positive orientation to the philosopher is known. Since periodical literature is, because of its rapid gestation, the most accurate reflection of evolving ideological positions, I have relied a good deal on such material here, although in several cases I was unable to consult complete sets (Juventud, Mercurio, Revista Blanca, Revista Ibérica, Vida y Arte). This essay is descriptive and synthetic rather than analytic. It begins with the reception given Nietzsche in Spain, tracing the extent to which he was read and discussed (I). Next is an account of the diffusion of his ideas and their influence upon young intellectuals (II). Then follow sections dealing with specific topics: critical reaction to Nietzsche's method (III), the Superman and his sociological relevance (IV), ethics and will (V), art (VI). The final section attempts to focus the Nietzschean phenomenon historically, and weighs the importance of the German's biographical image in Spain (VII).

The use that Rimbaud made of the definitive version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, first published on 5 April 1874, throws light on the evolution of his poetics as well as his ideologies. The source book, one of the most distinguished vulgarizations of Hindu and gnostic thought, presents eastern illuminism and panoramic views of Alexandria in passages that Flaubert composed for the first time in 1871, after serious study of thousands of pages of ancient texts, and his new portrait of Saint Anthony is of special interest in that no sources have been located for it.