The Pierpont Morgan Library divides its manuscripts, somewhat arbitrarily, into two principal groups, the “Medieval and Renaissance” and the “Autograph.” Though neither term correctly describes all the materials classified in its group, the division serves well enough to distinguish the handwritten books of the period prior to the spread of printing from the more varied manuscripts of the modern era.

The Morgan “Autographs” comprise the originals of literary and historical writings (with some others of primarily artistic, musical, philosophical, or scientific interest), all letters, and all documents save only those which are in effect illuminated manuscripts. Among these “Autographs” are many manuscripts which are not strictly autograph at all: some are original, though not in the author's hand (Book i of Paradise Lost being an illustrious example of this class, which includes many letters and most documents); others are copies which, for one reason or another, have a particular importance (manuscripts of Crashaw, Sterne, or Keats, for example).

Ruskin's constructive political economy is often thought to consist of the proposals for social regeneration made in Time and Tide and Fors Clavigera. These works, however, do not include what the late John A. Hobson regarded as Ruskin's principal contribution to constructive economic theory: the development of the concepts social utility and social cost. Because of the importance of these concepts in Hobson's own economy, Hobson might be considered—-as indeed he often said he was—Ruskin's disciple. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he was an original social economist who always admired and defended Ruskin.

Le formalisme platonicien a survécu tant bien que mal jusqu'au XIXe siècle. L'échafaudage des Idées, dominé par le bouquet flétri du Beau, du Bien et du Vrai, s'écroula alors sous les coups des philosophes qui l'avaient miné depuis deux siècles. La cangue du platonisme cesse de peser sur les épaules du spiritualisme occidental. Du relativisme à l'existentialisme, en passant par Bergson, la tentation d'un absolu et d'un éternel stériles s'efface et le temps n'apparaît plus, selon le mot de Bergson, comme la petite monnaie de l'éternité. Le temps n'est plus la faiblesse de l'homme par rapport à Dieu. Dieu étant mort, le temps représente la dignité de l'homme par rapport aux choses. L'existentialisme chrétien lui-même considère Dieu moins comme éternel que comme présent.

Any Formulation of aims and methods currently adopted in the fields of modern language scholarship in America must of necessity appear too limited to do justice to the ideals of a learned profession and too rigid to reflect the convictions and interests of its individual members. If, nevertheless, such a statement is offered on the following pages, it is motivated by the desire to survey the assets and liabilities of humanistic studies at a time when the very foundations of these studies have been subject to criticism. The philological profession can point to a greater age and to longer traditions than many another specialized occupation. Although some of its pursuits are now considered antiquated or esoteric, its survival through many transformations testifies to the fact that it serves a basic human need.

Although this paper is entitled “The Case of Shelley,” an essay of this length can of course present only the brief of a case—hardly more than a dogmatic statement of the heads of an argument which, given room enough, I would undertake to make plausible through the presentation of evidence. The statement of the case is methodical: that is, it proceeds according to a general theory of literary history which Shelley's reputation illustrates, but which was not derived from the study of that reputation alone. The method is inductive or experiential; and since the implications of the experiential method as applied to the writing of literary history are by no means generally understood, I think I shall get farther in the end if I invest a considerable portion of my space in definition.

Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry fills the twenty-year interregnum between the end of Symbolism as an organized movement and the birth of Surrealism. The earliest selections in Alcools were composed the year of Mallarmé's death in 1898, and Calligrammes appeared only a few months before Breton and Soupault began their collaboration on Les Champs magnétiques in 1919. The work of perhaps no other poet in France at the turn of the century flows in such a direct current between the two dominant schools of the last seventy-five years. Obviously our appreciation of this period would gain considerably could we but view the poems of Apollinaire in the order in which he created them, proceeding with him from the mellifluous, fin de siècle delicacy of his first published piece, Clair de lune, to the discordant lines of Victoire:

On veut de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons
On veut des consonnes sans voyelles
Des consonnes qui pètent sourdement Imitez le son de la toupie
Laissez pétiller un son nasal et continu
Faites claquer votre langue
Servez-vous du bruit sourd de celui qui mange sans civilité
Le raclement aspiré du crachement ferait aussi une belle consonne

Two Centuries Ago another Dr. Johnson, commenting on the griefs and dangers that beset the scholar, advised him to pause a while from letters to be wise:

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes …
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the gaol.
See nations slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.

A few years later he indicated that patrons are even greater ills than garrets in the life of the scholar. The corporate patronage of our time represents some advance over the system of individual patronage that was dying in the eighteenth century, and, in the field of modern scholarship, living merit is generally acknowledged–if not always in due proportion or in the crude but useful form of hire and salary. In two centuries there has been apparent progress, though it would be difficult to say how much. It is not the purpose of this essay to refute the universality of Dr. Johnson's sobering generalization but, for our own time and place, to qualify and perhaps to document it by surveying the honors reserved for living scholars, specifically those honors awarded by groups or institutions in the United States and Canada that have been or might conceivably be given to MLA members in recognition of unusual achievement.

For the background of The Ring and the Book Browning relied heavily on static features of Roman and Aretine life in the late seventeenth century. Many references to streets, buildings, landscapes, customs, politics, and religion could fit a narrative laid in 1650 or in 1750; moreover, the classical and Biblical allusions, which outnumber but resemble those in The Old Yellow Book, carry little connotation of a precise time. Manifestly topical, however, are the references to the heretical teachings of Miguel de Molinos, which Browning termed Molinism. In The Old Yellow Book this heresy is mentioned only once, when the writer of the first anonymous pamphlet suggests that those who do not support a wronged husband against an errant wife may seek to introduce “the power of sinning against the laws of God with impunity, along with the doctrine of Molinos and philosophic sin, which has been checked by the authority of the Holy Office.”

In one of his most stimulating discussions Ortega y Gasset declares that the function of the critic is neither to defend nor to attack, but to understand. In this sense the critic, he says, actually interprets and completes the work of the author so that the public can better understand him.

During the period in which Theodore Dreiser wrote his first five novels, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius,” the novelist indicated a particularly strong interest in those American painters who interpreted the city scene. And it was the so-called New York Realists—Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—who made the greatest appeal to him from approximately 1899 to 1915. Several reasons may be suggested for Dreiser's sympathy for this particular group of painters. First, the newspaper and magazine careers of the artists, with the exception of Henri, closely paralleled Dreiser's own career; and both Dreiser and the graphic artists eventually utilized this common background for their more ambitious work as novelist and as painter. Second, with Henri leading the attack, the group of painters emerged as the most aggressive force in the artistic revolt against the domination of the tradition-bound National Academy when they became known as the notorious “Ash-Can school” and “apostles of ugliness” soon after the turn of the century. Dreiser, of course, served a similar function in his challenge to the Genteel Tradition, the literary equivalent of the Academy in the United States. Third, the Ash-Can painters not only believed, as Dreiser did, that an artist must be an honest and truthful recorder and interpreter of the life he saw and knew, but it was in their depiction of these “truths” of city life, its violence and brutality and its beauty, that their relationship to Dreiser is most clearly seen.

In 1946, modern foreign language instruction in the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, underwent a drastic reorganization. The former departments of German and Romance Languages became departments of German and Romance Literatures; all language teaching as such (together with the teaching of philology and linguistics) was placed in the hands of a new Division of Modern Languages. The new program was quite frankly experimental: it was to be an attempt to adapt to the college situation the wartime experiences in teaching foreign languages to members of the armed forces. A grant to cover initial expenses was generously made by the Rockefeller Foundation. Within five years a faculty committee was to evaluate the new program and to recommend its continuation, revision, or abolishment.