Comparative Study of Literature Marsh

8/6/2019 Comparative Study of Literature Marsh

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Modern Language Association

The Comparative Study of LiteratureAuthor(s): A. R. MarshSource: PMLA, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1896), pp. 151-170Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/456257

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The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a farprofounder kind. It affects the very substance of men'sthought about books, substitutes for one form of promise andenticement to the reading of them another and quite differentappeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methodsin the study of them. I shall, perhaps, make my meaningclearer on this point by some brief illustration.It is well known that during the Middle Ages the value ofliterature, in so far as it was serious and not intended merelyto producejoie et soulaz,joy and solace, was conceived to con-sist in the fact that it served as a kind of bodying forth of aprofounder truth than can be directly expressed in words.The mediaeval mind was universally and completely possessedby that allegorical method of interpreting the documents ofthe past, which had its earliest use on a large scale in theexposition of the Bible. When Hilary and Ambrose in thefourth century established among the Latin Christians themanner of exegesis that Philo Judaeus had originated andthat the Alexandrian fathers had elaborated, they were un-wittingly fixing for many centuries the form of one of themost important activities of the human spirit, the study ofliterature. The fourfold meaning-historical, tropological,allegorical, and anagogical-which they believed to runthrough the sacred books and which they made it their aimto educe and expound, became at once for their own and forsucceeding generationsof Christians the chief sourceof interestin literature in general. For a time, of course, there wereobstacles in the way of the extension of this method to theprofane writers. The Christian teachers had, indeed, foundit impossible to do without Vergil and Horace and Cicero intheir schools, as the famous decree of the Emperor Julian,prohibiting such use, plainly shows. A deep suspicion ofthese works of the Gentiles, however, long lingered amongthe Christian teachers, and from time to time found evenviolent expression. When, nevertheless, the Gentile part ofsociety had long since disappeared,when the Christians found

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themselves the supreme and only masters of the Europeanworld, the remembrance of the old doubts and hates graduallydied away. Then it came about that the works of the greatpagan writers, whose fame was consecrated by long tradition,insensibly fell into the same kind of estimation that the docu-ments of the Christian faith enjoyed. These works, like theBible, were felt to contain, beneath the veil of the outwardform, a preciousdoctrine, and those that read them endeavoredto find in in them the same fourfold adumbration of hiddentruth as in the Gospel itself. Bernard of Chartres,the great-est teacher of France in the twelfth century, asserts thatVergil "inasmuch as he is a philosopher, describes humanlife under the guise of the history of Aeneas, who is thesymbol of the soul." Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan,Statius are regularly included in the lists of the philosophers.Cicero is not merely, to use the phrase of Paschasius Radber-tus, the 'king of eloquence;' he is put by Alars de Cambraibefore Solomon himself for wisdom (Romans de tous lesphilo-sophes):

Tulles qui moult fu sages clers,De totes clergies plus fersQue tout autre maistre de pris,Est premiers esleus et pris.

And, finally, Ovid, the most facile of poets in morals as inart, was expounded at enormous length as the profoundest ofteachers; and even his most scabrousworks, the Ars amatoriaand the Remediumnrmoris,were seriously studied as containinga mystic sense of deep spiritual import. So all literature, in-sofar as it fell within the field of the intellectual class, hadcome to mean an allegorical account of spiritual things. Andhow firmly this conception of it was held by the best intelli-gences may be seen in those passages in Dante's works, bothin his Convito, and in his dedicatory letter, sent with theParadiso to Can Grande della Scala, in which he asserts theapplication of the doctrine to his own poems.


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Yet already in Dante there begin to appear signs of a newmanner of thinking and feeling about literature. In severalcases in which he has to give an opinion about works of liter-ary art, his criterion is not, as we might expect, the characterand profitablenessof the doctrine enshrined within them, butthe beauty of the style in which they are written. It is acertain dolcestil nuovothat marks the difference between thegroup of poets to which he himself belongs and the earlierSicilian poets, whose last important representativewas

Bona-giunta da Lucca. It was preoccupationwith the question ofstyle, of language, that prompted his treatise De vulgari elo-quentia (or eloquio). And, finally, in view of GiovanniVillani's characterizationof Brunetto Latini, we can scarcelydoubt that Dante refersto the latter's rhetoricalinfluenceuponhimself, when he addressesto him the famous lines of the 15thInferno: Che in la mente m'e fitta, ed or mi accora,La cara e buona imagine paternaDi voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora

M'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna.That man makes his name deathless by noble utterance, by

eloquence-that was the lesson of Brunetto Latini to Dante.And, had Dante but known it, here was an idea that was toact as a solvent of that whole body of literary doctrine whichhad accumulated during the Middle Ages-doctrine aboutwhich he himself had never had a serious doubt.Before Dante died, the man had already nearly attainedmanhood who was to seize upon this idea, utter it in a thou-sand pleasing forms, impose it upon his contemporaries,andestablish it as an indubitable truth for many succeedinggener-ations. This man was Francesco Petrarca, the first clear-eyedstudent of antiquity, the first of the humanists, and, as he hasbeen called, the first modern man. In him was first thor-oughly realized that profound change in the whole conceptionand theory of the nature and object of literature, which is oneof the best examples we have of the changes the human spirit

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must inevitably from time to time pass through in its treat-ment of its dearest intellectual interests.It is not my purpose to dwell upon the characteristicsofPetrarch or of the great movement which he initiated, andwhich we have been in the habit of calling, with some exag-geration of pride in the modern world, the new-birth, theRenaissance. I desire simply to point out how distinct andin many ways limited a theory of literature is implied by thatword eloquentia,which Petrarch so incessantly uses, and whichhe appeals to as the ultimate criterion in forming his literaryjudgments. I can think of no passage in all the books of theRenaissance that lights up the literary characterof that move-ment as does Petrarch's brief discussion in his Rerum Memo-randarum Libri [II, p. 466] of the comparative merits ofPlato and Aristotle-a passage in which he accounts for hisdepreciation of il maestro di color che sanno, on the groundthat in libris tamen ejus qui ad nos venerunt,sane certafideseloquenticevestigium nullum est. We must, of course, guardourselves carefully from misinterpretation of Petrarch's con-ception of eloquentia. On the one hand, there certainlylingered in his mind not a few remnants of the mediaevalnotion of literary form as a veil for deeper, half-disclosedmeanings beneath. On the other hand, he cannot too oftenreiterate his faith that literature must be of profit to life, thatit must be morally uplifting, that it must contribute to thedevelopment of humanitas in society. And yet it remainstrue that in his thought literature is essentially eloquentia,isart, is style; and that to this quality it chiefly owes its efficacyfor good.And the chief work of the humanists, of Petrarch's succes-sors in Italy, in the field of letters, was to establish this idea.It was for this that they toiled at the resuscitation of antiquity.It was for this that they reformed their own literary style.It was for this that they labored at the perfecting of theItalian tongue. Eloquentia alone could give immortal fame,and the matter of books was thought to avail little, if they

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lacked this supreme quality of manner. Even the mostscabrous of subjects, the foulest diseases, the basest scandals,the most indecent scurrilities,might be treated with universalapproval and applause, by him who had the secret of elo-quentia. And when humanism passed from Italy to the restof Europe, one of the earliest signs of its appearancein a newcountry was a sudden preoccupation of the writers of thatcountry with style. What a place in the literary history ofFrance, for example, has the question of the language. Asone turns the pages of the famous manifesto of the Pleiade,the first group of French writers in whom the Renaissanceappears triumphant-I mean, of course, Joachim du Bellay'sDefense et illustration de la languefran9oise-one finds hardlyany other concern than this. Is the French tongue fit foreloquence? Can it be made to compare in this respect withGreek and Latin ? How can it be perfected in this regard?These are practically the only questions du Bellay discusses.It is absolutely the same story with Malherbe. And, as forBoileau, even if he does lay down the famous rule that

Rien n'est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable,it is still clear that the critic's interest and aim is the beau,rather than the vrai. And so it continues with the Frenchcritics and literary theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies. So also it is with no inconsiderable part of themin the nineteenth.

Nor is the case different with the other nations that feltstrongly the Renaissance influence-and this means all thechief literary nations of Europe-Spain, Portugal, Holland,Germany and England. In the last two, to be sure, the sud-den violence of the Reformation interfered with the quiet andcontinuous development of the idea of eloquence that we seein France. And yet no one can study the Elizabethans with-out recognizing that by them too literature as such wasconceived as largely a matter of style. In short, all over

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Europe the Renaissance brought about and fixed for manygenerations one and the same general attitude of mind towardsletters, one and the same criterion of excellence in them, oneand the same estimate of the chief source of edification to beobtained from them. When in 1736 the excellent ArchbishopFontanini brought out the first bibliography of Italian liter-ature and called it Bibliotecadell' eloquenzaitaliana, his meretitle summed up a whole great chapter in the history of literarystudy and criticism. And Bouterweck, when he named hiswell-known work Geschichteder Poesie und Beredtsamkeit(1801 ff.), affirmed the same theory of the quintessentialquality of his material.So with unanimous voice the Renaissance pronouncedliter-ature to be eloquence,just as the Middle Ages had pronouncedit to be allegory. The histories of literature were histories ofeloquence in this or that tongue, the professors of literaturewere professors of eloquence, the critics of literature weresamplers and tasters of eloquence. Nor is this view yet aban-doned by the expositors of literature. Not to mention thoseFrench critics of the Ecole Normale, whom the Germans soscornfully dub belletristen,what is that "grand style" whichMatthew Arnold tells us is the one important thing to seekfor in literature, if not the eloquentiaof Petrarch ?And when this critic tells us to remember and to use astouchstones of poetic excellence Dante's verse:

E la sua voluntate Bnostra pace,and Chaucer's:0 martyr souded in virginit4e,

as well as those Homeric passages he loved so well, does hebid us approachliterature in any differentspirit from ClementMarot, when he states in the preface of his translation ofOvid's Metamorphoseshat he hasjet Plceilur les livres latins,dont la gravitg des sentences,et le plaisir de la lecture . . .m'ont espris mes esprits,mend ma main, et amuse ma muse?

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Nay, when Lowell, in an address to this very Association butfive years ago, spoke of genius in literature as that " insolubleingredient which kindles, lights, inspires and transmits impul-sion to other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent,and makes them startlingly aware that they too may be partsof the controlling purpose of the world "-when Lowell thusspoke of genius, I say, was he not in real truth thinking ofthat 'god in us,' imagined by the humanists as by the ancients,who is the inspirer of eloquence, the suggester of the rare andirresistible word ?In spite of these evidences of the persistenceto our own timeof the Renaissance conception of literature,however, there areno less certain evidences, throughout the nineteenth century,of increasing hesitation to accept it as complete and final, ofdoubt whether it indicates to us the best that is to be foundin literature. Naturally, it was Romanticism that first gaverise to these doubts and hesitations. No inconsiderable partof the romanticists, to be sure, sought in their revolutionarydoctrine simply a new form of eloquence. Such was the casewith the fantastic romanticists like Tieck in Germany, andwith the rhetorical romanticists like Victor Hugo in France.With others, however, the case was different. Some, likeUhland, sought in works of literature evidence of a more orless complete expression of the creative and constructiveenergies of the human spirit, and prized them accordingly.Romanticists of this class turned to the Middle Ages, becausethey found in this period both individuals and society as awhole more freely imagining new things and bringing themto realization, than was the case in later centuries. And tosuch critics perfection of expression, eloquence, seemed ofquite secondary importance. Other Romanticists still foundliterature chiefly interesting as the utterance of racial ornational feeling; and the mere substitution of the phrasenational-literature' for 'eloquence' in the titles of literaryhistories indicates a revolution in the method of approachtoliterature and the study of it. By these innovations the

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THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 159traditional theory of the function of literature was seriouslyshaken. And as a further sign of the change the honoredlocations 'eloquence' and 'belles-lettres' began to fall intodisuse, and gradually into contempt.But romanticism carried in its bosom, unsuspected at first,a still more dangerous enemy of the old order of things-science. For the chief characteristic of science is that it con-cerns itself not with the manner, but with the matterof things;and just in proportion as attention has been more directed tothe matter of literature, has the Renaissance conception of itas eloquentiacome to seem insufficient and of doubtful value.At first, to be sure, the new literary science busied itself mainlywith externals. It adoptedthe traditional humanistic methodsof studying literature, endeavoring only to make them moresystematic and more precise. It constituted texts, accumu-lated information about books and their authors, cleared updoubtful points of literary history or of grammar, sought toobtain as large a body of facts about literature as possible.Above all it undertook the investigation of language upon ascale never before dreamed of. And in this last field it firstbegan to realize that the traditional objects of study werehopelessly inadequate. To the man of the Renaissance thewhole interest of language lay in its capacity for eloquence;and when he studied it, as in his Accademia della Crusca orhis Academie fran9aise, he was thinking only of perfecting itto this end. The man of science,on the other hand, found inlanguage one of the most important phenomena of universalnature, and studied it that he might understand it as such.In dealing with literature itself, however, the man of sciencehas been much slower in getting his bearings-slower, butnone the less surely working towards a new point of view.And one of the chief signs of the coming change is the greaterand greater reluctance he shows to deal with what is oftencalled the literary side of literature. Many and harsh com-plaints are made about him for this, and he is charged withneglecting that which alone makes the study of literature


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A. R. MARSH.worth while. But the real truth is that he is silent, becausehe does not yet know what to say. He sees the insufficiencyof what it has been customary to say, but he does not discernwith clearness the sure and adequate thing that is to be sub-stituted for it. The conception of literature has to be trans-formed as the conception of language has been transformed;and when this transformation has been accomplished, we mayproperly blame the man of science, if he fails to understandand interpret the new doctrine.But in the Ineantime,as I have before stated, we see on allsides signs of doubt and hesitationas to the true line of approachto literature, as to the most profitable method of studying it.On the one hand, we have the men of science, sure of theirlinguistics but uncertain of their aesthetics, treating literatureas a corpusvile for linguistic illustration. On the other hand,we have the representatives(often very imperfect ones) of theolder tradition clamoring for the so-called literary teaching ofliterature, and endeavoring to win us to aesthetic appreciations,the reading of which causes a weary weight of doubt and dis-trust to settle upon our spirits. From time to time, also, wehave projects for a more satisfactory method of literary studyand criticism. Such, for example, was the essay of the brilliantHellenist, Prof. Gildersleeve, entitled Grammarand Aesthetics,published some ten years since in the Princeton Review. Inthis essay, after speaking of what he rightly calls " the wide-spread distrust as to the ultimate value of all the aestheticcriticism of the day, whether sympathetic or other," Prof.Gildersleeve suggests that we return to the methods of theAlexandrian grammarians. "As an art," he says, "grammarentered largely into antique aesthetic criticism. While wemay consider this study tedious in itself and futile in its aimas a regulative art, there is much to be learned from the oldrhetorical use of grammar as an organon of aesthetic apprecia-tion. The ancient rhetorician took into account phonetics,word-formation,syntax, periodology, all from a purely subjec-tive point of view. Now all these matters fall underthe obser-

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vation of the scientific grammarian,all are subjected to rigidmeasurement and computation. We know the proportionsinwhich different vowel-sounds appear in given monuments ofliterature; we know what sequences, what combinations ofsounds certain languages will tolerate, the emergenceand thedisappearanceof such and such terminations, the growth andlimit of case use, tense use, the extent of section, member, andperiod; and while it is not proposed to make a mathematicalaestheticon the basis of grammar, it may be possible to removesome part of criticism out of the range of mere sensibility andopulent phraseology." Such is Prof. Gildersleeve's proposedmethod of studying literature; and it should be added thatsomething like it is already in actual use in this country andabroad. There are well-known teachers whose pupils are evennow at work counting and tabulating the color-words, thesound-words, the nature-words employed by this or thatpoet,-to say nothing of the rhyme-varieties, and other metri-cal and grammatical peculiarities.Free from mere sensibility and opulent phraseology such amethod of study certainly is; and yet it seems to have a viceno less serious than these. It fixes our attention upon thingswe do not greatly care to know about, and leaves us in thedark as to all the great and vital concerns of literature.But this is not the only notable suggestion of a more scien-tific method of studying literature that we have had of late.Such a method has recently been proposed in France by thewell-known critic, M. BrunetiBre. And his plan is to turnto the natural sciences for aid, borrowing from them the con-ception that has in our time so profoundly affected theirdevelopment,-the conception of evolution. M. Brunetiereis, however, not the first to seek help from the sciences ofnature. Taine had done the same thing, striving to interpretthe romantic doctrine of national literatures by means of thesupposed scientific principle of determinism. But Taine'sHistory of English Literature is by universal consent a failure,and I suppose that there is not at this moment a single eminent

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student of literature in the world who is practically employinghis method. M. Brunetiere's suggestion, however, seems atfirst sight to have more to recommend it. For one thing, thedoctrine of evolution is a much more generally accepted doc-trine than that of determinism,and is far from involving suchsweeping assumptions. But when we examine more closelythe works in which M. BrunetiBre has attempted to give apractical illustration of his idea, we can hardly avoid a feelingof disappointment and almost of deception practiced upon us.For his rvolution des genres dans l'histoire de la litteraturefranaaise and his Lvolutionde la pp&ie lyrique en France auXIXe sifcle, though indisputably they contain many excellentthings, contain nothing about evolution except in their titlesand introductions. Even had M. Brunetiere really succeeded,however, in cutting himself loose from the past of Frenchaesthetic criticism, and in seriously embarking upon the pro-ject he so valorously announced, we may fairly doubt theprofitablenessof his results. For as yet we have no right toapply the doctrine of evolution to literature at all. At thebest it is at present an analogy, and I believe a very usefulone-the more so since it leads us constantly to rememberthatin literature nothing is fixed or permanent, but that every-thing, both materials and forms, is undergoing incessantchange. That the law of this change, however, is the law ofevolution we do not yet know; nay, with that other analogyof language before us, we may rather doubt whether it willprove to be the case that it is. At any rate, it is little likelythat the prematureadoption of the doctrine, even as a workinghypothesis, would lead to useful and permanent results.But there is still another suggestion of a more adequatemethod of studying and criticising literature-a suggestionthat does not appear to have emanated from a single scholar,but seems rather unperceived to have embodied itself in aphrase, and launched itself into the world. This phrase is'Comparative Literature,' and when I have pronounced it, Ihave at last reached the subject which this paper purports to

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THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 163discuss. I fear I shall have seemed to many to make myprologue long-longer than the poem-a procedurethat noart of poetry could be found to justify. And yet, though Ihave done this, it has been with a purpose. I have notwished to-day to enter into the details of the comparativemethod of studying literature, but rather to bring out withdistinctness what I consider to be the relation of the very con-ception of such a method to the traditional conceptions on thesubject, and to other conceptions that have lately been ad-vanced. If I shall have done this, and if I shall havefurther briefly indicated the true and reasonable hope andpromise of such a conception, I shall have accomplished allthat I could wish.

The phrase 'Comparative Literature' is afloat, I say, andindeed seems to be constantly acquiring greater currency.There are already journals of comparative literature; and,what is more significant, there are professors of comparativeliterature. And yet, if we seek for a definition of the newterm, we shall find it amazingly difficult to obtain. Nodoubt, it was the fruitful development of the comparativemethod in the natural sciences, as in comparative anatomy,and in language studies, as in comparative grammar, thatinspired the desire for a similar employment of it in the studyof literature. But any concensus of intelligent opinion asto the exact manner of employing it can hardly up to the pre-sent time be found. There are some who appear to thinkthat comparative literature means comparing literary works,whether in one or in many languages, with a view todetermining their relative excellences. This view, at itsbest, is essentially the same as Matthew Arnold's, when hetells us that criticism is "a disinterested endeavor to learnand propagate the best that is known and thought in theworld." But the difficulty of this method obviously consistsin the fact that, until we have a race of men with no moral orspiritual prepossessions whatever, we cannot have and oughtnot to have a disinterested estimate of the comparativeexcel-


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lence of what has been known and thought in the world.Even more open to the charge of being merely subjective inits application and temporary in its results, is the compara-tive method, imagined by others, which selects as the objectof its investigations the creative intentions and the aestheticprocedes that appear in the great monuments of literature.A decidedly different conception of comparative literatureis that which gives as its task the investigation and classifi-cation of the different forms which literary or imaginativethemes or motives have assumed in the literatures of variouspeoples; as well as the study of the origins of these themesand of the manner of their diffusion. In this sense Benfey'sfamous introduction to his translation of the Pantchatantra,in which he studied the diffusion of the Indian beast-fables inthe Occident, was comparative literature. So also was thesurvey of the various forms of the epic tales that gather aboutthe figure of Charlemagne,which M. Gaston Paris gave inhis Histoire poetiquede Charlemagne. Comparativeliteraturein this sense, though within narrower field, were the studiesof the brothers Grimm in the popular traditions of the Ger-manic peoples. And here, further, we must put the investi-gations of Prof. Child upon the English and Scottish Ballads,as a monumental example of the same method. And yet itmust be noted that all of these works, except the last, wereproduced before the notion of comparative literature hadappeared at all, or at any rate before it had obtained realcurrency. The authors of them had not embarked uponinvestigations suggested by a general theory; they had simplyfollowed each a given material, wherever it might lead him.Each followed his material, wherever it might lead him-that is, each conformed himself to real facts in nature, and asa consequenceattained results that at least do not sin from'mere sensibility and opulent phraseology.' Others, moreover,have followed these scholars in the same or similar fields, andthey, too, have succeeded in producing works free from thesedefects. But still more important is the fact that as the

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number of these works increases,it is gradually becomingclearthat here are studies that are to yield us a much richer fruitthan has hitherto been supposed, and that are profoundly tomodify our whole conception of the nature and function ofliterature.

Comparativeliteraturein the sense I have just beendescrib-ing is as yet undeveloped in theory; it is still extremelylimited in practice. Many of those who have made the mostimportant contributions to it, have done so with no clearunder-standing of what they were really bringing to pass. Urgedon oftentimes merely by some blind instinct of erudition, theyhave labored at what they regarded as purely questions oforigins, or bibliography, or technical literary history. Andyet they have been cooperating to bring about a momentouschange in the attitude of men's minds towards literature as awhole.

This change is exactly parallel with the change wrought bythe comparative method in the study of language. For justas language ceased a generation ago to be regarded as chieflyinteresting from the point of view of style, of eloquence, sonow literature is ceasing to be thought of in these traditionalterms. More an(l more it is coming to be seen that literatureis one of the great provinces of universal nature,just as lan-guage is, and that the only really satisfactoryway to study it,is to study it as such. Conceived thus, the phenomena ofliterature change immediately their relative importance andinterest, they group themselves in new ways, they becomeindicative of new principles, more trustworthy than any thataesthetic criticism has ever succeeded in making out. Fromthis point of view the study of literature ceases to be a searchfor classic examples of excellence in style, to the end thatthese may be parted from the mass of other books and con-templated in and for themselves. It ceases also to be a searchfor those works that are preeminent for moral elevation, orintellectual energy, or any other single quality, however greatits importance from the point of view of practical living. The

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zoblogist does not allow himself to be influenced in his studiesby the popular preferencefor the perfected forms of life overthe obscure and undeveloped. He studies all, and from alllearns. The student of language, too, derives no less lightfrom the imperfect and unfixed speech of the untutored manthan from the most eloquent discourse. In the same way, thestudent of literature begins to see that he also may more pro-fitably study the whole body of the phenomena of literature,great and small, eloquent and rude, noble and ignoble (for, asthe Spanish proverb says, there are all kinds in the garden ofthe Lord)-he may more profitably do this, I say, than spendhis time in subjective theorizings about the true and the beau-tiful as manifested in literary master-pieces.The moment one faces the study of literature in this spirit,he sees at once that the traditional methods of procedure arelittle calculated to serve his ends. These methods, further-more, imply presuppositionsthat are altogether uncertain, oreven in many cases certainly false. Such, for example, is thefamous hypothesis of an universal human nature, an universalreason, the same in all the races of men, in all ages, in all theregions of the earth-nature and reason which it is the busi-ness of true eloquence to reproduce, stripped of the temporaryand the accidental. Take away this supposition, and whatbecomesof the critical method of Boileau and of all those whohark back to Boileau? And yet in the light of the pheno-mena of literature in their entirety, how uncertain a principledoes this become! What terrible limitations it requires!How misleading are its implications!To examine, then, the phenomenaof literature as a whole,to compare them, to group them, to classify them, to enquireinto the causes of them, to determine the results of them-this is the true task of comparative literature. But, as I cannot too often repeat, the methods by which these processesareto be carried out are as yet far from being systematicallyformulated. Certain objective points, however, can alreadybe discerned. It is clear, for example, that through the inves-

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tigation of three questions in particular, we are to be advancedgreatly on our way-I mean the question of literary origins,the question of literary development, and the question ofliterary diffusion. Upon the first of these questions much hasalready been done, though for the most part unconsciously andwithout real appreciation of the nature of the problem. Wecannot forget, for example, that the famous question whichfor nearly a hundred years has agitated the classical scholars,the Homeric question, is in reality but part of this largerquestion. The classical scholars in general do not yet knowthis; but that it is so is entirely clear to anyone who has fol-lowed recent investigations into the origins and history of epicpoetry among the various peoples that have had such poetry.Pio Rajna, in his Origini dell' epopea franeese, is in realitydiscussing the Homeric question as much as the question ofthe origin of the mediaeval Chansons de Geste. So also arethe students of Germanic heroic traditions, like the Grimmsin the past generation, and Miillenhoff in ours. So also arethe Krohns, father and son, and Comparetti in their investi-gations of the subject-matterof the Finnish Kalevala. Indeed,the time is already in sight when no one will think of utteringa word on the Homeric question, who has not first familiarizedhimself with the phenomena attending the birth of the IndianMcahdbhdrata nd Ramdyana, the Persian Schah-Nameh, theGermanic sages and epics, the French Chansons de Geste,theFinnish epic songs, the Celtic heroic poems and traditions,and all the lesser manifestations of epic tendency, whether inromances, ballads, folk-tales, or larger poems. And let it notbe supposed that such a method of study will contributemerely to the settling of the traditional Homeric question. Itis comparatively a small matter whether the Iliad and theOdysseyare the work of the same poet, or what are the consti-tuent parts of each and how put together. The importantmatter is, what is epic poetry? What is its true function?What characteristics,imaginative, ethical, and rhetorical, arethe necessary consequences of a perfect fulfillment of this2

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function? For the student who appoaches the matter withthese questions in his mind, though it may and I believe willremain true for him that the Homeric poems are the mostperfect examples of epic poetry we have, the determinationof this judgment will rest upon grounds quite other than thetraditional ones. And for such a student even the mostfamous discussions of epic poetry in the past, Voltaire's Essaisur la posie epique,Boileau's remarks, Joachim du Bellay'streatment of le longue poOme,he opinions of Quintilian andHorace, and even the views of Aristotle himself in his Poetics,will seem empiric and superficial, and of slight practical ortheoretical value.

Similar results will attend the scientific investigation ofboth the other main questions I have suggested, that of lite-rary development and that of literary diffusion. By the firstof these, I mean the process by which is gradually elaboratedthe material out of which literary masterpieces are made.Thus we can follow the slow amassing of the matter, bothstructural and imaginative, which the great romantic poetsand novelists-Ariosto, Spenser, Cervantes, to mention onlygreat names-at last found fit to their hands,-tracing it fromthe songs of the primitive Germanic scop and Celtic bard,through the poems of the romancejongleur, whether brief, likethe Spanish ballads, or long, like the Chansons de Geste, ill atlast it is ready for the masters. And as we watch the ever-varying forms the material takes, as we see the unceasingintrusion and extrusion of social and moral ideas, of types ofpoetic appeal, of artistic and rhetorical expedients, we realizemore adequately than mere aesthetic criticism can ever makeus, the true character of all poetic creation.Another example of the same process I may mention is theelaboration of the material and manner of the Christianheroicpoem-that poem of which Milton has given us the supremeexamples. Who can follow this from its origin in the fourthand fifth centuries, in the Latin poems of Juvencus, Sedulius,Avitus and others, through the Old English, Old Saxon, and

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THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 169Old Frankish Bible epics, through the more numerous similarpoems in many languages in the later Middle Ages, throughthe Renaissance poems and dramas, whether in Latin or inthe vulgar tongues, up to Milton, and indeed on to Klopstock-who, I say, can do this without obtaining a wholly newview of the true character of the Paradise Lost and the Para-dise Regained ?I will not dwell at length upon the results to be obtainedfrom the study of the question of literary diffusion, thoughthey promise to be no less significant. The investigationsof scholars like Mi.Gaston Paris upon the way in which thepoetic traditions of the Celtic race became current among theother peoples of Europe, and upon the modifications thuscausedin the literatures of those peoples, are as good proof ofthis as I can give. Brilliant essays here, also, are severalstudies upon the diffusion of Proven9al and French literaryforms in other countries-for example, Gaspary'sSicilianischeDichterschule,and the recent introduction to an edition of thelyrics of King Dionysius of Portugal, by a member of thisAssociation, Prof. Lang. And, finally, what lover of Englishliterature can fail to see a rich field for such study in thequestion, as yet barely entered upon, of the obligations of theElizabethans to Italy, France, and Spain?I will not prolong the list of illustrations of the lines alongwhich the comparative method of studying literature mayhopefillly and profitably be applied. No doubt, there aremany more than I have indicated; indeed several crowd inupon my mind as I speak. I shall do better, however, topass them over, for the sake of making myself a little clearerupon a point that may well have perplexed some of myhearers, in connection with what I have been saying. I feelsure that the question must have been pressing upon some inthis audience,whether such a method as I have beenoutliningdoes not after all neglect that very real something, eloquentia,art, style, which has hitherto been regardedas the very essenceand inner being of literature? Does it not without due reason


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A. R. MARSH.throw away the individual artist, from whose brainthe literarymasterpiecehas proceeded? And is this not as dangerous anerror as to overestimate the artist and his art ? The doubt isa natural one, and for that reason I desire to make myself alittle cleareron this point. I do indeed believe that no lite-rary masterpiece, whether as substance or as style, can beproperly regarded as the peculiar and individual creation ofthe man that brings it to the birth; just as I believe that noman's language is his own personal creation. And yet whocan fail to see that both in language and in larger creationthe modifying action of the individual is profound? Andwho can fail to see, further, that at all times the appeal ofliterature to men has largely consisted in that very eloquentia,whose universal sway I have been trying to help bring to anend. Here, then, are very real forces ever at work to makeliterature such as we see it and know it. As such they mustbe prized and studied.Nay, I shall go even farther, and say that in my opinionthere can be no greater mistake than to use the comparativemethod with beginners in the study of literature, substitutingits intellectual claims for the natural appeal of eloquence andbeauty. We have learned that we must teach elementarygrammar by the old empiric methods, and that comparativelinguistic science is but a confusion to the untrained mind.Assuredly it is so for the student of literature. Let him,then, be made familiar at the start with the more accessibleliterary masterpieces, those whose greatness is attested by thatuniversal feeling of men which is a safe guide in any practicalmatter. Seeurusjudicat orbis terrarum,says Augustine; andwithin limits the rule is true. But when the student has gonefar enough to be entitled to know what those masterpiecesreally are, how they came into being, and what the sanctionof their greatness is, then let him approach them with all theappliances of the comparative method in his hands.

A. R. MARSH.

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