REVIEWS cont. PAGE McKenzie, K., Concordanza delle rime di F. Petrarca (Paget Toynbee) 262 264 246 251 396 215 550 267 262 Reed, E. B., English Lyrical Poetry (Norman Hepple) 389 132 Schriften des literarischen Vereins in Wien, I-XVII (J. G. Robertson) 407 Skeat, W. W., The Science of Etymology (W. J. Sedgefield) Stjerna, K., Essays on Beowulf, transl. by J. R. Clark Hall (A. Mawer) 394 563 242 398 Suddard, M., Studies and Essays (Grace E. Hadow) 227 Thompson, E. N. S., The English Moral Plays (E. K. Chambers) 121 419 405 560 121, 277 Wright, C. H. C., History of French Literature (A. Tilley and H. MINOR NOTICES. Bladin, V., Studies of Denominative Verbs in English Jespersen, O., Elementarbuch der Phonetik. Jespersen, O., Growth and Structure of the English Language . Recluse, The, ed. by J. Påhlsson . Schick, J., Corpus Hamleticum, I Smith, Nicol, Jeffrey's Literary Criticism THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. IF in some future time a literary historian attempts to estimate the critical output of these last fifty years, he will find his task to be a labour of Hercules. He will be able at once to single out a few prominent figures such as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Matthew Arnold, Brunetière, Faguet and Benedetto Croce, and he will easily understand and explain their messages. But he will also notice that these thinkers have had comparatively few followers, and that hundreds and hundreds of other workers in literature have sprung up, mostly in the Universities, with quite different aims and methods. He will readily recognise that these academic men-and women-of research have done a vast amount of valuable work; that they have cleared up obscure questions, annotated and reprinted obscure authors, systematised and tabulated obscure periods, each contributing his own piece of masonry to a vast edifice of learning. But when he enquires what common bond united all these scholars and to what common goal all these efforts were directed, he will search long and in vain for a sufficiently convincing reply. This question, which a future historian is bound to put, we cannot help asking now. After all, to what purpose is all this minute knowledge of literature? Much of it has obviously and clearly no purpose at all, and runs riot almost as wildly as did the post-Augustan Virgilians or some of the seventeenth century scholars; so that able men devote toilsome years to the discovery of quaint and curious details which they vaguely declare to be important, without saying why. Can all this erudition be put to any ulterior and nobler use, or must most of it lose its vitality as soon as created? The present writer believes that the 'voluminous and vast' body of knowledge, which has now been made so easily accessible, can be coordinated and interpreted in a way impossible half a century ago. He believes that a subtler and higher kind of knowledge can be extracted from it by a method rather inadequately designated as that of Comparative Literature. M. L. R. VIII. 1 To understand the possibilities of comparative literature it is necessary to see in what relation it stands to the present tendencies of research. Owing to the strenuous competition for academic emoluments, many advanced students are guided in their labours by no other ideal than that of a higher position or an increased salary. But wherever a scholarly and intellectual purpose can be detected, it is generally this to enable others to view some fragment of literature with the same eyes as the specialist. The uninitiated reader looks upon a play, a poem, an essay or a novel much as the man in the street will soon look upon aeroplanes. It is there because it is there. The man of letters realises that a masterpiece is not only an aesthetic pleasure but a triumph of inventiveness for those who know the history of its type. He also perceives that the great books of the past were written for readers with different ideas and surroundings and sometimes with a different idiom from our own, and that much of their thought and style can be appreciated only when this atmosphere is recreated. Again, while performing his task of classification and appreciation, he finds that some classic has really borrowed the ideas and even the phrasing of another writer, perhaps of a different age or country, and must be stripped of his borrowed plumes. Thus the critic is really an artist, not necessarily of words but of facts. Whether he is studying an author, an age or the history of a type of literature, he has to gather together a mass of sometimes apparently incongruous knowledge, often penetrating far into other ages and languages or digressing into history, economics, sociology and art, and he weaves all this learning round his theme, till it stands out in a new garb. It is obvious that in such a scheme of study there can be no place for comparative literature. Every advanced worker in the most restricted field is himself a student who compares. To add to this programme a comprehensive history of 'influences' and parallels would be merely to authorise a sciolist to attempt what is now achieved by an army of specialists. It was this misdirection of energy and erudition against which Professor Gregory Smith, though for other reasons, warned the first readers of The Modern Language Review in 'Some Notes on the Comparative Study of Literature,' urging that this method, as usually applied, was a desiccated perversion, interesting only to scientists and antiquarians, whereas the true scope of such synthetic study would be found in the positive side of criticism, in discovering what Aristotle taught us to understand by the Universal in literary art.' Few broadminded students are likely to disagree with Professor Gregory Smith, as far as he goes. Undoubtedly one of the functions of comparative literature will be to emphasise what is fundamental and common 'in the history of motif and form.' But does he go far enough? Besides 'mere Darwinism' or 'the analogies which an unreasonably scientific age borrows so readily from the weather bureau or the physical laboratory,' the genesis of books has a philosophy peculiar to itself. We have, of course, long recognised that literature is a part of a nation's life and often indicates more clearly than laws or treaties or revolutions the trend of a people's mind. But quite apart from, or only half associated with this historical significance, it should be possible to investigate and explain the forces and influences which, in different epochs, bring different genres into existence. It is only by a method of comparative study though not the method justly censured by Professor Smith-that the enquirer can win access to these secrets. It may well be urged that the achievements of comparative literature, painstaking and valuable as such work undoubtedly is, are far from justifying such pretensions. Such a contention is only too true because, up till now, comparative literature has generally concerned itself only with resemblances and parallels. But if the student were to turn his attention to differences and contrasts, he would be amazed to find how quickly his researches were leading him behind the scenes. Why did the essay, which sprang into a sudden and glorious existence in France, die out of that country almost immediately afterwards and thrive and multiply for over three centuries among the English? And, in revenge, what caused the French to look to England, in spite of Rousseau, for romantic inspiration, and then so rapidly and splendidly to develop an artistic ideal of their own? Why has oratory flourished as a literary type during only four periods of European history, with Demosthenes, with Cicero, with Bossuet and with Burke? How was it that Greece created a certain kind of epic, that a Roman took that epic as the model for a similar poem, that then an Englishman drew inspiration from both, and yet that each one (assuming for convenience sake that Homer existed) produced something essentially different from the others? And how was it that after Homer only Virgil, Milton and, in a less degree, Dante caught the epic spirit, while so many other gifted poets from Lucan to Morris failed? Again, how was it that antiquity created a certain type of drama, that England and France accepted this model in the sixteenth century, blended it with their miracle plays, and yet produced a literature so fundamentally different each from the other? How was it that both countries produced their best drama in the seventeenth and not in any other century, while Italy failed to produce any first-rate work and Germany, drawing on the same sources of inspiration, produced yet another type of drama, and that too in the eighteenth century? Then as a contrast turn to the Roman satura. It differs from other types of Latin literature in being of native origin. Again it differs in being profoundly modified by the Romans themselves, first by Lucilius, then by Horace and then by Juvenal. Yet in northern and modern Europe, unlike the drama and the epic, it retains, beneath superficial changes, the spirit of the old classics, and again, unlike the drama and the epic, it is completely effaced in the nineteenth century by the novel and the short story. How was it that the Renascence in Italy found vent in an assertion of individuality, while in France, the pupil of Italy, it subjected itself to law? Why did lyric poetry spring into a short and imperfect existence in Greece, an even less perfect existence at Rome, and then, after fitful and timorous efforts in medieval Latin and one short if glorious outburst at the Renascence, find full and free scope only in the nineteenth century? Why was it the eighteenth century, in which sentimentality first really made its presence to be felt? Or take the idea of the Devil and the idea of a Gentleman, which run like threads through post-classical civilisation. Of course an exhaustive antiquarian enquiry into these two conceptions would be beyond the most prodigally comprehensive scheme of literary research, but a comparative study of how each idea changes as one age succeeds the other is like reading a picture history of moral and social development. These are a few examples, chosen almost haphazard, of the riddles which present themselves for solution as soon as the student begins to compare literatures. In compiling such a list it is hard to avoid debateable ground and a critical reader will undoubtedly shake his head at incidental assertions, which lack of space compels the writer to state with dogmatic brevity. But very few will deny the suggestiveness of the principle. In fact, most will go so far as to point out that such a method has long been recognised, and up to a certain degree has been put into practice. It would readily be conceded, for instance, that the Marprelate controversy can be understood more clearly by comparison with the Satire Ménippée; that Pope should be read side by side with Horace and Boileau; that Racine will suddenly stand in a new and fuller light when his Iphigénie is compared with the Iphigenia of Euripides, and then with that of Goethe; that Montaigne's Institution des Enfants will, by contrast, illuminate Ascham's Scholemaster, and |