THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY STUDIES DURING 

 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



BY CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY 



[Charles Mills Gayley, Professor of the English Language and Literature, University 

 of California, b. February 22, 1858, Shanghai, China. B.A. University of Mich- 

 igan, 1878; Litt.D. Kenyon, 1900; LL.D. Glasgow, 1901; LL.D. Michigan, 

 1904; Post-graduate, Universities of Giessen and Halle, 1886-87. Assistant Pro- 

 fessor of Latin, University of Michigan, 1884-86; Assistant Professor of Eng- 

 lish, University of Michigan, 1887-89. Member, American Philological Associa- 

 tion, Modern Language Association, Senior Common Room, Lincoln College, 

 Oxford. Author of several books on Poetics and the History of Literature; also 

 contributor to the New York Evening Post; The Nation; The Atlantic; and The 

 International Quarterly.] 



THIS inquiry demands a review, in the several countries concerned, 

 of the materials and methods of the science : first, of the development 

 of the disciplines contributory to it, viz., the theory of art in general, 

 and the history of art-criticism; the theory of that branch of art 

 called literature, and the history of applied poetics; the advance 

 of philology, material and historical, especially as affecting the 

 literary expression of individual and society; second, of the concep- 

 tions successively springing from the development of these disciplines 

 conceptions to which correspond the successive canons of literary 

 judgment; and third, of the efforts after a scientific mode of critical 

 procedure, which have empirically issued in the canons of literary 

 method. The inquiry demands also an historical treatment. The 

 order should preferably be by national divisions, not only because 

 such arrangement is obviously most simple, but because it involves 

 in the process the interrelation of critical tendencies, and leads in the 

 result, at the close of the century, to a discipline both cosmopolitan 

 and comparative, but independent, which subsumes disciplines 

 precedent and canons aesthetic or instrumental, which fortifies itself 

 with materials and methods of approach supplied by other sciences 

 social, biological, and psychological, and which itself may properly 

 be called literary philology. It will, from this order of research, ap- 

 pear that while at the end of the eighteenth century philology was 

 gathered from the ends of the earth and established as encyclopedic; 

 and the criticism of art systematized as historical, by the middle 

 of the nineteenth century, encyclopedic philology has borne lin- 

 guistic, and by the end literary philology, both of them historical in 

 aim after the tendency of Wolf and Winckelmann, but both also 

 comparative in method after the ideal of Herder. 



Since it will be impossible for us in the brief time at my disposal 

 to present the whole substance of this inquiry, I shall first outline 

 for you the stages of development which appear to be common to 



