LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 349 



be grateful. He has, however, enunciated one of the problems with 

 which comparative literature must grapple, and is grappling. Does 

 the biological principle apply to literature? If not, in how far may 

 the parallel be scientifically drawn? 



That leads us to still a third conception of the term under con- 

 sideration. Comparative literature, say some, is not a subject- 

 matter nor a theory, but a method of study. With the ancients it was 

 the habit of roughly matching authors. The method has existed 

 ever since there were two pieces of literature known to the same 

 man; it has persisted through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; 

 and it is alive to-day. Its merits and defects are those of the man who 

 uses it. To others the comparative method means the attempt to 

 obtain by induction from a sufficient variety of specimens the charac- 

 teristics, distinguishing marks, principles, even laws of the form, 

 movement, type, or literature under discussion. (Carriere, Freytag, 

 Aristotle.) In the discipline under consideration historical sequence 

 is just as important as comparison by cross-sections. The science is 

 called "comparative literary history" rather than "literature com- 

 pared," by French, German, and Italian scholars, not for nothing. 

 The historian who searches for origins or stages of development in a 

 single literature may employ the comparative method as much as he 

 who zigzags from literature to literature; and so the student whose 

 aim is to establish relations between literary movement and literary 

 movement, between author and author, period and period, type and 

 type, movement and movement, theme and theme, contemporaneous 

 or successive in any language, nationality, clime, or time. The com- 

 parison is not alone between diverse national literatures, but between 

 any elements involved in the history of literature, or any stages in the 

 history of any element. There have been, within my own knowledge, 

 those who would confine the word literature to the written productions 

 of civilized peoples, and consequently would exclude from consider- 

 ation aboriginal attempts at verbal art. But students nowadays 

 increasingly recognize that the cradle of literary science is anthropo- 

 logy. The comparative method therefore sets civilized literatures 

 side by side with the popular, traces folk-lore to folk-lore, and these 

 so far as possible to the matrix in the undifferentiated art of human 

 expression. Such is "comparative literature" when used of the 

 work of the Grimms, Steinthal, Comparetti, Donovan, Talvj, or 

 Ernst Grosse. The term is also properly used of the method of Taine, 

 which in turn derives from that recommended by Hegel in the first 

 volume of his JEsthetik (the appraisement of the literary work in 

 relation to Zeit, Volk, und Umgebung), and of the method of Brune- 

 tiere so far as he has applied it, for it is in theory the same, save that 

 it purports to emphasize the consideration of the element of individ- 

 uality. But that the method is susceptible of widely varying inter- 



