350 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



pretations is illustrated by the practice of still another advocate 

 thereof, Professor Wetz, who, in his Shakespeare from the Point of 

 yiew of Comparative Literary History, of 1890, and in his essay on the 

 history of literature, insists that comparative literature is neither 

 the literary history of one people, nor investigations in international 

 literary history; neither the study of literary beginnings, nor even the 

 attempt to obtain by induction the characteristics of Weltlitteratur, 

 its movements and types. While he accepts the analytical critical 

 method of Taine in combination with the historical and psychological 

 of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, he insists that the function of com- 

 parative literature is to determine the peculiarities of an author by 

 comparison with those of some other author sufficiently analogous. 



A survey of courses offered in European and American universities 

 and of the practice of our American philological journals and asso- 

 ciations shows that the academic conception is as I have stated it : 

 comparative literature works in the history of national as well as 

 of international conditions, it employs, more or less prominently, 

 the comparative method, logical and historical, it presupposes, and 

 results in, a conception of literature as a solidarity, and it seeks to 

 formulate and substantiate a theory of literary development whether 

 by evolution or permutation, in movements, types, and themes. 

 With these main considerations it is but natural that scholars should 

 associate the attempt to verify and systematize the characteristics 

 common to literature in its various manifestations wherever found; 

 to come by induction, for instance, at the eidographic or generic qual- 

 ities of poetry, the characteristics of the drama, epic, or lyric; at 

 the dynamic qualities, those which characterize and differentiate the 

 main literary movements, such as the classical and romantic; and 

 at the thematic, the causes of persistence and modification in the 

 history of vital subjects, situations, and plots. As to the growth, 

 or development, of literature, our survey shows that two distinct 

 doctrines contend for acceptance: one, by evolution, which is an 

 attempt to interpret literary processes in accordance with biological 

 laws; the other, by what I prefer to call permutation. Since literature, 

 like its material, language, is not an organism, but a resultant 

 medium, both product and expression of the society whence it springs, 

 the former theory must be still in doubt. It can certainly not be 

 available otherwise than metaphorically unless it be substantiated 

 by just such methods comparative and scientific as those of 

 which we have spoken. 



Much of this comparative method has been anticipated in theory; 

 but not so much in discipline and fact. The solidarity of literature 

 was long ago announced by Bacon. And he was not the only fore- 

 runner of the present movement. In one way or another the solidarity 

 of literature, the theories of permutation or of evolution, sometimes 



