352 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



matching of authors, the static or provincial view of history, and 

 the appraisement lacking atmosphere. 



While this science must exclude from the object under consider- 

 ation the purely subjective element, and the speculative or so-called 

 " judicial " (me judice) method from criticism and history, it need not 

 ignore or disregard the unexplained quantity, the imaginative. 

 Its aim will be to explore the hitherto unexplained in the light of 

 historical sequence and scientific cause and effect, physical, biological, 

 psychological, or anthropological, to reduce the apparently unreason- 

 able or magical element, and so to leave continually less to be 

 treated in the old-fashioned inspirational and ecstatic manner. We 

 shall simply cease to confound the science with the art. The more 

 immediate advantages of the prosecution of literary research in such 

 a way as this are an ever-increasing knowledge of the factors that 

 enter into world-literature and determine its growth, its reasons, 

 conditions, movements, and tendencies, in short, its laws; and a 

 poetics capable not only of detecting the historical, but of appreciat- 

 ing the social accent in what is foreign and too often despised, or 

 contemporary and too often overpraised, if not ignored. The new 

 science of literature will in turn throw light upon that which gave it 

 birth; it will prove an index to the evolution of soul in the individual 

 and in society; it will interpret that sphinx, national consciousness 

 or the spirit of the race, or, mayhap, destroy it. It will in one case 

 and in all assist a science of comparative ethics. The new discipline 

 brought to the study of all kinds of writing a scientific objectivity 

 and the historical method. It has taken up into itself what is object- 

 ive and historical of the older stylistic : it aims to reject or confirm 

 former theories, but on purely scientific grounds. It is the transition 

 from stylistic to a science which shall still find room for aesthetics, 

 but for aesthetics properly so called, developed, checked, and corrected 

 by scientific procedure and by history. 



Before the day of modern psychology, anthropology, linguistics, 

 and the comparative sciences of society, religion, and art, literature 

 was not possible to be studied either in relation to its antecedents 

 or to its components. Otherwise our study would long ago have been 

 known as comparative philology, a name improperly usurped by 

 the linguistic branch of the philological discipline. Such indeed is the 

 name by which Professor Whitney would have called the comparative 

 study of the literatures of different countries had the discipline, 

 been prosecuted as a science when he wrote. Such was the conception 

 of Wolf and Herder. The modern science of literature is a reaffirm- 

 ation of that aspect of philology the literary which, both because 

 it was dependent upon, and eclipsed by, the development of lin- 

 guistics, has long ceased to be regarded as philology at all; save in 

 Germany, where philological seminars have dealt not only with the 



