CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 375 



natural history, the comparative anatomy and embryology, the 

 evolutionist biology, of the nineteenth century. On the first explicit 

 promulgation of these theories by Taine their suggestiveness was 

 conceded, their too vigorous and rigorous application deprecated by 

 Sainte-Beuve and Scherer in criticisms to which the discussions of 

 the past two decades have added little. There is, perhaps, some 

 naivete in laboring this point. To critics of the calibre of M. Brune- 

 tiere, M. Faguet, M. Lemaitre, M. Anatole France, M. Pellisier, the 

 application of biological analogies to literature, and the theory of the 

 evolution of genres is, like the question of 'objective and subjective 

 criticism, a convenient theme for dialectical variations, a pleasant 

 device for keeping aloft the shuttlecock of rejoinder and surre- 

 joinder in the Parisian fcuilleton. None of his critics can know better 

 than does M. Brunetiere that it was not the distinction between 

 literary " history " and literary " evolution " that enabled him to write 

 his admirable book on the French lyric of the nineteenth century, 

 but rather his scholarly mastery of French literature, his trained gift 

 of exposition, and his lifelong loving familiarity with the poets. The 

 system does not save him from preferring, tout has, Racine to 

 Sophocles. It does not preserve him from vagueness and uncertainty 

 when he touches on the poetry of England and Greece. Nor does the 

 absence of a system prevent Scherer from being perhaps the only 

 French critic of his generation who writes of English poetry as one 

 to the manner born. The only law of literary development that has 

 any prospect of general recognition is the law of fashion expressed 

 in the words imitation, culmination, exaggeration, satiety, reaction. 

 And the chief canon of literary criticism was announced by Cicero 

 two thousand years ago : " Nemo potest de ea re quani non novit 

 non turpissime loqui." 



What, after all, does La Methode Scientifique dc VHistoirc Litter 

 aire of the conscientious Professor Renard contain but a bald and 

 painfully explicit enumeration of questions, problems, points of 

 view, generalizations which every competent and scholarly modern 

 critic applies as a matter of course when he needs them? And 

 what genuine student of literature would exchange for a wilderness 

 of such abstract categories the letters in which Fit/Gerald com- 

 municates the thrill of his literary admirations, or a Shakespearian 

 interpretation by Lamb. Hazlitt, or Coleridge 1 , a Causcrie of Sainte- 

 Beuve, an essay in criticism of Arnold, an "Appreciation" by 

 Pater, a seeming-frivolous fcuilleton of Anatole France or Jules 

 Lemaitre? Here, if anywhere, the saying of Renan applies: ''It is 

 the part of a clever writer to have a philosophy but not to parade it." 



In any case, the battleground or field of application of the new 

 biological criticism will for some time be French rather than Greek 



