402 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Seven eighths of the current reproach of pedantry flung at modern 

 studies in English, at excessive zeal for linguistic problems, may be 

 said to spring from an unholy desire to talk about Shakespeare 

 and Chaucer without the trouble of finding out precisely what 

 Shakespeare or Chaucer means. But the English scholar has other 

 than defensive relations with science; he must not neglect the rela- 

 tion of literary facts to laws which psychology, ethnology, sociology, 

 have shown to be of permanent importance for literature itself, 

 precisely as the psychologist or sociologist must not too eagerly im- 

 pose these laws upon literature without due study of the particular 

 case. In certain brilliant researches, psychological and biological in 

 method, sociological in aim, M. Tarde, working on the lines started 

 by Walter Bagehot in his Physics and Politics, arrives at the formula 

 of invention and imitation, a formula which he declares to be of 

 quite universal validity. He then goes on to apply it to literature, 

 really with no more novelty in this general view of the case than can 

 be found, stripped of biological and psychological allusion, in a dull 

 paper about the same formula read by the younger Racine long ago 

 before the Academy of Inscriptions; but M. Tarde announces, 

 without due researches in literature itself, without due employment 

 of a literary method, that all great literature begins (debute) with 

 a great book, like the Bible, or the Iliad. 1 Now, while M. Tarde 's 

 theory of the social process may be right, as opposed to Herbert 

 Spencer's theory about the development of the arts, it is nothing but 

 grotesque in this invasion of literature. Again, for the other instance, 

 a student of English literature, say in its development in the days 

 of Queen Anne, who should refuse to take account of the consider- 

 ations urged on social and psychological grounds by Bagehot himself 

 in his brief study of "literary fashion," would be darkening his room 

 against a welcome flood of light from the allied sciences. Some use 

 of these sciences is certainly desired; to determine it, one should 

 take into account the specific work in hand, the point of view and the 

 objective point, and one should also know something of the steps 

 by which scientific method in general, as well as particular results 

 of scientific research, have come into the alliance with literature. 



First of all, it should be clearly understood in what function the 

 student of English literature appears; much of our current contro- 

 versy might be avoided if these lines of research were more carefully 

 drawn and the object of it were kept steadily in view. Passing by the 

 publisher's public, the mob of gentlemen who read with ease, and 

 coming to those whose attitude toward the subject is of importance 

 for other reasons than mere supply and demand, we may count three 

 types: the individual reader with valuable opinions, who notes clown 

 what M. Anatole France has charmingly called the adventures of 

 1 Lcs Lois de I'Imitation, p. 233. 



