ENGLISH LITERATURE AND OTHER SCIENCES 403 



one's mind among books, the irresponsible but genial critic; then 

 the responsible and professional critic, the critic of the schools; and 

 finally the man whom, for lack of a more specific name, we may 

 call the scholar. Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine would perhaps 

 best impersonate these several functions on a high plane of achieve- 

 ment. The first is a literary free-lance, and his alliances cannot 

 concern us. For the other two, while it is evident that the critic is 

 frequently a scholar, in the best sense of the term, often a far better 

 scholar than the manufacturer of dissertations, and while there are 

 surely more bad scholars than bad critics, seeing that the critic is 

 anchored to his facts, while the scholar may drift over seas of erudi- 

 tion to no purpose whatever, none the less there is a very well-marked 

 distinction between them, and this distinction points imperatively 

 to a useful division of labor. It divides the critic's main task, which, 

 in Professor Saintsbury's phrase, is "the reasoned exercise of literary 

 taste," or, in other words, the assignment of values and the main- 

 tenance of a standard, from a task which is not so much the "bird's- 

 eye view," so heartily detested by Professor Saintsbury himself, as 

 a scientific study of facts in their whole range, and a search for the 

 principles and laws which govern the course of literature as an 

 element in human life. Everybody knows the distinction; but in 

 practice it is neglected to a most astonishing degree. Too often 

 scholar and critic are at odds, each thinking of his own intent and 

 imputing it to the other; and these barren disputes, waged back and 

 forth over quite familiar facts, could be settled offhand, or else dis- 

 missed as groundless, if only it were clearly understood that on one 

 side critical considerations are at stake and on the other side interests 

 of the scholar's larger but no more important research. To take an 

 illustration from the learner's point of view, Ward's English Poets is 

 an anthology on the great scale which could hardly be surpassed; 

 it was fitting that Matthew Arnold should write the introduction 

 for it, and that critics of the first rank should write the separate 

 appreciations. One hears it said that to read this book aright is to 

 understand the history of English poetry, and no statement could 

 well wander farther from the truth. Here is no history of English 

 poetry, but rather a practical and admirable criticism; not because 

 long epics and all dramas had to be omitted, but because the history 

 of any body of national poetry, of any literature, is something 

 quite different from a synthesis of appreciations. For the critic the 

 sum of parts in a literature is vastly greater than the whole; for the 

 student of literature as a social element, the whole is vastly greater 

 than the sum of its parts. Let us take a still more obvious illustra- 

 tion of the neglect to keep in view the real object of research. The 

 dispute about literary types, not yet lulled to rest, loses its seeming 

 contradictions so soon as we separate critical from scholarly interests. 



