404 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Hennequin, like M. Tarde, ridiculed the notion of a type; and from 

 a critical point of view they were right in defying any one to combine 

 into a type of Touraine authorship such natives of the soil as 

 Rabelais, Descartes, Alfred de Vigny, and Balzac; while the late 

 Joseph Texte 1 was quite as successful, defending his views on the 

 making of cosmopolitan literature, when he challenged the critics 

 to detach the typical Scotsman, the typical northern peasant, from 

 their idea of Robert Burns. For Burns means one thing in the 

 scale of literary achievement, and he means quite another thing in 

 the scale of literary evolution; and the two meanings, while related, 

 must not be confused. The critic is right when he insists that the 

 sense of values in a work of art should not be merged into mere 

 questions of environment; the scholar is right when he protests that 

 discussions of artistic value, of personality, shall not cloud his view 

 of cause and effect working in long ranges of literary evolution. As 

 the critic deals mainly with the product and its maker, the science 

 outside of literature which most nearly concerns him is psychology. 

 Professor Dilthey's several essays 2 have called attention to this 

 application of psychology to the problems of authorship and the 

 individual in art, an example that so far has had little following 

 in the study of English literature by am- consistently psychological 

 method. On the other hand, it is clear that the study of this liter- 

 ature as a social development, and as a whole, calls for help from 

 such sciences as sociology, ethnology, and anthropology, with history, 

 of course, as an inseparable ally. To trace back these two tendencies, 

 one toward an isolated and individual problem, and one toward 

 the problem of evolution in literature, is an interesting task; both 

 of them begin in the oldest critical studies. Xo doubt they can often 

 unite in one effort, and with the happiest result. witness the per- 

 fection of that study of Villon made by the late Gaston Paris, and 

 many another masterpiece of the same kind. For the purposes of 

 this paper, however, they should be considered each for itself. 



Before undertaking this task, it may be well to glance briefly at 

 an alliance of literature with scientific studies which concerns neither 

 critic nor scholar, but rather the poet himself. Professor Shaler has 

 recently called upon criticism to decide whether an imagination 

 trained by the quest of things scientific may not be fitted by such 

 training for poetic achievement, and has submitted certain interest- 

 ins dramas of his own making for the test. The answer will be of 

 considerable interest; for the assumption is quite different from that 

 other and qui'e familiar appeal which from time to time has urged 



1 Defending also the milieu ; see his Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. xvii, ff. 



- Xot.-ibly his linfrncje zum Studium der Jndiridualitat, Sitzungsber. der Berlin 

 Acad., 1896, i, 295, ff. The psychological school of criticism in Germany, mainly 

 concerned with Goethe, }\:\< done little so far of a comprehensive and positive 

 character. 



