ENGLISH LITERATURE AND OTHER SCIENCES 407 



parison of literature with literature and less on the results of other 

 sciences. He is sure that Du Bos rides the climatic hobby too hard. 

 But his protest, however mild, was unavailing. Montesquieu made 

 climate almost supreme, but brought the people itself into full view; 

 in time, Comte corrects the physical influence by the moral and the 

 mental, adding his famous milieu intellectuel; and at last Taine 

 comes to the full notion of sociological, ethnological, and physiological 

 environment as controlling factor in literature. Taine marks for 

 literature by a happy chance, particularly for the study of 

 English literature the culmination of a great movement in the 

 arts, in statecraft, and in philosophy at large, which everywhere 

 tended to find the source of things not in individual initiative, human 

 or divine, but in vast forces, cosmic law, working with absolute 1 

 certainty and to ends of a consummate perfection. As men turned in 

 government from king to people, and in nature from a personal and 

 voluntary supervision to the great democracy of natural forces, so in 

 literature itself, art as well as science, one put the individual author 

 into the background and began to talk of the literature of a nation, 

 the poetry of a people. Literature as a whole loomed large in the 

 foreground and absorbed the individual product. Origins and be- 

 ginnings were eagerly studied; and along with this particular study, 

 helping it and helped by it, rose the new and yet unnamed sciences 

 with which we are now concerned. "Study the people" is the new 

 cry of an anonymous reviewer, probably Goldsmith himself, giving 

 advice to the poet; "study the people," repeated the scholars who 

 took special literatures in hand; and "study the people" was the 

 watchword of that school of thinkers in England and France who 

 founded the science of sociology. At these two last-named groups 

 we are now to look. 



It was literary criticism, old as literature itself, which began the 

 new movement as part of that eternal discussion about the tests and 

 character of genius. Blackwell, Lowth, Hurd, Warton, Young, and 

 Robert Wood, the English group, Condorcet, Montesquieu, and 

 Rousseau in France, and, above all. the German Herder, drove crit- 

 icism from dusty library corners into the fresh air. This process, 

 so often described as a "'return" to nature, to medievalism, to sin- 

 cerity of heart instead of acuteness of mind. the gist of Rousseau's 

 first discourse, to savage simplicity instead of civilized duplicity. 

 the theme of the second discourse. was really a sociological 

 and ethnological extension of the timeworn discussion of genius in 

 the spirit of the great democratic- movement everywhere astir. 

 Lowth put the genius of Hebrew poetry, even of its figures anil 

 tropes, in the life of the Hebrew people: \\ ood. following Blackwell. 

 but with a saner conception of t'ungs. did a like service for Homer. 

 comparing Homeric "manners" with those of American red men; 



