408 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Sir William Jones, in one of two essays l added to his poems, pits 

 spontaneity and natural genius against the theory of imitation as 

 defended by the Abbe Batteux, and opens a significant view into 

 the literature of an old and distant people ; everywhere a transfer of 

 genius from individual to folk, nation, race. Young's essay, highly 

 rated as it is, has less novelty than one might suppose; Hobbes had 

 written to something of the same purpose, and St. Evremond, 

 exiled in England, had seen the great light long before Young; poetry, 

 he said, 2 is the speech now of gods and now of fools, but rarely of 

 ordinary men. This, of course, is the claim for esprit, championed by 

 Du Bos, against Boileau's plea for common sense. All the threads of 

 this long controversy for genius and the people, nature, spontaneity, 

 were woven by Herder into his doctrine of natural, national genius, 

 and the history of humanity itself. 



Parallel to this movement in literary criticism went the progress of 

 the new sciences themselves. In England, Locke and the grotesque 

 but incisive Mandeville, then Hume and Adam Smith, and, I am 

 fain to add, Lord Monboddo, along with the French school, gradually 

 made these new allies of literature into recognized sciences. Locke 

 invoked the reports of travelers, and advocated the study of "chil- 

 dren, savages, and idiots." 3 The comparative method seized upon 

 modern instances. England's influence on France, French ideas in 

 PZngland, are constantly cited by this school. Mandeville, and, after 

 him. Hume and Adam Smith, use what would now be called statistics. 

 Mandeville, long before Rousseau set up a perfect savage, insists on 

 the savage as he is, and laughs at Sir William Temple's virtuous red 

 man as "fit to be a justice of the peace." Hume, though skeptical 

 about the influence of climate on national character, finds 4 that 

 the " rise and progress of the arts and sciences" are due to sociological 

 conditions rather than to personal initiative and imitation. Adam 

 Smith, however small the compass of his essays on this topic, is of 

 supreme importance; Dugald Stewart, indeed, his editor, thinks 

 that Smith really invented that "theoretical or conjectural history" 

 \vhir-h deals by scientific inference with the origin and growth of 

 things hidden in a remote past. As for Monboddo. while it may be 

 true, as Sir Leslie Stephen says, that he followed dull Harris in an 

 attempt to revive Aristotelian philosophy, what he really accom- 

 plish^! was his own. Gibbon on the steps of the capitol at Rome. 

 planning his great work, is matched by Monboddo moved to write 

 his Origin and Progress of Language by the perusal of a Huron 

 dictionary supplementing a book of travels among the American 



"On the Arts commonly called Imitative," in Poems . . . from the Asiatic 

 Languages, Oxford, 177'-'. 



: (Euvres M(-sl<'f-*. Tonson, 1709, n, 119, ff. "elf la Poesie." 



3 Patten, De>.-cJr,pmf)if f,j English Thought, p. 15S. 



4 Essays, ed. Given and Grose, I, 174, fT. 



