412 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



enough. The scanty remnant of literature read at first hand, he has 

 to put this into proper relation with its environments in order not 

 only to understand it, but to supply the omissions, and to restore, so far 

 as he can, the literature as it was in its whole range and expression. 

 Back and forth, between these scanty remnants of literary achieve- 

 ment and the baffling hints of history, he must fare, until he decides 

 just what this literature has to say for itself, its proportion of 

 emotion and thought, its relation to classic remains, its proportion of 

 monkish isolation, and its measure of supply from contemporary life, 

 and until he decides whether this life itself was of the noble, semi- 

 barbarian type which Grimm and Waitz and Freeman championed, 

 or that feudal complex of a few chieftains and a host of serfs which 

 certain sociologists now declare to have held the foreground of earliest 

 Germanic as well as English history. Ethnology is offered as an aid 

 in this study; but ethnology, so far as it parallels past stages of our 

 race with modern savage conditions, must be used with a caution 

 which borders closely upon abstinence itself. English survivals, on 

 the other hand, are of vast importance for early English literature and 

 life; and what the Germans call Culturgeschichte, and Professor Tylor 

 wrote without so expressive a name, but with a wealth of material 

 and consummate genius of exposition, is a science with which the 

 scholar in literature must maintain relations as intimate as may be. 

 And all this is in the spirit of Taine. 



Students in English literature, however, are not mainly busied - 

 or at least, let us hope they are not with the reaches of literary 

 evolution. At the farthest extreme from this task they work on the 

 trails of imitation, and trace the course of jest or theme or phrase in 

 its passage from land to land, from century to century, from author to 

 author. I have elsewhere expressed the opinion that this work, highly 

 valuable in itself and as a detail in larger tasks, assumes too much 

 importance when it makes itself the main business of comparative 

 literature and becomes a kind of vast bookkeeping for the settlement 

 of accounts as among the literatures of the world. As I hinted, behind 

 this mere barter are the mines, the mills, and the seeclfields of litera- 

 ture itself. Xo better corrective for the abuse, or at least superfluous 

 u.se. of comparative literature on these trails of imitation can be found . 

 as I believe, than an alliance with sociological interests. Studies 

 which take environment into account, and reckon with social condi- 

 tions at every turn, which grant that while the story may pass every- 

 where, yet the form of it and the expression of it belong to the time 

 and the locality as well as to the author's genius, these, combined 

 with analysis of the actual literary traffic, will go far to restore dignity 

 to literary investigation without impairing its exactness. Literature 

 is a thing of export and import; it is also a thing of growth, and 

 always stands in some connection with the society which produces it. 



