ENGLISH LITERATURE AND OTHER SCIENCES 413 



When the individual author is in question, other scientific influences 

 come rightly into play. Here scholarship, as one is forced to call it, 

 must lean heavily upon criticism and ask psychology for aid; here is 

 the field for doctrines not only of the intellectual process, of author- 

 ship in itself, but of heredity as well. What subtle influence plays 

 through the heredity of literature, passing from author to author 

 and from group to group, M. Brunetiere has told the world of crit- 

 icism, heretofore too eager for discoveries in individual genius, too 

 eager to write down invention as its master- word. But the significance 

 of groups and schools in authorship frequently remains hidden with- 

 out sociological help. In dealing with any school of the soft, which 

 has got its vogue in whatever way, there must be careful consideration 

 whether this vogue is due to the author or to certain social, national 

 conditions. It is probably right to connect the vogue of Shakespeare's 

 historical plays, on English ground at least, and in their own time, 

 with a demand for a glorification of England brought about by the 

 ruin of the Armada and by the new feeling of national importance. It 

 is also, doubtless, right to connect the recent outburst of historical 

 novels in America with a similar sense of national importance rising 

 steadily since the Civil War and leaping into prominence with the 

 results of the war with Spain. But the offspring of the one Spanish 

 war is not to be compared with the offspring of the other. There the 

 social forces ran far behind the literary power of execution, and in 

 Shakespeare's case the social parallel amounts barely to a detail; here, 

 so far as one can judge at short range, the social, national phase is 

 overwhelmingly important, and the books themselves, save possibly 

 in one or two cases, are merely of commercial importance. Of the two 

 facts regarded as literary phenomena, one is full of significance for 

 the sociological study of literature, and has no attraction for the 

 critic, while the other, interesting in a casual way on the social side, 

 is carried impetuously from any such point of view and is submitted 

 to the great court of literary achievement. 



This division of labor is, then, evident enough as at least a partial 

 solution of our problem. The relation of English literature to other 

 sciences lies mainly in the need, for aid in the scholar's undertaking, 

 to study its evolution as a whole, to investigate its groups, its general 

 movements, and the influences which have determined its course. 

 The sciences which offer this aid direct arc those that deal with 

 society, with racial and national divisions, with the general history of 

 man on the earth. Criticism, on the other hand, seeking after values 

 and maintaining standards, has little use for these sciences save in an 

 indirect and casual way. It finds its warrants in its own material. In 

 individual psychology, however, it may have a valuable ally. For 

 both of the great interests, finally, scholarship and criticism alike, 

 history is an indispensable background. 



