480 GERMANIC LITERATURE 



may be, as its representatives, rule upon foreign soil. Often the 

 tyranny narrows down to the rule over a single work, but sometimes 

 it maintains itself for centuries. 



As applied to the methods of historic investigation, the preceding 

 considerations go to show that the important task is not the detec- 

 tion of such influences by collecting parallel passages, making 

 lists of allusions, counting up what one author has borrowed from 

 another, pointing out reminiscences, or even discovering plagiarisms. 

 Rather is it the main thing, when once this relationship, whether 

 plain or obscure, is established, to utilize the fact for understanding 

 the characteristics of the writer influenced, for determining his de- 

 gree of dependence, for estimating the proportions of the ingredients 

 in the resulting mixture, and for indicating as exactly as possible 

 the point at which a work, an author, a literature achieves a rela- 

 tive independence, the point where the personal, subjective, original 

 comes to light, where the national character frees itself from the 

 chrysalis, and rises, splendid and radiant, into the air. 



In this regard, one urgent demand to be made on our discipline 

 is a prompt right-about-face. Dozens of researches are seen to be 

 at the least superfluous, if not utterly on the wrong track. One 

 couples together two names from a national literature or from the 

 world's literature, without asking whether the connection is suffi- 

 ciently close to make its investigation worth the trouble. One over- 

 looks the fact that certain foundations lie, unavoidably and as a 

 matter of course, at the basis of certain periods of literature, and 

 that in such cases the more precise determination of details is of 

 no consequence. One fails to see that in the study of each writer 

 it is only necessary to consider certain central authors who have 

 influenced his development in essential and decisive points, and 

 without whom the younger author's work would have been incon- 

 ceivable. But the real disease of this sort of researches is that they 

 picture the influence of one author on another much too externally 

 and mechanically, while they conceive the highly complex creative 

 process in far too simple terms; they degrade the individual author, 

 till he is made to seem the helpless prey of vultures swooping down on 

 him; they interpret a work of art as they would a machine produced 

 by the joint efforts of many unthinking laborers; they do not even 

 see that the influence of one work often excludes that of another, 

 or that the most important question is whether a given work of art, 

 known, perhaps, to a writer for a long time, was actually occupying 

 his attention so strongly at a definite moment that it could exert an 

 influence on a newly arising work of art germinating within him at 

 that moment; they do not see that they must know the order in 

 which different works impressed themselves on the author in a 

 stimulating and life-giving fashion. 



