THE PROBLEMS AND METHODS OF MODERN HISTORY 

 OF LITERATURE 



BY JACOB MINOR 

 (Translated from the German by Professor E. Bagster-Collins, Columbia University) 



[Jacob Minor, Professor of German Philology, University of Vienna, b. Vienna, 

 April 15, 1855. Studied, Vienna and Berlin. Professor of German Literature, 

 University of Prague, 1884. Author of N euhochdeutsche Metrik, and other not- 

 able works and essays.] 



IT is one of the youngest sciences on which I have the honor to 

 report at this world-congress. For although its beginnings reach down 

 deeper into the past, it is itself hardly more than a hundred years old. 

 Indeed, the really scholarly treatment of the subject is younger still 

 by half a century. For throughout the eighteenth, and even in the 

 first third of the nineteenth century, the leading ideas emanated 

 from men who did not really belong to the science, but who were 

 firmly established in the literature of their own time. From this stand- 

 point they attempted to throw search-lights into- the past, although 

 even the best and greatest of them had only a general idea, concep- 

 tions only measurably accurate, regarding this past. Lessing, Herder, 

 Schiller, Humboldt. and the Schlegels, however great their influence 

 for our science, belong very largely to literature, because the main 

 part of their activity and the entire weight of their personality was 

 devoted to its service. From the days of E. J. Koch, literature was 

 thought to be amply provided for by bibliographical compendiums, 

 that contained, in addition to titles of books, meagre biographical 

 sketches and brief statements about material and content. It was 

 called "Literary Biography." Later the science of history took 

 up literature, and erected to it in the work of Gervinus a great 

 monument, which, alas, was intended also as a mausoleum. For its 

 author did not think that our literature would have a future; in his 

 opinion it had spent itself in the "classical period" and it would 

 now at the best lie fallow for some time. There followed after the 

 historians, the philosophers and a:\stheticists; and what was done 

 by the followers and the opponents of the Hegelian school in our 

 subject is perhaps to-day no longer sufficiently known and appre- 

 ciated. In the field of the literary-historical monograph, at least, the 

 recently deceased Haym, although his lifcwork of course extended 

 over the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century, stands 

 unequaled both in extent and depth of attainment. 



The philological follows the philosophical period, and although not 

 unchallenged and unshaken, it has stood its ground and will continue 



