MODERN HISTORY OF LITERATURE 499 



to do so, provided its representatives understand how to avoid nar- 

 row, pedantic ideas and theone-sidedness of method that have always 

 been the greatest danger to philology. The philological method was 

 transferred to our science simultaneously from classical philology and 

 from the study of older German literature; for Lachrnann and his 

 followers, as you are well aware, had first employed the strict philo- 

 logical method in this latter field. Even in modern literature it at 

 once yielded excellent results, as if as a foretaste of the future: Lach- 

 mann's edition of Lessing was the first edition of a modern High Ger- 

 man writer planned in accordance with philological principles. Still, it 

 was not until the seventies that W. Schcrer tried to carry out strictly 

 the method of the Lachmann school in the field of modern literature. 

 1 am speaking of things that I myself sawtakc root and grow. Yet the 

 development lies far enough in the past to admit the possibility of a 

 critical judgment. The chief advantage that the philological method 

 had at the outset was a hitherto unheard-of accuracy and minuteness 

 in scientific work. The student no longer contented himself with 

 arranging a rich material en -masse under general aspects or accord- 

 ing to leading topics; he tried to work through it even to the smallest 

 detail, and based far-reaching critical results upon the establishment 

 of a single date, or upon the discovery of an obscure personal char- 

 acteristic, or upon a striking parallel passage. A large amount of 

 ingenuity and acumen was exercised in this way by Schcrer and the 

 most talented among his disciples. It was only slowly and gradually 

 that the dangers which beset this, as every other path, dawned upon 

 his followers. Even to-day there is great lack of clearness in regard 

 to these matters, anything but complete agreement, and his atti- 

 tude towards these questions is one of the chief problems to occupy 

 the mind of every literary historian, perhaps not in his abstract 

 thought, still practically in the concrete cases of his daily work. 



1 once read a statement of a prominent natural scientist that every- 

 thing great that was done in the last century in the natural sciences 

 was due to the transference of the method from one science to the 

 other (for example from chemistry to medicine, etc.). I doubt whether 

 this statement would apply with the same definiteness to the mental 

 sciences, for in the case of these it depends, I suppose, less upon 

 typical agreements than upon individual differences. We appear. 

 however, to comprehend the dangers of the principle still less when 

 we are dealing with a transference from the unsafe and uncertain 

 to a field of greater safety and certainty. We shall probably always 

 comprehend less how the people of ancient and medieval tinic.- 

 1 hough. t and felt . and consequently ho\v they wrote, than how Goethe 

 or Kleist or Grillparzcr composed. We shall always determine merely 

 hypothetical]}* how the author of the Bacchac regarded as a man the 

 rites of Dionysos. Yet the fact that the poet of the second part of 



