October 27, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



553 



tile as the most ridiculous ones of the medieval 

 schoolmen. In the field of English scholar- 

 ship, for instance, a great deal of effort has 

 been put forth to determine the exact route of 

 the Canterbury Pilgrimage, and where the 

 knight began and ended his tale, where the 

 Chanoun's yemanne joined the cavalcade, and 

 similar points, as if it were an actual his- 

 torical occurrence. Such an attempt as this is 

 just as ridiculous as it would be to try to 

 determine whether it was the right or the left 

 slipper that Cinderella lost, if the story leaves 

 us in doubt on that point; for the Canterbury 

 Pilgrimage, although it may well have had one 

 or several prototypes, never took place in any- 

 thing like the form we know it anywhere else 

 than in Geoffrey Chaucer's brain. This is the 

 sort of task that lies within the compass of 

 uninspired industry, but it has nothing else to 

 recommend it; and when students are encour- 

 aged to devote themselves to such tasks, under 

 the name of constructive scholarship, and 

 questions so artificial and so remote from sig- 

 nificant facts and fixed principles are thus 

 associated so extensively with literature, it is 

 no wonder that it suffers in public esteem, and 

 that it has come to be considered by many as 

 profitless speculation. 



Something, though, that is worse for litera- 

 ture than its association with philology and 

 pedantry is its confusion with dilettantism. 

 There are no rewards offered to-day for the 

 production of literature of a high order, there 

 has been no intellectual or moral stimulus to 

 its production, and there is consequently no 

 power to discern it in present-day civilization 

 if it were produced; so that the best strength, 

 if not the best intellect, of to-day is directed 

 towards the solution of more material prob- 

 lems. The effect of this is to leave literary 

 production, to an unprecedented extent almost, 

 in the hand of the intellectually petty and the 

 spiritually contemptible. Men who in periods 

 of greater literary discrimination would not 

 have achieved even the negative distinction of 

 being ridiculed in satires such as those of 

 Pope or Dryden, through lack of competition, 

 get themselves considered authors, and the 

 public is led to believe that, if they are con- 



demned, literature with all the value and 

 honor accorded to it by tradition must be con- 

 demned too. Some men of this type have 

 entered college teaching and have thus been 

 enabled to identify themselves with learning 

 as well as with literature and to lessen the 

 respect and sympathy of the student as well as 

 that of the general public for the subject. It 

 is to their influence that the student owes his 

 impression that literature is a matter of form 

 rather than substance, and that in it what is 

 said is unimportant provided it be expressed 

 in an elegant or striking manner. This leads 

 to an esteem for mere felicity far beyond its 

 worth and to a serious corruption of taste. 

 What is known as " style " is certainly an 

 important factor in determining literary val- 

 ues, but style is not a mere matter of the 

 externals of expression, any more than being 

 a gentleman is only a question of convention- 

 alities of dress and deportment because it 

 seems so to the petty mind. 



Where this type of intellect does not iden- 

 tify excellence with externals or superficiali- 

 ties it is even more mischievous, for it incul- 

 cates a dislike for matter that is substantial 

 and nutritive and a strong taste for what is 

 stimulant or narcotic. Shaljespeare and other 

 writers that require depth of intellect and 

 breadth of sympathy for their appreciation are 

 abandoned, for the most part, to the philolo- 

 gists and pedants, or their greatness is ex- 

 plained as being due to skiU in literary tech- 

 nique or to some secondary or inferior quality. 

 That knowledge or wisdom is essential to 

 good literature is entirely overlooked and very 

 often the opposite is strongly implied. Under- 

 standing of life and its correct delineation is 

 not what is presented as the aim of literature, 

 but it is pictured as depending, in poetry, on 

 a sort of mildly epileptic or neurotic excite- 

 ment imparted by the writer to his verse so that 

 the reader is infected by it; and in prose, on 

 novelty and ingenuity. Classic literature is 

 regarded as consisting of what persons of more 

 solid attainments would call " minor verse " — 

 verse dealing with sentiment rather than pas- 

 sion — and fiction; for in this school all prose 

 that is literature is fiction, because facts are 



