The Comparative Study of Literature  

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THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE by Arthur Richmond Marsh

V. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. No observant person can, I think, have failed to note of late years a certain increasing hesitation and perplexity in regard to the true function of literature in studies. Indeed, there are reasons not a few for thinking that we are preparing for one of those revisions and restatements of the general conception of what we should try to get from literature, of which we have several examples in the past. I do not mean merely that our literary taste is changing, or that we are passing from one set of literary admirations to another. Such lesser variation is incessantly going on. Classicism yields to romanticism, romanticism to realism, and this to something else, in an unbroken round of change. But these minor modifications of feeling and opinion about literature may easily take place without any material disturbance of the general estimate of the nature of literature or of the attitude of men's minds towards it. My neighbor may think that bad in books which I think good, and yet we may both seek in our reading to satisfy essentially the same needs, intellectual or aesthetic. 151 152 A. R. MARSH. The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a far profounder kind. It affects the very substance of men's thought about books, substitutes for one form of promise and enticement to the reading of them another and quite different appeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methods in the study of them. I shall , perhaps, make my meaning clearer on this point by some brief illustration . It is well known that during the Middle Ages the value of literature, in so far as it was serious and not intended merely to produce joie et soulaz, joy and solace, was conceived to consist in the fact that it served as a kind of bodying forth of a profounder truth than can be directly expressed in words. The mediaeval mind was universally and completely possessed by that allegorical method of interpreting the documents of the past, which had its earliest use on a large scale in the exposition of the Bible. When Hilary and Ambrose in the fourth century established among the Latin Christians the manner of exegesis that Philo Judaeus had originated and that the Alexandrian fathers had elaborated, they were unwittingly fixing for many centuries the form of one of the most important activities of the human spirit, the study of literature. The fourfold meaning-historical, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical-which they believed to run through the sacred books and which they made it their aim to educe and expound, became at once for their own and for succeeding generations of Christians the chief source of interest in literature in general. For a time, of course, there were obstacles in the way of the extension of this method to the profane writers. The Christian teachers had, indeed, found it impossible to do without Vergil and Horace and Cicero in their schools, as the famous decree of the Emperor Julian, prohibiting such use, plainly shows. A deep suspicion of these works of the Gentiles, however, long lingered among the Christian teachers, and from time to time found even violent expression. When, nevertheless, the Gentile part of society had long since disappeared, when the Christians found THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 153 themselves the supreme and only masters of the European world, the remembrance of the old doubts and hates gradually died away. Then it came about that the works of the great pagan writers, whose fame was consecrated by long tradition, insensibly fell into the same kind of estimation that the documents ofthe Christian faith enjoyed. These works, like the Bible, were felt to contain, beneath the veil of the outward form, a precious doctrine, and those that read them endeavored to find in in them the same fourfold adumbration of hidden truth as in the Gospel itself. Bernard of Chartres, the greatest teacher of France in the twelfth century, asserts that Vergil " inasmuch as he is a philosopher, describes human life under the guise of the history of Aeneas, who is the symbol of the soul. " Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, Statius are regularly included in the lists of the philosophers. Cicero is not merely, to use the phrase of Paschasius Radbertus, the ' king of eloquence ; ' he is put by Alars de Cambrai before Solomon himself for wisdom (Romans de tous les philosophes): Tulles qui moult fu sages clers, De totes clergies plus fers Que tout autre maistre de pris, Est premiers esleus et pris. And, finally, Ovid, the most facile of poets in morals as in art, was expounded at enormous length as the profoundest of teachers ; and even his most scabrous works, the Ars amatoria and the Remedium amoris, were seriously studied as containing a mystic sense of deep spiritual import. So all literature, insofar as it fell within the field of the intellectual class, had come to mean an allegorical account of spiritual things. And how firmly this conception of it was held by the best intelligences may be seen in those passages in Dante's works, both in his Convito, and in his dedicatory letter, sent with the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, in which he asserts the application of the doctrine to his own poems. F H Lit 330.7 Prof. A.R. march. PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, VOL. XI, 2. 1896. NEW SERIES, VOL. IV, 2. V. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. No observant person can, I think, have failed to note of late years a certain increasing hesitation and perplexity in regard to the true function of literature in studies. Indeed , there are reasons not a few for thinking that we are preparing for one of those revisions and restatements of the general conception of what we should try to get from literature, of which we have several examples in the past. I do not mean merely that our literary taste is changing, or that we are passing from one set of literary admirations to another. Such lesser variation is incessantly going on. Classicism yields to romanticism, romanticism to realism, and this to something else, in an unbroken round of change. But these minor modifications of feeling and opinion about literature may easily take place without any material disturbance of the general estimate of the nature of literature or of the attitude of men's minds towards it. My neighbor may think that bad in books which I think good, and yet we may both seek in our reading to satisfy essentially the same needs, intellectual or aesthetic. 151 152 A. R. MARSH. The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a far profounder kind. It affects the very substance of men's thought about books, substitutes for one form of promise and enticement to the reading of them another and quite different appeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methods in the study of them. I shall, perhaps, make my meaning clearer on this point by some brief illustration . It is well known that during the Middle Ages the value of literature, in so far as it was serious and not intended merely to produce joie et soulaz, joy and solace, was conceived to consist in the fact that it served as a kind of bodying forth of a profounder truth than can be directly expressed in words. The mediaeval mind was universally and completely possessed by that allegorical method of interpreting the documents of the past, which had its earliest use on a large scale in the exposition of the Bible. When Hilary and Ambrose in the fourth century established among the Latin Christians the manner of exegesis that Philo Judaeus had originated and that the Alexandrian fathers had elaborated, they were unwittingly fixing for many centuries the form of one of the most important activities of the human spirit, the study of literature. The fourfold meaning-historical, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical—which they believed to run through the sacred books and which they made it their aim to educe and expound, became at once for their own and for succeeding generations of Christians the chief source of interest in literature in general. For a time, of course, there were obstacles in the way of the extension of this method to the profane writers. The Christian teachers had, indeed, found it impossible to do without Vergil and Horace and Cicero in their schools, as the famous decree of the Emperor Julian, prohibiting such use, plainly shows. A deep suspicion of these works of the Gentiles, however, long lingered among the Christian teachers, and from time to time found even violent expression. When, nevertheless, the Gentile part of society had long since disappeared, when the Christians found THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE . 153 themselves the supreme and only masters of the European world, the remembrance of the old doubts and hates gradually died away. Then it came about that the works of the great pagan writers, whose fame was consecrated by long tradition, insensibly fell into the same kind of estimation that the documents of the Christian faith enjoyed. These works, like the Bible, were felt to contain, beneath the veil of the outward form, a precious doctrine, and those that read them endeavored to find in in them the same fourfold adumbration of hidden truth as in the Gospel itself. Bernard of Chartres, the greatest teacher of France in the twelfth century, asserts that Vergil "inasmuch as he is a philosopher, describes human life under the guise of the history of Aeneas, who is the symbol of the soul." Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, Statius are regularly included in the lists of the philosophers. Cicero is not merely, to use the phrase of Paschasius Radbertus, the ' king of eloquence ; ' he is put by Alars de Cambrai before Solomon himself for wisdom (Romans de tous les philosophes): Tulles qui moult fu sages clers, De totes clergies plus fers Que tout autre maistre de pris, Est premiers esleus et pris. And, finally, Ovid, the most facile of poets in morals as in art, was expounded at enormous length as the profoundest of teachers ; and even his most scabrous works, the Ars amatoria and the Remedium amoris, were seriously studied as containing a mystic sense of deep spiritual import. So all literature, insofar as it fell within the field of the intellectual class, had come to mean an allegorical account of spiritual things. And how firmly this conception of it was held by the best intelligences may be seen in those passages in Dante's works, both in his Convito, and in his dedicatory letter, sent with the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, in which he asserts the application of the doctrine to his own poems. 154 A. R. MARSH. Yet already in Dante there begin to appear signs of a new manner of thinking and feeling about literature. In several cases in which he has to give an opinion about works of literary art, his criterion is not, as we might expect, the character and profitableness of the doctrine enshrined within them, but the beauty of the style in which they are written. It is a certain dolce stil nuovo that marks the difference between the group of poets to which he himself belongs and the earlier Sicilian poets, whose last important representative was Bonagiunta da Lucca. It was preoccupation with the question of style, of language, that prompted his treatise De vulgari eloquentia (or eloquio). And, finally, in view of Giovanni Villani's characterization of Brunetto Latini, we can scarcely doubt that Dante refers to the latter's rhetorical influence upon himself, when he addresses to him the famous lines of the 15th Inferno : Chè in la mente m'è fitta, ed or mi accora, La cara e buona imagine paterna Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora M'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna. That man makes his name deathless by noble utterance, by eloquence that was the lesson of Brunetto Latini to Dante. And, had Dante but known it, here was an idea that was to act as a solvent of that whole body of literary doctrine which had accumulated during the Middle Ages-doctrine about which he himself had never had a serious doubt. Before Dante died, the man had already nearly attained manhood who was to seize upon this idea, utter it in a thousand pleasing forms, impose it upon his contemporaries, and establish it as an indubitable truth for many succeeding generations. This man was Francesco Petrarca, the first clear- eyed student of antiquity, the first of the humanists, and, as he has been called, the first modern man. In him was first thoroughly realized that profound change in the whole conception and theory of the nature and object of literature, which is one of the best examples we have of the changes the human spirit THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 155 must inevitably from time to time pass through in its treatment of its dearest intellectual interests. It is not my purpose to dwell upon the characteristics of Petrarch or of the great movement which he initiated, and which we have been in the habit of calling, with some exaggeration of pride in the modern world, the new-birth, the Renaissance. I desire simply to point out how distinct and in many ways limited a theory of literature is implied by that word eloquentia, which Petrarch so incessantly uses, and which he appeals to as the ultimate criterion in forming his literary judgments. I can think of no passage in all the books of the Renaissance that lights up the literary character of that movement as does Petrarch's brief discussion in his Rerum Memorandarum Libri [ 1, p. 466] of the comparative merits of Plato and Aristotle-a passage in which he accounts for his depreciation of il maestro di color che sanno, on the ground that in libris tamen ejus qui ad nos venerunt, sane certa fides eloquentiæ vestigium nullum est. We must, of course, guard ourselves carefully from misinterpretation of Petrarch's conception of eloquentia. On the one hand, there certainly lingered in his mind not a few remnants of the mediaeval notion of literary form as a veil for deeper, half-disclosed meanings beneath. On the other hand, he cannot too often reiterate his faith that literature must be of profit to life, that it must be morally uplifting, that it must contribute to the development of humanitas in society. And yet it remains true that in his thought literature is essentially eloquentia, is art, is style ; and that to this quality it chiefly owes its efficacy for good. And the chief work of the humanists, of Petrarch's successors in Italy, in the field of letters, was to establish this idea. It was for this that they toiled at the resuscitation of antiquity. It was for this that they reformed their own literary style. It was for this that they labored at the perfecting of the Italian tongue. Eloquentia alone could give immortal fame, and the matter of books was thought to avail little, if they 156 A. R. MARSH. lacked this supreme quality of manner. Even the most scabrous of subjects, the foulest diseases, the basest scandals, the most indecent scurrilities, might be treated with universal approval and applause, by him who had the secret of eloquentia. And when humanism passed from Italy to the rest of Europe, one of the earliest signs of its appearance in a new country was a sudden preoccupation of the writers of that country with style. What a place in the literary history of France, for example, has the question of the language. As one turns the pages of the famous manifesto of the Pléiade, the first group of French writers in whom the Renaissance appears triumphant-I mean, of course, Joachim du Bellay's Deffense et illustration de la langue françoise—one finds hardly any other concern than this. Is the French tongue fit for eloquence ? Can it be made to compare in this respect with Greek and Latin ? How can it be perfected in this regard ? These are practically the only questions du Bellay discusses. It is absolutely the same story with Malherbe. And, as for Boileau, even if he does lay down the famous rule that Rien n'est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable, it is still clear that the critic's interest and aim is the beau, rather than the vrai. And so it continues with the French critics and literary theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . So also it is with no inconsiderable part of them in the nineteenth . Nor is the case different with the other nations that felt strongly the Renaissance influence and this means all the chief literary nations of Europe-Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany and England. In the last two, to be sure, the sudden violence of the Reformation interfered with the quiet and continuous development of the idea of eloquence that we see in France. And yet no one can study the Elizabethans without recognizing that by them too literature as such was conceived as largely a matter of style. In short, all over THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 157 Europe the Renaissance brought about and fixed for many generations one and the same general attitude of mind towards letters, one and the same criterion of excellence in them, one and the same estimate of the chief source of edification to be obtained from them. When in 1736 the excellent Archbishop Fontanini brought out the first bibliography of Italian literature and called it Biblioteca dell' eloquenza italiana, his mere title summed up a whole great chapter in the history of literary study and criticism . And Bouterweck, when he named his well-known work Geschichte der Poesie und Beredtsamkeit (1801 ff.) , affirmed the same theory of the quintessential quality of his material. So with unanimous voice the Renaissance pronounced literature to be eloquence, just as the Middle Ages had pronounced it to be allegory. The histories of literature were histories of eloquence in this or that tongue, the professors of literature were professors of eloquence, the critics of literature were samplers and tasters of eloquence. Nor is this view yet abandoned by the expositors of literature. Not to mention those French critics of the École Normale, whom the Germans so scornfully dub belletristen, what is that " grand style " which Matthew Arnold tells us is the one important thing to seek for in literature, if not the eloquentia of Petrarch ? And when this critic tells us to remember and to use as touchstones of poetic excellence Dante's verse : and Chaucer's : E la sua voluntate è nostra pace, O martyr souded in virginitée, as well as those Homeric passages he loved so well, does he bid us approach literature in any different spirit from Clément Marot, when he states in the preface of his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses that he has jeté l'œil sur les livres latins, dont la gravité des sentences, et le plaisir de la lecture . . m'ont espris mes esprits, mené ma main, et amusé ma muse ? 158 A. R. MARSH. Nay, when Lowell, in an address to this very Association but five years ago, spoke of genius in literature as that " insoluble ingredient which kindles, lights, inspires and transmits impulsion to other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent, and makes them startlingly aware that they too may be parts of the controlling purpose of the world "-when Lowell thus spoke of genius, I say, was he not in real truth thinking of that ' god in us,' imagined by the humanists as by the ancients, who is the inspirer of eloquence, the suggester of the rare and irresistible word? In spite of these evidences of the persistence to our own time of the Renaissance conception of literature, however, there are no less certain evidences, throughout the nineteenth century, of increasing hesitation to accept it as complete and final, of doubt whether it indicates to us the best that is to be found in literature. Naturally, it was Romanticism that first gave rise to these doubts and hesitations. No inconsiderable part of the romanticists, to be sure, sought in their revolutionary doctrine simply a new form of eloquence. Such was the case with the fantastic romanticists like Tieck in Germany, and with the rhetorical romanticists like Victor Hugo in France. With others, however, the case was different. Some, like Uhland, sought in works of literature evidence of a more or less complete expression of the creative and constructive energies of the human spirit, and prized them accordingly. Romanticists of this class turned to the Middle Ages, because they found in this period both individuals and society as a whole more freely imagining new things and bringing them to realization, than was the case in later centuries. And to such critics perfection of expression , eloquence, seemed of quite secondary importance. Other Romanticists still found literature chiefly interesting as the utterance of racial or national feeling ; and the mere substitution of the phrase ‘ national-literature ' for ' eloquence ' in the titles of literary histories indicates a revolution in the method of approach to literature and the study of it. By these innovations the THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 159 traditional theory of the function of literature was seriously shaken. And as a further sign of the change the honored locations ' eloquence ' and ' belles-lettres ' began to fall into disuse, and gradually into contempt. But romanticism carried in its bosom, unsuspected at first, a still more dangerous enemy of the old order of thingsscience. For the chief characteristic of science is that it concerns itself not with the manner, but with the matter of things ; and just in proportion as attention has been more directed to the matter of literature, has the Renaissance conception of it as eloquentia come to seem insufficient and of doubtful value. At first, to be sure, the new literary science busied itself mainly with externals. It adopted the traditional humanistic methods of studying literature, endeavoring only to make them more systematic and more precise. It constituted texts, accumulated information about books and their authors, cleared up doubtful points of literary history or of grammar, sought to obtain as large a body of facts about literature as possible. Above all it undertook the investigation of language upon a scale never before dreamed of. And in this last field it first began to realize that the traditional objects of study were hopelessly inadequate. To the man of the Renaissance the whole interest of language lay in its capacity for eloquence ; and when he studied it, as in his Accademia della Crusca or his Académie française, he was thinking only of perfecting it to this end. The man of science, on the other hand, found in language one of the most important phenomena of universal nature, and studied it that he might understand it as such. In dealing with literature itself, however, the man of science has been much slower in getting his bearings-slower, but none the less surely working towards a new point of view. And one of the chief signs ofthe coming change is the greater and greater reluctance he shows to deal with what is often called the literary side of literature. Many and harsh complaints are made about him for this, and he is charged with neglecting that which alone makes the study of literature 160 A. R. MARSH. worth while. But the real truth is that he is silent , because he does not yet know what to say. He sees the insufficiency of what it has been customary to say, but he does not discern with clearness the sure and adequate thing that is to be substituted for it. The conception of literature has to be transformed as the conception of language has been transformed ; and when this transformation has been accomplished, we may properly blame the man of science, if he fails to understand and interpret the new doctrine. But in the meantime, as I have before stated, we see on all sides signs of doubt and hesitation as to the true line of approach to literature, as to the most profitable method of studying it. On the one hand, we have the men of science, sure of their linguistics but uncertain of their aesthetics, treating literature as a corpus vile for linguistic illustration. On the other hand, we have the representatives (often very imperfect ones) of the older tradition clamoring for the so- called literary teaching of literature, and endeavoring to win us to aesthetic appreciations, the reading of which causes a weary weight of doubt and distrust to settle upon our spirits. From time to time, also, we have projects for a more satisfactory method of literary study and criticism. Such, for example, was the essay of the brilliant Hellenist, Prof. Gildersleeve, entitled Grammar and Aesthetics, published some ten years since in the Princeton Review. In this essay, after speaking of what he rightly calls " the widespread distrust as to the ultimate value of all the aesthetic criticism of the day, whether sympathetic or other," Prof. Gildersleeve suggests that we return to the methods of the Alexandrian grammarians. "As an art," he says, " grammar entered largely into antique aesthetic criticism . While we may consider this study tedious in itself and futile in its aim as a regulative art, there is much to be learned from the old rhetorical use of grammar as an organon of aesthetic appreciation. The ancient rhetorician took into account phonetics, word-formation, syntax, periodology, all from a purely subjective point of view. Nowall these matters fall under the obser- THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 161 vation of the scientific grammarian, all are subjected to rigid measurement and computation. We know the proportions in which different vowel-sounds appear in given monuments of literature ; we know what sequences, what combinations of sounds certain languages will tolerate, the emergence and the disappearance of such and such terminations, the growth and limit of case use, tense use, the extent of section, member, and period ; and while it is not proposed to make a mathematical aesthetic on the basis of grammar, it may be possible to remove some part of criticism out of the range of mere sensibility and opulent phraseology." Such is Prof. Gildersleeve's proposed method of studying literature ; and it should be added that something like it is already in actual use in this country and abroad. There are well-known teachers whose pupils are even now at work counting and tabulating the color- words, the sound-words, the nature-words employed by this or that poet, to say nothing of the rhyme-varieties, and other metrical and grammatical peculiarities. Free from mere sensibility and opulent phraseology such a method of study certainly is ; and yet it seems to have a vice no less serious than these. It fixes our attention upon things we do not greatly care to know about, and leaves us in the dark as to all the great and vital concerns of literature. But this is not the only notable suggestion of a more scientific method of studying literature that we have had of late. Such a method has recently been proposed in France by the well-known critic, M. Brunetière. And his plan is to turn to the natural sciences for aid, borrowing from them the conception that has in our time so profoundly affected their development, the conception of evolution. M. Brunetière is, however, not the first to seek help from the sciences of nature. Taine had done the same thing, striving to interpret the romantic doctrine of national literatures by means of the supposed scientific principle of determinism . But Taine's History ofEnglish Literature is by universal consent a failure, and I suppose that there is not at this moment a single eminent 162 A. R. MARSH. student of literature in the world who is practically employing his method. M. Brunetière's suggestion, however, seems at first sight to have more to recommend it. For one thing, the doctrine of evolution is a much more generally accepted doctrine than that of determinism, and is far from involving such sweeping assumptions. But when we examine more closely the works in which M. Brunetière has attempted to give a practical illustration of his idea, we can hardly avoid a feeling of disappointment and almost of deception practiced upon us. For his Evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la littérature française and his Evolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIX siècle, though indisputably they contain many excellent things, contain nothing about evolution except in their titles and introductions. Even had M. Brunetière really succeeded , however, in cutting himself loose from the past of French aesthetic criticism , and in seriously embarking upon the project he so valorously announced, we may fairly doubt the profitableness of his results. For as yet we have no right to apply the doctrine of evolution to literature at all . At the best it is at present an analogy, and I believe a very useful one—the more so since it leads us constantly to remember that in literature nothing is fixed or permanent, but that everything, both materials and forms, is undergoing incessant change. That the law of this change, however, is the law of evolution we do not yet know ; nay, with that other analogy of language before us, we may rather doubt whether it will prove to be the case that it is. At any rate, it is little likely that the premature adoption of the doctrine, even as a working hypothesis, would lead to useful and permanent results. But there is still another suggestion of a more adequate method of studying and criticising literature—a suggestion that does not appear to have emanated from a single scholar, but seems rather unperceived to have embodied itself in a phrase, and launched itself into the world. This phrase is 'Comparative Literature, ' and when I have pronounced it, I have at last reached the subject which this paper purports to THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 163 discuss. I fear I shall have seemed to many to make my prologue long-longer than the poem-a procedure that no art of poetry could be found to justify. And yet, though I have done this, it has been with a purpose. I have not wished to-day to enter into the details of the comparative method of studying literature, but rather to bring out with distinctness what I consider to be the relation of the very conception of such a method to the traditional conceptions on the subject, and to other conceptions that have lately been advanced. If I shall have done this, and if I shall have further briefly indicated the true and reasonable hope and promise of such a conception, I shall have accomplished all that I could wish. The phrase ' Comparative Literature ' is afloat, I say, and indeed seems to be constantly acquiring greater currency. There are already journals of comparative literature ; and, what is more significant, there are professors of comparative literature. And yet, if we seek for a definition of the new term, we shall find it amazingly difficult to obtain. No doubt, it was the fruitful development of the comparative method in the natural sciences, as in comparative anatomy, and in language studies, as in comparative grammar, that inspired the desire for a similar employment of it in the study of literature. But any concensus of intelligent opinion as to the exact manner of employing it can hardly up to the present time be found. There are some who appear to think that comparative literature means comparing literary works, whether in one or in many languages, with a view to determining their relative excellences. This view, at its best, is essentially the same as Matthew Arnold's, when he tells us that criticism is " a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." But the difficulty of this method obviously consists in the fact that, until we have a race of men with no moral or spiritual prepossessions whatever, we cannot have and ought not to have a disinterested estimate of the comparative excel- 164 A. R. MARSH. lence of what has been known and thought in the world. Even more open to the charge of being merely subjective in its application and temporary in its results, is the comparative method, imagined by others, which selects as the object of its investigations the creative intentions and the aesthetic procédés that appear in the great monuments of literature. A decidedly different conception of comparative literature is that which gives as its task the investigation and classification of the different forms which literary or imaginative themes or motives have assumed in the literatures of various peoples ; as well as the study of the origins of these themes and of the manner of their diffusion. In this sense Benfey's famous introduction to his translation of the Pantchatantra, in which he studied the diffusion of the Indian beast-fables in the Occident, was comparative literature. So also was the survey ofthe various forms of the epic tales that gather about the figure of Charlemagne, which M. Gaston Paris gave in his Histoire poétique de Charlemagne. Comparative literature in this sense, though within narrower field , were the studies of the brothers Grimm in the popular traditions of the Germanic peoples. And here, further, we must put the investigations of Prof. Child upon the English and Scottish Ballads, as a monumental example of the same method. And yet it must be noted that all of these works, except the last, were produced before the notion of comparative literature had appeared at all, or at any rate before it had obtained real currency. The authors of them had not embarked upon investigations suggested by a general theory ; they had simply followed each a given material, wherever it might lead him. Each followed his material, wherever it might lead himthat is, each conformed himself to real facts in nature, and as a consequence attained results that at least do not sin from 'mere sensibility and opulent phraseology.' Others, moreover, have followed these scholars in the same or similar fields, and they, too, have succeeded in producing works free from these defects. But still more important is the fact that as the THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 165 number ofthese works increases, it is gradually becoming clear that here are studies that are to yield us a much richer fruit than has hitherto been supposed, and that are profoundly to modify our whole conception of the nature and function of literature. Comparative literature in the sense I have just been describing is as yet undeveloped in theory ; it is still extremely limited in practice. Many of those who have made the most important contributions to it, have done so with no clear understanding of what they were really bringing to pass. Urged on oftentimes merely by some blind instinct of erudition , they have labored at what they regarded as purely questions of origins, or bibliography, or technical literary history. And yet they have been coöperating to bring about a momentous change in the attitude of men's minds towards literature as a whole. This change is exactly parallel with the change wrought by the comparative method in the study of language. For just as language ceased a generation ago to be regarded as chiefly interesting from the point of view of style, of eloquence, so now literature is ceasing to be thought of in these traditional terms. More and more it is coming to be seen that literature is one of the great provinces of universal nature, just as language is, and that the only really satisfactory way to study it, is to study it as such. Conceived thus, the phenomena of literature change immediately their relative importance and interest, they group themselves in new ways, they become indicative of new principles, more trustworthy than any that aesthetic criticism has ever succeeded in making out. From this point of view the study of literature ceases to be a search for classic examples of excellence in style, to the end that these may be parted from the mass of other books and contemplated in and for themselves. It ceases also to be a search for those works that are preeminent for moral elevation, or intellectual energy, or any other single quality, however great its importance from the point of view of practical living. The 166 A. R. MARSH. zoölogist does not allow himself to be influenced in his studies by the popular preference for the perfected forms of life over the obscure and undeveloped. He studies all, and from all learns. The student of language, too, derives no less light from the imperfect and unfixed speech of the untutored man than from the most eloquent discourse. In the same way, the student of literature begins to see that he also may more profitably study the whole body of the phenomena of literature, great and small, eloquent and rude, noble and ignoble (for, as the Spanish proverb says, there are all kinds in the garden of the Lord)-he may more profitably do this , I say, than spend his time in subjective theorizings about the true and the beautiful as manifested in literary master-pieces. The moment one faces the study of literature in this spirit, he sees at once that the traditional methods of procedure are little calculated to serve his ends. These methods, furthermore, imply presuppositions that are altogether uncertain, or even in many cases certainly false. Such, for example, is the famous hypothesis of an universal human nature, an universal reason, the same in all the races of men, in all ages, in all the regions of the earth-nature and reason which it is the business of true eloquence to reproduce, stripped of the temporary and the accidental. Take away this supposition, and what becomes of the critical method of Boileau and of all those who hark back to Boileau ? And yet in the light of the phenomena of literature in their entirety, how uncertain a principle does this become ! What terrible limitations it requires ! How misleading are its implications ! To examine, then, the phenomena of literature as a whole, to compare them, to group them, to classify them, to enquire into the causes of them, to determine the results of themthis is the true task of comparative literature. But, as I can not too often repeat, the methods by which these processes are to be carried out are as yet far from being systematically formulated. Certain objective points, however, can already be discerned. It is clear, for example, that through the inves- THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 167 tigation of three questions in particular, we are to be advanced greatly on our way-I mean the question of literary origins, the question of literary development, and the question of literary diffusion. Upon the first of these questions much has already been done, though for the most part unconsciously and without real appreciation of the nature of the problem. We cannot forget, for example, that the famous question which for nearly a hundred years has agitated the classical scholars, the Homeric question, is in reality but part of this larger question. The classical scholars in general do not yet know this ; but that it is so is entirely clear to anyone who has followed recent investigations into the origins and history of epic poetry among the various peoples that have had such poetry. Pio Rajna, in his Origini dell' epopea francese, is in reality discussing the Homeric question as much as the question of the origin of the mediaeval Chansons de Geste. So also are the students of Germanic heroic traditions, like the Grimms in the past generation, and Müllenhoff in ours. So also are the Krohns, father and son, and Comparetti in their investigations ofthe subject-matter ofthe Finnish Kalevala. Indeed, the time is already in sight when no one will think of uttering a word on the Homeric question , who has not first familiarized himself with the phenomena attending the birth of the Indian Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Persian Schah-Nameh, the Germanic sages and epics, the French Chansons de Geste, the Finnish epic songs, the Celtic heroic poems and traditions, and all the lesser manifestations of epic tendency, whether in romances, ballads, folk-tales, or larger poems. And let it not be supposed that such a method of study will contribute merely to the settling of the traditional Homeric question. It is comparatively a small matter whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are the work of the same poet, or what are the constituent parts of each and how put together. The important matter is, what is epic poetry ? What is its true function ? What characteristics, imaginative, ethical, and rhetorical , are the necessary consequences of a perfect fulfillment of this 2 168 A. R. MARSH. function ? For the student who appoaches the matter with these questions in his mind, though it may and I believe will remain true for him that the Homeric poems are the most perfect examples of epic poetry we have, the determination of this judgment will rest upon grounds quite other than the traditional ones. And for such a student even the most famous discussions of epic poetry in the past, Voltaire's Essai sur la poésie épique, Boileau's remarks, Joachim du Bellay's treatment of le longue poème, the opinions of Quintilian and Horace, and even the views of Aristotle himself in his Poetics, will seem empiric and superficial , and of slight practical or theoretical value. Similar results will attend the scientific investigation of both the other main questions I have suggested , that of literary development and that of literary diffusion . By the first of these, I mean the process by which is gradually elaborated the material out of which literary masterpieces are made. Thus we can follow the slow amassing of the matter, both structural and imaginative, which the great romantic poets and novelists-Ariosto, Spenser, Cervantes, to mention only great names at last found fit to their hands, -tracing it from the songs of the primitive Germanic scop and Celtic bard, through the poems of the romance jongleur, whether brief, like the Spanish ballads, or long, like the Chansons de Geste, till at last it is ready for the masters. And as we watch the evervarying forms the material takes, as we see the unceasing intrusion and extrusion of social and moral ideas, of types of poetic appeal, of artistic and rhetorical expedients, we realize more adequately than mere aesthetic criticism can ever make us, the true character of all poetic creation. Another example of the same process I may mention is the elaboration of the material and manner of the Christian heroic poem-that poem of which Milton has given us the supreme examples. Who can follow this from its origin in the fourth and fifth centuries, in the Latin poems of Juvencus, Sedulius, Avitus and others, through the Old English, Old Saxon, and THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 169 Old Frankish Bible epics, through the more numerous similar poems in many languages in the later Middle Ages, through the Renaissance poems and dramas, whether in Latin or in the vulgar tongues, up to Milton, and indeed on to Klopstock -who, I say, can do this without obtaining a wholly new view of the true character of the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained ? I will not dwell at length upon the results to be obtained from the study of the question of literary diffusion, though they promise to be no less significant. The investigations of scholars like M. Gaston Paris upon the way in which the poetic traditions of the Celtic race became current among the other peoples of Europe, and upon the modifications thus caused in the literatures of those peoples, are as good proof of this as I can give. Brilliant essays here, also , are several studies upon the diffusion of Provençal and French literary forms in other countries-for example, Gaspary's Sicilianische Dichterschule, and the recent introduction to an edition of the lyrics of King Dionysius of Portugal, by a member of this Association, Prof. Lang. And, finally, what lover of English literature can fail to see a rich field for such study in the question, as yet barely entered upon, of the obligations of the Elizabethans to Italy, France, and Spain? I will not prolong the list of illustrations of the lines along which the comparative method of studying literature may hopefully and profitably be applied . No doubt, there are many more than I have indicated ; indeed several crowd in upon my mind as I speak. I shall do better, however, to pass them over, for the sake of making myself a little clearer upon a point that may well have perplexed some of my hearers, in connection with what I have been saying. I feel sure that the question must have been pressing upon some in this audience, whether such a method as I have been outlining does not after all neglect that very real something, eloquentia, art, style, which has hitherto been regarded as the very essence and inner being of literature ? Does it not without due reason 170 A. R. MARSH. throw away the individual artist, from whose brain the literary masterpiece has proceeded ? And is this not as dangerous an error as to overestimate the artist and his art ? The doubt is a natural one, and for that reason I desire to make myself a little clearer on this point. I do indeed believe that no literary masterpiece, whether as substance or as style, can be properly regarded as the peculiar and individual creation of the man that brings it to the birth ; just as I believe that no man's language is his own personal creation. And yet who can fail to see that both in language and in larger creation the modifying action of the individual is profound ? And who can fail to see, further, that at all times the appeal of literature to men has largely consisted in that very eloquentia, whose universal sway I have been trying to help bring to an end. Here, then, are very real forces ever at work to make literature such as we see it and know it. As such they must be prized and studied. Nay, I shall go even farther, and say that in my opinion there can be no greater mistake than to use the comparative method with beginners in the study of literature, substituting its intellectual claims for the natural appeal of eloquence and beauty. We have learned that we must teach elementary grammar by the old empiric methods, and that comparative linguistic science is but a confusion to the untrained mind. Assuredly it is so for the student of literature. Let him, then, be made familiar at the start with the more accessible literary masterpieces, those whose greatness is attested by that universal feeling of men which is a safe guide in any practical matter. Securus judicat orbis terrarum, says Augustine ; and within limits the rule is true. But when the student has gone far enough to be entitled to know what those masterpieces really are, how they came into being, and what the sanction of their greatness is, then let him approach them with all the appliances ofthe comparative method in his hands. Arthur Richmond A. R. MARSH.

3 2044 019 978 667 ! FEB 10 1998 ALLED

164 A. R. MARSH. lence of what has been known and thought in the world. Even more open to the charge of being merely subjective in its application and temporary in its results, is the comparative method, imagined by others, which selects as the object of its investigations the creative intentions and the aesthetic procédés that appear in the great monuments of literature. A decidedly different conception of comparative literature is that which gives as its task the investigation and classification of the different forms which literary or imaginative themes or motives have assumed in the literatures of various peoples ; as well as the study of the origins of these themes and of the manner of their diffusion. In this sense Benfey's famous introduction to his translation of the Pantchatantra, in which he studied the diffusion of the Indian beast- fables in the Occident, was comparative literature. So also was the survey ofthe various forms ofthe epic tales that gather about the figure of Charlemagne, which M. Gaston Paris gave in his Histoire poétique de Charlemagne. Comparative literature in this sense, though within narrower field, were the studies of the brothers Grimm in the popular traditions of the Germanic peoples. And here, further, we must put the investigations of Prof. Child upon the English and Scottish Ballads, as a monumental example of the same method. And yet it must be noted that all of these works, except the last, were produced before the notion of comparative literature had appeared at all, or at any rate before it had obtained real currency. The authors of them had not embarked upon investigations suggested by a general theory ; they had simply followed each a given material, wherever it might lead him. Each followed his material, wherever it might lead him— that is, each conformed himself to real facts in nature, and as a consequence attained results that at least do not sin from ' mere sensibility and opulent phraseology.' Others, moreover, have followed these scholars in the same or similar fields, and they, too, have succeeded in producing works free from these defects. But still more important is the fact that as the THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 165 number ofthese works increases, it is gradually becoming clear that here are studies that are to yield us a much richer fruit than has hitherto been supposed, and that are profoundly to modify our whole conception of the nature and function of literature. Comparative literature in the sense I have just been describing is as yet undeveloped in theory ; it is still extremely limited in practice. Many of those who have made the most important contributions to it, have done so with no clear understanding of what they were really bringing to pass . Urged on oftentimes merely by some blind instinct of erudition, they have labored at what they regarded as purely questions of origins, or bibliography, or technical literary history. And yet they have been coöperating to bring about a momentous change in the attitude of men's minds towards literature as a whole. This change is exactly parallel with the change wrought by the comparative method in the study of language. For just as language ceased a generation ago to be regarded as chiefly interesting from the point of view of style, of eloquence, so now literature is ceasing to be thought of in these traditional terms. More and more it is coming to be seen that literature is one of the great provinces of universal nature, just as language is, and that the only really satisfactory way to study it, is to study it as such. Conceived thus, the phenomena of literature change immediately their relative importance and interest, they group themselves in new ways, they become indicative of new principles, more trustworthy than any that aesthetic criticism has ever succeeded in making out. From this point of view the study of literature ceases to be a search for classic examples of excellence in style, to the end that these may be parted from the mass of other books and contemplated in and for themselves. It ceases also to be a search for those works that are preeminent for moral elevation, or intellectual energy, or any other single quality, however great its importance from the point of view of practical living. The 166 A. R. MARSH. zoölogist does not allow himself to be influenced in his studies by the popular preference for the perfected forms of life over the obscure and undeveloped. He studies all, and from all learns. The student of language, too, derives no less light from the imperfect and unfixed speech of the untutored man than from the most eloquent discourse. In the same way, the student of literature begins to see that he also may more profitably study the whole body of the phenomena of literature, great and small, eloquent and rude, noble and ignoble (for, as the Spanish proverb says, there are all kinds in the garden of the Lord)—he may more profitably do this , I say, than spend his time in subjective theorizings about the true and the beautiful as manifested in literary master-pieces. The moment one faces the study of literature in this spirit, he sees at once that the traditional methods of procedure are little calculated to serve his ends. These methods, furthermore, imply presuppositions that are altogether uncertain, or even in many cases certainly false. Such, for example, is the famous hypothesis of an universal human nature, an universal reason, the same in all the races of men, in all ages, in all the regions of the earth-nature and reason which it is the business of true eloquence to reproduce, stripped of the temporary and the accidental. Take away this supposition , and what becomes of the critical method of Boileau and of all those who hark back to Boileau ? And yet in the light of the phenomena of literature in their entirety, how uncertain a principle does this become ! What terrible limitations it requires ! How misleading are its implications ! To examine, then, the phenomena of literature as a whole, to compare them, to group them, to classify them, to enquire into the causes of them, to determine the results of them— this is the true task of comparative literature. But, as I can not too often repeat, the methods by which these processes are to be carried out are as yet far from being systematically formulated. Certain objective points, however, can already be discerned. It is clear, for example, that through the inves- THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 167 tigation ofthree questions in particular, we are to be advanced greatly on our way—I mean the question of literary origins, the question of literary development, and the question of literary diffusion. Upon the first of these questions much has already been done, though for the most part unconsciously and without real appreciation of the nature of the problem . We cannot forget, for example, that the famous question which for nearly a hundred years has agitated the classical scholars, the Homeric question , is in reality but part of this larger question. The classical scholars in general do not yet know this ; but that it is so is entirely clear to anyone who has followed recent investigations into the origins and history of epic poetry among the various peoples that have had such poetry. Pio Rajna, in his Origini dell' epopea francese, is in reality discussing the Homeric question as much as the question of the origin of the mediaeval Chansons de Geste. So also are the students of Germanic heroic traditions, like the Grimms in the past generation, and Müllenhoff in ours. So also are the Krohns, father and son, and Comparetti in their investigations ofthe subject-matter of the Finnish Kalevala. Indeed, the time is already in sight when no one will think of uttering a word on the Homeric question , who has not first familiarized himself with the phenomena attending the birth of the Indian Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Persian Schah- Nameh, the Germanic sages and epics, the French Chansons de Geste, the Finnish epic songs, the Celtic heroic poems and traditions, and all the lesser manifestations of epic tendency, whether in romances, ballads, folk-tales, or larger poems. And let it not be supposed that such a method of study will contribute merely to the settling of the traditional Homeric question. It is comparatively a small matter whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are the work of the same poet, or what are the constituent parts of each and how put together. The important matter is, what is epic poetry ? What is its true function ? What characteristics, imaginative, ethical, and rhetorical, are the necessary consequences of a perfect fulfillment of this 2 168 A. R. MARSH. function ? For the student who appoaches the matter with these questions in his mind, though it may and I believe will remain true for him that the Homeric poems are the most perfect examples of epic poetry we have, the determination of this judgment will rest upon grounds quite other than the traditional ones. And for such a student even the most famous discussions of epic poetry in the past, Voltaire's Essai sur la poésie épique, Boileau's remarks, Joachim du Bellay's treatment of le longue poème, the opinions of Quintilian and Horace, and even the views of Aristotle himself in his Poetics, will seem empiric and superficial , and of slight practical or theoretical value. Similar results will attend the scientific investigation of both the other main questions I have suggested, that of literary development and that of literary diffusion. By the first of these, I mean the process by which is gradually elaborated the material out of which literary masterpieces are made. Thus we can follow the slow amassing of the matter, both structural and imaginative, which the great romantic poets and novelists—Ariosto, Spenser, Cervantes, to mention only great names—at last found fit to their hands, -tracing it from the songs of the primitive Germanic scop and Celtic bard, through the poems ofthe romance jongleur, whether brief, like the Spanish ballads, or long, like the Chansons de Geste, till at last it is ready for the masters. And as we watch the evervarying forms the material takes, as we see the unceasing intrusion and extrusion of social and moral ideas, of types of poetic appeal, of artistic and rhetorical expedients, we realize more adequately than mere aesthetic criticism can ever make us, the true character of all poetic creation. Another example of the same process I may mention is the elaboration of the material and manner of the Christian heroic poem-that poem of which Milton has given us the supreme examples. Who can follow this from its origin in the fourth and fifth centuries, in the Latin poems of Juvencus, Sedulius, Avitus and others, through the Old English, Old Saxon, and THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 169 Old Frankish Bible epics, through the more numerous similar poems in many languages in the later Middle Ages, through the Renaissance poems and dramas, whether in Latin or in the vulgar tongues, up to Milton, and indeed on to Klopstock -who, I say, can do this without obtaining a wholly new view of the true character of the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained ? I will not dwell at length upon the results to be obtained from the study of the question of literary diffusion , though they promise to be no less significant. The investigations of scholars like M. Gaston Paris upon the way in which the poetic traditions of the Celtic race became current among the other peoples of Europe, and upon the modifications thus caused in the literatures of those peoples, are as good proof of this as I can give. Brilliant essays here, also, are several studies upon the diffusion of Provençal and French literary forms in other countries-for example, Gaspary's Sicilianische Dichterschule, and the recent introduction to an edition of the lyrics of King Dionysius of Portugal, by a member of this Association, Prof. Lang. And, finally, what lover of English literature can fail to see a rich field for such study in the question, as yet barely entered upon, of the obligations of the Elizabethans to Italy, France, and Spain? I will not prolong the list of illustrations of the lines along which the comparative method of studying literature may hopefully and profitably be applied . No doubt, there are many more than I have indicated ; indeed several crowd in upon my mind as I speak. I shall do better, however, to pass them over, for the sake of making myself a little clearer upon a point that may well have perplexed some of my hearers, in connection with what I have been saying. I feel sure that the question must have been pressing upon some in this audience, whether such a method as I have been outlining does not after all neglect that very real something, eloquentia, art, style, which has hitherto been regarded as the very essence and inner being of literature ? Does it not without due reason 170 A. R. MARSH. throw away the individual artist, from whose brain the literary masterpiece has proceeded ? And is this not as dangerous an error as to overestimate the artist and his art ? The doubt is a natural one, and for that reason I desire to make myself a little clearer on this point. I do indeed believe that no literary masterpiece, whether as substance or as style, can be properly regarded as the peculiar and individual creation of the man that brings it to the birth ; just as I believe that no man's language is his own personal creation. And yet who can fail to see that both in language and in larger creation the modifying action of the individual is profound ? And who can fail to see, further, that at all times the appeal of literature to men has largely consisted in that very eloquentia, whose universal sway I have been trying to help bring to an end. Here, then, are very real forces ever at work to make literature such as we see it and know it. As such they must be prized and studied. Nay, I shall go even farther, and say that in my opinion there can be no greater mistake than to use the comparative method with beginners in the study of literature, substituting its intellectual claims for the natural appeal of eloquence and beauty. We have learned that we must teach elementary grammar by the old empiric methods, and that comparative linguistic science is but a confusion to the untrained mind. Assuredly it is so for the student of literature. Let him, then, be made familiar at the start with the more accessible literary masterpieces, those whose greatness is attested by that universal feeling of men which is a safe guide in any practical matter. Securus judicat orbis terrarum, says Augustine ; and within limits the rule is true. But when the student has gone far enough to be entitled to know what those masterpieces really are, how they came into being, and what the sanction of their greatness is, then let him approach them with all the appliances ofthe comparative method in his hands. Arthur Richmond A. R. MARSH.

3 2044 019 978 667 UMDELLAR FEB 10 1998 BOOK SUE WALLED.