What Is "Comparative Literature"?

SOME ten years ago, I made bold to publish a plea for the formation of a Society of Comparative Literature ; and to call attention to the fact that the work which such a society might perform had not been undertaken by any English or American organization, or by any periodical or series of publications in the English language. I was then of the opinion, which I still hold, that the principles of literature and of criticism are not to be discovered in æsthetic theory alone, but in a theory which both impels and is corrected by scientific inquiry. No individual can gather from our many literatures the materials necessary for an induction to the characteristic of even one literary type; but an association, each member of which should devote himself to the study of a given type, species, movement, or theme, with which he was specially and at first hand familiar, might with some degree of adequacy prosecute a comparative investigation into the nature of literature, part by part. Thus, gradually, wherever the type or movement had existed, its quality and history might be observed. And in time, by systematization of results, scholarship might attain to the common, and probably some of the essential, characteristics of classified phenomena, to some of the laws actually governing the origin, growth, and differentiation of one and another Of the component literary factors and kinds. A basis would correspondingly be laid for criticism not in the practice of one nationality or school, nor in æsthetics of sporadic theory, otherwise interesting and profitable enough, but in the common qualities of literature, scientifically determined. To adopt, as universal, canons of criticism constructed upon particular premises, —by Boileau or Vida, Puttenham, Sidney, or Corneille, or even Lessing and Aristotle, and to apply them to types, or varieties of type, movement, or theme, with which these masters were unacquainted, is illogical, and therefore unhistorical. And still, that is precisely what the world of literary dictators persists in doing. Alle Theorie ist grau. The principles of the drama cannot be derived from a consideration of the Greek drama alone, nor of European drama, but of all drama, wherever found, European, Peruvian, Chinese ; among aboriginal as well as among civilized peoples ; and in all stages of its history. From such comparative formulation of results proceed the only trustworthy canons for that kind of composition ; some of them general, some dependent upon conditions historically differenced. So also with the nature and laws of other types, movements or moods, forms or themes, and ultimately of literature as a unit. Our current æsthetic canons of judgment, based upon psychological and speculative premises that sometimes by accident fit the case, but more frequently upon historical inexperience, might thus be renovated and widened with the process of scientific knowledge.

That dream seems now in a fair way to be realized. The society is yet to be founded ; but the periodical is on its feet. And it was in prospect of its first appearance that I asked myself some months ago, what this term “ Comparative Literature ” might now mean to me ; and answered it in the manner that follows.¹ Imperfect as the answer may be, it is possibly of interest, if for no other reason, that it makes a different approach to a subject which since then Professor Woodberry has discussed in the Journal of Comparative Literature. To his significant and poetic utterance, I shall accordingly in due season recur.

What, then, is “ Comparative Literature ” ? Of the name itself, I must say that I know of no occurrence in English earlier than 1886, when we find it used for the comparative study of literature, in the title of an interesting and suggestive volume by Professor H. M. Posnett. The designation had apparently been coined in emulation of such nomenclature as the vergleichende Grammatik of Bopp, or Comparative Anatomy, Comparative Physiology, Comparative Politics. If it had been so constructed as to convey the idea of a discipline or method, there would have been no fault to find.

Before Posnett’s book appeared, Carriere and others in Germany had spoken properly enough of vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte ; and the French and Italians, not only of the comparative method or discipline, l’histoire comparative, but also of the materials compared, l’histoire comparée des littératures, la storia comparata, or, from the literary avenue of approach, la littérature comparée, letteratura comparata. At Turin and Genoa, the study had been listed under such captions long before the English misnomer was coined. Misnomer it, of course, is ; for to speak of a comparative object is absurd. But since the name has some show of asserting itself, we may as well postpone consideration of a better, till we have more fully determined what the study involved, no matter how called, is ordinarily understood to be.

It is, in the first place, understood of a field of investigation, — the literary relations existing between distinct nationalities : the study of international borrowings, imitations, adaptations. And to recognize such relations as incidental to national growth is of the utmost importance — social as well as literary. “ C’est prouver sa jeunesse et sa force,” says Gaston Paris, “ c’est s’assurer an avenir de renouvellement et d’action au dehors, que de faire connaître tout ce qui se fait de grand, de beau, de neuf en dehors de ses frontières, de s’en servir, sans l’imiter, de 1’assimiler, de le transformer suivant sa nature propre, de conserver sa personnalité en l’élargissant et d’être ainsi toujours la même et toujours changeante, toujours nationale et toujours européenne.” Such is also the thought of M. Texte, when he writes in his introduction to Betz’s Litérature comparée of “ the great law which regulates the literary development of every nation : that of growth by successive stages of concentration and expansion . . . the law of the moral development of nations, as of individuals.” And M. Texte is but echoing Matthew Arnold’s “ Epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of expansion in the due course of things follow them.” Arnold was writing in 1865, but earlier still, Goethe had called attention to the limitations of a literature exclusively national: “ Eine jede Literatur ennuyirt sich zuletzt in sich selbst, wenn sie nicht durch fremde Theilnahme wieder aufgefrischt ist.” Whether this “ periodicity ” of digesting what one has, and acquiring what one has not, is the only law of moral development, is not for us now to answer. International dependence is a fact. Literary reciprocity is natural, even if not necessary. Nor was Goethe the first to announce the principle.

This attention to literary relations is, of course, the consequent of the study of literatures as national: first the history of each literature ; then the historic relations between literatures. That in turn is naturally followed by the synthesis in literature as a unit. “ The nineteenth century,” says M. Texte, “ has seen the national history of literatures develop and establish itself : the task of the twentieth century will undoubtedly be to write the comparative history of those literatures.” Likewise, Professor Brandes is conducted from the study of individual literatures to that of reciprocal movements, and so to the comparative view. In his Hauptströmungen, written about 1870, he takes for the central subject of his work the reaction in the first decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the eighteenth, and the overcoming of that reaction. “ This historic incident,” he says, “ is of European interest, and can only be understood by a comparative study of European literature. Such a study I purpose attempting by simultaneously tracing the course of the most important movements in French, German, and English literature. The comparative view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so near to us that we can assimilate it and of removing our own until we are enabled to see it in its true perspective.” It will undoubtedly have been remarked that while Brandes regards the comparative study of literature from the point of view of international relations, he also passes beyond the strictly objective realm of research. For, in his esteem, the comparative view has the advantage of “ removing our own literature until we are enabled to see it in its true perspective. We neither see what is too near the eye nor what is too far away from it.” This is to add to the proper function of historical research an appraisement of one’s own literature after impartial comparison with the literatures of other nations. “ The scientific view of literature,” proceeds Brandes, “ provides us with a telescope of which the one end magnifies, and the other diminishes ; it must be so focused as to remedy the illusions of unassisted eyesight. The different nations have hitherto held themselves so distinct, as far as literature is concerned, that each has only to a very limited extent been able to benefit by the productions of the rest.” Here, again, the way had been marked out by Arnold, when he advocated the comparison of literary classics in one language, or in many, with a view to determining their relative excellence, that is, to displacing personal or judicial criticism by a method more scientific. I am aware that this conception of the study concerns its method and purpose rather than its field. But I mention it here because it implies a more comprehensive and deeper conception underlying all these statements of the material of comparative study : the solidarity of literature. Not, by any means, what Goethe projected in his dream of a cosmopolitan literature to which the best of all national efforts should contribute. “ Everywhere,” wrote the poet, “ one hears and reads of the progress of the human race, and of broader views of relationships, natural and human. How this may in general come about, it does not fall to me to inquire or to determine. I will, however, of my own accord, call the attention of my friends to one fact: I am persuaded that there is a Weltlitteratur in process of construction, in which is reserved for us Germans an honorable rôle.” But under this prophetic cosmopolitanism of ideal and art — this millennial Bible — lay that same belief in an essential, historical oneness of literature. And that is the working premise of the student of Comparative Literature to-day: literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural, and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual, and of social humanity. Writing in 1896, Professor Marsh put it thus : “ To examine the phenomena of literature as a whole, to compare them, to inquire into the causes of them, this is the true task of Comparative Literature.” Posnett’s statement, ten years before, implied the same “ solidarity ” of the subject matter; and so, again, Matthew Arnold’s, ten years earlier still: “ The criticism [and criticism covers historical as well as logical comparison] I am really concerned with — the criticism which alone can much help us for the future — is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action, and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another.”

From this conception of the material as a unit, scholars naturally advance to the consideration of its development, the construction of a theory. If a unity, and an existence approximately contemporaneous with that of society, why not a life, a growth ? “ We no longer have to examine solely the relations of one nation with another,” says one, “ but to unfold the simultaneous development of all literatures, or, at least, of an important group of literatures.” It is the task of Comparative Literature, according to another, to find whether the same laws of literary development prevail among all peoples or not. The internal and external aspects of literary growth, Mr. Posnett announces to be the objects of comparative inquiry ; and, accepting as the principle of literary growth the progressive deepening and widening of personality,—in other words, the contraction and expansion of Arnold and Texte, — with the development of the social unit in which the individual is placed, this author finds a corresponding differentiation of the literary medium from the primitive homogeneity of communal art, a gradual individualizing of the literary occasion and an evolution of literary forms. While, as I have said, he recognizes the importance of the comparative study of external sources of national development and the resulting social and literary reaction upon the literature in question, he devotes himself, preferably, to the “ comparative study of the internal sources of national development, social or physical, and of the effects of different phases of this development on literature ; ” and in pursuance of this method he adopts, whether right or wrong, “ the gradual expansion of social life, from clan to city, from city to nation, from both of these to cosmopolitan humanity, as the proper order of studies in Comparative Literature.” Mr. Posnett’s method is perhaps impaired by the fact that he regards the relation of literary history to the political rather than to the broader social development of a people, but he certainly elaborates a theory ; and it is the more instructive because he does not treat literature as organic, developing by reason of a life within itself to a determined end, but as secondary and still developing with the evolution of the organism from which it springs. In this theory of institutional growth result also the methods of Buckle and Ernst Grosse, which may be termed physiological and physiographical; and the physio - psychological of Schiller, Spencer, and Karl Groos ; and the method of Irjö Hirn, which combines the social and psychological in the inquiry into the art impulse and its history ; and that of Schlegel and Carriere, who, emphasizing one side of Hegel’s theory, rest literary development largely upon the development of religious thought. In M. Brunetière, on the other hand, we have one who boldly announces his intention to trace the evolution of literary species, — not as dependent upon the life of an organism such as society, but in themselves. He frankly proposes to discover the laws of literary development by applying the theory of evolution to the study of literature. The question of the growth of literary types, he says in the first volume of his Evolution des genres dans l’histoire de la littérature, resolves into five subsidiary questions : the reality and independence of types, their differentiation, their stability, the influences modifying them, and the process of their transformation. When he asserts that the differences of types correspond to differences in the means and ends of different arts and to diversities in families of minds, and that the principle of differentiation is the same that operates in nature from homogeneity to heterogeneity, most of us concur ; but when he details the signs of youth, maturity, and decay which the type may exhibit, and the transformation of one type into another — as, for instance, the French pulpit oration into the ode — according to principles analogous in their operation to the Darwinian struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, and natural selection, we become apprehensive lest the parallel be overworked. If Brunetière would only complete the national portion of his history, or, at least, try to substantiate his theory, we should be grateful. He has, however, enunciated one of the problems with which Comparative Literature must grapple, and is grappling. Does the biological principle apply to literature ? If not, in how far may the parallel be scientifically drawn ?

That leads us to still a third conception of the term under consideration. Comparative Literature, say some, is not a subject-matter nor a theory but a method of study. With the ancients it was the habit of roughly matching authors — Virgil with Homer, Terence with Menander, or Terence with Plautus — with a view to determining relative excellence, the habit of which we cherish a vivid reminiscence from our undergraduate struggles with Quintilian and the Ars Poetica. The method has existed ever since there were two pieces of literature known to the same man, it has persisted through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and it is alive to-day. Its merits and defects are those of the man who uses it. To others the comparative method means the attempt to obtain by induction from a sufficient variety of specimens the characteristics, distinguishing marks, principles, even laws of the form, movement, type or literature under discussion. For instance, Carriere’s comparative study of the drama in various periods and literatures; or portions of Freytag’s inquiry into the technique of tragedy, irrespective of the nationality producing it; or even Aristotle’s Poetics, for it is based upon an induction from all dramas and epics, even though only Greek, that were known to him. And here we are reminded that in the discipline under consideration historical sequence is just as important as comparison by cross sections. The science is called “ comparative literary history ” rather than “ literature compared ” by French, German, and Italian scholars, not for nothing. The historian who searches for origins or stages of development in a single literature may employ the comparative method as much as he who zigzags from literature to literature; and so the student whose aim is to establish relations between literary movement and literary movement, between author and author, period and period, type and type, movement and movement, theme and theme, contemporaneous or successive in any language, nationality, clime, or time. To repeat, the comparison is not alone between diverse national literatures, but between any elements involved in the history of literature, or any stages in the history of any element. There have been, within my own knowledge, those who would confine the word literature to the written productions of civilized peoples, and consequently would exclude from consideration aboriginal attempts at verbal art. But students nowadays increasingly recognize that the cradle of literary science is anthropology. The comparative method therefore sets civilized literatures side by side with the popular, traces folklore to folklore, and these so far as possible to the matrix in the undifferentiated art of human expression. Such is “ Comparative Literature ” when used of the work of the Grimms, Steinthal, Comparetti, Donovan, Talvj or Ernst Grosse. The term is also properly used of the method of Taine, which in turn derives from that recommended by Hegel in the first volume of his Æsthetik (the appraisement of the literary work in relation to Zeit, Volk, und Umgebung), and of the method of Brunetière so far as he has applied it, for it is in theory the same, save that it purports to emphasize the consideration of the element of individuality. But that the method is susceptible of widely varying interpretations is illustrated by the practice of still another advocate thereof, Professor Wetz, who, in his Shakespeare from the Point of View of Comparative Literary History, of 1890, and in his essay on the history of literature, insists that Comparative Literature is neither the literary history of one people, nor investigations in international literary history; neither the study of literary beginnings, nor even the attempt to obtain by induction the characteristics of Weltlitteratur, its movements and types. While he accepts the analytical critical method of Taine in combination with the historical and psychological of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, he insists that the function of Comparative Literature is to determine the peculiarities of an author by comparison with those of some other author sufficiently analogous. To flood the peculiarities of Shakespeare, for instance, with the light of the personality of Corneille, that is Comparative Literature, according to Wetz! And there its work ends and the work of literary history and æsthetic criticism begins.

This, then, would seem to be the view of Comparative Literature, its field, theory, and method, that one might obtain from perusal of the more evident contributions to the exposition of the subject.

I remember that some twelve years ago Colonel Higginson pointed out in the Century Magazine the desirability of studying literature from the general rather than from the national or provincial point of view, and expressed surprise that no University in this country supported a chair of what I think he called WorldLiterature. In reply a student of the University of Michigan described a course in the comparative study of literary types which had been given there as early I think as 1887. It goes without saying that courses in literary history and inductive poetics not called comparative but comparative in fact had been given by professors of languages, ancient or modern, many times before. Such, for instance, were the courses of Professor Child at Harvard. At the present day courses of comparative study are pursued in all larger universities. Most of the graduate work in philology would fall within the purview of Comparative Literature.

Courses in the nature and history of literary types and movements in general, and in the theory and history of criticism, have been given, sometimes under some special designation, at others under that of Comparative Literature, at California since 1889. A chair for the study was established at Harvard in the early nineties. At Columbia the study of literature “ at large,” as Professor Matthews calls it, “ that is, the tracing of the evolution of literary form and of the development of criticism as masterpieces ” was recognized by courses as early as 1892, though the department was not organized under the title Comparative Literature until 1899. At Yale and Princeton the history of literary types and movements, national and general, and the comparative study of poetics have been growing in importance during the same period. An examination of the courses offered in American universities distinctively under the title of Comparative Literature shows that effort is at present chiefly directed to the study of international borrowings, commonly called “ source-hunting ” or of the larger influences or movements involving various literatures. Next in order of cultivation come courses in the theory of literature in general, and the history and theory of types such as lyric or drama. In general, however, teachers of Comparative Literature seem to regard European letters as a totality unrelated and self-explanatory. With the exception of a course or two such as Woodberry’s Oriental Element in European Literature, no provision has been made for the investigation of the wider unit which alone can afford a basis for scientific processes and results. Of European universities, the Italian have longest and most effectually cultivated the study under consideration. Turin, for instance, has offered the course of which I have already spoken in the comparative history of the neo-Latin literatures since 1876; and the same curriculum seems to obtain at the other Universities of Italy. Genoa, Padua, Bologna, and Rome as well as Turin announce their literary courses always as follows : Letteratura italiana, latina, greca, storia comparata delle literature e lingue neo-latine. Of these the last is, so far as it goes, genuinely a course in Comparative Literature, bounded to be sure by natural affinities, but not by limits of modern history. As to literary courses in German Universities, those listed as neuere Philologie are confined usually by the boundaries of nationality. When vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte is specifically announced international relationships are of course investigated, but the European unit of literary solidarity does not appear as yet to have been in any considerable degree exceeded, at any rate by workers in modern philology. Inter-European influences have been treated by Koch and Kölbing at Breslau, by Schultze at Halle, by Brandl and Geiger at Berlin, and in many other universities. Courses like that offered by Meyer at Berlin on the method and function of the comparative history of literature, and dissertations such as Grosse’s on the aim and method of literary science, Ten Brink’s on the function of literary history with Wetz’s reply to it, and Elster’s Antrittsrede at Leipsic on the same subject indicate the steady development of the conception from the empirical and particular to the inductive and systematic stage. The work of Klein in the broad field of the drama, and of Brandes of Copenhagen in literary movements, mark epochs in the application of the science. And still, so far as may be gathered from systems of study, the palm must be given, not to Italy, Germany, or Denmark, but to Switzerland, —to Geneva, where the courses of research are international in the widest sense. Lyons, indeed, at one time promised to eclipse the rest, but it was unfortunately deprived of Professor Joseph Texte by his death when he had served but two years.

Judging from the articles and books reviewed in the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renaissance Litteratur, and making allowance for such material as belongs exclusively to the latter category and is not comparative, we may say that the editors classify under Comparative Literature international literary history, researches into sources of individual works, literary æsthetics, the history of types, and minor elements of literary form and material, and finally folklore. The term Comparative Literature seems to be used vaguely but with especial regard to international relativity; still any article treating of poetry or of its antecedent conditions scientifically and with some show of comparative method seems eligible to their pages.

This survey might be extended to the practice of our American philological journals and associations. The academic conception will, however, be found to be as I have stated it: Comparative Literature works in the history of national as well as of international conditions, it employs, more or less prominently, the comparative method, logical and historical, it presupposes, and results in, a conception of literature as a solidarity, and it seeks to formulate and substantiate a theory of literary development whether by evolution or permutation, in movements, types, and themes. With these main considerations it is but natural that scholars should associate the attempt to verify and systematize the characteristics common to literature in its various manifestations wherever found; to come by induction, for instance, at the eidographic or generic qualities of poetry, — the characteristics of the drama, epic, or lyric ; at the dynamic qualities, those which characterize and differentiate the main literary movements, such as the classical and romantic ; and at the thematic, the causes of persistence and modification in the history of vital subjects, situations, and plots. As to the growth, or development, of literature our survey shows that two distinct doctrines contend for acceptance: one, by evolution, which is an attempt to interpret literary processes in accordance with biological laws ; the other, by what I prefer to call permutation. Since literature like its material, language, is not an organism, but a resultant medium, both product and expression of the society whence it springs, the former theory must be still in doubt. It can certainly not be available otherwise than metaphorically unless it be substantiated by just such methods — comparative and scientific — as those of which we have spoken.

How much of this is new, of the nineteenth century, for instance? Very little in theory ; much, and that important, in discipline and fact. The solidarity of literature was long ago announced by Bacon, who in his Advancement of Learning says, “ As the proficience of learning consisteth much in the orders and institutions of universities in the same states and kingdoms, so it would be yet more advanced if there were more intelligence mutual between the universities of Europe than there now is. . . . And surely as nature createth brotherhoods in families, and arts mechanical contract brotherhoods in communities, and the anointment of God superinduceth a brotherhood in kings and bishops, so in like manner there cannot but be a fraternity in learning and illumination, relating to that paternity which is attributed to God who is called the Father of illuminations or lights.” Bacon was the founder, in England, of that species of literary history which, as soon as national literatures were placed in comparison, could not but result in the conception of literary unity. He was our first distinguished advocate of the genetic method of critical research : the procedure by cause and effect to movement, influence, relation, change, decay, revival ; and he emphasized the elasticity of literary forms and types, — ideas all essential to the understanding of literature as a growth. But he was not the only forerunner of the present movement. In one way or another the solidarity of literature, the theories of permutation or of evolution, sometimes crudely, sometimes with keen scientific insight, were anticipated by Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians of note all the way from Dante, Scaliger, and Sidney down. In England, Webbe, Puttenham, and Meres, Ben Jonson, Edmund Bolton, prepared for Bacon ; and Bacon was well followed by the Earl of Stirling (whose Anacrisis furnishes hints by the score for the comparative method of literary research), by Davenant in his Preface to Gondibert, by Cowley (a fine advocate of the analytical and historical methods); and by our prince of criticism, the perspicacious Dryden, who in his Heads of an Answer to Rymer insists upon a standard of literary judgment at once historical and logical, upon the recognition of development in literary types, the principles of milieu and national variety, and the adoption accordingly of criteria that shall allow for the diversity and gradual modification of literary conditions. Most worthy, too, of recognition which, I think, he has never fully obtained, is John Dennis ; for in his Remarks upon Blackmore’s Prince Arthur and in his Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry he more clearly than any predecessor foreshadows the theories of the early and middle nineteenth century concerning the influence of religious ideals in the permutations of literature. Shaftesbury, Bentley, Swift, the Wartons, Hurd, Addison, Hallam, Carlyle, and De Quincey, — it was not necessary that any of these should defer his birth till 1900 to appreciate what the comparative study of literature, in one or more of its phases, meant.

In Germany, Herder and Schiller may have been the first, as Professor Wetz has said, to give the science a comprehensive foundation. They, however, owed not a little to Bodmer and Breitinger and others of the Swiss school of 1740, to the Æsthetica of Baumgarten of 1750, and to Winckelmann’s application of the historical method to the study of fine art. When we come down the line and add the contributions of Goethe, Richter, the Schlegels to literary science, and then of Gervinus, Boeckh, Paul, and Elze, we begin to wonder what there is left of system for the student of Comparative Literature to devise.

In France, likewise, there have been approaches to one or another side of the idea and discipline from the Défense of Joachim du Bellay, 1549, and the Poetics of Scaliger (one of the greatest comparers of literary history) down. The Recueil of Claude Fauchet, 1581, Pasquier’s Treatise on the Pléiade, Mairet’s Preface to Sylvanire, the early battles of Corneille with the Academy and Chapelain, all illustrate phases of this slowly maturing method of study. Rapin’s Poëtes Anciens et Modernes, of 1674, aims not only to adapt Aristotle’s Poetics to modern practice, but to teach the moderns that certain qualities of poetry, no matter what the conditions of the age, endure. And the age felt Rapin, especially the England of the age, — Dryden and his school. The scientific importance of literary history and the advantages of the comparative method in criticism were clearly apprehended by Saint-Évremond as early as by Rapin. Desmarets de Saint Sorlin had advanced to a conception of poetry as an institutional mouthpiece for society and religion as far back as 1657, — but nine years after Davenant’s famous Preface on the same theory, and fully two hundred before its more distinguished elaboration by Carriere. That Perrault, Fontenelle, the Daciers, La Fontaine, Fénelon, indeed, and the younger heroes of the Battle of the Books, should by some be supposed to be the founders of the comparative method is extremely odd : they were anticipated not only by several whom I have mentioned and by the Pléiade in France, but by the Areopagus in England as well. Why multiply examples ? I believe that without difficulty one could indicate a forerunner earlier than 1830 for every doctrine or ideal comprised to-day under the term Comparative Literature, except the theory of evolution on the Darwinian principle, — and for much of the method. Dubos, Batteux, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, La Harpe, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, Ginguené, Baour-Lormian, Stendhal, Hugo, Villemain, — a host of prophets before the immortal Sainte-Beuve and those Monday chats that gathered up in method and ideal all that was worth gathering and gave the impetus to most of the theory and method current to-day !

This cloud of witnesses is not produced, however, to discredit, but to confirm the scope and hope of the so-called Comparative Literature of to-day. They testify to the need of a science in the nature of things. They perform their service by anticipations in detail of a discipline that could not be designated a science until the sciences propædeutic thereto had been developed. The experimental stage of literary theory has by its antiquity, its persistence, and its faith, given proof of the naturalness and worth of the science that was to follow when experience should be ripe. Experimental efforts accomplished this much at least: they marked out the field, — the relativity of literature ; they shadowed the substance and significance of the ideal of literary solidarity, and they foreshadowed that of spiritual community ; they apprehended a comparative method of procedure, and applied it to some few objects of investigation, to the history of sources, for instance, and of themes ; and to artistic and literary analogies with a view to inductive canons of criticism. But, on the other hand, the method as conceived was, in the nature of the case, but imperfectly scientific ; and the objects of its application, the determination of literary types, their reality and characteristics, and the study of literary conditions antecedent and environing, were but vaguely comprehended. The facts were insufficient. As to a growth of literature, our earlier scholars utterly failed to elaborate a theory, failed generally to surmise ; and that being so, a study of movements, national or international, and the moods that underlie them, was incapable of prosecution. How could they build a science the social and psychological foundations of which were not yet established ?

Advances in historical method, in psychological, sociological, linguistic, and ethnological research have, now, furnished the discipline with an instrument unknown to its forbears in critical procedure ; and with fresh and rich materials for illumination from without. The conception of literature as a unit is no longer hypothetical; the comparison of national histories has proved it. The idea of a process by evolution may be unproved; but that some process, as by permutation, must obtain is recognized. We no longer look upon the poet as inspired. Literature develops with the entity which produces it, — the common social need and faculty of expression ; and it varies according to differentiœ of racial, physiographic, and social conditions, and of the inherited or acquired characteristics of which the individual author is constituted. The science of its production must analyze its component factors and determine the laws by which they operate. By a constant factor are fixed the only possible moulds or channels of expression, and, therefore, the integral and primary types, as, for instance, within the realm of poetry, the lyric, narrative, and dramatic. By the presence of other factors, both inconstant, these types are themselves liable to modification. I refer, of course, to environment, that is to say, to the antecedent and contemporary condition of thought, social tendency, and artistic fashion ; and to the associational congeries called the author. So far as physiological and psychological modes of expression may be submitted to objective and historical analysis, so far as the surrounding conditions which directly or indirectly affect the art in which the author works, and the work of the author in that art, may be inductively studied, and their nature interpreted and registered in relation to other products of society, such as language, religion, and government, so far is the discipline of which we speak legitimately scientific. And as rapidly as experimental psychology, anthropology, ethnology, or the history of art in general, prove their right to scientific recognition, they become instruments for the comparative investigation of the social phenomenon called literature. It is thus that the literary science, just now called Comparative Literature, improves upon the efforts of the former stylistic or poetics, largely traditional or speculative, and displaces the capricious matching of authors, the static or provincial view of history, and the appraisement lacking atmosphere.

While this science must exclude from the object under consideration the purely subjective element, and the speculative or so-called “ judicial ” (me judice) method from criticism and history, it need not ignore or disregard the unexplained quantity, — the imaginative. Its aim will be to explore the hitherto unexplained in the light of historical sequence and scientific cause and effect, physical, biological, psychological, or anthropological, to reduce the apparently unreasonable or magical element, and so to leave continually less to be treated in the old-fashioned inspirational or ecstatic manner. We shall simply cease to confound the science with the art. We no longer refer history to Clio, law to the tables of the Mount, or medicine to the Apollo-born sage of Epidaurus; but while we acknowledge the science, we none the less respect the genius, — the Herodotus, or Marshall, or Lorenz. Not only does literary science take up into itself the best methods that literary history has so far devised, — the analytical-critical of Dryden and Hegel and Taine, the psychological and cultural of Schiller, as expressed in his matchless essay on poetry naïve and sentimental, and of Goethe in his Deutsche Baukunst and his Wahrheit und Dichtung, and the efforts at a comparative discipline exerted by SainteBeuve and Arnold, — it avails itself, as I have said, of the results, and so far as possible of the methods, of the sciences that most directly contribute to the comprehension of man the producer ; it partly bases and partly patterns its procedure upon those other records of human consciousness, the histories of ethics and religion and society ; it gathers hints from theories not yet scientific, but historically on the way, — theories of art in general, æsthetic, physiological, and psychological, or even speculative, if, as in the case of Winckelmann, the speculation be founded upon induction from facts historically considered. The more immediate advantages of the prosecution of literary research in such a way as this are an ever increasing knowledge of the factors that enter into world-literature and determine its growth, — its reasons, conditions, movements, and tendencies, in short, its laws ; and a poetics capable not only of detecting the historical but of appreciating the social accent in what is foreign and too often despised, or contemporary and too often overpraised if not ignored. The new science of literature will in turn throw light upon that which gave it birth; it will prove an index to the evolution of soul in the individual and in society ; it will interpret that sphinx, national consciousness or the spirit of the race, or, mayhap, destroy it. It will in one case and in all assist a science of comparative ethics.

This is what Comparative Literature means to me. Before I attempt to show what the science should be called, let us see what it means to the editors of the new periodical. In his scholarly and poetic editorial in the first number of the Journal of Comparative Literature, Professor Woodberry, treating of what the subject already is, announces the method, the field, the theory of literary community substantially as we have already conceived them; save that under the objects of comparative investigation he does not explicitly include literary movements, and that in the category of forms he appears to assimilate the fundamental and generic modes of expression, lyric, drama, etc., with the extrinsic and more or less conventional and interchangeable, trappings such as alliteration and rhyme. He fails consequently to attach to a particular phase, the comparative study of literary types or modes, the significance which, in my opinion, it possesses. That, however, matters little. His forecast of the course of the science is inspiring. “ The study of forms,” he says, “ should result in a canon of criticism, which would mean a new and greater classicism ; . . . the study of themes should reveal temperamentally, as form does structurally, the nature of the soul.” “ It is in temperament,” he continues, 舠 in moods, that romanticism, which is the life of all literature, has its dwellingplace. To disclose the necessary forms, the vital moods of the beautiful soul, is the far goal of our effort, — to help in this, in the bringing of those spiritual unities in which human destiny is accomplished.” With this the genuine student of literary science must agree. And yet it may strike him as peculiar, that in the outlook over literary theory the possibility of growth appears to be ignored. The omission can hardly be accidental. I take it to indicate non-acceptance of a theory of evolution such as Brunetière’s, however, rather than rejection of all theory of development. Movements are the corollaries of the “ vital moods in which is the life of literature ; ” and the life of literature changes with the gradual deepening and widening of the “ beautiful soul ” individual, racial, or integrally human. I find, therefore, a testimony to our theory of literary permutation in Professor Woodberry’s reticence. I rejoice also to note his insistence upon a matter of method apparently minor but of importance to our comprehension of the discipline, namely, that the study of international relations and influences is but one of the objects of Comparative Literature : the study of a single literature may be just as scientifically comparative if it seek the reason and law of the literature in the psychology of the race or of humanity.

Now what shall this science be called, since the name which it has is malformed and misleading ? If it were not for traditional prejudice, the term stylistic should be recognized as of scientific quality, and it should cover the history as well as the theory of all kinds of writing. According to the older nomenclature, the individuality and the purpose of the author, the quality of his thought and the objective characteristics of literary species and form, are, all of them, factors of style. Elze, Boeckh, Maas, and others arrange the matter thus: Style is the form and method of expression in language. Stylistic is the general theory of style, and this general theory divides itself naturally into the theory of prose style or rhetoric and the theory of poetic style or poetics. I am not going to propose “ stylistic.” The old stylistic is limited by tradition, by its speculative quality, and by that well-worn and slippery dictum of Buffon, — style is of the individual. What is called Comparative Literature has, on the other hand, brought to the study of all kinds of writing a scientific objectivity and the historical method. It has taken up into itself what is objective and historical of the older stylistic : it aims to reject or confirm former theories but on purely scientific grounds. It is the transition from stylistic to a science of literature which shall still find room for æsthetics, but for æsthetics properly so called, developed, checked, and corrected by scientific procedure and by history.

Without our modern psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and the comparative sciences of society, religion, and art, literature could be studied neither in relation to its antecedents nor to its components. Otherwise our study would long ago have been known as comparative philology, a name improperly usurped by a younger branch of the philological discipline. Such indeed is the name by which Professor Whitney would have called the comparative study of the literatures of different countries had the discipline been prosecuted as a science when he wrote. Comparative Literature is a reaffirmation of that aspect of philology— the literary — which, both because it was eclipsed by, and dependent upon, the development of linguistics, has long ceased to be regarded as philology at all ; save in Germany, where philological seminars have dealt not only with the phonology and history of language as they asserted themselves, but also as of old with whatever concerns the literary side of language as an expression of the national, or more broadly human spirit. Since all study of origins and growth, whether of one phenomenon or more than one, must be comparative if scientifically conducted, it is not necessary to characterize the literary science, of which we speak, by that particular adjective. More methods than the comparative enter into it, and it is more than a method; it is a theory of relativity and of growth ; and its material is vertically as well as horizontally disposed. The Comparative Literature of to-day, based upon the sciences of which I have spoken and conducted in the scientific method, is literary philology, — nothing more nor less ; it stands over against linguistic philology or glottology, and it deals genetically, historically, and comparatively with literature as a solidarity and as a product of the social individual, whether the point of view be national or universal. We welcome academic departments and journals, devoted to its interests, but literary philology is not and cannot be measured by the scope and effort of a distinct academic department, or of a specific journal, however excellent the latter, like this to which we wish Godspeed, may be. The new discipline is already the property and method of all scientific research in all literatures, ancient or modern, not only in their common but in their individual relations to the social spirit in which they live and move and have their being. The more we develop what now is called Comparative Literature, the more rapidly will each literature in turn seek its explanation in Literary Philology.

Charles Mills Gayley.