The Future of Comparative Literature

Abstract

THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. If in some future time a literary historian attempts to estimate the critical output of these last fifty years, he will find his task to be a labour of Hercules. He will be able at once to single out a few promi? nent figures such as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Matthew Arnold, Brunetiere, Faguet and Benedetto Croce, and he will easily understand and explain their messages. But he will also notice that these thinkers have had comparatively few followers, and that hundreds and hundreds of other workers in literature have sprung up, mostly in the Universities, with quite different aims and methods. He will readily recognise that these academic men?and women?of research have done a vast amount of valuable work; that they have cleared up obscure questions, annotated and reprinted obscure authors, systematised and tabulated obscure periods, each contributing his own piece of masonry to a vast edifice of learning. But when he enquires what common bond united all these scholars and to what common goal all these efforts were directed, he will search long and in vain for a sufficiently convincing reply. This question, which a future historian is bound to put, we cannot help asking now. After all, to what purpose is all this minute knowledge of literature ? Much of it has obviously and clearly no purpose at all, and runs riot almost as wildly as did the post-Augustan Virgilians or some of the seventeenth century scholars; so that able men devote toilsome years to the discovery of quaint and curious details which they vaguely declare to be important, without saying why. Can all this erudition be put to any ulterior and nobler use, or must most of it lose its vitality as soon as created ? The present writer believes that the ' voluminous and vast' body of knowledge, which has now been made so easily accessible, can be coordinated and interpreted in a way impossible half a century ago. He believes that a subtler and higher kind of know? ledge can be extracted from it by a method rather inadequately designated as that of Comparative Literature. M. L. R. VIII. 1 [5] 2 The Future of Comparative Literature To understand the possibilities of comparative literature it is necessary to see in what relation it stands to the present tendencies of research. Owing to the strenuous competition for academic emoluments , many advanced students are guided in their labours by no other ideal than that of a higher position or an increased salary. But wherever a scholarly and intellectual purpose can be deteeted, it is generally this?to enable others to view some fragment of literature with the same eyes as the specialist. The uninitiated reader looks upon a play, a poem, an essay or a novel much as the man in the street will soon look upon aeroplanes. It is there because it is there. The man of letters realises that a masterpiece is not only an aesthetic pleasure but a triumph of inventiveness for those who know the history of its type. He also perceives that the great books of the past were written for readers with different ideas and surroundings and sometimes with a different idiom from our own, and that much of their thought and style can b"e appreciated only when this atmosphere is recreated. Again, while performing his task of classification and appreciation, he finds that some classic has really borrowed the ideas and even the phrasing of another writer, perhaps of a different age or country, and must be stripped of his borrowed plumes. Thus the critic is really an artist, not necessarily of words but of facts. Whether he is studying an author, an age or the history of a type of literature, he has to gather together a mass of some? times apparently incongruous knowledge, often penetrating far into other ages and languages or digressing into history, economics, sociology and art, and he weaves all this learning round his theme, till it stands out in a new garb. It is obvious that in such a scheme of study there can be no place for comparative literature. Every advanced worker in the most restricted field...