Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Modern Language Review, Vol. 8: A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Study of Medieval and Modern Literature and Philology
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 Virgiliane 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.
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