Note 10 — Chapter I · PURPOSE AND METHOD

Criticism has been treated of late with scientific precision. See the bibliographical array in Gayley and Scott’s admirable Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, Boston, 1899. From the imperial critic, the “gentle reader” and patron represented by Montaigne, who gives no reasons but his own likes and dislikes, as witness that delightful essay on books, in its opening sentence, through the official critics, down to M. Brunetière, the scientific critic, faithful to the doctrine of evolution in general, and attentive to the law in the particular case, it is to be noted how criticism has been approaching the sociological domain, the study of poetry as an element of human life. Sainte-Beuve was still a critic of poets and poems, for all his “natural method”; Taine crossed the border and studied poetry, the product, under sociological and ethnological conditions. See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, VIII. 87 f., 69 f.; IX. 70; and Taine, Derniers Essais, Paris, 1894, pp. 58 f. M. Brunetière, in carrying on the plan of Taine, and Hennequin, in opposing it, work on sociological and historical ground, rather than in the old æsthetics. Hennequin’s Critique is “scientifique”; while a title like M. Brunetière’s Evolution of Species in Literature can be conceded to criticism only by taking such liberties with the word as to leave it practically undefined. Still, these men work for criticism if not in it, and they give no reason for disputing what is said in the text about the paucity of books on poetry as an element in human society. They have the modern poet, the modern poem, in view; they wish to lay down metes and bounds and adjust the law. Hennequin will found a new science, “an immense anthropology,” made up of all the vital sciences (Crit. Sci., pp. 185 f.); but his place is with the critics, and not with scholars in historical and comparative literature. His æsthopsychology indicates devotion to the poetic impulse rather than to the product. Mr. Granger (Worship of the Romans, p. vii) has lately called up the word ethology, suggested by Stuart Mill (Logic of the Moral Sciences, pp. 213 ff., 218), in line with a hint that the foundations of comparative psychology must be laid in the study of the people and of their habits of thought. Something of this sort has been done by M. Le Bon in his Psychologie des Foules, quoted below.