Methods and Aims in the Study of Literature

is really no lack of it, is neither easy to find nor easily arranged. I have included several extracts from a mere wish to have them together for ease of reference and comparison. Yet the thought that gives unity to the whole is not, I hope, too much overlaid, being more than once clearly expressed by authors who are quoted for example, by Browning (p. 187), where he speaks of the marriage of law and impulse in the work of the great Creative Artist. And the gradual progress of the selections, from those that insist upon the necessity of law and order in poetic art to those that insist upon the necessity of emotion, must be evident; though I am aware that the extract from Reynolds (pp. 16-17), and those from Boeckh (pp. 45-46, 49–52), being essentially Platonic, would not lose if they were brought closer to one from the Symposium (pp. 220-222). At all events, I trust the reader will find correspondences between one part and another, and, in spite of occasional interruption and discrepancy, a general corroboration of opinion and experience throughout.

The main course of the selections is as follows: First, under a single heading, come those on method in general; those on the relation of scientific to artistic method; those on method in arts other than literature; one on the method of observation and comparison in natural science, where the procedure is fundamentally the same as that employed in the study of literature; and one on the life of a scholar who fully understood this basic truth. Then, under a second heading, come those on observation and comparison in literature, and, under a third, supplementary to these, the extracts from Wordsworth's letters. The fourth section, illustrating the practice

of poets and others in composing, naturally follows these letters, and leads up to the fifth, on the studies of poets. As a final illustration of the bond between rigorous method and the artistic utterance of passion, I could hardly avoid choosing for the sixth section the treatment of the supreme passion of love by (in the main) supreme poets. And I have ventured in all humility to close with a passage from Scripture that seems to gain added significance in the new setting, while it puts the final emphasis where the final emphasis in the study of literature and of life belongs.

It only remains for me to record my thanks and acknowledgments to several authors and publishers who have kindly allowed me to make use of various selections to Houghton Mifflin Company for the extracts from Palmer's Herbert and Allen's review of it, and for those from Shaler's Autobiography and Norton's translation of the Vita Nuova;1 to Mr. Kenyon Cox and Charles Scribner's Sons for several paragraphs from The Classic Point of View; to Longmans, Green, & Co. for an extract from Professor Albert S. Cook's edition of Burke's Speech on Conciliation; to the editors of Modern Language Notes for permission to reprint my article entitled A Glance at Wordsworth's Reading, and to them and to Professor Laura E. Lockwood for her article on Milton's Corrections; to Harper and Brothers and William Blackwood and Sons for Minto's essay, The Historical

1 The selections from The Autobiography of Nathaniel S. Shaler and C. E. Norton's The New Life of Dante are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of their works.

Relationships of Burns; to Dr. Ida Langdon for the passage from Materials for the Study of Spenser's Theory of Fine Art; and to Professor Justin H. Smith for extracts from The Troubadours at Home. The selections from Jowett's translation of Plato are reprinted with the consent of the holders of the copyright. Two definitions of 'art' on page 2 are borrowed from The Artistic Ordering of Life by Professor Cook; I am also indebted to him for the passage from Shedd on The Meaning of Methodology, and for the extract entitled Byron's Early Reading. Aside from these instances, I hope I have in the footnotes given proper credit in all cases where credit is due. A few trifling errors, infelicities in punctuation, and the like, I have silently corrected or emended; but it has seemed undesirable, if not impossible, to normalize all the selections in all respects.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, NEW YORK

LANE COOPER