Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/17

vi affords a splendid field for the exercise at once of analysis and of imagination.

To our friends, the men of Literature, we would say that nothing has contributed more largely to lower the value of their studies in the eyes of thinking men than the old-fashioned worship of imagination, not merely as containing an element of mystery, but as altogether superior to conditions of space and time; that, under the auspices of this irrational worship, the study of Literature tends to become a blind idolatry of the Unknown, with a priesthood of textual pedants who would sacrifice to verbalism the very deity they affect to worship; but that the comparative study of Literature not only opens an immense field of fruitful labour but tends to foster creative imagination.

Mr. Matthew Arnold in his Discourses in America has recently discussed this supposed conflict between Science and Literature; and, though his treatment of the definition of Literature—a subject to which we shall presently refer—is by no means satisfactory, few will refuse to join with him in the hope that Literature may some day be "studied more rationally" than it is at present. To such rational study this volume is intended as a contribution, however slight—an effort, it may be feeble, to treat Literature as something of higher import to man than elegant dilettantism or, what is possibly worse, pedantry devoted to the worship of words.

Should the present application of historical science to Literature meet with general approval, the establishment