Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/13



I.— 1.

the preliminary announcement of this Review it was stated that its chief attention would be devoted to research in all departments of its subject. The word “research” is capable of several interpretations, and some amplification of this statement is perhaps desirable.

To the founders of the Review it seems that research as they understand it is the life-blood of literary history; that without it, without the constant discovery of new facts and of new relations between the old, the study can be little more than the reiteration of stale arguments, coloured perhaps by temporary likes and dislikes, by fashion and by prejudice, but still essentially the same; a weary study and one without pleasure or profit either to the teacher or to the taught.

But in matters of literary history “research” is not quite the same thing as in the natural sciences. We have less to do with that which has never previously been known, and more with that which has never been rightly interpreted. There is little for us to discover in the way of bare fact that was not known to some person or other before our day; much of our work must necessarily be rediscovery, but it is no less important on that account and no less worthy of the name of research. Much toil might indeed have been saved to us if our forefathers had thought fit to put on record a few of the familiar facts about their great contemporaries, their lives and their writings, which we now labour to infer from a hint or a jest. Had they done this we should have been many stages further on the endless road, but there would still have been need, as much and no 1