[5]. Lord Radnor in Spence’s Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 368.
[6]. Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine, pp. 89 ff., 255.
[7]. Ribot, Psychology of the Emotions, pp. 329 ff., rejects Guyau’s emendation of Grant Allen, and backs Groos in his view of the play theory.
[8]. “Gedanken über Musik bei Thieren und beim Menschen,” 1889, in Deutsche Rundschau, LXI. 50 ff.
[9]. Athenæum, III. 67.
[10]. 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.
[11]. Such are the Comparative Literature of Posnett, and the less didactic work of Letourneau, L’Évolution Littéraire dans les diverses Races Humaines, Paris, 1894. The former was mainly pioneer work, meant to open and define its subject; and in this it attained its end. This sociological method has been applied, of course, in a critical way, to many individual works, and to many periods of literature; not so, however, with the poetic product at large.
[12]. There is more to be said for the partial origin of poetry in choral songs of a sexual character sung after the communal feast of the horde or clan. This “sex-freedom,” so revolting to modern ideas, left late traces in history; and Professor Karl Pearson quotes Tsakni’s La Russie Sectaire to the effect that such license still prevails at fairs and periodic festivals in Russia, combined with choral dance.—Pearson, The Chances of Death, II. 243. There are Australian festivals of this sort; and license of May-Day, of Shrove-Tuesday, and the rest, is familiar in European survival. On the other hand, it will be found that erotic poetry of the individual and lyric sort is almost unknown among savages.
[13]. History of Creation, 2 vols., trans., New York, 1893, I. 355, quoting from his General Morphology. He adds that by “tribe” he means “the ancestors which form the chain of progenitors of the individual concerned.”
[14]. Der Fetischismus, Leipzig, 1871, pp. 61, 74 f. A pretty little parallel of savages and children in the worship of images and dolls was drawn by M. Anatole France in a review of Lemonnier’s Comédie des Jouets. See France, La Vie Littéraire, II. 10 ff.