THE LITERARY RESURRECTIONIST.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1247, 2 October 1911, Page 3

THE LITERARY RESURRECTIONIST.

The other day we confessed to a certain Bynipathy with tho aims of tho literary resurrectionist. There are, however, two Bides to the question, and perhaps tlie most powerful protest against his methods ever made is in an article written by the late M. Brunetiero almost thirty years ago. Bruuetiere wrote at a psychological moment. A searcher had issued as hitherto unpublished a sot of some three or four hundred verses by Boussnet, which wcto (shown to have already appeared in certain editions of his works, and another had printed as unknown work of La Fontaine's six tales which turned out not to have been by that writer. Moreover, in one case actual harm had been done by an exhumation. Cousin, having found a body of memoirs which furnished him wtih a key to "Cyrus" and "Clelie," thereupon conceived such an enthusiasm for those romances as to leavo upon a reader's mind tho impression that in them classic art attained its final flower. In such circumstances Brunetiere was "not tho man to minco his words,' and ho not only deprecated the practice of disinterring work which in nino cases out of ten had remained unpublished for tho simple reason _ that it was not worth publishing, but ' roundly\set r ~it,(forth.-.,that certain of tho classics themselves—Moliere, La iiochef'ouoauld, La Fontaine—would be tho better of being relieved of. somo superfluous baggage. Moreover,' he argued, let no man think -to "renovate tho subject" by utilising hitherto unpublished matter. It'-ho.'wishes to renovate tho subject, let him" do so by .an cver-closer study of the main body of the author's works, or let him trace its fortunes down history and note how it has fared during fluctuations of critical taste, or let him do as Taine did with English literature,' and consider it as reflecting the times which gave it birth. "Hero," he concludes, "is the proper aim of criticism; to interpret the works, and, tho. longer they have lived, to find a deeper reason for their vitality. There are works that survivo their authors; there arc others that die with thorn; there arc even works which their authors survive. Somo last only during tho ago that produced them; others last longer than tho languages themselves in which thev aro written. Why? That is tho problem to solve, 0110 which has not been and probably nover will be solved, because for each generation it is stated in new terms, and 'for every man in that generation who approaches it in terms perceptibly dilferent." On all of which it is an easy comment to make that for a professional critic of the sort who takes a whole literature for liis provinco it is natural to seek to reduco it to manageable dimensions, but for those who cultivate literature intensively and look at an .author's work as a help towards understanding the "natural history" of his mind a work inferior as literature may bo exceedingly, significant, and may speak as a thumbmark does to tho trained eye of a detective.—"Manchester Guardian."