RIDICULOUS “RESEARCH.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19269, 5 September 1924, Page 5

RIDICULOUS “RESEARCH.”

RHETORIC AND LINGUISTIC INSTRUCTION. It was no less a person than Goethe who living long enough to see scholars begin the dissection of his works, pronounced the searching out of “sources” of a literary masterpiece “ridiculous. \rchcEology in history and the archseoiogical spirit in philology—the attempt in graduate work to collect and explain his torical and linguistic remains in order to reconstruct the human past—is of distinct value, but it cannot be staled too emphatically that the archaeological spirit in literature in our academic courses is wholly out of place, contributing in nowise toward the appreciation or to the spiritual value of great literary monuments of human genius, but rather to the contrary. It is often forgotten in this connection, says the North American Review, that mere tyros in scholarship just winning their academic spurs, who are gifted with imagination, diligence, and temerity, could, in the name of pseudo-scholarship, develop in many pages the fancied relationship, say, of a portion of the plot of Romeo and Juliet to some Esquimo love song, which the greatest interpreters of Shakespeare in the universities of the world could not, and certainly would not, take the trouble to refute. It is the too frequent presence of pedantry of this type, sometimes termed “scholarship” by the unreflecting, together with the fact that so much time is devoted to rhetoric and linguistics instruction, which is making the literary departments of our colleges ineffective as representative of the liberal disciplines.