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Theory of Literature
trace its history, though Saintsbury's own ambitious books are
vitiated by the unclear and obsolete conceptions of meter and
rhythm on which they are based, demonstrating thereby that no
proper history can be written without an adequate scheme of
reference. The same type of problems will arise in a history of
English poetic diction, for which we have only little sketches,
or in a history of English poetic imagery, which has not been
even attempted.
With this type of study one might be expected to class the
many historical studies of themes and motifs such as Hamlet or
Don Juan or the Wandering Jew 5 but actually these are dif-
ferent problems. Various versions of a story have no such neces-
sary connection or continuity as have meter and diction. To trace
all the different versions of, say, the tragedy of Mary Queen of
Scots throughout literature might well be a problem of interest
for the history of political sentiment, and would, of course, inci-
dentally illustrate changes in the history of taste—even chang-
ing conceptions of tragedy. But it has itself no real coherence or
dialectic. It presents no single problem and certainly no critical
problem. 22 Stoffgeschichte is the least literary of histories.
The history of literary genres and types offers another group
of problems. But the problems are not insoluble 5 and, despite
Croce's attempts to discredit the whole conception, we have
many studies preparatory to such a theory and themselves sug-
gesting the theoretical insight necessary for the tracing of a clear
history. The dilemma of genre history is the dilemma of all his-
tory: i.e., in order to discover the scheme of reference (in this
case, the genre) we must study the history ; but we cannot study
the history without having in mind some scheme of selection.
Our logical circle is, however, not insurmountable in practice.
There are some cases, like the sonnet, where some obvious external
scheme of classification (the fourteen-line poem rhymed
according to a definite pattern) provides the necessary starting-
point j
in other cases, like the elegy or the ode, one may legiti-
mately doubt whether more than a common linguistic label holds
together the history of the genre. There seems little overlap between
Ben Jonson's "Ode to Himself," Collins' "Ode to Eve-
ning," and Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" j
but a
sharper eye will see the common ancestry in Horatian and Pin-