230
PARTISAN REVIEW
we do not keep the aim of pleasure superior to the aim of knowl–
edge, whenever we justify literature by the history or science of
literature. All sorts of studies are properly ancillary to the true
study of literature-the study of causes, the study of the shapes
men's minds have had in the past are not only legitimate but neces·
sary. Yet when Professor Lovejoy in his influential book,
The
Great Chain of Being,
tells us that for the study of the history of
ideas a really dead writer is better than one whose works are still
enjoyed, we naturally pull up short and wonder if we are not in
danger of becoming like those Edinburgh body-snatchers who
saw
to
it
that there were enough cadavers for study in the medical
school.
The critics have made us very ,sensitive to this danger
by
their revolt against the historical study of literature. Here we
must distinguish: the revolt was not against the history of litera–
ture but against the scientific history of literature. When history
gave up its literary connection it allied itself with the science of
the 19th century which believed that the world was reflected with
perfect literalness in the will-less mind of the observer. The new
history had many successes and a strong influence upon literary
study; one of the ways that literary study could become scientific
was by the investigation of genesis, of how the work came into
being. I am not concerned to show that the study of genesis is
harmful to the right experience of the work of art: I do not believe
it is. Part of the economy of the human mind is to think geneti·
cally. And I am inclined to believe that whenever the genetic
method is attacked in itself we ought to suspect that special inter–
ests are being
defen,tl'~J~
So far is it
fro~
being true that the
genetic method is inimical to the work of art, that the very opposite
is so; a work of
art~
or any human thing, studied ·in its genesis can
take on an added value. Still, the genetic method can easily
be
vulgarized and when it is used in its vulgar form it can indeed
reduce the value of an object; in much genetic study the attention
is so centred on the conditions of the work of art that the implica–
tion is clear that to the student the work of art is "nothing but" its
conditions.
One of the attractions in the study of the conditions of a work
of art is that it seems to offer a high degree of certainty. Aristotle
tells us that every study has its own degree of certainty and that
the
