ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the views of a number of critics who shared J. M. Robertson's conviction that science and literary criticism could and indeed should go hand in hand. It provides the examination of Robertson's ideas and theories about scientific literary criticism. One may suggest that, whatever its merits in other respects, as a scientific or theoretical treatise on the standards for literature and literary criticism, Principles of Success in Literature fails to offer much beyond the rather hazy principle of success as a pseudo-empirical test of literary merit. In his analysis of literature on a sociological basis, Hennequin does provide a new and potentially interesting methodology. Much of the chapter is concerned with a refutation of Taine's theory of race, milieu, and moment, which, Hennequin felt, did not sufficiently take into account the forces contributed by the individual.
