ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold’s warning in “The Study of Poetry” against what he called the “historical fallacy” still stands. The fallacy is to confuse the evidential value of works of literature—that is, considered as documents merely defining chronological stages in the development of a literature, a genre, a “movement,” or indeed of an individual author— with their “real” or permanent value. The existence of a book—or of several books—does not prove anything: they may be bad books, or just trivia. It is true Arnold’s illustrations of the fallacy, apart from a passing deprecation of any comparing of Caedmon with Milton, were all drawn from Old or Middle French. But that was because in 1880, the date of “The Study of Poetry,” Old and Early Middle English were still in the exclusive keeping of the philologists and the antiquarians. Literary criticism proper still began with Chaucer. But for some two generations now eminent scholars with persuasive tongues and unquestioned literary sense like W. P. Ker, R. W. Chambers, and J. R. R. Tolkien have been staking out quite as large claims for our own early literature as Arnold’s French contemporaries were making in his time for the Chanson de Roland and Chrétien de Troyes. And the scholars have been joined more recently by some talented and vociferous literary critics, notably C.S. Lewis and John Speirs.
