The late R. G. Collingwood, a philosopher whose work has proved helpful to many students of literature, once wrote ``We are all, though many of us are snobbish enough to wish to deny it, in far closer sympathy with the art of the music-hall and picture-palace than with Chaucer and Cimabue, or even Shakespeare and Titian. By an effort of historical sympathy we can cast our minds back into the art of a remote past or an alien present, and enjoy the carvings of cavemen and Japanese colour prints; but the possibility of this effort is bound up with that development of historical thought which is the greatest achievement of our civilization in the last two centuries, and it is utterly impossible to people in whom this development has not taken place. The natural and primary aesthetic attitude is to enjoy contemporary art, to despise and dislike the art of the recent past, and wholly to ignore everything else.''

One might argue that the ultimate purpose of literary scholarship is to correct this spontaneous provincialism that is likely to obscure the horizons of the general public, of the newspaper critic, and of the creative artist himself. There results a study of literature freed from the tyranny of the contemporary. Such study may take many forms. The study of ideas in literature is one of these. Of course, it goes without saying that no student of ideas can justifiably ignore the contemporary scene. He will frequently return to it. The continuities, contrasts, and similarities discernible when past and present are surveyed together are inexhaustible and the one is often understood through the other.