Matthews, Brander - William Lyon Phelps (essay date 1908)

William Lyon Phelps (essay date 1908)

SOURCE: "A Cosmopolitan Critic," in The Forum, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, January, 1908, pp. 377-381.

[In the following review of Inquiries and Opinions, Phelps offers some minor reservations about Matthews's literary judgments, but, on the whole, enthusiastically endorses them.]

Among American teachers of English, Professor Brander Matthews is notable for the breadth of his culture and the openness of his mind. He is a quite different person from the modern Ph.D. product, "made in Germany." The latter is no doubt useful in his way, but his way is not always human, or humanizing. The attitude of Professor Matthews toward literature has always been characterized by two distinguishing features: first his treatment of literature as a whole, without regard to the language in which it happens to have been written; second, his willingness to treat contemporary authors as definitive subjects of study. In...

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