George Edward Woodberry entered Harvard when Lowell was finishing his career as a professor. Lowell became interested in the impecunious undergraduate who aided in cataloguing his library, and in 1891, shortly before he died, recommended the young scholar for the new chair of comparative literature at Columbia University. There for fourteen years Woodberry taught. He established the new department upon the firm basis which has ever since been its characteristic, and inspired in his students, among whom were Joel E. Spingarn and John Erskine, the same love of letters which had been developed in him by Lowell.

Woodberry was a curious combination of characteristics. A Yankee by birth, he learned at Harvard to love the Mediterranean lands and literatures. Spingarn described him as intellectually a frustrated effort to combine the individualism of the transcendentalist, which had inherited a Calvinistic substratum, with the European Platonic and Roman Catholic tradition. In spite of his assertion that Athens was the finest achievement of man and her defeat at Syracuse the great tragedy of history, he was more Hellenistic than Hellenic. In him the classical spirit was overlayed and to some degree alloyed by the demands of scholarship and by the feeling that he was singing the classical song in a strange land. He was excessively attached to tradition. John Macy called him the last of the Lowells instead of the first of the Woodberrys, a man so deeply concerned to transmit the traditional torch that he made no addition to its light. The charge, though not baseless, is somewhat too severe. His strange combination of motive forces, which he denoted his "agnostic, pagan, and Puritan instincts," inevitably produced a novel outlook upon life. In preaching the idealistic gospel of Lowell, he contributed to its several new tenets.

Two characteristic attitudes contributed heavily to his work. His nieces and nephews once decided that his most characteristic expression was the question "Why?" Persistently for all his shyness, he tried to satisfy his curiosity as to the "whys" of life. The second habit was his repeated recognition of likenesses. North Africa reminded him of the plains of Nebraska; a gravelly brook near Taormina took his mind back to the Berkshires. Both New England and North Africa were "marabout-breeding" countries, producing revivals, transcendentalists, and new lights in religion. A curious, imaginative man alert to note resemblances is well equipped to appreciate and criticize what he observes.

The critical problems of interest to Woodberry were those which naturally concern the idealist, particularly the relation between genius and training. Whittier was Nature's demonstration that the die she casts may be better than the diploma of the schools. Had he read Theocritus, he could never have written "Snow-Bound." Genius makes a very little art go a long way. As a rule, however, the greatest poets have been the greatest scholars in the living knowledge of their age. They have firmly grasped literary tradition and the great ideas that concern mankind as well as the great forms in which these ideas have been cast. They have not been professional scholars. Woodberry bewailed the modern shift of scholarship to a near-scientific pursuit, more like law or medicine than an item of civilized culture. The concurrent disappearance of classical studies as the sine qua non of scholarship was the greatest single loss to modern culture that Woodberry could envision. The methods of classical study—which he still thought of in Renaissance rather than German terms—might communicate little to the modern man; but he should at least be well read in Greek and Latin literature.

Woodberry declined then to accept the popular American belief in genius without benefit of culture. Once the materials of culture have become part of the artist so that he uses them instinctively, they function as a part of that power which we call genius. The creative faculty uses the entire personality of the artist; in creating literature the mind acts, employing all its powers just as men in other callings perform their functions.

Following Aristotle, Woodberry saw art as a new creation, as "nature regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be; an ordered and complete world.… The reality that remains in it out of the world that was, is only a residuum; the characteristic part, the vital and illuminating part, is what the artist has brought new-born in his own soul—that which never was before." Art remolds the world like clay to the form the artist's soul desires. Art is therefore freedom, while nature is necessity; art is soul, nature is body; art is spirituality, nature is materialism.

Reasoning in this Platonic-Aristotelian vein and reinforced by Sidney, Wordsworth, and Shelley, Woodberry followed the traditional differentiation between poetry and history in his distinction between scientific and imaginative truth. "Science and philosophy formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale," by the aid of the imagination. He approved with Aristotle the use of historical plots in drama and narrative as wise economy; with well-known characters, much is done for the audience before the story begins. Distance also lends an unreal air to what is gross; the story of Oedipus is relieved by its unreality from much of that crudeness which would make a similar current event too crude for artistic treatment.

On one classical principle, however, Woodberry disagreed with tradition; he denied that impersonality is the mark of the classical artist. Not self-effacement, but universality, produces the so-called classical objectivity. In dealing with universal truth, the author omits his own idiosyncrasies and hobbies, but not his basic personality. Aeschylus no more effaced his personality from his plays than did Shakespeare; both authors are present in all their works with their human characteristics effective rather than their peculiarities. To speak of classical impersonality as opposed to romantic subjectivity seemed to him absurd. The classical tradition as much as the romantic requires that the poet sincerely feel what he writes; how then can he be objective?

Upon another matter of importance to classical theory, Woodberry felt that a change of emphasis had come with the development of the reading public. He insisted upon proper arrangement of parts—"the theory of art is most fixed in the doctrine of order"—and demanded that the work possess organic unity. Upon the relative importance of plot and character, however, he deviated sharply from the accepted interpretation of Aristotle's principle. Interest in action is the interest of the boy or the practical man whose meditative life is barely begun. Once man has begun to meditate, he ceases to be satisfied with action in itself and finds his true interest in what action reveals of the character of the agent. Character in the Greek tragedies was simple, being set forth by its ruling passion; agents were more nearly types than those created later, as in Shakespeare's plays. The more mature mind, he insisted, finds special interest in character because it is more profound than plot. Scott was one of the first to show how character should be presented: being and doing should be fused; Scott "achieves expression in its highest form—the expression of a soul using its human powers in earthly life." He agreed with Aristotle that action, emotion, and thought constitute experience and are the major concerns of the writer. His different emphasis from Aristotle's upon plot and character may be more apparent than real, for it is quite possible that tradition has set a greater gap between the importance of the two in his scheme than he actually intended; and Woodberry realized that Aristotle was writing of characteristics of earlier Greek tragedy and epic, not legislating for all literature.

Artistic purpose and moral precept, Woodberry declared, have always been the two aims of poetry. Somewhat like Yvor Winters, he equated morals with mores, the principles by which men live; and "one can no more imagine life truly without ethics than he can imagine mass without cohesion." Somewhat like Poe, he felt that the moral effect derived from the work is not the major intent of the poet, but derivative from his portrayal of life. Like Poe again, he believed that poetry should gratify those who "take pleasure in loveliness.… The direct aim of all art is to please, and to please immediately." The value of the work is in fact not what the author intended but what the reader receives. "It is common enough for the reader to find meanings in a book that the writer did not consciously put there; … and moreover, the reader may respond to the work with greater sensitiveness than belonged to the creator and in new ways."

Woodberry's specific critical practice is best observed in his lives of Emerson and Poe, and his editions of Poe and Shelley. He showed himself to be a sympathetic interpreter, appreciative of the author's efforts, and an equitable judge of his attainment. Perhaps his most detailed statement of his critical position occurs in Two Phases of Criticism, Historical and Aesthetic, published in 1914 as a response to the recent upsurge of aesthetic criticism under the leadership of his former pupil Joel E. Spingarn.

It was a contest of highly qualified scholars on both sides. Woodberry defended that historical approach which Spingarn, though trained in it, had discarded.

Limitation of poetic criticism to the world of aesthetics, Woodberry declared, becomes invalid as soon as the poem is written down. It then becomes a part of the actual world, and therefore subject to judgment and evaluation. Even reputed success of a poem is not final; "it is still pertinent for criticism to inquire into the quality of the success, its value; and I am conservative enough to add that the critic may even ask whether it was right." While aesthetic freedom is a variety of free speech, such freedom does not liberate the poet from judgment of the wisdom or value of what he has said; the freedom implies the probability that he will incur such judgment. In a world that needed so desperately the guidance of reason Woodberry looked to criticism to "declare the judgment of reason on the intellectual and moral values of art."

After his attempt to establish the duty of criticism to judge, Woodberry proceeded to validate historical criticism. Even if one should accept the aesthetic concept of criticism, that it attempts to re-create the work of art as it was in the mind of the creative artist, this very act places the so-called criticism in the field of history, the past. The only hope of successfully studying the past lies in study of the period and the personality of the author himself; that is, in biographical and historical study. The universal element in all art must be appreciated in the garb it has put on before one can truly enjoy it. The aesthetic critics wanted to reach the dessert before eating the meat and potatoes. The would-be critic, if he is to practice with any scope, must be a scholar versed in the ways of people of all ages who have produced poetry or have contributed to its production. Of course one would like to penetrate the author's mind; but this is extremely difficult to do even with contemporaries. The offerings of the psychological critics he brushed aside as too much concerned with possible pathological states of the author and too little interested in the universal. And if the process is difficult with men of our own time, how can we hope to enter the mind of the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer, the troubadour, or Omar? Whether the critic likes it or not, he must be an historical critic.

He was aware of the danger that historical criticism cease to be the tool and usurp the place of the product; this very dereliction had turned men like Spingarn away from it. But the correction for overemphasis upon historical background is surely not to resort to other ancillary studies like medicine, pathology, sociology, or the subconscious. Woodberry would have the appreciative reader approach the poem adequately prepared to understand its content, evaluate it, and enjoy it. If he remembers that the poem's the thing, he may use to advantage any knowledge that will throw light upon it.

Woodberry showed only occasional interest in the progress of American literature. He was attracted to Hawthorne's and Emerson's work, and he admired Lowell. Poe interested him chiefly as a literary symptom of his time. The great literary tradition occupied his mind almost wholly; his shyness and lack of social connections probably contributed to his unconcern about the literature of his native land. Stedman and Lowell felt deep interest in the growing American literature, a concern which one might expect Woodberry to have shared. John Erskine has noted, it is true, that he tried constantly to open the eyes of his Columbia students to see literature as belonging to the entire world. He kept directing their attention to the possible future America, which would not be regional, nor of any one racial stock, but would amalgamate the energies of all lands and races. It is regrettable that he failed to incorporate his ideal into an intelligent concern with current literary problems as they aided or hindered the realization of his ideal.

His lack of interest in American literature led him at times to superficial judgments. The flowering of New England he attributed to local conditions and to the classical instruction given at Harvard. He failed to note the low grade of classical instruction at Harvard to which the early nineteenth-century graduates had attested; and even more strangely, he ignored the significant awareness of the Bostonians of literary and cultural happenings in Europe. He dismissed the contents of the Southern Literary Messenger while Poe was its editor as "exceedingly tame and dreary" except for Poe's own contributions—a statement which examination of those numbers does not support. As for American writers, "all authors have a sponsor": Joaquin Miller found his in Byron, Bret Harte in Dickens, Cooper in Scott. Such a belief indicates that he accepted without much examination charges advanced by bilious Anglophiles of the earlier years. Spingarn has noted that he brushed aside as unimportant the racier writers like Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville. He declared openly that genius had fled from a barbarous, materialistic America, which because of its lack of idealism could give birth to no poets.

With Woodberry, the school of Lowell came to an inglorious halt, until it had a rebirth in the New Humanists. His indifference to the immediate American literary scene save to condemn it made him unable to contribute greatly to American readers, though he did serve as a reminder to the few who appreciated him that idealism was a tenable literary position.