character of literary works to extra-literary conditions and thus imply an environmental determinism as rigid and undemonstrable as that proposed by Mme. de Stael or Taine. Inevitably, as Welleck has said, the study of literature as a product and a mirror of non-literary history will crowd out all specifically literary concerns, including the very criteria by which literature is normally distinguished from ordinary writing.
It is this deep suspicion regarding literary values that finally discredits the historical solution to the problem of literary history. When knowledge about America is the prime concern, our ideas about literature cannot be permitted to interfere in the selection of data. "Literary criticism and literary history," Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., once proclaimed, "Are two distinct branches of scholarship, each with its own point of view and technique, and having no more in common than, say, history in general and the study of ethics. until the historian frees himself from the domination of literary critics, his work is certain to fall short of its highest promise." Envisaging a literary history so committed to "historical values" that it would make no distinction between literary and non-literary writings, Louis Wright proposed that "literature" be construed as "the total output of the printing press." Once the historical method has arrived at this point of critical indifference, of course, it can go a step farther and place a higher value on sub-literature. "No historian of American letters," Schlesinger said, "however highly he may personally esteem Ralph Waldo Emerson, could treat the middle third of the nineteenth century without devoting considerably more space to William H. McGuffey." And from there it can take the final step to Pattee's view that inferior literature alone has any historical significance: "To study only the literature of aristocracy is to be ignorant of America, for America, taking all of its elements together, is synonymous with vulgarity." granted its premises, the historical method is virtually