W ITH the death of Croce, on November 20, 1952, in his eightyseventh year, not only a great philosopher, aesthetician, historian, politician has passed, but also a great literary critic, a highly influential theoretician of literature, and a learned investigator of literary history. Croce was certainly a practical comparatiste; he not only studied relations (e.g., between Spain and Italy, Germany and Italy),l but always kept the literary map of Europe in mind, comparing, contrasting, ranging over it, from Homer to Gerard Manly Hopkins. But Croce was no friend of the usual comparatisme, the studies of themes and motifs, sources and influences, for their own sake. In reviewing the prospectus of one of the predecessors of this journal, Woodberry, Fletcher, and Spingarn's ill-fated Journal of Comparative Literature, in 1903,2 Croce asked pointedly: What is comparative literature ? If it means the comparative method, then it obviously goes far beyond literature and is constantly used in the study of even a single author. If it means the tracing of literary themes and influences, it is useful but leaves us with a feeling of emptiness. "These are merely erudite investigations, which in themselves do not make us understand a literary work and do not make us penetrate the living core of artistic creation." They refer only to the after-history of a work already formed (its fame, translations, imitations, etc.) or to the materials which may have contributed to its origins. But if we define comparative literature as the study of all antecedents of a work of art, philosophical and literary, then it is identical with all literary history and the word "comparative" is really a superfluous pleonasm. There is only a choice between mere literary erudition and a truly historical and interpretative method. It is needless to say that Croce always preferred this second alternative, though he himself was immensely erudite. Stoffgeschichte, especially, was the target of his criticism. In reviewing, for instance, a German thesis on the different dramas based on the Mary Queen of Scots story,3 Croce scores the false assumption that a historical fact is an