A generation has passed since the death of Professor Guérard, but my desire to revisit some of his books has been more than an exercise in nostalgia. By remembering him, and the humanistic tradition to which he belonged, I hope to take some measure of changes which have overtaken the study and criticism of literature in our time; he may help me define our situation today, by way of contrast. The three chief books of Guérard I have been rereading with much pleasure were all written in the thirties, which were my undergraduate student years: not an idyllic time, by any means, but in terms of intellectual culture and excitement they seem almost like a lost Paradise, from which we have since departed—if not necessarily in all ways "declined."

The watershed of course was World War II and its aftermath, and those earlier years may appear relatively escapist, naive, and simple-minded—though the half century from 1890 has also been understood as "America's Coming-of-Age" (associated with another World War). This latter perspective governed the work of M.D. Zabel when he first edited Literary Opinion in America (1937)—no assemblage of uncritical "innocents." But his essayists represented a state of literary culture in which the professional linguists and philosophical theoreticians had not yet come to the fore in large numbers; though the overwhelming majority of his critics were associated with academia, not a single one wrote in terms inaccessible to the intelligent layman. Guérard (Albert Léon—the gifted son is Albert Joseph) was part of a world in which learning (especially about literature, history, and the arts) had not yet become specialized and professionalized. Today we find hosts of linguists, narratologists, psychoanalysts, and so forth, talking (each group) to one another as theoreticians and scientists—certainly not to a general public, and too often not even to the humanistic university as a whole.