LITERARY VITALITIES 321 



temporary England, France, and Germany in a certain defined direc- 

 tion as astronomers tell us the Milky Way is being drawn across the 

 heavens to some unknown immeasurably distant pole-star or central 

 sun. Streams and currents of Classicism and Romanticism and 

 Euphuism and Symbolism, and what not, criss-cross each other in this 

 many-colored sea; intermingle, blend, separate, start afresh on new 

 voyages of elective affinity, cohere, dissolve, vanish. 



All this is wonderfully fertile in suggestiveness : the true student 

 will enter the labyrinth with the proper clue, will seize or select " a 

 tendency," saturate himself with its phenomena, study, analyze, 

 microscopically examine, completely master it if possible. 



How interesting, for instance, to collect and study the Prefaces to 

 celebrated works as they lie before us in early and late editions of 

 English masterpieces; revealing the authors' most intimate thoughts 

 about their work. A Preface is the authors' card of introduction to 

 the master of the household. Seen through spectacles of such clear 

 glass, Dryden or Wordsworth take on a new aspect. 



Or the study of the Great Odes, the monumental Elegies, the 

 conversational or the psychological Drama, the. soul of Shakespeare 

 concrete in his works, this or that movement in Elizabethan literature, 

 the lyric of the Stuarts, the insweep and outsweep of the complex, 

 mutually interacting currents (which are to the literary historian 

 what Demosthenes' action! action! action! is to the orator). 



The beginning and the end of the last hundred years have seen 

 a remarkable advance indeed, a revolution in the "method" 

 of studying literature. Bits of actual research such as Johnson's 

 Lives of the Poets were rare indeed in the eighteenth century, but they 

 exerted a powerful if silent influence in bringing about this revolution. 

 How charmingly original and instrumental in reestablishing cordial 

 relations between France and Germany was Mme. de StaeTs De 

 I'Allemagne! 



One fancies Herodotus talking with the priests of Memphis as the 

 eloquent Frenchwoman stands beside Goethe and Schiller and inter- 

 rogates them on the mysteries of German transcendentalism. 



" Institutions are the lengthened shadows of men," said Emerson. 

 Literatures are the personal expression of nationality. A nation is 

 a musical instrument a harp, a viol, a pipe-organ whose 

 musicians are its great writers or speakers. When it has refined 

 itself into some exquisite speaking-tube, into some vox humana of 

 a thousand strings and subtleties, it utters itself in Euripides, in 

 Lope or Calderon, in Schiller or Milton, and the quality of its music 

 is as distinguishable as the voice of Jacob. 



Therefore it is, that nations must be conceived, from a literary 

 point of view, as huge ethnic documents, to be studied all around, in- 

 side and out, intensively and extensively, magnified units as sharply 



