322 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



individualized as crystals of star, or rhomb, or diamond structure. 

 Ignorance of this fundamental fact evoked the absurd sentimentaliz- 

 ing of Chateaubriand over the American Indians, the Voltairean 

 criticism of Shakespeare, the maunderings of Rousseau over "the 

 state of nature," the powdered and periwigged Greeks and Romans of 

 Racine. Knowledge of its essentiality has given us Matthew Arnold, 

 analyzing the delicate spiritualities of French wit and style, Carlyle, 

 Germanized to the finger-tips in the deep sea of Teutonic transcend- 

 entalism, poetry, history, Ruskin, a cinque-cento Italian born out 

 of his time, expressing in pigment-like English the radiant thing that 

 Raphael's cherubs see, Sainte-Beuve thrilling with an almost orches- 

 tral fullness of knowledge of the literatures he discusses, FitzGerald 

 and his Persians, Max Miiller and his multifarious Orientalism. 



Contrast these living items of the Newer Criticism snatched from 

 a hasty resume of the nineteenth century, with the dead items, the dead 

 methods, the dark and inarticulate gropings that went before and 

 did duty for literary criticism. It is like comparing crisp sentences 

 out of the Laokoon, or the charming interpretations of Winckelmann 

 on Greek art, with the over-emphatic archaeology of The Last Days of 

 Pompeii. No true lover of either Boccaccio or Longfellow, of either 

 Wagner or Wolfram, would place the Decamerone and The Tales of 

 a Wayside Inn, or Parsifal and his interpreter alongside of each other. 



Set in its larger framework of ethnic environment, therefore, 

 each human, each literary document must be studied as the gem in 

 the rough and in the bezel, as well, on the finger of the wearer, as 

 well as blazing on the outstretched forefinger of Time, one of the 

 world's masterpieces. 



The vast psychology of Egypt lies momentarily dreamlike, en- 

 chanted, subterranean, entombed hundreds of feet under the 

 shovel or the scalpel of excavator or psychologist : no plummet has 

 yet reached these frozen depths or unlocked their deep-sea recesses : 

 the 500,000,000 of mummies answer not. But will it remain so 

 forever? The fixed stare of pyramid and sphinx, and obelisk and 

 pylon, monumentally calm, the glazed eyeball of King and Queen 

 and Pharaoh, will one day fill with light and life and love; to these, 

 too, Herder's beautiful words will become applicable and change to 

 three beautiful worlds teeming with motion, radiance, and vitality. 

 Egypt will speak as Greece has spoken and its speech will become 

 a thing of joy. 



