CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 371 



In these respects there is little to distinguish the historian of the 

 classic literatures from other historians. His exposition of the known, 

 his divination of the unknown, raise the same problems of literary, 

 erudite, or critical method that confront the student of English, 

 German, or Japanese literature. And if classical philology be defined 

 as "the knowledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity," the 

 human nature of the Greek is presumably as significant for folk-lore, 

 ethics, and sociology as the human nature of the Veddahs or the Poly- 

 nesians, and the Iliad is as instructive a document as the Kalevala. 



But to pursue either of these truisms further would be to lose 

 ourselves in detail, and after all miss the root of the matter. The 

 essential facts that determine the relation of classical (and especially 

 Greek) literature to the other intellectual interests of the modern 

 world are those that distinguish it from other literatures, its peculiar 

 intrinsic excellence and the influence which it has as a matter of 

 history exercised upon the development of Western civilization. 

 Herbert Spencer deplores the exaggerated attention that is still 

 bestowed upon "two petty Mediterranean tribes." And it is true 

 that to the geological and cosmogonical imagination familiar with 

 aeons of time and million-leagued space, the glory that was Greece, 

 the grandeur that was Rome, dwindle to the punctual insignificance 

 of the Roman Empire in Scipio's dream, or of the globe at whose 

 "vile semblance" Dante smiled in retrospection from beyond the 

 seventh Sphere. But our minds do not really inhabit the eternities 

 and the infinities, but the historic atmosphere of the past three 

 thousand years, and we do not live by the geological and cosmo- 

 gonical imagination, but by admiration, hope, and love, and by the 

 imaginative reason. 



And a like answer holds when the petty parochial scale of Greek 

 life is contrasted with the vaster ancient empires revealed by Oriental 

 studies, or with the world-commerce and the world-politics which 

 the progress of science and the fusion of races may be preparing for 

 the twenty-first century. The ancient civilizations of China, Baby- 

 lonia, and Egypt possess for us an interest of erudite curiosity. They 

 do not speak directly to our minds or hearts. We are not their 

 spiritual children, but the sons of Greece and Rome. Time may alter 

 this by merging the life of Western Europe in a wider world-civiliz- 

 ation whose unity will rest solely on the telegraph and the associated 

 press, on the laboratory, the rolling-mill, and the battle-ship, and in 

 which the peculiar spiritual inheritance and tradition of China 

 and Japan will count for as much or as little as that of Italy, France, 

 and England. When that day arrives a Martian sociologist, viewing 

 mankind with impartial survey from China to Peru, will tabulate the 

 statistics of Grocco-Roman civilization in the fashion of Herbert 

 Spencer, with no consciousness of the special quality that differentiates 



