372 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



them to our apprehension from analogous phenomena in the civiliz- 

 ations of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Hoang Ho, or the Amazon. 

 A primrose by the river's brim will be a yellow primrose to him, and 

 nothing more. With Mr. Goldwin Smith, he will speak of Hector's 

 Andromache as " that savage woman." A line of Homer that happens 

 to illustrate a "survival," a trait of primitive psychology, or the de- 

 velopment of a political institution, will be for him a fact of precisely 

 the same significance as a Babylonian brick, an Egyptian scarabseus, 

 or a Fiji fetish. But that it had also been used as a text by Socrates 

 and Plato, emended by the founders of Alexandrian criticism, 

 imitated by Virgil, Milton. Goethe, and Tennyson, recited on the 

 field of battle by a Roman Imperator, declaimed in the crisis of his 

 destiny by an English prime minister, translated by Chapman. 

 Pope, and Bryant, and singled out as a touchstone of true poetry 

 and talisman of the grand style by Matthew Arnold, these would 

 be irrelevant and incidental associations, misty obscurations of the 

 dry light of science. 



Now for many purposes of the philologian as well as of the sociologist 

 this scientific impartiality is the merest postulate of sound method, 

 and to deprecate it is sheer sentimentality. " Into paint will I grind 

 thee, my bride." Literature, even Greek literature, is raw mater- 

 ial for the style statistician and the syntacticist of to-day, for the 

 sociologist of to-morrow. As M. Gustave Lanson observes, in 

 his courteous but cautious lecture on Histoire Litteraire et la Socio- 

 logy, the historians of literature have all been sociologists in the 

 fashion of M. Jotirdain, who produced prose all his life without 

 knowing it. But the sociologist is abroad, and M. Jourdain is grow- 

 ing self-conscious. He now publishes his abstract of Buchholz's 

 Homerische Realicn, or his notes on Athenian life in Aristophanes 

 in the Journal of Sociology and entitles them the Sociology of 

 Homer and Aristophanes. They smell as sweet. The present speaker 

 himself at the Congress of the Chicago Exposition delivered, or was 

 delivered of, a study that has never recovered from the handicap of 

 its baptism as The Implicit Ethics and Psychology of Thucydidcs. 

 The contagion is irresistible, and for many purposes, I repeat, 

 benign. But for the purpose of estimating the still vital significance 

 of Hellenism to modern life and thought, this aping of scientific 

 method is a falsifying abstraction from the essential facts of the 

 historical tradition. The objectivity which it affects is possible to 

 a child of modern Europe only by virtue of an ignorance which will 

 prove more misleading than the prepossessions and prejudices of the 

 professional Hellenist. It may be left to the sociologists of Tokio and 

 Pekin, who share no family tree of civilization with us unless it be that 

 in the branches of which ancestors probably arboreal found nightly 

 repose. 



