376 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



literature. Greek will at the most be drawn upon for casual illustra- 

 tion of principles elsewhere established. M. Brunetiere himself can 

 hardly expect that after he has shown us how modern French lyric 

 is a transformation of seventeenth century pulpit eloquence, he will 

 be able to prove a like origin for the Jiolian lyric of Sappho 

 and Alcseus. The mere mastery of the erudition indispensable to 

 the historian of classical literature will exercise a sobering and con- 

 servative restraint upon speculation, and a deep sense of Hellenic 

 logic, measure, and proportion is incompatible with the exagger- 

 ations of the Spirit of System. We may venture to predict, then, 

 that the future historian of Greek literature will have no thesis to 

 sustain, but will write rather in the spirit of Croiset's admirable 

 Introduction. 



Thirdly the idea of a possible science of literature finds expression 

 in the phrase " Comparative Literature." The literary criticism of the 

 Romans, as it appears in Aulus Gellius and Macrobius, was mainly a 

 comparison of Latin authors with their Greek sources. The criticism 

 of the Renaissance often took this form, as we may observe in Francis 

 Meres' naive Macedon and Monmouth "comparative discourse of 

 English Poets, etc., with the Greek, Latin and Italian Poets, etc." 

 The comparison of the various Merope, Sophonisba, Medea and Ipi- 

 geneia tragedies has always been a popular scholastic exercise. Com- 

 parative literature in a sense also is that discussion of the relative 

 merits of the ancients and moderns which was suggested perhaps 

 by Tacitus' Dialogus to John of Salisbury, Leonardo Bruni, and Dry- 

 den, and which constitutes an interesting but sufficiently studied 

 chapter in the literary history of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries. 1 But something more than this is meant by the modern 

 science of comparative literature, though precisely what it is not 

 easy to say. In the International Scientific Series 2 it stands for a 

 method of correlating the forms of literature with the corresponding 

 .social and political conditions, applicable impartially to the ' tribal " 

 epic inspiration of Homer or the Hottentots, to the drama and ora- 

 tory of the city-state, to the development and expression of person- 

 ality that accompanies the growth of the modern nation and finds 

 its fullest expression in the modern '' novel." In the practice of the 

 few university chairs that bear the title, comparative literature 

 is more concerned with coexistences than sequences, and seems to 

 mean the special study of those periods of European culture which 

 are swept by a common wave of thought and literary taste, as 

 the Middle Age. the Renaissance, the Reform. From this point of 

 view are written the Periods of European Literature, edited by Mr. 

 Saintsbury. 



1 Rigault, Jlixtnirf d? In (turrdlr des A ncir-ns ft rlcfs ^lodrrnes (Paris, 1S59). 



2 Posnett, Cnmparatire, Literature (London, 18S6). See also in Contemporary 

 Review, June, 1901, his naive account of how he founded the " new science." 



