CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 377 



The journals of comparative literature have hardly yet defined for 

 themselves a field distinct from that of Poet Lore or the special jour- 

 nals of English, French, and German literature. Their hospitality 

 welcomes almost any erudite inquiry that includes more than one 

 literature in its scope, from the article on Internationale Tabaks 

 Poesie, in the Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Litter atur-Geschichte, N. F. 

 vol. 13, p. 51, to the exhaustive study of Der Einfluss der Anakreon- 

 tik und Horazens, auf Johann Peter Uz, in vol. 6, p. 329. 



In this convenient, if not precisely scientific sense, "comparative 

 literature" is simply the study of literature as practiced by the 

 growing body of scholars who are enabled to compare one literature 

 with another by the broadening of modern erudition, the multipli- 

 cation of monographs, and the bibliographical facilities and card 

 catalogues of modern libraries. From such studies a science may or 

 may not emerge, but at present their constitutive principle is no 

 definable scientific method, but Goethe's conception of a world- 

 literature, or rather Matthew Arnold's idea of Europe as a federation 

 of states whose culture is measured by their knowledge of one another 

 and of classical antiquity. 



If we lay due stress upon the slighted second element in this 

 definition, comparative literature brings us back to our main topic, 

 the historical influence of the classics upon the literatures of modern 

 Europe. The proportion of articles devoted to this fundamental 

 subject by the journals is absurdly small. And in return M. Texte, 

 in his introduction to M. Betz's useful Bibliography of Comparative 

 Literature, 1 complains that the new science has been coldly received 

 by classical scholars. And it is doubtless true that the classicist is 

 absorbed in his own specialty, and is inclined to be tenacious of dis- 

 tinctions of quality which scientific impartiality is supposed to ignore. 

 But, to dismiss these recriminations, there is plainly a great work 

 to be accomplished which demands the cooperation of both classical 

 and modern philologists and critics. The relation of the modern 

 literatures to one another can never be understood until their 

 common debt to antiquity has been measured. 



The merest outline of the work to be clone requires more space than 

 can be given to it here. The inspiration and influence of classical 

 antiquity must be characterized for each of the great epochs of 

 modern culture, it must be traced in the development of each of the 

 national literatures, it must be minutely observed in the education 

 and life-work of individual authors, it must be studied in the specific 

 history of each separate literary form and tradition. 



To the Middle Age it is Aristotle, the master of them that know. 

 Hippocrates the physician, Virgil the mage, Ovid the story-teller, 



1 Louis P. Rotz, La Literature corn-pane, Essai Bibliographitfue, deuxieme edi- 

 tion, etc. Strasbourg, 1904. 



