384 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



ation of Shelley. Such critics may well take to heart the warning 

 of Fielding: "The ancients may be considered as a rich common 

 whereon every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnas- 

 sus has the right to fatten his muse. Nor shall I ever scruple to take 

 to myself any passage which I shall find in any ancient author to 

 my purpose without setting down the name of the author from whom 

 it was taken." Even Mr. Swinburne sees the personal genius of Ben 

 Jonson in scraps of the elder Seneca that found a way into his note- 

 book, and dogmatically emends as meaningless a sentence that is 

 an accurate rendering of a line of Euripides. Even M. Brunetiere 

 selects to illustrate how far the plasticity of Leconte de Lisle sur- 

 passes the art of Alexandria a passage directly translated from an 

 Epyllion of Theocritus. Even Symonds celebrates the one fine 

 tirade in the Misfortunes of Arthur without observing that it is a 

 version of Lucan. It would be pedantry to attach any importance to 

 items like these which might be multiplied indefinitely. But collect- 

 ively they point a plain moral to the student : 



" 'Tis not for centuries four for nought 

 Our European world of thought 

 Hath made familiar to its home 

 The classic mind of Greece and Rome." 



The general reader may enjoy literature in ignorance of these pitfalls. 

 But the professional interpreter and critic of literature must have the 

 acquaintance with the ancients, or a certain flair for imitation and 

 paraphrase, that will enable him, as Dryden says of Ben Jonson. 

 "to track his author in the snow." He cannot evade the task by 

 facile denunciations of the pedantry that spies upon the plagiarisms 

 of genius. It is not a question of plagiarism at all, but of inspirations, 

 origins, and sources. Nor may he dismiss the importunate topic with 

 the Gallic lightness of M. Lemaitre, who tells us the essence of ali 

 ancient authors is to be found conveniently potted in Montaigne. 

 Rather will he declare with M. Brunetiere that the chief desideratum 

 of systematic literary study to-day is a history of humanism, and a 

 history of Hellenism and the influence of the classics in Italy. Rome. 

 England, and (lermany. Such works will doubtless be written. The 

 history of classical scholarship is already brought down to the Renais- 

 sance in Saridys's admirable compendium. For a satisfactory treat- 

 ment of the larger theme, the history of the influence of antiquity, we 

 must wait. The preliminary labor of detail is only begun. The accu- 

 mulation and sifting of "parallel passages'' in commentaries and 

 monographs must go on. The history of every literary form or (]< nr< 

 must be studied with a devotion not less minute but more discrimin- 

 ating than that which has been bestowed upon the epic and the 

 drama. The fortunes of special literary motifs and commonplaces 

 must be curiouslv followed. The sources of each of the great modern. 



