CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 385 



the influence of each of the great classic, writers must be traced back- 

 ward and forward through the centuries. There must be a multipli- 

 cation of such monographs as Tollkiihns' Homer und die Romische 

 Poesie, Comparetti's Virgil in the Middle Age; Rheinhardstottner's 

 Plautus and his Imitators, Stein's Sieben Bucher zur Geschichte des 

 Platonismus, Spingarn's Literary Criticism of the Italian Renaissance, 

 Thalmeyr's Goethe und das classische Altherthum, Bertrand's La Fin 

 du Classicisme et le Retour a I' Antique. Zielinski has sketched the in- 

 fluence of Cicero in the course of the centuries. Who will comprehend 

 for us in a similar survey the Aristotle of antiquity, of the Middle 

 Age, of literary classicism, of nineteenth-century scholarship and 

 political science? Who, supplementing the work of Greard and Volk- 

 mann. will show us not merely what Plutarch was to his own day, but 

 what he has meant for Montaigne, for Shakespeare, for Rousseau, for 

 Madame Roland, for Emerson? All this detail, however, though of 

 intense and curious interest to the specialist, will receive its true 

 significance only from the larger synthesis for which it is the indis- 

 pensable preparation. The pseudo-classicists of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury half seriously justified their slavish adherence to classical models 

 by affirming that to copy them was in reality to imitate nature. As 

 Pope says of Virgil: "Nature and Homer \vere, he found, the same." 

 from this superstition the philosophic historian of Hellenism will be 

 free. But he must and will recognize that classical literature collect- 

 ively has been to the modern world something more than a certain 

 number of particular books written by individual authors who lived 

 in a pre-scientific age, though to a literal and nominalistic apprehen- 

 sion it is obviously and merely that. 



But viewed across the chasm of the Middle Age in its transfigured 

 historic detachment, its idealized totality, the art and literature of 

 antiquity has been felt as a great objective fact like nature, a com- 

 plete system of knowledge like science, the embodiment and symbol 

 of a spiritual and moral ideal like Christianity. And as the history of 

 our civilization could be written in relation to any one of these three 

 uTent facts or ideas, so it can and must be studied in the various 

 phases of its apprehension of classical antiquity as a whole. Such an 

 historic survey will have more than a merely scholastic or erudite 

 interest. It will confirm the salutary faith that the Hellenic inspir- 

 ation, though often transformed, never dies, that it persists amid all 

 change a permanent and essential constituent of the modern spirit, 

 that it remains to-day for our finest minds in Pater's phrase not an 

 absorbed element, but a conscious initiation. Across the gulf of the 

 centuries, undimmed by the mists and fervors of the Middle Age, un- 

 deflected by the prismatic splendors of our twentieth-century palaces 

 of art and science, the white light of Hellenism still pours unwavering 

 its purest ray serene. 



