PROBLEMS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE 387 



have not. For, as Terence 1 says, " there is nothing so difficult that 

 it may not be found out by searching." 



Of the various kinds of record, that of literature, whether extant 

 or reconstructed, is much the most important. This is because litera- 

 ture is itself the very essence and exponent of whatever was most 

 characteristic and significant in the civilization of the ancients; 

 because it is the clearest and most intelligible of the records; because 

 it is the amplest. Indeed, without it all the other forms of record 

 are practically non-existent, or, if existent, are unintelligible. All 

 philosophy, nearly all history, nearly all the light on religion and 

 social institutions, are but the content of literature. The monuments 

 of art, though they speak a language all their own, gain new and 

 fuller meaning from the testimonies in literature concerning the art 

 and artists of antiquity. Language itself exists in amplitude and 

 variety only in the literature; indeed, in the case of the Greeks at 

 least, there is little of the language extant that is not literary, i. e. 

 marked by conscious art, even the rude memorials engraved on stone 

 or bronze being thrown into literary form. And the full character 

 and meaning of language, its range and power, are not revealed ex- 

 cept in the highly developed forms of literature. If all other kinds of 

 record were lost or made inaccessible we could still read in literature 

 alone nearly the whole story of antiquity, in all its beauty and 

 strength, though this might lack, to be sure, some elements of vivid- 

 ness and concrete reality that the monuments of art in particular 

 yield us. Yes, as Bacon says, "the images of men's wits and know- 

 ledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and 

 capable of perpetual renovation." 



Extant literature, as has already been intimated, is the foundation 

 and chief substance of our studies. But extant literature is for several 

 reasons defective. In the first place, from it are absent many import- 

 ant constituents of the whole, the vision of which is the ideal of our 

 efforts. Not only arc the works of many great writers of antiquity 

 lost, and known to us only at second- or third-hand in quotations or 

 in scattered and obscure allusions, but even whole classes of litera- 

 ture have no adequate representatives in what has survived. Herein 

 how different the problem of the student of a modern literature from 

 that of the student of classical literature: the former is bewildered 

 by the wealth of his materials, from which he must choose in order 

 to draw his pictures; the latter is embarrassed by his poverty: at 

 critical points he often can make only a sketch, and that, too. a con- 

 jectural one, whereas the other gives us a picture rich in detail. 

 Then, too, in its transmission to our day, ancient literature has 



1 Nil tarn dijf.cil cst quin quaerendo inuctig<iri possiet; which remind* one of 

 Chaeremon's 



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