PROBLEMS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE 393 



the work of the interpreter of classical antiquity is never finished, 

 can never be finished. Authors will continue and must continue to be 

 edited, monographs must be written, and there will ever be calls 

 for new histories of classical literature. 



The interpreter of the writings of the ancients especially of the 

 great poets of Greece must always have a happy task. His work 

 will have a universal appeal; in no other literature than that of 

 Greece has been so complete and so adequate .an expression of na- 

 tional life and ideals, in this case of the whole of the life and thought 

 of a people marvelously endow r ed passing in brilliant review before 

 us. Then too the Greek poets (as Aristotle has observed), in fact, 

 all great poets, express the Universal with penetrating and im- 

 pressive power: the individual is the speaker and mouthpiece, 

 but the message is from humanity to humanity. "The 'I' [of the 

 lyric poet]," says Tennyson, "is not the author speaking of himself, 

 but the voice of the human race speaking through him." "Der 

 vollkommene Dichter spricht das Ganze der Menschheit aus," said 

 Goethe. 



There is another fine saying of Goethe's, quoted by Biese: "Lit- 

 erature [what Goethe elsewhere calls Weltlitteratur] is but a fragment 

 of fragments; of what has been done and spoken only a very small 

 part has been written down; and of what has been written down only 

 a very little has remained, and yet even this little shows so much of 

 repetition that we are impressed with the thought of how limited 

 are the soul and fortunes of man." A national literature, like that of 

 the Greeks, is but a part, a member, of the Weltlitteratur, and is 

 apprehended in its fullness only when so apprehended. Similarly, 

 Greek and Roman literature themselves, when each is considered with 

 relation to what makes it up its several groups or kinds of litera- 

 ture, and within these the individual authors, and under each author 

 his own separate works, every one of these being (as Plato has 

 reminded us) a living organism are but organic parts of larger 

 and larger units, the lesser being intelligible only in their relation to 

 the larger units, and the larger intelligible only when their relation 

 to their organic constituents is recognized. Hence the historian of 

 classical literature will do more than know and interpret the in- 

 dividual authors, and his history will be more than a collection of 

 notes and memoranda of this nature, arranged on a chronological 

 string. He is concerned with authors not alone as separate individ- 

 uals, but also and primarily in their relation to each other and 

 to their literary progcners; he is concerned less with static conditions 

 than with dynamic relations. Literature, a particular literature, as 

 an organism, has had an organic growth and development: it is 

 his concern to discover the origins: to trace the complex stages of 

 growth; to determine the modifying influences; to analyze each 



