394 CLASSICAL LITERATURE 



successive form of literature and to study its inheritances as well as 

 its original features; to show how one movement of thought passed 

 into another, with the fitting modes of expression, how action and 

 reaction succeeded each other; in the case of individual authors to 

 ascertain and set forth their sources, in the fullest sense of this 

 much abused word, the great types according to which their 

 works were framed how these types arose and their modifica- 

 tion of the types; their special literary originals and the degree to 

 which they were dependent on these originals; their personal inno- 

 vations and their characteristic additions to the riches of literary 

 expression whether in art or in substance of thought. Literary 

 histories of this nature or perhaps I should say studies in literary 

 history of this nature are now beginning to be written. Founda- 

 tions for them have been laid in a more comprehensive and accurate 

 knowledge of some of the branches of literature and of some of the 

 authors, and the superstructure will arise as a matter of course. To 

 be sure, at times even in our day some of these attempts are for 

 obvious reasons foredoomed to failure: like those of a French ecclesi- 

 astic, who has recently undertaken to prove that Homer is but a copy 

 and travesty of the Bible: Is not Agamemnon's refusal to deliver 

 Briseis modeled on Pharaoh's denial to release the Israelites ? and 

 are not four children given to Agamemnon because Saul, King of 

 the Jews, had the same number? the very difference in the sex 

 of the members of the two families one son and three daughters 

 as against three sons and one daughter being but a subtle proof 

 of this theory! 



We have already briefly adverted to the problems that will con- 

 front the historian of classical literature, as, first, he studies the indi- 

 vidual work, then passes on to the author, then to a branch of 

 literature, and at last to the national literature either of the Greeks 

 or of the Romans. But these national literatures are, as we have 

 remarked, organic parts of what Goethe has called Weltlitteratur. 

 What we now inquire - is the relation of the historian of class- 

 ical literature to the science of Weltlitteratur, which, for want of 

 a better name we call " Comparative Literature," and what are the 

 problems that arise from this relation? 



As a science fundamentally historical, comparative literature 

 has exactly the same problems that we noted as arising in the study 

 of a national literature, though on a much larger scale, "and in 

 diffusion more intense" (as George Eliot says). But comparative 

 literature has something more; it has in fact some of the qualities 

 of what the makers of the programmes of this Congress might call 

 a Normative Science: it teaches us. or should teach us, the fruitful 

 doctrines of (esthetics and psychology as applied to literary creations. 

 The ancients constructed their canons of art of various kinds, not as 



