478 GERMANIC LITERATURE 



component parts exert a mutual influence. Thus there is reared, 

 on the foundation of the separate sciences of the national literatures, 

 a general or comparative science of literature. Such a science was 

 foreshadowed and sketched in outline by far-seeing thinkers even 

 a century ago ; it was further shaped with varying success by their 

 followers; to-day, though still vague in aim and uncertain in method, 

 it is of great promise for the future, especially in such a field as 

 America, where so many languages and literatures meet, and whence, 

 indeed, has sprung one of the more successful of recent investigators 

 who have devoted themselves to this branch of literary history. 



Dependence on others as models and standards is a matter of 

 course, a natural and necessary condition. Every author, even he 

 who seems most original, must first of all have fought his way from 

 dependence to independence. Writers inherit from their predecessors 

 the richest treasures, without will or codicil. Even a writer who has 

 long seemed so eccentric and pathological as Friedrich Hebbel is 

 gradually seen to have a truly organic place in the regular develop- 

 ment of our composition and style. The same work of art belongs to 

 the most varied lines of development. Philosophy of the world and 

 of life, idea and tendency, matter and motive, technique and present- 

 ation, style and language, each has its own line of development. 

 Originality in one direction does not exclude dependence in another; 

 a poet, a work, may on one side open up a fresh line of development 

 while on another side standing at the close of an earlier line. Myriad 

 crossings of the different lines are possible. 



The history of a people's literature is an almost uninterrupted suc- 

 cession of culture borrowed, influences received, stimulus felt from 

 other literatures. When one people is culturally, socially, and polit- 

 ically superior to another, and at the same time in close geographical 

 contact and lively intercourse with it, the weaker, younger, more 

 primitive people is wholly surrendered to the intellectual influence 

 of the more advanced. In such a transfer of culture, involving the 

 passing over from one people to another of their philosophy of life 

 and of the world, their social structure, technical achievements, 

 morals, and customs, it may happen that the art of the one people 

 is simply transplanted to the new soil. The dependence of the new 

 literature is very marked, sometimes amounting to complete lack 

 of originality; the new shoot does not count for anything in the 

 development of the world's literature. The foreign literary works are 

 circulated and read in their original tongue, they are abbreviated 

 and excerpted, annotated and paraphrased; translations, imitations, 

 and a freer working-over of the matter into new form follow; the 

 material, motives, and characters that have been taken over are 

 changed and remodeled, at first sparingly, but later with greater 

 and greater freedom. The first thing to become nationalized is the 



