Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/28

14 14 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE and which is stimulating if it is properly understood, is per- nicious when it is misread to mean that the artist has no moral responsibihty. Life is influenced by Literature as much as ' Literature is influenced by Ufe. Many a suicide in Germany was the result of Werther's self-pitying sorrows; and many a young man in France took pattern by Balzac's sorry heroes. As instructive as any study of these successive hterary movements is an inquiry into the several hterary species, with due consideration of their evolution, their permanence, and their occasional commingling one with another. There is a special pleasure in tracing the development of oratory, for example, down from the days of the Greeks to our own time, deducing its essential and eternal principles, and weigh- ing the influence of Demosthenes on Cicero, and of both on Bossuet and on Daniel Webster. There is an equal profit in observing how history has been able to separate itself from oratory on the one hand and from the epic on the other. A most interesting illustration of the progress from the hetero- geneous to the homogeneous is to be found in the evolution of Athenian tragedy, which included at first much that was not strictly dramatic. It developed slowly out of the lyric; and in the beginning it contained choral dances, epic narratives, and descriptive passages. Amid these confused elements it is not always easy to seize the essential action of the drama. But as Greek tragedy grew, it came slowly to a consciousness of itself, and it eliminated one by one these non-dramatic acces- sories, until at last we find a story shown in action and repre- sented by a group of characters immeshed in an inexorable struggle. A parallel development took place a little later in the Greek comic drama, whereby the lyrical-burlesque of Aristophanes became the more prosaic comedy of Menander; the earlier conglomerate of incongruous elements discarded one by one its soaring lyric, its personal lampooning, and its license of political satire, while at the same time it steadily