Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/200

 discoverer delving at will for new ideas, and labelling them when found with strange word-marks. The critic also deals with but their range is for him far wider, and he possesses a certain scientific freedom of treatment in idea and language. The artist of Japan or China must work with the materials his social condition offer; the artist of Athens possessed a far finer quarry, but his materials were also socially limited; the true critic, the "discerner," compares and contrasts the most divergent types of social and individual character at will, and, if the development he observes is fatal to any universal aesthetic standard and deprives him of the enthusiasm such a standard might supply, he is at least superior to the artist alike in the range and quality of his knowledge.

The critic cannot, therefore, allow the art-conception of literature to stand for a moment between him and the object of his study, whether the champions of that conception are found among the Athenians themselves or their modern disciples. And so, to return to our prosaic question, we ask again, With what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start upon their career of literary production?