Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/257

 is intensely individual. Between the world-religions of Israel and Islâm and the world-cultures of Alexandria and Rome there are, no doubt, very wide differences. Yet, though the former reach universality through social bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through the unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both is to rise above old restrictions of place and time, and to render possible a literature which, whether based on Moses or Homer, may best be termed a "world-literature."

What, then, is world-literature? What are the marks by which it may be known? What is its proper place in the evolution of literature?

The leading mark of world-literature has been already stated; it is the severance of literature from defined social groups—the universalising of literature, if we may use such an expression. Such a process may be observed in the Alexandrian and Roman, the later Hebrew and Arab, the Indian and Chinese, literatures; and this universalism, though differing profoundly in its Eastern and Western conceptions of personality, is alike in the East and West accompanied by the imitation of literary work wrought out in days when the current of social life was broken up into many narrow channels foaming down uplands of rock and tree. Closely connected with this imitation of early models is the reflective and critical spirit, which is another striking characteristic of world-literature. Language now becomes the primary study of the literary artist, and the causes of his devotion to words are not difficult to discover. Just as the language of Hebrew life, in its struggle with Northern and Southern invasion, and in its own internal break-up, underwent a gradual change which necessitated the production of Targûms, or Paraphrases of the Law, Prophets, and Writings, and thus led to a scrupulously exact study