Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/26

 Beauve, Taine, in France; G. G. Gervinus, Koberstein, Hettner, Scherer, and the authors of "culture-histories"—Grün, Riehl, Kremer, and others—in Germany, have by no means clarified European ideas of "literature" so thoroughly as might have been expected. No doubt we would not now, with Hallam, apologize for neglecting such "departments of literature" as books on agriculture or English law; still we have by no means reached any settled ideal of "literature " such as Hallam himself obscurely outlined by excluding history, save where it "had-been written with peculiar beauty of language or philosophical spirit," from his Literature of Europe. Must we, then, surrender the word to the abuse alike of the learned and unlearned at the peril of some such caprice as that of Lamb—caprice not to be enjoyed as a freak of humour, but rather despised as the miscarriage of sober, possibly prosaic, inquiry? If we review the causes which have produced the abuse we shall at least understand the difficulties to which any definition of "literature" must be exposed.

§2. The word literatura even among the Romans had no settled meaning. Tacitus uses the phrase literatura Græca to express "the shapes of the Greek alphabet;" Quintilian calls grammar literatura; and Cicero uses the word in the general sense of "learning " or "erudition." Accordingly, when scholars of the Renaissance began to use the word they did not intend to convey ideas which it now readily suggests. They did not intend to convey the idea of a body of writings representing the life of a given people; much less did they purpose by using the word to draw distinctions between one class of such writings and another. Borrowing the word in its Latin significations, they did not stop to dream of days when modern nations would possess their own bodies of writings,