Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/260

 commonwealth tended to humanise and rationalise these myths, they remained, even in the days of Greek world-literature, a treasure-house from which Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion could bring forth things new and old for those who were tired of the crowded and dusty thoroughfares of Alexandria. Italy, indeed, had no real mythology of her own, and the purely practical value attached to agricultural life by the old Romans was fatal to any poetical sentiment of Nature; yet in the world-empire of Rome also we find the poet turning away from man to physical nature, and, though the inspiration of Lucretius may smack too much of the savant, and that of Vergil too much of manuals de re rusticâ, we are justified in regarding the world-literature of Rome, like that of India or Greece, as a witness to the sentiment of Nature in man.

But here we must draw a distinction between some of the world-literatures known to history and others. No doubt the habit of realising humanity as a whole accustoms the mind to the contrast between man and physical nature, and sets it the difficult task of reconciling the claims of each; but the social conception of humanity is connected with physical nature in a different manner from the individual conception. Wherever the idea of personality as distinct from all social ties has been reached, the aspects of the physical world are and must be altered. Hence the great differences between the sentiment of Nature as manifested in the Græco-Latin literature of Alexandria and Rome, and the same sentiment as manifested in the literatures of India and China. In the latter no separate relation between each individual and the physical world is observed; all is social, and differences of human personality do not obtrude themselves between the world of Man and the world of Nature.