Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/273

 The show of all these splendid things—the sun,

Common to all the world, stars, water, clouds,

Fire—then returns to whence he came, my friend;

For, though a man should live a few sad years,

Yet shall he ever see this show pass by,

And, though he were to live a century,

No grander sight than this he e'er shall see."

§ 65. When the muse of Menander was thus uttering the last notes of that dramatic song which had risen from Athens at the birth of her literature, the separation of philosophy and science from the spirit of literary creation had been established. Science, which, save in its infancy, refuses to be the citizen of any peculiar State and rapidly grows into the cosmopolitan questioner of Nature and Humanity, had thrown off the pleasing form of Athenian conversation, so brilliantly assumed by the world-wide thought of Plato, and in Aristotle had settled down into a dry-as-dust collector of facts. Two circumstances would seem to prove that Aristotle himself realised with peculiar distinctness this separation of science from literature. The first of these is his intentional alteration of his own style from a graceful imitation of the Platonic to that crabbed but closely accurate use of words with which every student of his extant works is familiar. Not only do Cicero, Quintilian, and others speak of Aristotle as a master of style, but it is a well-ascertained fact that in his early writings he essayed to imitate the form of Plato's dialogues; and, though Aristotle's dialogues may not have been so dramatic as those of Plato, he certainly produced three of these compositions ( and ) closely after the Platonic model. This transition from the diction of a stylist to the harsh and often obscure brevity which has been likened to a table of contents, a transition which has been aptly compared to "passing from a sunlit garden, gay with flowers, to a dark and chilly reading-room," may