Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/275

 science and criticism. It cannot make imagination live or change the dry skeletons of analysis into creatures of flesh and blood. Hence in Alexandrian erudition formal prose occupies the foremost place, critics like Zenodotus, men of science like Euclid and Archimedes, and chroniclers like Manetho and Berosus, finding it their proper instrument. Didactic "poetry," like the astronomical "epic" of Aratus, called Prognostics of the Weather (Diosêmeia), and the so-called "epics" of Nicander on venomous bites and on antidotes to poison, are not sufficiently removed from science to be called "literature," and as examples of imagination in the service of science rank much below Darwin's Loves of the Plants. If Alexandria could offer us nothing better than such productions we might pass by the great library, contented to note that literature had become so much a thing of the past, so little a reflection of living mind, that even Theocritus is believed to have made one of those tricks with written words which mark a time when literature has become a formal toy rather than a spiritual reality. The Syrinx, a little poem in twenty verses attributed to Theocritus, is so arranged that lines, complete and incomplete, succeed one another in couplets, "passing from the hexameter down to the dimeter dactylic metre, so as to represent the successive lengths of the reeds in a Pandean pipe." When we remember how such "half-mechanical conceits" (as Sir J. F. Davis calls them), consisting in the fantastic imitation of such objects as a knot, a sceptre, a circle, have been well known to the Chinese and Arabs, we may find in this Syrinx and in the practice of Simmias of Rhodes (who wrote verses "in the shapes of an egg, an altar, a double-edged axe, a pair of wings") evidences of the Oriental torpor which had fallen upon Greek poetry at Alexandria.