Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/28

 stages of civilisation among the Greeks in the three grand divisions of their poetry; how the epic belongs to a period of monarchical institutions when men's minds were impregnated and swayed by legends handed down from antiquity; how the elegiac, iambic, and lyric poetry arise in more agitated times and accompany the growth of republican governments; and how the drama represents the prime of Athenian power and freedom. But this is only one out of a host of such examples. Take any branch of verse or prose composition, and you soon find that directly or indirectly its existence implies certain conditions of social life. The oratory of the Athenian Ekklêsia or the Roman Forum, of the English Parliament or the French Pulpit; the hymns of the Indian or Hebrew priests; the rythmical prose of Hebrew or Arab poets; the songs of the Homeric aoidos or the Saxon scôp; the chorus of the Khorovod in the Russian Mir or village-commune; Athenian, Roman, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, English, French, and German dramas;—all result from and reflect the action, thought, and speech peculiar to the particular places and particular times at which they appear. But this dependence on limited spheres of social life is concealed by the vague word "literature." Containing a generalization, and as such suggesting some abstract unity unconditioned by time and space, the word leads us to expect identity in the form and spirit of writing whenever and wherever it appears—an identity which does not strike us as false until repeated comparisons and contrasts have forced upon us the recognition of the falsity. We can easily understand how the enthusiastic study of classical models contributed to disseminate in modern Europe the idea of this uniformity, and the belief that archetypes of "literature" had been fixed once for all in the brilliant