Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/367

 the development of national literatures we must picture something of the same kind, only allowing for the early influence of Christian world-religion, and not forgetting that special causes have given to some national literatures of Europe a more cosmopolitan aspect than to others. To watch the internal and external development by which local and national differences give way in turn to national and cosmopolitan ideals—this is one line of study open to students of national literatures; another is the deepening and widening of personal character which accompany such social expansion; a third is the changing aspect of physical nature which this social and individual evolution likewise involves. But to chronicle the rise of new forms, new spirits, of verse and prose in each European nation, and the gradual separation of science from literature; to trace such growth to its roots in social and physical causes; finally, to compare and contrast these causes as producing the diverse literatures of England and France and Germany, of Italy and Spain and Russia; this, truly, were the task of a literary Hercules. We shall here but briefly illustrate the evolution of individualism in national literatures and the effect of such evolution on man's views of physical nature.