But in the former the isolated feelings of individuals, their personal loves, their personal pains and pleasures, are brought into constant contrast or comparison with Nature's life. The Western idyll is a "picture-poem " of dramatic and descriptive character curiously differing from such abstract, social, and impersonal poetry as India offers in abundance; and, whatever the origin of the idyll may have been, its essential features—dramatic perception of individual character and picturesque description of physical nature—show how differently the individualism of the West looks upon Nature, compared with the monotheistic social view of Hebrews and Arabs and the polytheistic social view of Indians and Chinese.[1]
But, though it may be readily admitted that in the history of the world there have been certain social stages sufficiently similar in the literature they produced and the conditions of their literary production to warrant our use of the word "world-literature," it may be said that our order of treatment—after the literatures of the city commonwealth and before those of the nation—is not in harmony with prevailing ideas of literary development. Why not pass, it may be asked, from the city commonwealth to the nation, and from national literatures reach the universalism of world-literature? No doubt much might be said for this arrangement if the philosophy of ancient Greece, if the language, law, and religion of ancient Rome, were not so closely intertwined with the growth of our European nationalities; if their social and political progress had not been so profoundly affected by the world-wide ideas of Roman
- ↑ M. Victor de Laprade (Le Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modernes, p. 216) notes the vastness and profundity of the Indian sentiment of Nature and contrasts it in these respects with the Greek. The source of the difference is plainly to be found in the individualism of Greek contrasted with the socialism of Indian life.
