Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/31

§4. But if it be hard for the popular mind to avoid confusing early and adult conceptions of literature, the critical mind, from causes peculiar to itself, is exposed to a similar confusion. If the facts of social development have been almost unavoidably overlooked by average intelligence, they have been deliberately set aside by the professed critic. When men first began to ask themselves why it was that the poet's works pleased them, they sought to find the cause not in human senses, emotions, intellect, but in analyses of the works themselves. Thus the Poetics, attributed to Aristotle, mark an effort to extract general principles of dramatic creation from the practice of the Athenian masters, Sophocles in particular. Few questions are asked about the development of the Athenian drama. The literary influences of Athenian life, contrasted with the life celebrated by the early epic and lyric poets of Greece, are ignored. No attempt is made to compare the drama of Athens with that of other Greek cities, much less to discover whether "barbarians" possessed any similar spectacles. Thus, by neglecting the influences of social life on literature, Greek criticism fostered the deadly theories that literature is essentially an imitation of masterpieces, that its ideals are not progressive but permanent, that they have no dependence on particular conditions of human character, on the nature of that social instrument language, on circumscribed spheres of time and place. In the imitative workmanship of Roman artists the principles of the Greek only gathered strength; and, transmitted through Rome to the peoples of modern Europe, they everywhere more or less checked the growth of truly national literature. While the more vigorous life of England and Spain developed new forms of the drama, Italy and France accepted the classical models, Germany following their example. It is true