the means to secure such pleasures have likewise varied from wild combinations of gesture, music, dance, and song, in which the words were of the least importance, to printed letters as the main instrument of the literary artist. Compare, for example, the so-called "Pindaric" odes of Gray with those of the Greek master himself, and nothing but our modern idea of literary art, as mainly an appeal to the eye and ear through print, can hide the grotesque absurdity of strophe and antistrophe reappearing like fleshless skeletons two thousand years after the dance and song that gave them life have died away.
As the means so also the ideal ends of literary production have varied remarkably under different conditions of social life. The prevalent belief that the proper ends of science are discovery and instruction, but that of literature pleasure, the greatest pleasure of the greatest number in the given national group,[1] is due to developments in social organisation and thought which have democratically expanded the audience of literature, specialised the pursuits of science, and established rather superficial distinctions between experience and its students on the one side and imagination and its votaries on the other. Some of these ideas would have been sadly out of place in days when the cultured few (as in Athens or Rome) reposed upon the labours of a mass of slaves; others, in days when science and literature were so closely intertwined as in the science-poetry of Empedocles or even the dialogues of Plato, would have been too con-
- ↑ Mr. Palgrave (Songs and Sonnets of Shakespere, p. 237) tells us that "pleasure is the object of poetry; and the best fulfilment of its task is the greatest pleasure of the greatest number." They who still fancy that literature in an age of democracy can remain the monopoly of a cultured Cloud-cuckoo-town will shrink from this use of a Philistine formula and resent the expression of poetry's ideal end in an echo of Benthamism. But art and criticism, if they are living, must reflect contemporary life and current thought.
