CHAPTER II

SOME WAYS OF STUDYING LITERATURE — {concluded)

I AS we pass from individual books to their authors, so by an equally natural

transition we pass from an individual author to the age in which he lived, and the
nation to which he The His- belonged. We cannot go far in our study of toricai
literature before we realise that it involves the ^^^^^2^ r , , . /. ,. A Literature,
study of the history of literature. A great writer is not an isolated fact. He has his
affiliations with the present and the past ; and through these affiliations he leads
us inevitably to his contemporaries and predecessors, and thus at length to a
sense of a national literature as a developing organism having a continuous life of
its own, yet passing in the course of its evolution through many varying phases.
Thus in our study of literature on the historical side we shall have to consider two
things—the continuous life, or national spirit in it ; and the varying phases of that
continuous life, or the way in which it embodies and expresses the changing spirit
of successive ages. First, what do we mean when we speak of the history of any
national literature—of the history of Greek, or French, or English literature? The
ordinary text-book may perhaps give us the impression that
40 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
we mean only a chronological account of the men What is ^^° wrote in these languages, and of
the a National books they produced, with critical analyses ra ure. ^^ their merits and defects,
and some description of literary schools and traditions, and of fluctua- tions in fashions and
tastes. But in reality we mean much more than this. A nation's literature is not a miscellaneous
collection of books which happen to have been written in the same tongue or within a certain
geographical area. It is the progressive re- velation, age by age, of such nation's mind and
character. An individual writer may vary greatly from the national type, and the variation, as we
shall have to insist presently, will always be one of the most interesting things about him. But
his genius will still partake of the characteristic spirit of his race, and in any number of
representative writers at any given time, that spirit will be felt as a well-defined quality
pervading them all. We talk of the Greek spirit and the Hebrew spirit. By this we do not of
course suggest that all Greeks thought and felt in the same way, that all Hebrews thought and
felt in the same way. We simply mean that, when all differences as between man and man have
been cancelled, there re- mains in each case a clearly recognised substratum of racial character,
a certain broad element common to all Greeks as Greeks, and to all Hebrews as Hebrews. It is in
this sense that we speak of the Hebrew and the Hellenic views of life, and compare and
contrast them with one another. Now, as such common qualities are most fully expressed in
the literatures of the two peoples—as Greek literature is the completest revelation of the mind
and character