II

We are now in a position to realize in its full significance the conception of world literature. It is not to be supposed that such world literature can be comprehended in the hundred or more "best books." Each student must make his own selection: it is the province of literary study to give him the philosophy of literature that will be behind the "best books." The pedigree of our civilization furnishes, as it were, a map of all literature to aid the process of selecting. We recognize certain literature as ancestral: Classical and Biblical literatures have the first claim on us. As regards the third of the dominant factors in our pedigree, Romance, we must distinguish: the important point here is not the actual literature of the Middle Ages— which, with the single exception of Dante, is not of supreme excellence-but the Romantic ideal which mediaevalism has enthroned side by side with the ideal of the Classical. A second division of literature appears to hold to us a less close affinity: Indian, Persian, Norse, Celtic, the branches of Semitic and Aryan other than Hellenic and Hebraic, all this stands to us as collateral world literature. Other literature is to be deemed extraneous. Yet here, as always, intrinsic literary importance can countervail questions of affinity. No poetry can be more remote from us than the poetry of Finland: yet such a poem as the Kalevala, by its intrinsic charm, and by the way it has preserved stages of imaginative evolution otherwise lost, can be brought from the outer extremity of our literary field into the heart of our world literature. When we come to modern poetry, the important point to recognize is that the whole of Europe, with the European element in all parts of the world, constitutes a single reading circle. The various nations have gradually differentiated from the unity of mediaeval Europe in which they grew together: yet in our broad outlook we see here a single literature. Usage limits the word 'dialectic' to linguistic significance: otherwise we might say that the English

and European literatures were dialectic variations of one great literature. These literatures have a common evolutionary history: descent from a common ancestral stock, with the same modifying force of mediaevalism. Of course, national idiosyncrasies, individual genius of authors, the various accidents of history, come in as disturbing forces. The recognition of this unity was never so clear as at the present moment, when— the main literary interests being drama and fiction-we turn indifferently to the Norwegian Ibsen, the Swedish Strindberg, the Russian Turgenieff and Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, the Polish Sienkiewicz, the Austrian Grillparzer and Hauptmann, the Spanish Echegaray, the Italian D'Annunzio; while the German Goethe and the French Balzac and Victor Hugo have always maintained themselves as the giants of modern creative literature. It belongs to perspective that, other things being equal, the English reader naturally selects what is English, the French reader what is French: but this is so only when other things are equal.

World literature understood in this sense is the proper field for literary culture, whether that culture be elementary or advanced. The more limited a man's opportunities for reading, the more important it becomes that he should start with a true perspective. For all of us, older or younger, Homer and the Bible are more important than Chaucer or Dryden; Greek tragedy is a prerequisite for intelligent appreciation of Shakespeare. What we have to resist is a position often taken as if it were a dictate of common sense, but which is really founded upon misapprehension: it is said, We cannot know all literature, let us make sure of our own. But this begs the question as to what constitutes "our own literature." For an English reader "our own literature" is, not what English authors have composed in the English language, but what the Englishspeaking civilization has absorbed from the other civilizations of the world in addition to what it has itself produced. We

should deem it a narrow historic view that would lead (say) an Englishman to express his patriotism by studying carefully the history of Britain and refusing to take any interest in the British empire. The British empire is the greatest fact in the history of Britain. Yet even the British empire is a narrow thing in comparison with the English-speaking civilization. And the English civilization-like the French, the German, the Italian civilization-is perpetually being enriched by what it can absorb of national cultures other than its own. Particular national literatures are the reflection of particular national histories: in world literature stands reflected the history of civilization.

But it belongs to the other work of mine to which I have referred to deal with the bearing of world literature upon general literary culture. The subject of the present work is the formal study of literature: and for this the only adequate field is world literature. It is an historic blunder to look for the roots of our English literature to the literature written in AngloSaxon and Old English. The forces which have inspired our great masters are revealed only in the broad field suggested by our Table of Literary Pedigree1 (Chart VI, page 81): in that field the writers of Anglo-Saxon and Old English constitute a very small corner. World literature presents the literary material as an historic unity. The main stream is the Classical literature, which has had the prerogative voice in determining our literary conceptions. From the first century of the Christian era this main stream receives the sister stream of Biblical literature, potent from the first as to matter and spirit, yet still waiting for its full recognition in its bearing on literary form. The literary stream continues to receive tributaries as it passes through ages of mediaevalism, and of the separate modern

I

It is one of the merits of Mr. Courthope's great History of English Poetry (Macmillan) that it is based on recognition of this fact. The first two volumes are specially important.

literatures moving under common conditions side by side. The palpable errors of traditional theory and criticism have arisen mainly from the narrowness of outlook which led to them. Only world literature-literature studied apart from distinctions between particular languages-gives a body of literary material from which it is safe to make generalizations; only in world literature can the life history of literature be fully revealed.

CHAPTER V

THE OUTER AND THE INNER STUDY OF LITERATURE

I

It is clear that the study of literature, by its inherent character, and in the nature of things, is one which must bring us in contact with many other distinct studies. On page 94 I have endeavored to indicate in tabular form (Chart VIII) this affiliation of literary with other studies.

For a working definition, we may consider literature as a function of thought, which is the matter of literature, and language, which is its medium. But this is not sufficient: there are obviously many things beside literature such things as a lawyer's bill, an act of parliament, a post-office Guidewhich are expressions of thought in language. The differentia which marks off literature from other expressions of thought in language seems to be the element of art which runs through all literary expression.

We may consider the three elements of literature separately. The thought which constitutes the matter of literature is, in the first place, the productive thought of authors; when we follow this out we are brought at length to the study of biography. Something more than authors, however, is necessary to make literature. A lunatic may write a book, and, if he can command funds, may get his book duly published and catalogued; but it requires some degree of acceptance of books -by a larger or smaller public, acceptance at the time or in some future age-in order to constitute books literature. Thus literature must reflect, not only the thinking of authors, but also the sentiment of readers who have given the particular books their currency. Successive phases of a national literature reflect successive phases of the nation's history. And thus