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Updated: June 27, 2025
History, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures. The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect.
He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus his poetical activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till after, the Hannibalic war and felt in a general sense his influence; he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy, and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.
But the day came, in some countries a little earlier, in some a little later, when it was replaced by the national idioms. The different literatures of the West had therefore been preceded by a Latin literature that had for a long time held out a supporting hand to each.
The thorough going application of this scientific method to the literatures and history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achievement of the nineteenth century. It has completely altered the view of revelation and inspiration. The altered view of the nature of the documents of revelation has had immeasurable consequences for dogma.
At Harvard these include Edwin L. Mark, '71, Professor of Anatomy; Paul Hanus, '78, Head of the Department of Education; and Edwin F. Gay, '90, until recently Dean of the School of Business Administration; at Yale, John E. Clark, '56, for many years Professor of Mathematics, and the late Professor Willard T. Barbour, '05, of the Law School; at Columbia, the late Calvin Thomas, '74, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Henry R. Seager, '90, Professor of Economics; at Dartmouth, Gabriel Campbell, '65, long Professor of Philosophy; and Frank H. Dixon, '92, Professor of Economics, later occupying the same chair at Princeton; where are also Duane Reed Stuart, '96, Professor of Greek, Christian Gauss, '98, Professor of Romance Languages, and Edward S. Corwin, '00, who now holds the chair of Political Science, formerly occupied by President Wilson.
Though we speak of national and race literatures, like the Greek or Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good literature knows no nationality, nor any bounds save those of humanity.
Whether one examines one literature by itself or all literatures en masse, one will always reach the same result: the lyric poets before the epic poets, the epic poets before the dramatic poets.
To one group of poets the humor, pathos, and tragedy of peasant life deeply appealed, and found expression in a poetry distinctively and unmistakably national, from which a kind of pleasure could be drawn unlike anything else in other literatures. In this group Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira O'Neill cannot pass unmentioned.
This surely would be the verdict of an impartial critic who compared Homer, the lyrists, the tragedians, Plato, Theocritus, the epigrammatists, with the corresponding names in modern literatures.
Since then I have learned to care for foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious metropolitan sort.
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