(ourselves included) have produced literary forms unknown to the Greeks, or that countries widely removed from European culture possess such forms as no European language can correctly express, because among no European people have they been developed. Our à priori notions of "epic," "lyric," "dramatic," can only be dispelled by such comparisons; and not until we have taken the trouble to trace the rise of different species of literature in different countries, and have thus learned the more or less different general and special ideas of literature entertained in each, can we hope to rise above the gross errors to which such à priori notions must expose us.
We have already seen the weakness of searching for universal conceptions of the “lyric; " let us now turn for illustrations of a similar weakness to the "epic." When Hallam contrasts Paradise Lost in choice of subject with the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, Thebaid, Jerusalem Delivered, he implies that all these poems belong to a common species which he calls "heroic poetry; " and, according to Macaulay, in his comparison of Milton with Dante, this is "the highest class of human compositions." Now, whether we use the name "epic" or "heroic " is, of course, a verbal matter; the important point is that we declare certain poems of very different ages and countries to possess certain common characteristics, and to approach some universal model. Of such a model Coleridge was evidently thinking when he said
propriety and should be adhered to," we cannot help refusing our assent, not because we have any objections to urge against the Greek classifications of their own poetry, or the various uses to which modern critics have applied them, but because neither the art nor the criticism of the Greeks (or any other people) can possess that infallibility and "natural" propriety which Mr. Arnold would admire. If we find a certain propriety in Greek classifications, it is not because they possess any universal "nature," but because, shorn of many ideas they conveyed to the Greek mind, they fall in with modern modes of thought and conceptions of life similar in some respects to those of the Greeks, especially the Alexandrian Greeks.
