It will be the aim of the following
pages to sketch the broader outlines of the course that critical inquiry
has taken in each.
I. The first thing that strikes us in the early attempts of criticism
is that its problems are to a large extent remote from those which
have engrossed critics of more recent times. There is little attempt
to appraise accurately the worth of individual authors; still less,
to find out the secret of their power, or to lay bare the hidden lines
of thought on which their imagination had set itself to work. The first
aim both of Puttenham and of Webbe, the pioneers of Elizabethan
criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects
they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to
analyse the metre and other more technical elements of their poetry.
But this, after all, was the natural course in the infancy of the
study. All science begins with classification; and all classification
with the external and the obvious. The Greek critics could take no
step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic,
or dramatic.
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