ABSTRACT
One cannot begin to speak of the classical without becoming categorical. Presumably that is why Benedetto Croce, a rigorous critic of all critical categories except his own, roundly declared that the word was meaningless. Stendhal's manifesto, Racine et Shakespeare, had little to say about either dramatist; they were no more than tutelary spirits, presiding over a dialectic which German romanticism had learned from Lessing. Gibbon had practiced what he preached so consummately that an anthropologist might call him culture-bound. People may well agree with his value judgment; most of them still feel somewhat closer to the isles of Greece than to the Trobriand Islands, and prefer to believe that fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay. The treatise On the Sublime could take the synoptic overview of comparative literature by discussing Greek style with cross-reference both to Cicero and to the book of Genesis.
