Without these highly philosophical trivialities the divisions of kinds still wander through the books called Institutions of Literature, written by philologists and men of letters, and the ordinary school-books of Italy, France and Germany; and psychologists and philosophers still persist in writing about the Æsthetic of the tragic, of the comic and of the humorous.[47] The objectivity of literary kinds is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetière, who looks on literary history as "the evolution of kinds,"[48] and gives sharply defined form to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.[49]
[1] Republic, iii. 394; see also E. Müller, Gesch. i. Th. d. Kunst, i. pp. 134-206; ii. pp. 238-239, note.
[2] Poet. ch. 6
[3] Annotazioni, introd.
[4] Cf. for Sanskrit poetry S. Levi, Le Théâtre indien, pp. 11-152.
[5] Cf. Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. I., i. pp. 126-154, 2nd ed.
[6] Introd. to his tr. of the Poetics.
[7] Lintilhac, Un Coup d'état, etc., p. 543.
[8] Hamburg. Dramat. Nos. 81, 101-104.
[9] Op. cit. Nos. 96, 101-104.