I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by
Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more
accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his
achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of
romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed
invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency
to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical
criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a
Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of
rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very long ago.
While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which Western and
Eastern thought met with such strange result to both, diverted the
critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of grammar,
philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of that
University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of
that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes
out new methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.
The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an
ignorance of the true principles of research, an enthusiastic
spirit for accumulating materials with a wonderful incapacity to
use them.
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