Books: The Interdependence of Literature
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Georgina Pell Curtis >> The Interdependence of Literature
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"the literature of India,with its great antiquity, its language,
which is full of expression, sweetness of tone, and regularity of
structure, and which rivals the most perfect of those western
tongues to which it bears such a resemblance, with all its
richness of imagery and its treasures of thought, has hitherto
been void of any influence on the development of general
literature. China contributed still less, Persia and Arabia were
alike isolated until they were brought in contact with the
European mind through the Crusaders, and the Moorish Empire in
Spain."
This independence and originality of Greek literature is due in
some measure to the freedom of their institutions from caste; but
another and more powerful cause was that, unlike the Oriental
nations, the Greeks for a long time kept no correct record of
their transactions in war or peace. This absence of authentic
history made their literature become what it is. By the purely
imaginary character of its poetry, and the freedom it enjoyed
from the trammels of particular truths, it acquired a quality
which led Aristotle to consider poetry as more philosophical than
history.
The Homeric poems are in a great measure the fountainhead from
which the refinement of the Ancients was derived. The history of
the Iliad and the Odyssey represent a state of society warlike it
is true, but governed by intellectual, literary and artistic
power. Philosophy was early cultivated by the Greeks, who first
among all nations distinguished it from religion and mythology.
Socrates is the founder of the philosophy that is still
recognized in the civilized world. He left no writings behind
him; but by means of lectures, that included question and answer,
his system, known as the dialectics, has come down to us.
Aesop, who lived 572 B.C., was the author of some fables which
have been translated into nearly every language in the world, and
have served as a model for all subsequent writings of the same
kind. In 322 B.C., the centre of learning owing to the conquests
of Alexander the Great, was moved to Egypt in the city that bears
his name. Here the first three Ptolemies founded a magnificent
library where the literary men of the age were supported by
endowments. The second Ptolemy had the native annals of Egypt and
Judea translated into Greek, and he procured from the Sanhedrim
of Jerusalem the first part of the Sacred Scriptures, which was
later completed and published in Greek for the use of the Jews at
Alexandria. This translation was known as the Septuagint, or
version of the Seventy; and is said to have exercised a more
lasting influence on the civilized world than any book that has
ever appeared in a new language. We are indebted to the Ptolemies
for preserving to our times all the best specimens of Greek
literature that have come down to us.
THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE GREEK FATHERS.
The interdependence of Greek literature includes some reference
to the Greek fathers and their writings.
Many of the books of the Old Testament, regarded as canonical by
the Catholic Church; but known as the Apochrypha among
non-Catholics, were written in Greek. A number of them are
historical, and of great value as illustrating the spirit and
thought of the age to which they refer. The other class of
writers includes the work of Christian authors. Greek and Latin
writings wholly different from Pagan literature, began to appear
soon after the first century, and their purifying and ennobling
influence was more and more felt as time passed. The primitive
Christians held these writings of the Greek and Latin fathers in
great esteem, and in the second and third centuries Christianity
counted among its champions many distinguished scholars and
philosophers, particularly among the Greeks. Their writings,
biblical, controversial, doctrinal, historical and homiletical,
covered the whole arena of literature.
Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Athanasius,
Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, and John Chrysostom are only a few of
the brilliant names among Greek and Latin writers, who added a
lasting glory to literature and the Church.
ROMAN.
To the Roman belongs the second place in the classic literature
of antiquity. The original tribes that inhabited Italy, the
Etruscans, the Sabines, the Umbrians and the Vituli had no
literature, and it was not until the conquest of Tarentum in 272
B.C. that the Greeks began to exercise a strong influence on the
Roman mind and taste; but Rome had, properly speaking, no
literature until the conclusion of the first Punic war in 241
B.C.
This tendency to imitate the Greek was somewhat modified by Roman
national pride. We catch sight of this spirit in Virgil and
Horace, in Cicero and Caesar. The graceful softening of language
and art among the imaginative Greeks, becomes in the Romans
austere power and majesty, with a tendency to express greatness
by size. These early indications of race characteristics never
died out, as we may see by the contrast between the Apollo
Belvidere of the Greeks, and the Moses of Michelangelo. The
oldest existing example of Latin or Roman literature is the
sacred chant of the Frates Arvales. These latter composed a
college of Priests whose prescribed duty was to offer prayers for
abundant harvests. This took place in the spring, in solemn
dances and processions, not unlike the Bacchic festivals of the
Greeks, although the Roman dances took place in the temple with
closed doors. The dance was called the tripudium from its having
three rhythmical beats. The inscription of this litany of the
Frates was discovered in Rome in 1778, and experts have agreed
that the monument belongs to the reign of Heliogabalus, 218 A.D.
It is said to contain the very words used by the priests in the
earliest times.
"Most of the old literary monuments in Rome," says a modern
writer, "were written in Saturnian verse, the oldest measure used
by the Latin poets. It was probably derived from the Etruscans,
and until Ennius introduced the heroic hexameter the strains of
the Italian bards flowed in this metre. The structure of the
Saturnian is very simple, and its rhythmical arrangement is found
in the poetry of every age and country. Macaulay adduces as an
example of this measure, the following line from the well-known
nursery song:
'The queen was in her parlor,
Eating bread and honey.'
From this species of verse, which probably prevailed among the
natives of Provence (the Roman Provencia) and into which at a
later period, rhyme was introduced as an embellishment, the
Troubadours derived the metre of their ballad poetry, and thence
introduced it into the rest of Europe."
Literature with the Romans was not of spontaneous growth; it was
chiefly due to the influence of the Etruscans, who were their
early teachers, they lacked that delicate fancy and imagination
that made the Greeks, even before they emerged from a state of
barbarism, a poetical people. The first written literature of the
Romans was in the form of history, in which they excelled. Like
other nations, they had oral compositions in verse long before
they possessed any written literature. The exploits of heroes
were recited and celebrated by the bards of Rome as they were
among the Northern nations. Yet these lays were so despised by
the Romans that we can scarcely see any trace of their existence
except in certain relics which have been borrowed from true
poetry and converted into the half fabulous history of the infant
ages of Rome. That the Romans, as a people, had no great national
drama, and that their poems never became the groundwork of a
later polished literature was due to the incorporation of
foreigners into their nation who took little interest in the
traditions of their earlier achievements. Father Ennius (239-169
B.C.), as Horace calls him, was the true founder of Latin poetry.
He enriched the Latin language, gave it new scope and power; and
paid particular attention to its grammatical form. What he has
done was so well done, that it has never been undone, although
later ages added new improvements to the language. In fable Rome
was an imitator of Greece; but nevertheless Phaedrus (16 A.D.)
struck out a new line for himself, and became both a moral
instructor and a political satirist. Celsus, who lived in the
reign of Tiberius, was the author of a work on medicine which is
used as a textbook even in the present advanced state of medical
science.
The Greek belief in destiny becomes in the Romans stoicism. This
doctrine, found in the writings of Seneca, and in the tragedies
attributed to him, led to the probability that he was their
author. Seneca has had many admirers and imitators in modern
times. The French school of tragic poets took him for their
model.
Corneille and Racine seem to consider his works real tragedy.
Cicero's philosophical writings are invaluable in order to
understand the minds of those who came after him. Not only all
Roman philosophy of the time; but a great part of that of the
Middle Ages was Greek philosophy filtered through Latin, and
mostly founded on that of Cicero. But of all the Roman creations,
the most original was jurisprudence. The framework they took from
Athens; but the complete fabric was the work of their own hands.
It was first developed between the consulate of Cicero and the
death of Trajan (180 years), and finally carried to completion
under Hadrian. This system was of such a high order that the
Romans have handed it down to the whole of modern Europe, and
traces of Roman law can be found in the legal formulas of the
entire civilized world.
After the fall of the Western Empire these laws had little force
until the twelfth century, when Irnerius, a German lawyer, who
had lived in Constantinople, opened a school at Bologna, and thus
brought about a revival in the West of Roman civil law. Students
came to this school from all parts of Europe, and through them
Roman jurisprudence was carried into, and took root in foreign
countries. By common consent the invention of satire is
attributed to the Romans. The originator of the name was Ennius;
but the true exponent of Roman satire was Lucilius, who lived
148-102 B.C. His writings mark a distinct era in Roman literature
and filled no less than thirty volumes, some fragments of which
remain. After his death there was a decline in satire until fifty
years later, when Horace and Juvenal gave it a new impetus,
although their style was different from that of Lucilius. Doctor
Johnson was such an admirer of the two finest of Juvenal's
satires that he took pains to imitate them.
Boethius, the last of the Roman philosophers, left a work "on the
Consolations of Philosophy," which is known in all modern
languages. A translation was made into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred
in 900 A.D. Virgil (70-19 B.C.) has taken Homer as his model in
his great national poem of the Aeneid. In many passages it is an
imitation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In his didactic poems,
known as the Bucolics, Virgil has made use of Theocritus, while
in the Georgics he has chosen Hesiod as his model. The later
didactic poets of all ages have imitated Virgil, particularly in
England, where Thomson's Seasons is a thoroughly Virgilian poem.
It is easy to see in Virgil where borrowed methods end and native
strength begins; for, in spite of being close imitators of the
Greek, there is a character peculiar to the writers of Rome by
means of which they have acquired an appearance of dignity and
worthiness all their own.
HEROIC POETRY.
The traditions of all nations go back to an age of heroes.
Nature, also, has had her time of stupendous greatness, a period
of great revolutions in nature, of which we can see traces to
this day; and of huge animals, whose bones are still being dug
up. The history of civilization also has its period of great
achievements, and poetry has had its time of the wonderful and
gigantic. In numerous heroic poems of different nations we can
trace the unity of all heroic personages, as in the Iliad and the
Odyssey of Greece, the Sagas of the North in the Nibelungen-lied,
and the Ramayon of the Orient. Freedom, greatness and heroism are
embodied in these poems, and many of them breathe a martial
spirit.
We find the same character, however touched by local color, in
all these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at
the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on
the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul
of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness
of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old
heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this
kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great;
one which has a past, a legendary history, vivid recollections,
and an original and poetical manner of thought, as well as a
clearly defined mythology.
Poetry of this order--lyric as well as epic--is much more the
child of nature than of art. These great mythological poems for
hundreds of years were never written; but were committed to
memory, sung by the bards, and handed down from one generation to
another until in time they were merged, after the Christian era,
into the historical heroic poems. These in turn were the origin
of the chivalrous poetry which is peculiar to Christian Europe,
and has produced such remarkable effect on the national spirit of
the noblest inhabitants of the world. Nor has this oral poetry
entirely died out. In the present day Mr. Stephen Gwynne has
astonished the world by telling of how he heard aged peasants in
Kerry reciting the classics of Irish-Gaelic literature, legendary
poems and histories that had descended from father to son by oral
tradition; and the same phenomena was found by Mr. Alexander
Carmichael among the Gaelic peasants in the Scottish Highlands
and surrounding islands. It has been said that heroic poetry is
of the people, and that dramatic poetry is the production of city
and society; and cannot exist unless it has a great metropolis to
be the central point of its development, and it is only by the
study of the literature of all nations that we see how
essentially these heroic poems were the foundation of all that
followed them in later ages.
SCANDINAVIAN.
The Scandinavian Nation held, during the Middle Ages, the first
and strongest influence over the poetry and thought of Western
Europe. The oldest and purest remains of the poets of German
Nations are contained in the Scandinavian Edda. Its mythology is
founded on Polytheism; but through it, as through the religion of
all nations of the world, there is a faint gleam of the one
Supreme God, of infinite power, knowledge and wisdom, whose
greatness and justice could not be represented in the form of
ordinary man. Such was the God of the Pagan Germans, and such was
the earliest belief of mankind.
Perhaps the poet priests of primitive times, who shaped the
imaginative mythology of the North, were conscious of the one
true God; but considered Him above the comprehension of the rude
men of the times, so they invented the deities who were more
nearly akin to the material forces that these people alone
understood. The second part of the first Edda contains the great
Icelandic poems, the first of which is the song of Voland, the
famous northern smith.
Voland, or Wayland, the Vulcan of the North, is of unknown
antiquity; and his fame, which spread all over Europe, still
lives in the traditions of all the nations of the North. These
poems, although fragmentary, still far surpass the
Nibelungen-lied, and in their powerful pathos and tragic passion
they surpass any ancient poetry except that of Greece.
The Scandinavians in general, and Icelanders in particular,
traveled over every part of the West, and penetrated into
hitherto unexplored seas, collecting in every quarter the facts
and fancies of the age. In the character of wandering Normans
they exerted a strong influence in shaping poetry, and in
developing the Crusades. They brought back with them to their
Northern homes the Christian and chivalrous poems of the South.
In many of these the likeness to the Icelanders own Northern
Sagas was remarkable, suggesting some still more remote age when
one heroic conception must have dominated all peoples.
After bringing home these poems of Southern Europe, the
Scandinavians proceeded to adapt them to their own use, giving
them a new force and beauty. The marvellous in Southern poetry
became with them something fraught with deeper meaning; and the
Northern version of the Nibelungen-lied acquired an ascendency in
its strength and poetical beauty, over the German heroic. Hence,
during the Middle Ages, the Scandinavians in general, and
Icelanders in particular, came to possess a peculiar chivalrous
poetry of their own. It was, however, destined to share the same
fate as the great poems of the rest of Europe; first to be
reduced to prose romance, and then broken up into ballads. The
chief cause of this breaking up of the old order of poetry was
due to the Reformation. The national poetry was left to be
carried on by the common people alone, and of course in their
hands was corrupted and mutilated. Scott speaks of this in his
Lay of the Last Minstrel, where he describes the old bard, who
" 'Tuned to please a peasant's ear
The harp a King had loved to hear."
These Bards, or Scalds, meaning Smoothers of Language, were
welcome guests in the early ages, at the Courts of Kings and
Princes. Up to the twelfth century, when the Monks and the art of
writing, put an end to their profession, these poets continued to
come from Iceland and travel all over the world. In return for
their songs they received rings and jewels of more or less value;
but never money. We have a list of 230 Scalds who made a name for
themselves from the time of Dagnar Lodbrok to that of Vladimir
II, or from the end of the eighth to the beginning of the
thirteenth century. When Christianity entered Scandinavia the
spirit of the old tradition still remained with the people, and
became their literature under the name of "Folk Sagas," or as we
would call them, fairy tales. These legends are found not only in
modern Scandinavia, but they have made their way into all the
literature of Europe. Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Blue
Beard, the Little Old Woman Cut Shorter, and the Giant who
smelled the blood of an Englishman (the Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum of our
nursery days), were all heroes and heroines of Scandinavian
songs, later adapted in various ways to the use of different
countries. After awhile this lost art revived in the Romances of
chivalry, and in popular ballads. They describe all the changes
in life and society, and are akin to the ballads of the British
Isles. In them we find the common expression of the life and
feelings of a common race. The same stories often influenced the
bards of all countries at different periods. These ballads are
all written in the same form and express a certain poetic feeling
which is not found in the Epic Age. In all countries they had a
refrain, or chorus, which marks the migration of poetry from the
Epic to the Lyric form.
"This simple voice of song," to quote a modern author, "travelled
onward from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, the language of
the general sorrows, hopes and memories; strange, and yet near to
every one, centuries old, yet never growing older, since the
human heart, whose history it relates in so many changing images
and notes, remains forever the same."
SLAVONIC (RUSSIA).
Schlegel says of the Russian Nation:
"Her subjection to the Greek Church was alone sufficient during
the Middle Ages, and is in some measure sufficient even in our
own time, to keep Russia politically and intellectually at a
distance from the rest of the Western world."
Little if any part was taken by the Slavs in the Crusades. They
had hardly any of the spirit of chivalry, and their belief,
during their period of barbaric heathenism, was not so romantic
and ideal as the Gothic.
The heroic prose tales of Russia are older and more popular than
her ballads. They are told in the nurseries, and recount the
heroic deeds of Vladimir the Great. The ballads are mostly a
recital of the feuds between the Poles and the Tartars, not
unlike the Border ballads of Scotland.
Their greatest hero is Yermak, who conquered the Mongols, and in
the fifteenth century won for the Czars the country that is now
called Siberia. Yermak's deeds and praises are sung from one end
of Russia to the other, even at the present day; and the poorest
peasants usually have a colored print representing him on
horseback, nailed to the wall of their cabins.
SERBIAN.
The popular poetry of the Slavic race, which still survives, is
found in its perfection among the Serbians and Dalmatians, while
it is almost extinct among the other nations. It is of unknown
antiquity, and has been handed down from one century to another.
The Slavs have always been a singing race, and must have been so
from Pagan times, as their songs abound with heathen gods and
customs, dreams, omens, and a true Eastern fatalism. Love and
heroism are the usual themes, and among the Serbians the peculiar
relation of sister and brother forms the principal subject of
interest.
A Serbian woman who has no brother is considered a fit subject
for sympathy. The Serbian poetry is nearly all Epic, and in this
particular class of verse no modern nation has been so
productive. There is a grand and heroic simplicity in their song,
as it recounts their daily life; the hall where the women sit
spinning near the fire, the windswept mountain side, where the
boys are pasturing their flocks, the village square where youths
and maidens dance, the country ripe for the harvest, and the
forest through which the traveller journeys, all reecho with
song. This Serbian poetry first became generally known in Europe
through Goethe and Grimm in Germany, and Bowring and Lytton in
England.
FINNISH.
The Finnish race reached a high degree of civilization at a very
early period. They have always been distinguished by a love of
poetry, especially for the elegy, and they abound in tales,
legends and proverbs. Until the middle of the twelfth century
they had their own independent kings, since then they have been
alternately conquered by the Russians and Swedes; but like the
Poles, they have preserved a strong national feeling, and have
kept their native language. Their greatest literary monument is
the Kalevala, an epic poem. Elias Lonnrot, its compiler, wandered
from place to place in the remote and isolated country in
Finland, lived with the peasants, and took from them their
popular songs, then he wrote the Kalevala, which bears a strong
resemblance to Hiawatha. Max Muller says that this poem deserves
to be classed as the fifth National Epic in the world, and to
rank with the Mahabharata and the Nibelungen-lied. The songs are
doubtlessly the work of different minds in the earliest ages of
the nation.
HUNGARIAN.
The Magyars, or Hungarians as they are called, came into Europe
from Asia, and first settled between the Don and the Dneiper.
They possessed from remote antiquity a national heroic poetry,
the favourite subject of which was their migration and conquests
under the Seven Leaders. They laid claim to Attila as being of
their nation, and many of their most warlike songs recounted his
deeds and those of the other Gothic heroes. The Magyars have
never taken kindly to foreign influence, and when, in the
fifteenth century, Mathias Corvin tried to bring Italian
influence to bear on them, the result was a decline in
literature, and neglect of the old poems and legends. During the
Turkish invasions the last remnants of the national songs and
traditions disappeared; and under the Austrian rule the
Hungarians have become decidedly Germanized.
Within the past century Kisfalud has sought to restore the
national legends of his country, and a new impetus has been given
to the restoration and preservation of the Hungarian language and
literature.
GOTHIC.
Gothic poems were sung in the time of Attila; but the Gothic
language and monuments have everywhere perished except in Spain,
where the Spanish Monarchs are anxious to trace their descent
from the Gothic Kings. Attila, Odoascar, Theodoric, and the
Amali, with other heroes, Frankish and Burgundian, all appear in
these old poems. The German songs that Charlemagne had collected
and put in writing are undoubtedly the outcome of these ancient
Gothic poems of the first Christian era. Their substance is found
in the Nibelungen-lied and the Heldenbuch.
As in the legends of Troy and Iceland, so also in the
Nibelungen-lied, the story centres on a young hero glowing with
beauty and victory, and possessed of loftiness of character; but
who meets with an early and untimely death. Such is Baldur the
Beautiful of Iceland, and such, also, are Hector and Achilles of
Troy. These songs mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic
world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity
that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin
descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the
sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma
is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the
young hero who is the prey of the gods.
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