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 LECTURES ON LITERATURE
 
 COLUMBIA 
 
 UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 SALES AGENTS 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 LEMCKE & BUECHNER 
 
 30-32 West 27tii Street 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 Amen Cornek, E.G.
 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LECTURES 
 
 LECTURES m LITERATURE 
 
 2 3<^9(^ 
 
 Neto gork 
 
 THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1911 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPTEIGHT, 1911, 
 
 By the COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PEE88. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published April, igii. 
 
 NorbJooD 3|re3S 
 
 J. S. Gushing Co. — Herwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 
 NOTE 
 
 These lectures by members of the Faculty of Columbia 
 University were delivered, with one exception, during the 
 academic year 1909-1910.
 
 ■ ^ I 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 LECTtTEE PAGE 
 
 I. Approaches to Literature . ..... I 
 
 By Brander Matthews, Professor of Dramatic Liter"+ure. 
 
 ORIENTAL LITERATURES 
 
 II. Semitic Literatures ........ 21 
 
 By Richard J. H. Gottheil, Professor of Rabbinical I^iterature 
 and the Semitic Languages. 
 
 III. The Literature of India and Persia .... 43 
 
 By A. V. W. Jackson, Professor of Indo-Iranian Languages. 
 
 IV. Chinese Literature ........ 67 
 
 By Friedrich Hirth, Professor of Chinese. 
 
 CLASSICAL LITERATURES 
 
 V. Greek Literature ........ 91 
 
 By Edward Delavan Perry, Jay Professor of Greek. 
 
 VI. Latin Literature ........ 115 
 
 By Nelson Glenn McCrea, Professor of Latin. 
 
 LITERARY EPOCHS 
 
 Vn. The Middle Ages 133 
 
 By William Witherle Lawrence, Associate Professor of English. 
 
 VIII. The Renaissance ........ 15.5 
 
 By Jefferson B. Fletcher, Professor of Comparative Literature. 
 
 IX. The Classical Rule 177 
 
 By John Erskine, Associate Professor of English. 
 
 X. The Romantic Emancipation ...... 203 
 
 By Curtis Hidden Page, sometime Adjunct Professor of the 
 Romance Languages and Literatures. 
 
 MODERN LITERATURES 
 
 XL Italian Literature in the Eighteenth Century . . 219 
 By Carlo L. Speranza, Professor of Italian, 
 vii
 
 VIU 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LErrrRE pa(.r 
 
 XII. Spanish Literature ........ 233 
 
 By Henry Alfred Todd, Professor of Romance Philology. 
 
 XIII. English Literature ........ 251 
 
 By Ashley H. Thorndike, Professor of English. 
 
 XIV. French Literature ........ 273 
 
 By Adolphe Cohn, Professor of the Romance Languages 
 and Literatures. 
 
 XV. German Literature ....... 291 
 
 By Calvin Thomas, Gebhard Professor of the Germanic 
 Lxnguages and Literatures. 
 
 XVI. Russian Literature 311 
 
 By J. A. Joffe, Lecturer on Slavonic Literature. 
 
 XVII. The Cosmopolitan Outlook ...... 333 
 
 By William P. Trent, Professor of English Literature. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 XVIII. Literary Criticism ...,..,. 355 
 
 By J. E. Spiugarn, Professor of Comparative Literature. 
 
 INDEX 375
 
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 2- ?)<hS(^ 
 By Brander Matthews, Professor of Dramatic 
 Literature 
 
 Two winters ago Columbia University invited its teaching 
 staff, its students, and its friends to a series of lectures which 
 set forth the essential quality and the existing condition of 
 each of the several sciences, and to-day Columbia University 
 begins another series of lectures devoted to a single one of 
 the arts — the art of Literature. In the opening decade of 
 this twentieth century, when the triumphs of Science are 
 exultant on all sides of us, there would be a lack of propriety 
 in failing to acknowledge its power and its authority; and a 
 grosser failure would follow any attempt to set up Art as a 
 rival over against Science. Art and Science have each of 
 them their own field; they have each of them their own work 
 to do; and they are not competitors but colleagues in the 
 service of humanity, responding to different needs. Man 
 cannot live by Science alone, since Science does not feed 
 the soul; and it is Art which nourishes the heart of man. 
 Science does what it can ; and Art does what it must. Science 
 takes no thought of the individual; and individuality is the 
 essence of Art. Science seeks to be impersonal, and it is 
 ever struggling to cast out what it calls the personal equa- 
 tion. Art cherishes individuality and is what it is because 
 of the differences which distinguish one man from another; 
 and therefore the loftiest achievements of Art are the result 
 of the personal equation raised to its highest power. 
 
 Of all the liberal arts Literature is the oldest, as it is the 
 most immediate in its utility and the broadest in its appeal. 
 B 1
 
 2 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 Better than any of its sisters is it fitted to fulfil the duty of 
 making man familiar with his fellows and of explaining him 
 to himself. It may be called the most significant of the arts, 
 because every one of us, before we can adjust ourselves to 
 the social order in which we have to live, must understand 
 the prejudices and desires of others, and also the opinions 
 these others hold about the world wherein we dwell. Litera- 
 ture alone can supply this understanding. The other arts 
 bring beauty into life and help to make it worth living; but 
 since mankind came down from the family tree of its arboreal 
 ancestors, it is Literature which has made life possible. It 
 is the swiftest and the surest aid to a wide understanding of 
 others and to a deep understanding of ourselves. It gives 
 us not only knowledge but wisdom; and thereby it helps to 
 free us from vain imaginings as to our own importance. 
 Ignorance is always conceited, since it never knows that it 
 knows nothing; and even knowledge may be puffed up on 
 occasion, since it knows that it knows many things; but 
 wisdom is devoid of illusion, since it knows how little it ever 
 can know. 
 
 The poet Blake declared that we never know enough un- 
 less we know more than enough; and who of us is ever likely 
 to attain to that altitude of comprehension? After all, even 
 the most protracted investigation of fact and the most inces- 
 sant meditation on truth must be circumscribed by the brief 
 radius of human knowledge. What are threescore years and 
 ten? What is a century even? And as time pulses by, ever 
 quickening its pace, we are often tempted to echo Lowell's 
 envious ejaculation, "What a lucky dog Methuselah was! 
 Nothing to know, and nine hundred years to learn it in!" 
 
 If Literature is the most venerable of the arts, and if it 
 is the most significant, it should be approached with the out- 
 ward signs of reverence. When we stand up here to discuss 
 it, to declare its importance and to consider its purpose, it 
 is fit that we robe ourselves in stately academic costume
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 3 
 
 and don gown and hood, that the noble theme may be dealt 
 with in all outward respect. Buffon was so possessed by 
 the dignity of letters that he put on his richest garb, with 
 lace ruffles and gem-studded sword, before he sat him down 
 at his desk to labor at his monumental work; and Machiavelli 
 also arrayed himself "in royal, courtly garments," and thus 
 worthily attired he made his ''entrance into the ancient 
 courts of the men of old." 
 
 But this lordly approach is not imperative, for Literature, 
 lofty as it may be at times, is not remote a^id austere. At 
 its best it is friendly and intimate. It is not for holidays 
 only and occasions of state; it is for everyday use. It is 
 not for the wise and the learned only, but for all sorts and 
 conditions of men. It provides the simple ballad and the 
 casual folk-tale that live by word of mouth, generation after 
 generation, on the lonely hillside; and it proffers also the 
 soul-searching tragedy which grips the masses in the densely 
 crowded city. It has its message for every one, old and 
 young, rich and poor, educated and ignorant; and it is su- 
 preme only as it succeeds in widening its invitation to include 
 us all. At one time it brings words of cheer to the weak 
 and the downhearted; and at another it stirs the strong 
 like the blare of the bugle. It has as many aspects as the 
 public has many minds. It is sometimes to be recovered 
 only by diligent scholarship out of the dust of the ages; 
 and it is sometimes to be discovered amid the fleeting words 
 lavishly poured out in the books of the hour, in the maga- 
 zines, and even in the daily journals. It may be born of a 
 chance occasion and yet be worthy to survive through the 
 long ages — the Gettysburg address, for example, and the 
 "Recessional." 
 
 Literature is now what it was in the past, and it will be 
 in the future what it is now, infinitely various and unend- 
 ingly interesting. We can venture to project the curve of
 
 4 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 its advance in the years to come only after we have grasped 
 what it is to-day; and we can perceive clearly its full mean- 
 ing in our own time only after we have acquainted ourselves 
 with its manifold manifestations in the centuries that are 
 gone. True it is that Literature is the result of individual 
 effort and that its sublimest achievements are due to single 
 genius; and yet it is racial also, and it is always stamped 
 with the seal of nationality, which is the sum total of myriads 
 of individuals. Literature is ever marked with the image 
 and superscription of the people whose ideas it expressed 
 and whose emotions it voiced. Races struggle upwards and 
 estabhsh themselves for a little while and then sink back 
 helpless; mighty empires rise and fall, one after another, 
 each believing itself to be destined to endure; and it is mainly 
 by the Literature they may chance to leave behind them 
 that they are rescued from oblivion. What do we really 
 know about Assyria and about Babylon? Where are the 
 cities of old time? Why is it that we can see Sparta only 
 vaguely, while Athens towers aloft in outline we all recognize? 
 The massive monuments of Egypt persist through thousands 
 of years, but the souls of the dwellers in the valley of the 
 Nile are not known to us as we know the souls of the Hebrews, 
 whom they took captive, and whose sacred books reveal to 
 us their uplifting aspirations and their unattained ideals. 
 We can extract not a httle Ught from the laws of Rome, but 
 not so much as we can derive from the lighter writings of 
 the Latins; and the code which is known as the novels of Jus- 
 tinian does not afford us as much illumination as the realistic 
 fiction of Petronius. The many ruins of Rome are restored 
 for us and peopled again with Hving men and women, only 
 when we read the speeches of Cicero, the lyrics of Horace, 
 and the letters of Pliny. 
 
 It is not in the barren annals of a nation that we can most 
 readily discover the soul of a race. Rather is it in those 
 lesser works of the several arts in which the men of old
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 5 
 
 revealed themselves unconsciously and yet amply. The 
 records of the historians and the codes of the lawgivers are 
 assuredly not to be neglected, but they are not more signifi- 
 cant than the unpretending efforts of forgotten artists, the 
 painters of the Greek vases, for instance, and the molders of 
 the Tanagra figurines. The idyls of Theocritus are not less 
 illuminating than the orations of Demosthenes or the trage- 
 dies of ^schylus. 
 
 ^ Literature is precious for its own sake, but it has ever an 
 added value from the light it cannot help casting on the 
 manners and customs which disclose the indurated charac- 
 teristics of a people. The unmistakable flavor of the Middle 
 Ages lurks in the etherialized lyrics of the German minne- 
 singers no less than in the more mimdane fabUaux of the 
 French satirists. We cannot open a book, even if it shelters 
 only evanescent fiction, aiming solely to amuse an idle hour, 
 without opening also a window on a civilization unlike any 
 other; and he would be a traveler of marvelous ability who 
 could make us as intimately acquainted with the simple 
 rustics of the Black Forest, with the primitive peasants of 
 Sicily, or with the deserted spinsters of New England, as we 
 find ourselves after we have read a volume or two by Auer- 
 bach, by Verga, or by Miss Wilkins. Some of us there are 
 who love Literature all the more because it can catch for 
 us this local color, fixed once for all, and because it can pre- 
 serve for us this flavor of the soil, this intimate essence of a 
 special place and of a special period. 
 
 "The real fiterature of an epoch," Renan declared, "is 
 that which paints and expresses it," and such is the real Lit- 
 erature of a race also. Perhaps the epoch is most completely 
 painted and expressed when the author is interpreting the 
 life that is seething about him, dealing directly with what he 
 knows best, as Plautus has preserved for us the very aroma 
 of the teeming tenements of the Latin metropoUs, as Moliere 
 has limned for us the "best society" of France under Louis
 
 6 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 XIV, and as Mark Twain has set before us the simple ways 
 of the Mississippi river-folk. But, after all, this does not 
 matter much; and even if a writer is handling a theme re- 
 mote from his own experience, he is still painting his own 
 epoch and expressing his own race, although he may not be 
 aware of it. Whatever ineffectual effort he may make, no 
 man can step off his shadow. However violently he seeks to 
 escape, he is held fast by his heredity and his environment. 
 "Hamlet" is a tale of Denmark, "Romeo and Juhet" is a tale 
 of Italy, and "Julius Caesar" is a tale of ancient Rome; but 
 Shakspere himself was an Elizabethan EngUshman, and 
 these tragic masterpieces of his were possible only in the 
 sceptered isle set in the silver sea in the spacious days of the 
 Virgin Queen. Racine borrowed his stories from Euripides, 
 and he persuaded himself that he had been able to make 
 Greek drama hve again; but his "PhMre" and his "Andro- 
 maque" are French none the less, and they are stamped with 
 the date of the seventeenth century. So absolutely do they 
 belong to the period and to the place of their author that 
 Taine insisted that these tragedies of Racine could best be 
 performed in the court costumes and in the full-bottomed 
 wigs of the reign of Louis XIV, since only thus could they 
 completely justify themselves. 
 
 This intimate essence of nationahty is evident not only in 
 the thoughts that sustain the work of the artist and in the 
 emotions by which he moves us, it may be discovered also in 
 his style, in his use of words to phrase his thoughts and to 
 voice his emotion, in the pattern of his composition, and in 
 the rhythm of his sentences. The way in which he links 
 paragraph to paragraph may lead us back to his birthplace 
 and the stock from which he sprang. We can catch the ac- 
 cent of his ancestors in the rise and fall of his periods, and 
 sometimes it seems almost as though his many forefathers 
 were making use of him as their amanuensis.
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 7 
 
 Consider Shakspere and Bacon, and set them over against 
 each other. They were contemporary Enghshmen, aUke and 
 yet unhke, alert and intelHgent, energetic and wise, both of 
 them, yet with a different wisdom, masters of expression each 
 in his own fashion, and possessed of the interpreting imagi- 
 nation. When our attention is called to it, as Mr. Havelock 
 EHis has lately done, we cannot fail to find that Shakspere 
 ''with his gay extravagance and redundancy, his essential 
 ideahsm, came of a people that had been changed in char- 
 acter from the surrounding stock by a Celtic infolding," and 
 that Bacon "with his instinctive gravity and temperance, 
 the suppressed ardor of his aspiring intellectual passion, his 
 temperamental naturalism, was rooted deep in that East 
 AngUan soil which he had never so much as visited." 
 
 To seek to seize these subtler differences, due not so much 
 to nationality as to provinciality, if the word may be thus 
 applied, is not to inquire too curiously, for it is to advance 
 in knowledge and to draw a little nearer to that secret of 
 genius, which must remain ever the inexplicable result of the 
 race, the individual, and the opportunity. There is not a 
 little significance in Mr. Ellis's suggestion that we can per- 
 ceive in the pages of Hawthorne "a glamor" of which "the 
 latent aptitude had been handed on by ancestors who dwelt 
 on the borders of Wales," whereas Renan came from a family 
 of commingled Gascon and Breton descent, so that "in the 
 very contour and melody of his style the ancient bards of 
 Brittany have joined hands with the tribe of Montaigne and 
 Brantome." It was Comte w^ho declared that "humanity is 
 always made up of more dead than living." 
 
 There is significance also in the fact that the most of the 
 major writers of Latin Literature were not Romans by birth 
 and that not a few of them were Spaniards, Seneca for one 
 and Martial for another. Petronius was possibly a Parisian, 
 and the mother of Boccaccio was probably a French woman. 
 It is to be noted also that Rutebceuf , Villon, Regnier, Scarron,
 
 8 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 Moliere, Boileau, La Bruyere, Regnard, Voltaire, Beaumar- 
 chais, Beranger, and Labiche were all of them natives of Paris. 
 Who can dispute the deduction that certain of the dominant 
 characteristics of French literature may be due to the cir- 
 cumstance that so many of its leaders were bom in the streets 
 of the city by the Seine ? May not this be one of the causes 
 of that constant urbanity which is the distinguishing note 
 of the best French authors ? 
 
 That accompUshed scholar, the late Gaston Boissier, did 
 not hesitate to assert that he wrote not for his fellow-inves- 
 tigators, but for the general reader. This is what all French 
 authors have done when they have preserved the true Pari- 
 sian tradition. They have willingly renounced overt indi- 
 viduality and they have shrunk from a self-expression which 
 they could not transmit without the risk of shocking, or at 
 least of annoying, those to whom they were talking, pen in 
 hand. They accepted the wholesome restraints of the rules 
 of Art, which, as M. Faguet has maintained, "are all of them 
 counsels of perfection, allowing every exception which good 
 taste will justify, from which it results that the one important 
 rule is to have good taste." The value of good taste in Lit- 
 erature will be strikingly revealed to any one who comes 
 from the profitable pleasure of reading Boissier's "End of 
 Paganism," with its rich scholarship, its large and penetrating 
 wisdom, its gentle urbanity, and its ripe ease of style, to take 
 up Pater's "Plato and Platonism," thin and brittle in its 
 temper, artificial and affected in its manner, and, in a word, 
 self-conscious and berouged. Still may we hail France in 
 the words of the Scotchman Buchanan : — 
 
 "At tu, beata Gallia, 
 Salve, bonarum blanda nutrix artium." 
 
 There is ever profit in this effort to seize the potent influ- 
 ence of heredity and environment, even upon the genius who 
 may seem at first glance to be the least controlled in the
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 9 
 
 exuberance of his personality. We have grasped a true 
 talisman of artistic appreciation when we can compare the 
 practical common sense and the austere gravity of the Roman 
 with the inexhaustible curiosity and the open-minded intel- 
 ligence of the Greek, and when we contrast the restraining 
 social instinct of the French with the domineering energy 
 of the English, But however interesting may be this en- 
 deavor to perceive the race behind the individual, and to 
 force it to help explain him, there are other ways of seeking 
 an insight into Literature not less instructive. 
 
 We can confine our attention, if we please, to a chosen few 
 of the greatest writers, the men of an impregnable suprem- 
 acy. We can neglect the minor writings even of these 
 masters to center our affections on their acknowledged 
 masterpieces. We may turn aside from the authors indi- 
 vidually, however mighty they may be, and from their sev- 
 eral works, however impressive, to consider the successive 
 movements which one after the other have changed the 
 stream of Literature, turning it into new channels and sweep- 
 ing along almost every man of letters, powerless to with- 
 stand the current. We may perhaps prefer to abandon the 
 biographical aspects of Literature to investigate its bio- 
 logical aspects, and to study out the slow differentiation of 
 the several Uterary species, history from the oration, for 
 example, and the drama from the lyric. Or, finally, we may 
 find interest in tracing the growth of these critical theories 
 about literary art which have helped and which have hin- 
 dered the free expansion of the author's genius at one time 
 or at another. There are many different ways of penetrat- 
 ing within the open portals of Literature. All of them are 
 inviting; all of them will lead a student to a garden of de- 
 light; and which one of them a man may choose will depend 
 on his answer to the question whether he is more interested 
 in persons, or in things, or in ideas. 
 
 There is unfading joy in a lasting friendship with a great I
 
 10 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 writer, whether it is Aristotle, "the master of all that know," 
 or Sophocles, who " saw life steadily and saw it whole " ; Dante, 
 who "wandered through the realms of gloom," or Milton, 
 the "God-given organ-voice of England." Such a friendship 
 brings us close to a full mind and to a noble soul. And such a 
 friendship can be had only in return for loyal service, for a 
 « strenuous resolve to spare nothing needed for full apprecia- 
 tion of the master's genius. A friendly familiarity with an 
 author of cosmopolitan fame can be achieved only by wide 
 wanderings, to and fro, here and there, in the long centuries 
 in search of the predecessors whom he followed, the con- 
 temporaries to whom he addressed his message, and the suc- 
 cessors who followed the path he had been the first to tread. 
 Wisely selected, by an honest exercise of our own taste, 
 a single author may serve as a center of interest for the lov- 
 ing study of a lifetime. Lowell found that his profound 
 admiration for Dante pleasantly persuaded him to studies 
 and explorations of which he httle dreamed when he began. 
 A desire to understand Moliere will lead an admirer of that 
 foremost of comic dramatists to investigate the history of 
 comedy in Greece and Rome, in Spain and Italy, and to trace 
 out the enduring influence of the great French playwright on 
 the later comedy of France, England, and Germany; it -mil 
 also tempt him into unexpected by-paths, whereby he may 
 acquire information about topics seemingly as remote as the 
 Jesuit methods of education, as Gassendi's revival of the 
 atomic theories of Lucretius, and as the practice of medicine 
 in the seventeenth century. 
 
 Closely akin to this devotion to one of the mighty masters 
 of Literature is the concentration of our interest on a single 
 literary masterpiece. We may prefer to fill our ears with 
 "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey" or to recall the 
 interlinked tales "of the golden prime of good Haroun al 
 Raschid." We may find ample satisfaction in following the 
 footsteps of one or another of the largely conceived cos-
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 11 
 
 mopolitan characters, figures which have won favor far be- 
 yond the borders of their birthplace. Some of these heroic 
 strugglers Uve only in the language which they hsped at 
 first, while others have gone forth to wander from one land, 
 one literature, one art, that they may tarry awhile in other 
 lands, other literatures, and other arts. 
 
 After all his travels Ulysses abides with his own people; 
 the gaunt profile of Don Quixote still projects itseK against 
 the sharp hills of Spain, and Falstaff is at home only in the 
 little island where he blustered boldly and breezily. But 
 Faust is a seedling of one soil transplanted into another, 
 where he struck down deeper roots, only to tower aloft again 
 in the land of his origin. And Don Juan, the lyrical hero of 
 a mystical Spanish legend, touched at Italy, before he was 
 received in France, where he was transformed into the im- 
 placable portrait of "a great lord who is a wicked man." 
 And from the French drama "Don Juan" strayed into Enghsh 
 poetry and into German music; so Faust, born obscurely in 
 Germany, ventured out from English poetry into German 
 drama and into French music. It is well for the arts that there 
 is and always has been free trade in their raw materials, and 
 that no customhouse can take toll on the ideas which one 
 nation sends to another to be worked up into finished prod- 
 ucts. From race to race, from century to century, from art 
 to art, there is unceasing interchange of intellectual com- 
 modities; and no inspired statistician can strike the balance 
 of this international trade whereby men are enabled to 
 nourish their souls. 
 
 Nor are these brave figures the sole travelers whose wan- 
 derings we may trace from one literature to another, subdu- 
 ing their native accents to new tongues. Even humbler 
 characters may bear a charmed life; the intriguing slave of 
 Greek comedy was taken over by the Latins, to revive after a 
 slumber of more than a thousand years in the Italian comedy- 
 of-masks and in the Spanish comedy of cloak-and-sword.
 
 12 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 from which he stepped forth gaily to disguise himself as the 
 Mascarille and the Scapin of Moliere, and as the Figaro of 
 Beaumarchais, of Mozart, and of Rossini. 
 
 Although many lovers of letters may be tempted to devote 
 themselves mainly to the masters and to the masterpieces of 
 Literature and to the perennial types which Literature has 
 seen fit to preserve through the ages, there are other students 
 who will find their profit in fixing their attention rather on 
 the several movements which have modified Uterary endeavor. 
 Even to-day one cannot help perceiving the persistence of the 
 irrepressible conflict between the ideals of the Greeks, who 
 sought for beauty always, and the ideals of the Jews, who set 
 aloft duty. Hellenism swept swiftly from Athens to Rome, 
 and then to all the shores of the Mediterranean, until it spent 
 its force and finally found itself desiccated into Alexandrian- 
 ism. Then, in its turn, the Hebraic spirit, softened by Chris- 
 tianity, spread abroad from distant and despised Palestine 
 until it attained to the uttermost boundaries of the wide-flung 
 Roman Empire. The influence of these contending ideals is 
 still evident in this twentieth century of ours, especially in 
 the obvious cleavage between the artistic aspirations of the 
 races of Romance origia and those of the peoples of Teutonic 
 stock. 
 
 Certain of the less admirable consequences of a narrow 
 acceptance of the Hebraic doctrines revealed themselves in 
 the misguided asceticism of the Middle Ages, thereby making 
 easier the early triumphs of the Renaissance, which was in 
 its essence an effort to recapture the joyous Uberty of the 
 Greeks. The new learning and the new discovery of the 
 wisdom of the ancients was indeed a new birt,h for the arts, 
 and for Literature not the least. Man came into his own 
 once again, and he was in haste to express himself. He drew 
 a long breath and felt at last free to live. As was inevitable, 
 he pushed back the Hmits of liberty until he sometimes at-
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 13 
 
 tained an unworthy and unwholesome license. His new 
 knowledge made him arrogant and intolerant; and he was 
 ready to reject all restraint. Yet in time he was able to 
 recover not a little of the harmony and of the proportion 
 which had characterized the great Greeks, even if he never 
 quite attained to their simplicity and to their sympathy. 
 
 Then the reaction came at last, and just as Hellenism had 
 shriveled up into Alexandrianism, so the Renaissance in its 
 turn dried up into the empty and formal Classicism of the 
 eighteenth century, with its code of rules for every art. Clas- 
 sicism lost its grasp on the realities of life, and it cheated itself 
 with words. It kept the letter of the law and refused to con- 
 form to its spirit. It sterilized the vocabulary of verse. It 
 left the poet with no fit instrument for the wireless communi- 
 cation of emotion. In England it gave us the poetry of Alex- 
 ander Pope and the criticism of Samuel Johnson; and in 
 France it codified the regulations which were responsible for a 
 long succession of hfeless tragedies, and by its emphasis upon 
 legislation to curb Literature it brought about the reaction of 
 the Romanticists, who succeeded only in the negative work 
 of destruction and who failed lamentably to establish their 
 more positive contentions. 
 
 Romanticism had its rise contemporary with the American 
 Revolution and with the French; and in all its manifestos 
 there rings the tocsin of revolt. It promulgates its declaration 
 of the rights of man in the domain of Art; and it tends to a 
 stark individualism leading straight to the anarchy which 
 refuses to acknowledge any check upon the caprice of the 
 moment. It exalts the illegal, the illegitimate, and the 
 ilhcit. It glorifies the outlaw and the outcast; and it relishes 
 the abnormal rather than the normal, the morbid rather than 
 the healthy. The violence and extravagance of the roman- 
 ticism of Victor Hugo, for example, made inevitable the real- 
 ism of Turgenieff and Howells. The principle of Art for Art's 
 sake, which the French Romanticists took for a battle-cry
 
 14 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 and which is stimulating if it is properly understood, is per- 
 nicious when it is misread to mean that the artist has no moral 
 responsibihty. Life is influenced by Literature as much as 
 ' Literature is influenced by Ufe. Many a suicide in Germany 
 was the result of Werther's self-pitying sorrows; and many 
 a young man in France took pattern by Balzac's sorry heroes. 
 
 As instructive as any study of these successive hterary 
 movements is an inquiry into the several hterary species, 
 with due consideration of their evolution, their permanence, 
 and their occasional commingling one with another. There 
 is a special pleasure in tracing the development of oratory, 
 for example, down from the days of the Greeks to our own 
 time, deducing its essential and eternal principles, and weigh- 
 ing the influence of Demosthenes on Cicero, and of both on 
 Bossuet and on Daniel Webster. There is an equal profit in 
 observing how history has been able to separate itself from 
 oratory on the one hand and from the epic on the other. A 
 most interesting illustration of the progress from the hetero- 
 geneous to the homogeneous is to be found in the evolution of 
 Athenian tragedy, which included at first much that was not 
 strictly dramatic. It developed slowly out of the lyric; and 
 in the beginning it contained choral dances, epic narratives, and 
 descriptive passages. Amid these confused elements it is not 
 always easy to seize the essential action of the drama. But as 
 Greek tragedy grew, it came slowly to a consciousness of 
 itself, and it eliminated one by one these non-dramatic acces- 
 sories, until at last we find a story shown in action and repre- 
 sented by a group of characters immeshed in an inexorable 
 struggle. A parallel development took place a little later in 
 the Greek comic drama, whereby the lyrical-burlesque of 
 Aristophanes became the more prosaic comedy of Menander; 
 the earlier conglomerate of incongruous elements discarded 
 one by one its soaring lyric, its personal lampooning, and its 
 license of political satire, while at the same time it steadily
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 15 
 
 strengthened the supporting plot, with the appropriate inter- 
 relation of character and situation. 
 
 No Uterary species has had a more unexpected and a more 
 unprecedented prosperity than the novel in prose, which in 
 the nineteenth century became the most popular of forms, 
 essayed by many a writer who possessed only a small share 
 of the native gift of story-telling. The novel is almost the 
 only one of the literary species that the Greeks of the Golden 
 Age did not develop and carry to a perfection which is the 
 despair of all later men of letters. They seem to have cared 
 little for prose fiction; and when they had a story to tell they 
 set it forth in verse, inspired by the muse of epic poetry. 
 To-day that forsaken maiden can find work fit for her hands 
 only by laying aside her singing robes and condescending to 
 bare prose. 
 
 Two of the foremost of modem masters of prose fiction, 
 Cervantes and Fielding, have claimed that their stories were, 
 in very truth, epics in prose. On the other hand, George 
 Meredith seemed to consider the novel to be derived rather 
 from comedy; and there is no question that the expansion of 
 prose fiction was aided, also, by the delicate work of the sev- 
 enteenth-century character-wTiters and of the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury essayists. We may, if we choose, declare that the series 
 of papers in which Steele and Addison sketched the character 
 and the career of Sir Roger de Coverley was, in fact, the earliest 
 of serial stories. In Literature, as in life, he is a wise child 
 who knows his own father; and a writer may have supposed 
 himself to be a nameless orphan when in reality he is the miss- 
 ing heir of many honorable ancestors. 
 
 Prose fiction may be the offspring of the epic and it may 
 have received a rich legacy from the essay; but it has grown 
 to maturity under the guardianship of the drama, and in the 
 closest comradeship with both comedy and tragedy. The 
 earher novelists, Cervantes, Le Sage, and Fielding, had all 
 begun as playwrights; so also had the later, Hugo and Dumas.
 
 16 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 The influence of Comeille and Racine on Mme. de La Fayette 
 is as indisputable as the influence of Moliere on Le Sage and 
 of Ben Jonson on Dickens. And since it has become the 
 dominant literary form, the novel has in its turn served as a 
 stimulant to the drama. There is no difficulty in tracing the 
 impression made by "Gil Bias " on the "Marriage of Figaro" 
 and by "Gotz von Berlichingen " on "Ivanhoe." Nor can 
 any disinterested inquirer dispute that the social dramas of 
 Dumas fils and of Augier are deeply indebted to the " Human 
 Comedy" of Balzac, and that the comedies of Mr. Pinero and 
 Mr. Henry Arthur Jones owe much to the mixture of humor 
 and pathos to be found in the pages of Dickens and Thackeray. 
 
 Once when an American painter in Rome was told by a 
 purse-proud picture-buyer that she did not pretend to know 
 anything about Art, but she did know what she Uked, the irri- 
 tated artist could not repress the swift retort, "So do the 
 beasts of the field !" To know what we hke is only the begin- 
 ning of wisdom; and we ought to be able to give good reason 
 for the faith that is in us. The French, who are subtly curious 
 in their use of words, make a useful distinction between a 
 gourmet, the delicate taster, and a gourmand, the gross-feeder; 
 and the distinction holds in Literature as well as in life. The 
 wise Goethe tells us that "there are three classes of readers — 
 some enjoy without judgment, some judge without enjoyment; 
 some there are who judge while they enjoy and who enjoy 
 while they judge." It is within our power always to gain 
 admittance into this third group and to attain a reasoned 
 appreciation of the authors whose writings we relish. 
 
 Indeed, we may even acquire an open-mindedness which 
 will carry us a little farther, until we can understand how it 
 is that sometimes we admire what we do not personally enjoy, 
 and that on other occasions we may for the moment find pleas- 
 ure in what we do not greatly admire. We can learn to 
 control our likings; and in time we can correct our instinc-
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 17 
 
 tive tendency to let our personal preferences erect themselves 
 into eternal standards. Of course, these personal preferences 
 must ever be the basis of our ultimate judgments, since we 
 are born always ^\ath a bias in favor of one school or of the 
 other. Our native tendency is toward the ancient or toward 
 the modem, and we are by instinct either romanticists or 
 realists, whether we are conscious of this prejudice or not. 
 Our opinions may be as the leaves that change color with the 
 revolving seasons; but our principles are rooted in us. It is 
 fate, rather than free will, which decides for us in which camp 
 we will find ourselves enlisted. Before we were bom it was 
 settled for each of us, once for all, whether we should delight 
 in the massive simphcity of the Attic dramatists with their 
 unerring union of a content of high value with a form that 
 seems to be inevitable; or whether we should revel rather in 
 the rich luxuriance and bold energy of the Ehzabethans; the 
 one moving majestically with the sweep of a glacier, and the 
 other boiling over with the impatience of a volcano. 
 
 But even if we cannot help being partizans, we ought to 
 strive to master our prejudices so that we may learn at least 
 to imderstand the spirit of the masterpieces wrought by those 
 with whom we are not in accord. The critic needs not only 
 insight and equipment; his task calls also for sjonpathy and 
 for disinterestedness. The code of criticism is not as the law 
 of the Medes and Persians which altereth not; it changes 
 from race to race and from epoch to epoch; it is modified by 
 the successive movements of human feeling and of human 
 thought. 
 
 The scholars of the Renaissance, secure in their inheritance 
 of Greek wisdom, had a sublime behef in the comprehensive- 
 ness and in the certainty of their knowledge; but now in this 
 new twentieth century of ours we modems — 
 
 "Whom vapors work for, yet who scorn a ghost, 
 Amid enchantments, disenchanted most" — 
 c
 
 18 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 we are at last aware that we are but peering through a chance 
 crack in the dark wall which shuts us in, and that we can only 
 glimpse a fragment of knowledge, glad that even so little is 
 granted to us. We have surrendered the hope of ever attain- 
 ing final truth; but none the less are we still nerved by the 
 longing for it. Perhaps there are a few who would echo 
 Lessing's proud declaration that he valued the privilege of 
 seeking the truth above the actual possession of it. 
 
 Criticism must needs lag behind creation, even if literary 
 criticism may be also creation itself in its own fashion. The 
 critic cannot do his work until after the lyrist and the drama- 
 tist and the orator have done theirs. It is on them that he 
 feeds, and from their unconscious practice he derives his rea- 
 soned principles. In fact, it is only when the earlier impulse 
 of poetry was beginning to slacken a httle, that the critic came 
 forward to undertake his parasitic task. He felt it to be his 
 duty, as indeed it is, to apply to the present the standards of 
 the past; and it was long before he was willing to recognize 
 the possibility that these standards might be found in the 
 living languages as well as in the dead. 
 
 Apparently the earliest attempt to hold up a modem author 
 as worthy of detailed study was in 1373, when Boccaccio began 
 his lectures on Dante; and so late as 1768, when Gray was 
 appointed to a chair of Modern Literature and Languages at 
 Cambridge, he did not feel himself bound — so Lowell notes 
 — to perform "any of its functions except that of receiving 
 his salary." Yet, even then, Lessing had already conceived 
 of Literature as a single whole, however multiform its mani- 
 festations might be in many tongues. Lessing is the first of 
 modern critics, as he is the foremost; and he pointed out the 
 path of progress to Sainte-Beuve, to Taine, and to Brunetiere. 
 It is due to their investigation into the laws which govern the 
 evolution of Literature that the attitude of criticism is now 
 more tolerant, and indeed more modest, than it was when 
 Ronsardfelt himself authorized to speak of the "naive facihty"
 
 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 19 
 
 of Homer, and when Milton, with all his admiration, deemed 
 that Shakspere "warbled native woodnotes wild." Thoreau 
 anticipated our later opinion when he asserted that "in Homer 
 and in Chaucer there is more of the serenity and innocence of 
 youth than in the more modern and moral poets." 
 
 Brunetiere was perhaps the most suggestive of recent 
 Hterary critics, abounding in fertile generalizations, and 
 applying to Art ideas supplied by Science. Here he was fol- 
 lowing Taine rather than Sainte-Beuve, who was more keenly 
 interested in the idiosyncrasies of individual authors than in 
 the larger movements of Literature. Sainte-Beuve preferred 
 to give us "biographic psychology," to borrow Taine's apt 
 phrase. Yet even in criticism there are few real novelties; 
 Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," for example, is imitated from 
 the Italians; Taine's theory of the influence of heredity and 
 environment is amplified from Hegel; and the objections 
 which adverse critics have brought against the veracious 
 realism of Mr. Howells are curiously akin to those that Petro- 
 nius urged against the Roman poet, possibly Lucan, who had 
 ventured to write an epic in which there was less inventive 
 exuberance and more interpretative imagination. Gaston 
 Boissier even discovered a vague premonition of the struggle- 
 for-life theory in Saint Augustine's "City of God." 
 
 Time was when man lived in a cave mitil he learned how 
 to put together a wooden frame for a more commodious dwell- 
 ing; and after a while he filled up this framework with the 
 bricks he had found out how to bake, and traces of this tem- 
 porary device are still e\'ident in the decorations of the later 
 and loftier temples which the Greeks built of marble. Only 
 of late has man gone back to the primitive frame, putting it 
 together now, not with wood, but with wrought steel; and the 
 sky-scraper, however modern it may seem to us, is in reality a 
 reversion to an ancient type of building. A similar spectacle 
 greets us in all the arts, especially in the art of Literature;
 
 20 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 
 
 the new is ever the old, even when it presents itself with aU 
 the latest improvements. Genius reveals itself when the hour 
 is ripe; it does its work in its own fashion; it comes and it goes 
 again, leaving us the richer. There have been many men of 
 many minds, speaking in their several tongues; but Literature 
 is one and indivisible. It has a voice for every mood. It 
 cheers and sustains; it inspires and uplifts; it lights the path 
 for all of us. It passes the flaming torch from sire to son, 
 Greece to Rome, Rome to the Renaissance, the Renaissance 
 to the modem world. 
 
 "All passes. Art alone 
 Enduring stays to us ; 
 The bust outlasts the throne, 
 The coin, Tiberius ; 
 
 "Even the gods must go; 
 Only the lofty Rime 
 Not countless years o'erthrow, 
 Nor long array of Time."
 
 II 
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 By Richard J. H. Gottheil, Professor of Rabbinical 
 Literature and the Semitic Languages 
 
 Long before the masterpieces of Greek Literature were 
 conceived, the God Nebo, as the Babylonians themselves 
 explained the beginnings of their culture, had brought the art 
 of writing to the Delta of the Tigris and the Euphrates. In 
 attributing a divine origin to this art, these ancient Semites 
 emphasized the value which they placed upon it; and their 
 descendants have not failed to follow the road traced by their 
 ancestors. The debt which Western civilization owes to the 
 nearer East is growing largely on our view, the more archae- 
 ology and comparative research unravel the secrets of past 
 ages, "^wo gifts of inestimable value we owe to the Semites. 
 One is the expression in a tangible and intelligent form of our 
 monotheistic Weltanschauung, out of which the three great 
 world-religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have issued. 
 \The other is the alphabet, by means of which the thoughts and 
 aspirations which lie at the basis of our modern Western cul- 
 ture have been propagated. But while the great religious 
 systems which have come from the efforts of priests and 
 prophets in ancient Palestine have had their counterpart in 
 other important systems that had their birth in India and 
 in China, the alphabet which Phoenicians and Aramaeans 
 invented has had a triumphant march as a means of commer- 
 cial and intellectual intercourse amongst the most varied 
 peoples. It seems probable that writing was invented in 
 various and different parts of the globe, in Egypt, in China, 
 
 21
 
 22 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 in America, as well as in ancient Babylonia. But none of the 
 systems was destined to have the vogue acquired by that of 
 the Semites, to become the parent also of the alphabets used 
 by tongues so radically divergent as Indo-European, Mongolo- 
 Tartar, and Malay. 
 
 sLn dealing with ancient peoples we are accustomed to use 
 the term Literature with the greatest possible latitude. We 
 include as such all that has come down to us of their writ- 
 ings, to whatever field of human activity they may refer. 
 In this manner. Literature is no longer sjoionymous with 
 belles-lettres, but may comprise treatises upon all possible sub- 
 jects; including even business documents and social letters. 
 In this use of the word there is, it is true, a certain justifica- 
 tion, above and beyond that of mere archaeological convenience. 
 Among the Semites, the line of demarcation between every- 
 day writing and that which is formal and literary has never 
 been drawn clearly; just as little as definite forms of literary 
 expression have been reserved for the treatment of certain 
 subjects. Jews, Syrians, and Arabs would write grammatical 
 treatises in verse; or, if need be, medical and legal ones. The 
 passion for poetic diction was supreme; and where we would 
 write an order in council or an official document in the ordi- 
 nary, albeit twisted, style of official parlance, the Arab scribe 
 will make it an occasion for the exercise of whatever ingenuity 
 he may possess in the turning of happy phrases and the collo- 
 cation of pleasing rhymes. But the purpose of the present 
 presentation will be served best if the latitude in the use of 
 the word Literature be restricted and the attempt be made 
 to conform to the more usual acceptation of the term. 
 
 It is difficult, practically impossible, to give any general 
 characterization of Semitic Literatures as a whole, for the 
 reason that the historic and psychic development of the 
 Semitic peoples has been so varied. It is true that the peo- 
 ples which have produced these Literatures have kept their 
 racial affinity intact to a surprising degree; and this despite
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 23 
 
 the many admixtures of foreign blood due to the practice of 
 polygamy which has always been more or less indigenous in 
 the East. But the history of the Semites covers so wide a 
 period of time and traverses so extensive a part of the earth's 
 surface, that it is impossible to find the psychologic unity 
 of the whole race. From the oldest specimen of Babylonian 
 Literature inscribed upon a stele of King Gudaca (which is 
 dated at about 4000 B.c.),to the productions of modern Arabic 
 writers in Cairo or of Hebrew literati in American ghettos, is 
 a long hail. From Southern Mesopotamia into Western Asia, 
 Northern Africa, Europe, and the cities of the American conti- 
 nent, the geographical distribution of Semitic peoples almost 
 comes around a full circle. In their march through the world 
 they have come in contact with many civilizations and peoples 
 alien to them in race and in ideals. In many cases they were 
 able to impress their own individuality upon these aliens, 
 either by actual conquest or by the more durable influence 
 of an imposing culture. The Babylonians, forced by their 
 movement westward into the proximity of Egypt and the 
 ancient civilizations of Crete and Asia Minor, knew how to 
 impose their script and many of their religious ideas upon the 
 whole of the nearer East which they conquered. In the early 
 Middle Ages the Arabs did the same, carrying Asia into 
 Europe, making the Mediterranean a propagator of Semitism, 
 and by the force of their religious enthusiasm compelling the 
 physical and mental submission of other races, Indians, 
 Iranians, Egyptians, Berbers, and Goths. ^Alone among the 
 important Semitic races, the Jews built up no great world- 
 power; preferring to exist by the inner force of a long martyr- 
 dom and to exercise a spiritual influence by their presence 
 everjrwhere as a theocratic people, and by giving to the world 
 the two daughter faiths, Christianity and Islam. And they 
 are the only Semitic people that have survived with a live and 
 active conscience from the earliest times down to the present 
 day!
 
 24 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 Yet, whatever may be the influence exercised by Semitic 
 peoples upon the world, and whatever may be the forces that 
 have originated with them, they were themselves influenced 
 by this world strongly and variously. The forces put out by 
 the great culture-peoples of former times do not run in parallel 
 lines, but intertwine and intermingle. That which goes forth 
 as flood may return as an ebb-tide. No one people is exclu- 
 sively the giver, no one entirely the receiver. The commerce 
 of the human mind is like unto that of the body. The giver 
 of to-day is the receiver of to-morrow. And so it has been 
 with the Semites. Japheth has dwelt in the tents of Shem; 
 but Shem, also, has not spumed the habitations of his brother. 
 A good deal of the mythology of ancient Greece has its roots 
 in the religious conceptions elaborated by Babylonian priests ; 
 many of the legends about the gods on Olympus have their 
 origin in the stories told about Anu and Bel and Tammuz. 
 But, in later times, Greece repaid its debt to the East, by 
 giving it a philosophic terminology and the framework for a 
 systematic theology. The whole Mohammedan and Jewish 
 philosophy of the Middle Ages, reaching back to that curious 
 fusion of East and West in the Neo-Platonic Schools of Alex- 
 andria, is but an echo of the thoughts elaborated by Stoics 
 and Peripatetics in ancient Hellas. Jewish tradition has the 
 conceit that Plato and Aristotle imbibed wisdom at the feet of 
 the Rabbis: a quaintly Eastern method of acknowledging 
 this dependence. It is true that Babylonian astronomy and 
 medicine and mathematics laid the basis for the labors of 
 Ptolemaeus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Euchd; but, at a later 
 time, their works were translated into Eastern tongues and 
 their names became household ones for Syriac, Hebrew, and 
 Arabic literati. In our own day modem Arabic and Hebrew 
 belles-lettres are strongly under the influence of the great 
 writers of Western Europe, and a great many of the works of 
 Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Racine, and Moliere can be read 
 in Semitic translations. It is these influences of the most
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 25 
 
 varied forces, historical, religious, philosophic, scientific, and 
 literary, to which Semitic peoples have been subject which 
 have produced the varying character that we see exhibited 
 in Semitic Literatures. 
 
 Of all the literary forms in which mankind has clothed its 
 thought and its feeling, one has been entirely wanting among 
 the Semites. They have never developed a drama of their 
 own. From time to time attempts have been made to vindi- 
 cate for the Semitic people a sense of the beautiful inherent 
 in dramatic presentation; notably in connection with some 
 particular explanation of such books in our Bible as the ''Song 
 of Solomon" and the tragedy of Job. But, apart from the 
 difficulties of exegesis inherent in this theory, no such claim 
 has ever been made by the people itself out of whose loins these 
 books have issued, and it is quite plain that they were never 
 consciously intended to be put upon the stage. Nor have 
 other Semitic peoples ever attempted to fill up the void. The 
 Turkish Karakoz or Shadow-play, which of late years has 
 made its way into Syria and Egypt, is of non-Semitic origin, 
 and the attempt even to adapt Moliere for the Egyptian stage 
 has remained little more than a literary curiosity. There 
 must be some reasons inherent in the development of Semitic 
 culture that are opposed to the development of the drama, 
 and which successfully withstood the infectious influence of 
 the greatest dramatic influence which the world has seen. 
 One is led to suppose, then, that the mythological element 
 which is present to such a degree in the ancient drama has 
 made it repellent to the austere monotheism of the Semites. 
 It is true that the ancient Semites had their mythology as well 
 as the ancient Greeks ; that they deified their kings and human- 
 ized their gods. Babylonian religious culture is full of it. 
 But even Babylonian religion, as it proceeded on the road 
 from polytheism to henotheism, gradually sublimated these 
 mythological elements. Traces of them, only, are to be found 
 in our Bible; and the severe monotheism of later oflSicial
 
 26 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 Judaism and Islam made short work with these vestiges. The 
 naive outlook upon the universe and its forces was gone; 
 and with it went the power to discuss them even with playful 
 seriousness. Nor must it be forgotten that in ancient Greece 
 the stage was the pulpit from which the great lessons of life 
 were preached to the multitude. The Jews had their prophets 
 and teachers to do this work, Mohammedans their preachers 
 and moralists. In this manner the need for a stage was not 
 felt. In addition to this, the distinct dislike to represent the 
 human figure in any form, though not itself strong enough 
 to prevent artistic development in other directions, must have 
 acted as a deterring restraint. 
 
 What has been said of the drama may, to a large extent, 
 be said also of epic poetry. "During one period only of their 
 history, and that almost at its birth, have the Semites devel- 
 oped the tale of their supposed heroic times into an extended 
 epic. The Babylonian story of the doings of the hero Gilga- 
 mesh, representing as it does certain astro-cosmological ideas 
 transferred from heaven to earth, takes us back into the twi- 
 light of the gods; but it had no real life beyond the confines 
 of that branch of the Semitic peoples in which it had its birth. 
 A national or racial epic must deal with a "host of gods," or 
 with such supernatural powers of human beings as bridge over 
 the chasm that separates the human from the divine. But 
 when the older "host of gods" became the "God of hosts," 
 as it did for the writers of the Bible, the transcendence of the 
 Deity beyond things mundane cut the very heart out of all 
 such fanciful musings. Jehovah, as very spirit, must deal 
 with his people in other ways. Heaven was filled with angels 
 that did his bidding, and saintly men on earth received direct 
 messages to mankind. Ethical monotheism could not deal 
 playfully with the great problems of the world, and the beau- 
 tiful had once more to stand aside before the moral. It is 
 true that many of the events narrated in the epic of Gilgamesh 
 have filtered down Semitic tradition and have found their way
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 27 
 
 into both Bible and Koran. But they are embedded there 
 mainly as fossils; reminiscent, it is true, of an earlier life, but 
 hardly forming an integral part of later Semitic religious con- 
 cepts. Many traits in the stories of the patriarchs, such 
 figures as those of Moses, the man of God, of Samson, the man 
 of strength, of Solomon, the king of wisdom, of Daniel, the 
 man of j udgment, lie clearly upon the border line of mythology. 
 So does the figure of Alexander the Great in Syriac, Hebrew, 
 and Arabic folk-tale. "He of the Two-Horns" is only a later 
 reflection of the ancient Gilgamesh; and the figure of the 
 old Babylonian hero lingers on down to our own day, when it 
 has found its most permanent artistic expression in Michael 
 Angelo's two-horned Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. 
 But no great epic has grown up around the exploits of any of 
 these heroes; and no great influence was there to promote the 
 writing of epic poetry. When the heroic period of Jewish 
 history was finished, the life of the people had already become 
 one of pain and of sorrow. Their thoughts were sad and 
 severe, as their life was hard and often unlovely. Nor were 
 conditions among other Semitic peoples such as to favor 
 the growth of epic poetry. The non-Jewish Semites of Syria 
 and Mesopotamia developed into Christian churches, to whom 
 matters of church government and the minutiae of belief 
 primed all other considerations. Islam was born into a world 
 that had already outgrown the stage of innocent fancy in its 
 outlook upon the universe. It had no childhood days, but 
 was called at once to the serious tasks of man's estate. It had 
 to fight its way and develop in an upward struggle against 
 civilizations that had already passed their zenith. It came 
 too early into contact with city life; and the fresh air of the 
 desert was soon befouled in the atmosphere of the market- 
 place. 
 
 ™^It is from the desert that the Semite has sprung; and every 
 
 new development, every great effort has had its origin there. 
 
 vNot without reason did the Hebrews imagine that their life
 
 28 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 in the wilderness was the pre-qualification for their entrance 
 into the Holy Land of promise. All the great movements 
 in Islamic history have been engendered and nourished in the 
 desert, from the time of Mohammed himself down to that of 
 the modern Wahebis, Mahdists, and Senoussis. —The desert 
 has conserved the pure joy of living, and though it has trained 
 its dwellers to hardiness of body and firnmess of purpose, it 
 has at the same time preserved in them a simplicity of mind. 
 It is these characteristics that have enabled the Arabian desert 
 to produce the only other Semitic epic of which we have any 
 knowledge. The exploits of the black hero Antara, his deeds 
 of prowess and his magnanimity may be heard to-day in prose 
 and verse as one sits to coffee in Cairo, Alexandria, or Beirut. 
 But, though told in the city, they breathe the true air and 
 spirit of the desert. And, though pitched in a minor key and 
 entirely free from every supernatural admixture, they are 
 truly epic in character, as they depict all the virtues dear to 
 the roving spirit of the Arab, intrepidity, courage, and hos- 
 pitality. 
 
 'It is in Ijo-ic poetry that the Semitic muse has found its 
 fullest literary expression. A great deal of this poetry is, it is 
 true, religious in character, because religion has played so 
 large a part in the life of Semitic peoples. But, from time 
 to time, secular poetry has been cultivated as well. Whether 
 such secular poetry ever existed in ancient Babylonia and 
 Syria, we cannot tell. Whatever has come down to us en- 
 graven upon clay tablets is in the form of prayers, of psalms, 
 and of litanies, expressive entirely of the higher aspirations of 
 the people, or of their fears of evil that could be warded off 
 only by the right word spoken at the proper moment. That 
 this poetry affects the style, known to Egyptian and early 
 Hebrew Literature, called parallelismus membrorum, in which 
 the clauses of a verse bear a definite relation to each other, is 
 certain. Whether it passed beyond that and attained to an 
 accentuating rhythm has not yet been proven. But some of
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 29 
 
 the psalms indited by these priests and singers of long ago 
 reveal a depth of feeling, a consciousness of sin, and a burning 
 desire for forgiveness, that place them side by side with the 
 noblest productions of the ancient Hebrew Muse and the re- 
 ligious writings of the prophets. It is, therefore, evident that 
 the psalmists and prophets of the Bible do not stand altogether 
 alone as the unique product of a single branch of the Semitic 
 family. They and their work were part and parcel of the 
 great Semitic tradition, under the ban of which stood the whole 
 of Western Asia from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean 
 Sea. 
 
 And yet Hebrew poetry has certain characteristics which 
 single it out for special comment. It is the form in which a 
 good deal of our Bible has been written, and in this manner it 
 has acquired for us a pecuhar meaning and significance. To 
 write poetry, religious or secular, never became the preroga- 
 tive of a single class; priests, prophets, and laymen all made 
 use of it to express their inmost feelings. Nor has it ever lost 
 the freshness of its source during the long vista of years that 
 stretches from the earliest writings to be found in the Bible 
 down to the present day. Like those whose thoughts its 
 words expressed, it has suffered the contact of all the forces to 
 which they have been exposed and in which they have been 
 molded successively. Yet, it has remained substantially 
 the same. At first, it is the naive and untrammeled expres- 
 sion of a semi-agricultural people, with its songs of the well, 
 its rough poems of victory, its laments over fallen heroes, its 
 Jove-songs put into the mouth of an ideahzed king. Tn the 
 service of Faith, it is enthroned in hymns for public service 
 or for private use, in adorations, prayers, and supplications. 
 It takes the message of the human heart in all its manifoj^d 
 changes and wings them heavenward. It bespeaks the sorrow 
 of the sin-laden individual or of the community bowed down 
 in public grief. During the Middle Ages it comes under the 
 influence of its Arabic peers. It adopts the whole outward
 
 30 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 form of its more fortunate brother. In modern times it must 
 perforce take on a modern dress; and the great Italian, Eng- 
 lish, German, and French poets become its models. During 
 the Biblical period the form is rugged, the license with which 
 the poet moves is great; so much so that even to this day and 
 despite the many theories that have been put forward, the 
 proper scanning of Biblical verse, if there is any such scanning, 
 is still unknown. In the Arabic period it is the Kasidah that 
 holds sway, and the old tongue is forced to sing in Arabic 
 metres. After the Reformation, canto, terzett, and hexame- 
 ter exert their influence; and our Hebrew poets of to-day — 
 for the ancient tongue has never died out — have a freedom of 
 expression and a privilege to develop the language which their 
 forbears would have envied. Yet, throughout all, it is the 
 same noble language of the Bible that speaks and sings, the 
 same simple constructions that please and fascinate. It is 
 true that a great deal of Israel's post-Biblical poetry is of a 
 purely religious character; religion, up to recent times, was 
 the all in all to those that sang and to those that listened. 
 But in Spain and in modern times, these exclusive fetters 
 have been cast off. Love and wine and the lighter moments 
 of human existence found expression also. Hebrew was not 
 only a church language; it was the medium of intercourse 
 between the scattered members of the Jewish people, and al- 
 most the only means by which they expressed thought and 
 feeling. 
 
 Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the literary develop- 
 ment of Oriental Christians. But those living in Syria and 
 Mesopotamia, and the later converts in the highlands of 
 Ethiopia, have produced a large, and in some ways an impor- 
 tant body of Literature. The first of these, the most promi- 
 nent survival of the Aramaic race, preserved its language 
 merely as a Church tongue. The Arabic invasion in the 
 seventh century did not only level all political distinctions; 
 it routed, also, the civilizations with which it came in contact.
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 31 
 
 after having taken from them those elements that it lacked 
 itself. In addition, it drove the tongues in which these civi- 
 lizations were articulate out of the highways and byways 
 into remote regions and mountain fastnesses. Many Persian- 
 speaking districts in the eastern part of the Califate gave way 
 to the language of the desert, just as in the far West the Gothic 
 tongue of Spain was supplanted by that of the conquering 
 Arabs. In the same manner, within a hundred years after 
 the entrance of the Arabs into Syria and Mesopotamia, the 
 Syriac language had ceased to exist as a language of the people 
 and had taken refuge in the hills of the Anti-Lebanon, in the 
 mountains of the Kurdistan and in far-off Azerbaijan, in 
 which places it is still spoken by remnants of Aramaean peoples. 
 Apart, then, from a few folk-poems and village songs, Syriac 
 poetry, in the main, is of a rehgious character. Despite a 
 certain formality and stiffness, and up to the time when it 
 made way for the Arabic, it has produced some poets of real 
 merit, such as Saint Ephrahn, Isaac of Antioch, Jacob of Serug; 
 but the range in which even they allowed their poetic feeling to 
 wander is constrained. The lighter touch that comes from 
 livinginand with the world is wanting; the odor of the cloister 
 and of the monk's cell pervades it all. The same is true, only 
 in a much wider degree, of Ethiopic poetry. The written 
 language was a creation of the Church; and whatever need 
 was felt to express feelings in versified form kept to the end the 
 impress of this origin. 
 
 In addition to the Hebrews, the Arabs are the only Semitic 
 people of consequence that have developed the art of literary 
 expression untrammeled by the fetters of a church. They 
 are the only ones that have lived in the invigorating air of a 
 national home, and that have developed the full life of a people 
 conscious of its strength. The evident result of this is seen 
 in their rich and many-sided Literature and in the great mass 
 of lyric poetry they have produced. Some innate love for 
 poetic diction must have been ingrained in the very nature of
 
 32 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 the Arab. For even before the art of writing had been de- 
 veloped among these roving spirits of the desert, the tribal 
 bard sang of his love, of his chase, and of his camel. Even in 
 the desert, where the art of living even is difl&cult and comfort 
 is wanting, where the possession of a flock means riches and a 
 few extra tents ease and contentment, the poet was an un- 
 crowned king. A phrase beautifully turned was enough to 
 put aside the wrath of the powerful; a few rhymes aptly strung 
 could dominate the uncontrolled spirit of a Beduin chieftain. 
 And even when the Beduin turned into the denizen of the 
 city, and when the tribal chief became the calif and the sultan 
 of a more or less organized community, the love of happy 
 diction retained its ascendancy. The poet was not less 
 honored in the palaces of Damascus, of Bagdad, and of Cor- 
 dova than he was around the fire of a desert encampment. 
 But the home and the well-spring of poetic expression still 
 remained the pure air of the great sand sea; and eminent 
 philologists even, in their search for the hidden meanings of 
 obsolete words or for the correct use of certain expressions, 
 were accustomed to send for information to some desert tribe. 
 Mohammed himself was quite afraid of the power of the poets; 
 and in consigning them to the lowest limbo of Purgatory, si- 
 lently acknowledged the power they wielded. The stream of 
 poetic composition has flowed on uninterruptedly from those 
 early times down to the present day. 
 
 The form in which the Arabs write their poetry is that of a 
 quantitative meter, each line consisting of two equal halves, 
 the first pair rhyming and the same rhyme being kept through- 
 out the poem at the end of the second half of the line. It 
 might be thought that this exigency of rhyme would stultify 
 and formalize poetic effort; but so supple is the Arabic tongue, 
 and so extensive is the Arabic vocabulary, that the danger 
 was most happily avoided. Arabic verse never descends 
 to mere rhyming alliteration. At an early period meter 
 became greatly diversified, the schoolmen laying down six-
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 33 
 
 teen different ones as canonical. Popular poetry, however, 
 continued to develop these forms and to add to their number. 
 It became the custom to open the poem, or Kasidah, as it was 
 termed, with a true desert scene, a view of the vestiges of the 
 camp left by the tribe of which the loved maiden was a mem- 
 ber. This is followed by a description of the desert beauty 
 and an account of the poet's own prowess, intermingled with a 
 detailed picture of his camel and his daily life. This classical 
 form of the Kasidah did not, however, become quite stereo- 
 typed. The true poetic spirit outbalanced the influence 
 towards conventionality. When the petty court at Al-Hirah 
 and the larger one at Damascus brought the Beduin Arab into 
 a wider circle of life, he began to sing of other themes; or, at 
 least, to give a heightened color to former ones. Persian in- 
 fluences at Al-Hirah, Byzantine ones at Damascus, developed 
 his innate love for the charms of poetry. At Damascus, also, 
 the comparative luxuriousness of life introduced that sensual 
 element which must in a measure color all true art. The 
 Court of the Umayyids became a center where Literature was 
 prized, and minnesingers vied for applause and for more 
 substantial gifts. Not pietistic, and yet good Mohammedans, 
 the Syrian cahfs were not averse to the chase, and to wine, 
 and to physical beauty; and their court poets put their mas- 
 ters' feelings into verse. Few singers of love have equaled 
 Omar ibn Abi Rabi'a; few have contended with each other in 
 biting satire as did Jarir and Farozdak. There were Chris- 
 tian poets, as Al-Ahtal, and female ones, as Lailah and al- 
 Khansa. At Bagdad, and under the Abbasides, the horizon 
 of the poet was still further widened. The influence of Per- 
 sian mysticism became more pronounced, the wealth of im- 
 agery more abundant, and court poets dogged the footsteps 
 of Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun. Even the sultanlets of 
 Mesopotamian principalities followed the lead of their greater 
 masters. It was at the Court of Hamdanite Saif al-Daulah 
 in Aleppo (948) that al-Mutanabbi lived, who developed to
 
 34 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 the utmost the possibilities of the old Arabic Kasidah and 
 thus marks the end of the classical period of Arabic poetry. 
 
 Nor were the Mohammedan powers that were further re- 
 moved from the heart of the Empire less expressive of their 
 love for the rhyming word. Mohammedan Egypt and Mo- 
 hammeda,n Spain have also produced their poets; but these 
 poets were bound less securely by the bonds of tradition, and 
 they favored the introduction of new and more popular metri- 
 cal forms. The old Kasidah, with its set meters, made way 
 for the Muwashshah, the strophic poem, and for the Zajal, a 
 sort of ottave rime, probably under the influence of non- 
 Arabic surroundings. 
 
 Finally, the love of the Arab for his national poetry is seen 
 also in the care which he took to preserve it. During the 
 second and third centuries of the Hijrah many collections were 
 commenced which were to treasure up the productions of the 
 Arab muse for the enjoyment of future generations. These 
 collections were made in various ways; the poems written by 
 members of a single tribe were gathered together, or those 
 dealing with a single subject; or those poems which were con- 
 sidered to be the most remarkable from one or the other point 
 of view were brought together, and in course of time antholo- 
 gies grew up in which all manner of virtues and vices received 
 their meed of praise and blame at the hands of the most noted 
 poets. 
 
 There is one form of literary expression which deserves 
 special mention; for the Arab has cultivated it to a surprising 
 degree, and he has found imitators among other Semitic 
 peoples. I refer to rhjoned prose, that elevated diction which 
 stands upon the border line between prose and poetry, and in 
 which the individual prose phrases are held together by the 
 rhyme. The excessive value in which it was held by the 
 Arabs is, no doubt, due to the fact that it was employed 
 largely by Mohammed in his Koran. From here it passed 
 to the religious preachers who, in the gatherings of the faithful
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 35 
 
 on Fridays, intercalated it into their Khutbahs. From the 
 preachers it passed to the official scribes and secretaries, and 
 from them into general Literature. Poets and poetasters, 
 historians and biographers, easily fell into the groove, and the 
 preface to nearly every Arabic book bears witness to the 
 delight of the Arab for assonance and rhyme. As pure Lit- 
 erature it has found its highest expression in the Makamahs 
 of al-Hamadani and al-Hariri, those fine examples of the 
 literary tale, where the plot is nothing more than a series of 
 pegs upon which to hang all the evidence of the richness of 
 the Arabic vocabulary and the ingenuity of the author. A 
 good imitation of al-Hariri is to be found in the Hebrew 
 Makamahs of al-Harizi; a less literary but still more inge- 
 nious copy in those of the Syriac writer Ebed Yesu. 
 
 This tendency to rhymed prose and to alliteration marks 
 the charm of Semitic prose- writing in general. If we add to 
 this a certain stateliness and grandeur, we can understand the 
 attraction it has always had for the Western ear. All of these 
 characteristics are very evident in the prose of the Bible. It 
 is these characteristics that have led noted scholars to imagine 
 that some metrical scheme must lie at the base even of the 
 stories contained in the Book of Genesis. Unfortunately, 
 this grandeur and this alliteration are not always apparent 
 in our translations of the Bible. The simplicity of Hebrew 
 constructions is apt to become monotonous in a modern 
 tongue; the alliterations and assonances are easily lost, and 
 the peculiar cadences refuse reproduction. One has to read 
 in the original the simple stories of the patriarchs, the tales of 
 the wars for Jehovah's sake, the descriptions of the glories of 
 kings and prmces, in order to appreciate their full literary 
 value. 
 
 "It is generally thought that Hebrew Literature ended with 
 the final canonization of the Bible as the Book of the Jewish 
 Church. We have already seen that this was not the case as 
 regards poetry. It was still less so in the case of prose. It is
 
 36 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 true that other languages forced themselves upon the Jews 
 as a means of daily intercourse. Already in late Biblical 
 times this was true of Aramaic; but though prose and poetry 
 were written in this sister dialect both within the Synagogue 
 and without, Hebrew maintained its place as a literary lan- 
 guage of the people. Nearly all the so-called apocryphal 
 writings were originally in Hebrew, and perhaps some parts 
 of the New Testament. In the Talmuds and in the homiletic 
 Literature of the Talmudic period (the Midrashim), we find a 
 mixture of the two dialects, a cross between the literary 
 Hebrew and the more popular Aramaic. But all through the 
 Middle Ages and down to our own day, we have a long line of 
 writers in Hebrew upon all conceivable subjects: history, 
 biography, linguistics, ethics, and especially theology and 
 casuistry; until, in modem times, the printing-press and the 
 newspaper speak to us in a language derived directly from 
 that in which the prophets of old delivered their harangues. 
 And, at the present, from being the language of learned in- 
 tercourse and of literary expression, Hebrew bids fair to have 
 a new lease of life in the Holy Land as the tongue of a recon- 
 stituted people. 
 
 No such revived Hfe awaits the Syriac. Its place has been 
 taken by Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish. Syriac has remained 
 purely a Church language. It produces no Literature to-day, 
 and even in the Church service its days are numbered. What- 
 ever prose works it produced down to the thirteenth century, 
 when production practically ceased, are with very few excep- 
 tions of a rehgious character or deal with religious subjects. 
 There is much that is noble in the homilies and sermons and 
 Bible commentaries composed by Nestorian and Jacobite ec- 
 clesiastics. The Holy Ephraem, Philoxenus of Mabry, and 
 Jacob Burdeana, in their various writings, show us what expres- 
 sion the Syriac language is capable of when it is pure at its 
 source and undefiled; while the numerous Acts of the Martyrs, 
 the Histories of holy men, the Romances of Addai and the
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 37 
 
 Christ, of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and of the Emperor 
 JuHan are sufl&cient evidence that imagination was not want- 
 ing even in the cell of the monk and the study of the cloister. 
 But there was an additional reason that prevented Syriac Lit- 
 erature from flowing unobstructed in channels of its own. We 
 have seen that it was held within strict limits by Church and 
 religious tradition. Its development was also retarded by 
 the fascinating influence of Greek wisdom. In the late Greek 
 schools of Syria and Mesopotamia, both Nestorian and Jacob- 
 ite clerics had become acquainted with Greek Literature and 
 with Greek Science. Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, to mention 
 only a few, represented to them the great outside world and 
 satisfied their natural longing for a wider and a more compre- 
 hensive knowledge. They translated many of the great works 
 of Greek thinkers into their own Syriac and followed this up 
 with similar renderings of Greek historical and Church writ- 
 ings. Later Syriac Literature is thus in the thraldom of a 
 foreign bondage. Caught between the Church and Hellas, 
 all initiative was driven out. But even as a Literature of 
 translation it rendered two noble services to the world of 
 thought and to Literature. It was the stepping-stone on 
 which Eastern imagery passed over from Asia into Europe. 
 The Panchatantra, or Fables of Bidpai, was translated from 
 the Pahlavi by Syriac-speaking monks; from Syriac into 
 Arabic and Hebrew, and from Hebrew into the various 
 languages of modem Europe, providing entertainment and 
 enjoyment wherever it went. It was the same with the 
 great Sagirite. Middle Age Europe would have known 
 little of this tremendous mind, and both Jewish and Moham- 
 medan thought would have remained without the terminology 
 with which they were able to turn their theology into a re- 
 ligious philosophy, had not these translators into Syriac made 
 the "Organon" and other similar works available to the 
 Oriental mind. 
 We have seen that Arabic rhymed prose had its origin in the
 
 38 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 Koran. The ordinary prose of the Arabs had a similar be- 
 ginning. In the wonderful development of Islam, few ele- 
 ments are more surprising than the influence exerted by its 
 founder in almost all the walks of life. Great teachers had 
 existed before him who had founded religious and ethical 
 systems to which millions of human beings have given their 
 adhesion. They have been the great central fire from which 
 later times have drawn their inspiration. But in none of the 
 great systems has the influence of one man been so all-per- 
 vading as has that of Mohammed, the Arabian prophet. 
 Religion, ethics, law, social and political science, all these, 
 as far as Mohammedans are concerned, are based upon what 
 he is believed to have said and to have done. It was also his 
 boast that he had given to his people a Bible and that he had 
 raised them to the position of lettered folk, on a par with 
 "the people of a Book," as Jews and Christians were called. 
 In the Koran, Arabic prose was put to writing for the first 
 time. It was Mohammed who commenced to fix definitely 
 for his people the supposed history of the past and to transmit 
 in literary form the legends about their predecessors which 
 they had heard from their neighbors. It is true that he had 
 parametic ends in view. But, in doing so, he excited an in- 
 terest in the past that was destined never to wane again. In 
 opposition to the poets, he gave a literary value to prose which 
 it had not previously possessed. His example was followed 
 in this matter also. The poets continued to sing of the val- 
 iant deeds of their tribesmen; but, in putting their poems 
 into writing, they or others did not now scruple to prefix to 
 the poetry a prose description of the events and persons con- 
 cerned. In this manner Arabic historiography was born. 
 A long line of annalists and historians testify to the worthy 
 interest these men and their readers had in their own history 
 and in that of their neighbors. Mohammedanism was born 
 in the full light of day, and its historians, more than those of 
 any other people or religious body, have collected the materials
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 39 
 
 which permit us to look into every nook and corner of their 
 manifold doings. It would be useless to mention the names of 
 these many writers, from the great biographer of the prophet, 
 Ibn Ishak (733), and the excellent annahst, al-Tabari (738), 
 down to the first philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun (1332). 
 Each division of the various Mohammedan empires has its 
 own historians; each country and each principal city. The 
 lives of its great men are told in irmumerable biographies; and 
 the science of geography aided an understanding of the sur- 
 roundings in which the events narrated took place. 
 
 All this was done, not only with a view to the permanent 
 fixing of historical tradition, but also with a taste for literary 
 expression. This same taste is shown in the many books 
 written by Arabs and denominated "Adab" or polite litera- 
 ture, in which, with a mixture of prose and poetry, stories, 
 witty sayings, curious traits, commendable virtues, and rep- 
 rehensible faults, were collected and illustrated, and in this 
 way an antidote was given to the rough and ready pothouse 
 tales told by the professional story-teller. Of these latter, 
 the most noted are, of course, those comprised within the 
 cycle of the " Thousand Nights and a Night. ' ' To most West- 
 erners these Boccaccian tales represent the quintessence of 
 the ability of Arabic litterateurs. But they convey a most 
 erroneous impression of what that ability really was. The 
 '* Arabian Nights" have never been looked upon as Literature 
 by the Arabs themselves. They represent the gossip of the 
 club; ribald tales which one may tell over drink or food, but 
 which are not deserving of a place by the side of the great 
 masterpieces. They are not even a faithful picture of real 
 Arab life as are the romances of Antar, of the Banu Hilal, or 
 Saif dhu al-Yazan. They are the unhealthy product of the 
 close city life, not of the clear air of the desert ; an imitation 
 only, built up on the basis of the Persian ''Thousand Days" 
 and reeking of the filth of Bagdad and Cairo. Unfortunately 
 Galland and Lane, Weil, Knight, and Burton have given
 
 40 SEMITIC LITERATURES 
 
 them a vogue in the West, which they have never enjoyed 
 in the East itself. 
 
 Unfortunately, the West has never fully understood the 
 East, nor has it understood the debt that it owes to its earlier 
 sister. In the Mediterranean area the commingling of the 
 two has gone on from the earliest times. The deeper becomes 
 the study of the ancient world-powers in Egypt, Syria, and 
 Mesopotamia, the firmer does the conviction grow that the 
 beginnings of our Art, our Architecture, and our Litera- 
 ture are to be found there. In that region we must look for 
 the beginnings of much Greek mythology. Many ideas made 
 prominent in Greek philosophy had their origin in Babylonian 
 conceptions. If the East was hellenized under Alexander 
 the Great and his followers, many elements of culture were 
 brought back into Europe. But the chief glory of the Semites 
 lies in the fact that they have produced two great books, and 
 have given Bibles to two of the great religious factors in the 
 development of the medieval and modem world. I have 
 already spoken of the Koran. As a book of holy traditions 
 and religious exhortations, it has been and is the center around 
 which nearly three hundred millions of mankind gather. As 
 a masterpiece of the world's Literature, it has inspired a large 
 and an important following, and even we of to-day can still 
 feel the elemental force of its power and the grandeur of the 
 simple efforts towards the divine which it contains. 
 
 What, then, are we to say of our Bible and of its influence ? 
 If we look at it simply from the religious point of view, it is 
 clear that this influence cannot be fully measured. It has 
 driven whole peoples to greatest and noblest efforts. It has 
 been a joy to those glad of heart and a comfort to them that 
 sit in darkness. But its literary influence has been almost as 
 strong as has been its religious importance. It has not only 
 molded later Hebrew Literature and inspired singers and 
 writers in that ancient tongue; even in translation its influ- 
 ence has been world-wide. Modem German Literature takes
 
 SEMITIC LITERATURES 41 
 
 its rise with Luther's translation. No man of Western origin 
 understood it better than did the great German reformer. 
 No one has reproduced its spirit in a modern tongue better 
 than he has. And in our own Enghsh Literature, what monu- 
 ment has been of more lasting endurance than the noble 
 version made by the divines of King James ? How much of 
 our later Literature takes its inspiration from that version! 
 How much of our song is but the echo of its sacred pages ? 
 Were it only for this gift of the spirit and of the pen, our 
 gratitude should be eternal to those who wrote and who 
 treasured up these highest aspirations of the human soul.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 By A. V. W. Jackson, Professor of Indo-Iranian 
 Languages 
 
 When one has caught the first glimpses of the Northern 
 Indian dawn from the heights of the Khaibar Pass, and has 
 watched from the top of Adam's Peak the splendor of an 
 Eastern day sweep out of the sea that laves Ceylon, or has seen 
 the bright stars of the long caravan night grow pale before the 
 gorgeous crimson of the herald morn in Persia, one catches 
 some of the fire, the ruddy glow, that belongs to the Crimson 
 East. True, this may not be conducive to justice of judg- 
 ment or accuracy of cold criticism, yet it inspires one with an 
 enthusiasm for those lands of the dawning sun, and helps to- 
 ward a better understanding and truer appreciation of the 
 Literatures of India and Iran — a sympathy which I hope 
 you may in a manner share. 
 
 The history of these two cousin realms, India and Persia, 
 covers a period of more than three millenniums, and is spread 
 over a territory of many thousand miles. To crowd such 
 widespread bounds of time and space into the compass of less 
 than an hour is a task indeed, and will require generous in- 
 dulgence and leniency on the part of the auditor when making 
 a final estimate of the accomplishment. 
 
 India and Persia, each in its way, represent the oldest types 
 of Aryan civilization and the most ancient form of Indo- 
 European Literature. The morning stars sang together when 
 
 43
 
 44 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 poetry was born in these distant lands, and poesy's youthful 
 voice was first lifted in a sacred hymn of praise, alike in the 
 region of the Indus and the Ganges and in the realm of the 
 Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The story of a religious 
 beginning is the same in both, and we may trace the historic 
 development of each in turn. 
 
 The melody of India's voice broke forth earliest in a chant. 
 It was the anthem of the Brahman priest praising the divine 
 powers of nature personified in the sacred hynms of the Vedas. 
 The Rig, the earliest of the four Vedas, comprises a thousand 
 hymns, almost every one of which is a religious lyric in form 
 and expression. These hymns are not mere primitive out- 
 pourings of the human soul, as they were once thought to be; 
 they are finished poems, carefully wrought, and associated 
 with the sacrifices conducted by the priests of old. As the 
 anthem proceeds we behold, one after another, the gods of the 
 Vedic host rising before our visiony It is now Agni, the god of 
 fire, as the heavenly messenger carrying the oblation from the 
 altar to the divine beings above. Next, Indra, the storm-god, 
 marshaling the warring elements of the sky against the demon 
 of drought in the form of a dragon, whom he slays with the 
 lightning, and thus lets loose the pent-up rains to yevive the 
 parched lands dying of thirst. Or it maybe the Sun, the Moon, 
 or the Morning and the Evening Star, that receive their meed 
 of praise and thanksgiving. Sometimes the prayer is for 
 victory, long life, children, happiness. Not infrequently the 
 petition has some baser end in view — the gaining of riches 
 in cattle, or some minor boon — vital to the suppliant, no 
 doubt, but unworthy in our eyes to-day. /A_ few of these 
 hymns, but very few, and they are late, are mere panegyrics 
 of patrons; and some are purely didactic. One entire book, 
 the ninth, religious in its tone, is devoted to the laudation of 
 the soma-plant, the ancient Persian haoma, from which the 
 Indo-Iranians extracted the sacred drink that played so large a 
 part in their sacrifices. The tenth, or last, book includes a long
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 45 
 
 wedding anthem, several hymns for the funeral ritual, a song 
 of creation, a cosmogonic hymn, and some poems which show 
 the earliest beginnings of Hindu speculative thought and pos- 
 sess a loftiness of concept that commands respect even from 
 the most advanced philosophy to-day. 
 
 All the hymns — suktas, 'well-spoken compositions,' they are 
 \called — are written in polished verse, with a considerable 
 jvariety of meters and diversity of style. Some of them may 
 antedate 1500 b.c. in time of composition; none can be later 
 than 1000 b.c. according to the opinion of scholars best compe- 
 tej^ to judge. 
 
 '^he noblest of the early h5Tnns are the few addressed to 
 Varuna, a supersensuous, transcendental being, who rules the 
 world from his supernal realm of heaven, and who originally 
 represented the all-embracing sky. Some of the stanzas that 
 are reverently lifted towards the far-distant abode of this 
 celestial monarch almost approach the majesty of the Psalms. 
 This is especially true of some stanzas in one of the hymns 
 in the Atharva collection, the fourth of the Vedas, magnifying 
 the omniscience and omnipresence of this divine being, in a 
 style not elsewhere matched in Vedic Literature : — 
 
 "This earth is all King Varuna 's possession. 
 
 And yonder lofty sky with boundaries distant, 
 The ocean's twain are but the loins of Varun, 
 Yet in the tiniest drop he lieth hidden. 
 
 " What though one flee beyond the farthest heaven 
 One could not even there escape King Varun, 
 His spies come hither forth from out of heaven. 
 With all their thousand eyes the earth surveying. 
 
 " King Varuna discerns all this that lieth 
 
 Between the firmaments and that beyond them, 
 The very winkings of men's eyes are numbered, 
 He reckons all, as doth the dice a player."
 
 46 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 And again from the Rig: — 
 
 " Whatever be, O Varuna, the trespass 
 
 Which we as men do 'gainst the race of heaven, 
 When heedlessly we violate thy statutes, 
 
 Chastise us not, O God, for that transgression." 
 
 The hymns, however, which have the greatest literary inter- 
 est in the whole collection, perhaps because they are richest 
 in fancy, are the twenty addressed to Ushas, the goddess of the 
 dawn, who corresponds to the Eos of the Greeks and the 
 Aurora of the Romans. The sunrise splendors of Northern 
 Hindustan, more gorgeous than ahnost anywhere else in the 
 world, stirred the hearts of the early Rishis, or Vedic bards, 
 with a throb that burst from their lips in lyric song well-nigh 
 unequaled in the religious lyrics of any other people. Ushas, 
 the damsel fair, born of the sky, twin sister of the night, 
 flees before the light of her lover, the sun, who pursues her 
 across the heavens. Often she plays the part of a coquette 
 as she throws her garb of darkness aside and arrays herself 
 in robes of splendor. The verse weaves itself into a myriad 
 similes as it moves along: — 
 
 "The bringer of glad joys shines out resplendent, 
 Wide unto us she throws the portals open, 
 Arousing all the world she shows us riches ; 
 The dawn hath wakened every living creature. 
 
 " This daughter of the sky comes on our vision, 
 Refulgent maiden clad in shining raiment, 
 Princess of all the earth's goodly possessions, 
 O Dawn auspicious, shine thou to-day upon us." 
 
 And yet, amid all this brilliancy and splendor, a somber tone, 
 a note of sadness comes in, the mingling of the vox humana 
 with the vox seraphica in the lyric cry : —
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 47 
 
 "Gone and departed now are all those mortals 
 Who looked of old upon the Dawn so radiant ; 
 To-day she is beheld by us now living — 
 But those are coming who will see her later." 
 
 / It must not be supposed, however, that the sentimental note 
 is a dominant one in the flig-Veda. A soimd and wholesome 
 tone pervades the entire collection; and occasionally this takes 
 the form of gentle humor or mild sarcasm, good-natured satire 
 or didactic ridicule)> Thus, in one instance, the bard intimates 
 that whatever be the calling or station in life, whether priest, 
 doctor, carpenter, or what-not, all men are after money; 
 it is the same everywhere; and he concludes his jingle in a 
 light-hearted vein that is quite modem : — 
 
 "Poet am I ; Papa's a quack, 
 Mama the upper millstone turns ; 
 Whate'er our aims — like chasing cows — 
 We all are hunting after wealth." 
 
 Quite up-to-date for three thousand years ago! 
 
 The swift march of time does not allow me to attempt a 
 characterization of the other three Vedas. Ab uno disce omnes. 
 But were I to do so, I should not claim them as rivals for the 
 Rig in literary excellence. 
 
 Still less could I make plea for that body of explanatory 
 works known as Brahmanas, which were composed after the 
 era of early Vedic creation had ceased, and which seem to eluci- 
 date the hymns by legendary and traditional matter. Even 
 less strong would be my appeal in the case of those strings of 
 rules called Sutras, '' Threads," that were twined about the 
 ritual which had now grown up around both Vedas and Brah- 
 manas. These Sutras and Brahmanas served, it is thought, 
 to carry the Vedic age forward for five or six hundred years, 
 so that they cover a period ranging presumably from 1000 
 to 400 B.C. Neither of them, however, can make any pre-
 
 48 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 tense to literary qualities. The Brahmana writings are usu- 
 ally spoken of as stupid, silly, inane. The crabbed Sutras, 
 mere formulas to give the rules for the ancient rites and ob- 
 servances, have about the same artistic value as an algebraic 
 formula. Nevertheless, they both have one special interest; 
 they are both written in prose and thus furnish, so far as the 
 Brahmanas go, the earliest examples of prose literature that 
 exist in any Indo-European Literature. The short, choppy 
 sentences of their childish babble are crude enough, it must be 
 confessed, and yet they are often full of fancy. Here is one, the 
 "Legend of the Origin of Night and Day" in the time of primi- 
 tive man, when Yama and his sister Yami were the first beings 
 on earth. I translate the brief narrative nearly literally, so as 
 to preserve the abrupt sentences of the crude style; it is 
 rough enough, but all the imaginative element is there ! 
 
 " Now Yama died. The gods sought to comfort Yami. When 
 they asked her she responded: 'It was to-day he died.' The gods 
 then said, ' Verily if this goes on she will never forget him.' Now up 
 to that time there had been day only, not night. The gods created 
 night. Then came the morrow. Then she began to forget him. 
 Hence they say : ' 'Tis days and nights make us forget our sorrow." 
 
 The fact that the beginnings of Hindu philosophy are to be 
 sought in the Veda has already been intimated; the fact 
 also that philosophy can be treated poetically (Pope tried it 
 in his " Essay on Man ") is proved by the Sanskrit Upanishads, ^ 
 the oldest philosophical treatises, as a whole, in Indian Litera- 
 ture. Numbering some two hundred, these speculative writ- 
 ings cover a long period of time, running back to the sixth 
 century b.c. or earlier, although the latest of them, mere 
 sectarian tracts written even after the Mohammedan conquest 
 of India, may come down as late as 1000 a.d. The oldest of 
 these documents best illustrate the early stages of pantheistic 
 speculation which subsequently developed into the six recog- 
 nized systems of Hindu philosophy. In matter of style the
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 49 
 
 Upanishads are principally composed in verse, but some are 
 in prose or contain prose. Yet, just as Plato's prose is the 
 prose of a poet-philosopher, so they rise at times fully to the 
 standard of recognized Literature, especially in their visual- 
 ized images of the individual soul merging into the All-Soul 
 which gave it birth, or when the phantasmagoria of the world 
 sink into the real background of non-phenomenal existence, 
 and the fitful dream of unreality gives place to the dreamless 
 sleep of the real. To indicate what influence these philosophic 
 productions have had upon the Occident I need only refer to 
 Schopenhauer, who found the Upanishads his solace in life 
 and his consolation in death, or allude to the writings of our 
 own Emerson. 
 
 The calm and serene speculation of the Upanishads gives 
 place to the stirring action of the two great epic poems of 
 India, the " Mahabharata " and the "Ramayana." 
 
 The "Mahabharata," sometimes called the " Iliad of India," 
 is an epic tale of the great war between two rival and related 
 families, which brought the whole of Aryan India into a fatal 
 feud. In compass the monstrous poem is nearly eight times 
 as large as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" taken together, since 
 it contains two hundred thousand verses. The noble Arj una, 
 a perfect type of knighthood, is its Achilles; the god-born 
 Kama is its Hector ; and the martial Yudhishthira, leader of the 
 hosts, its Agamemnon. Yet there the likeness between the 
 huge epic and the Grecian masterpiece practically ends. 
 
 Notwithstanding its unwieldy length the "Mahabharata" 
 has the quality of a true national epic. Its stirring scenes, 
 its deeds of heroism and valor in the fateful battle of eighteen 
 days that forms the crisis of the epic, its situations full of chiv- 
 alry and courage, and its episodes full of love, tenderness, and 
 devotion, of pathos and despair, are literary masterpieces 
 when taken by themselves, and show the human heart stirred 
 to the bottom. Some of the scenes, like those following the 
 night of slaughter, with the lamentation of the women over the
 
 50 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 dead, and the spectral images that rise before the view, would 
 require strains inexpressibly grand — the genius of a Wagner 
 — to give them a tone if set to music ; and the final apotheosis 
 of the heroic figures of the poem, as they ascend to heaven, 
 forms a fitting close to this noble epic, voluminous and vast. 
 The fault of the work, in Western eyes, is its enormous length; 
 the Mr]8ev ayav of the Greeks was not known to the Indian 
 redactors, or final redactor, who wove those ancient Hindu 
 rhapsodies of the past into a giant national poem, and brought 
 the national epic into its present form. 
 
 The other epic, the "Ramayana," or wanderings of the 
 hero Rama, is a more artificial epic as opposed to the folk-epic 
 of India, and represents the true type of a long romantic poem. 
 Unlike the " Mahabharata, " which grew out of old rhapsodies, 
 the "Ramayana" is largely the work of a single author, Val- 
 miki, who blazed out the path for many of the artistic devices 
 that became standards in later Indian Literature, and whom we 
 can, perhaps, date about 500 b.c. The wanderings of the hero 
 Rama, cheated of his throne and banished with his faithful 
 wife Sita, form the theme of the epic. The romance and pathos 
 deepen when the devoted Sita is forcibly carried away by a 
 demon-king to the uttermost bounds of Ceylon in the south. 
 Then comes the adventurous element, when the monkeys of 
 Southern India, the aboriginal population in the guise of 
 monkeys, join hands with the distracted hero in the war to re- 
 cover his wife. Virtue and right triumph at last, and Sita 
 is ultimately restored to her lord. 
 
 From its plot the "Ramayana" is sometimes called the 
 "Odyssey of India," but the parallel is only a distant one; 
 closer analogies in some of its parts might perhaps be found 
 in legends connected with King Arthur, like whom Rama 
 stands as a hero sans peur et sans reproche. Judged from a 
 literary standpoint, the poem suffers, like its companion-piece, 
 from its great length, nearly fifty thousand verses. It has, 
 however, marked literary merit, and many of its episodes and
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 51 
 
 descriptions are full of beauty. The poem fulfils yet another 
 mission, it is a great moral teacher for the youth of India, in 
 whose eyes Rama is the prince ideal and his beloved Sita the 
 nonpareil of wifely devotion. 
 
 At the very time when the orthodox Brahmanical Literature 
 was being developed in the Sanskrit epics, a dialectic Litera- 
 ture in Pali, the sacred language of the Buddhists, was taking 
 shape and entering upon that long literary life which was to 
 extend from the sixth century B.C. to the seventh century a.d. 
 To speak critically, it must be acknowledged that most of the 
 productions of this quasi-Indian Protestantism are not Litera- 
 ture, judged from the esthetic standpoint, forbidding as they 
 are by their schematic formalism, their endless repetitions, 
 and their didactic tone. Nevertheless, it must in fairness be 
 emphasized that such a work as the ''Dhammapada/' a book 
 of moral maxims and sententious virtue, — if virtue can be 
 reduced to aphorisms, — presents its religious teaching with 
 rare strength and beauty. The Pali ''Jatakas," moreover, 
 or stories of Buddha's successive births, contain an immensely 
 interesting mass of folklore in their entertaining accounts of 
 Buddha's earlier incarnations in both human and animal form; 
 and in them we have the beginning of the beast fable for which 
 India is renowned. 
 
 It was out of the Sanskrit animal fables that a new branch 
 of Literature was actually developed in Europe, as represented 
 earliest by the works of ^Esop and Babrius, though some au- 
 thorities still refuse assent to this view. Story-telling under 
 the guise of animal tales was admirably developed among the 
 Hindus from the earliest times. The five books of the San- 
 skrit "Pancatantra," and its successor, the "Hitopades'a," 
 or "Book of Good Counsel," if we translate its title, stand as 
 the culmination of this style of fiction. The student of com- 
 parative literature knows that the fascinating collection of 
 apologues in the Pancatantra was translated into Pahlavi, 
 the Persian of the sixth century of our era and thence into Syr-
 
 52 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 iac, in the same century, and into Arabic in the eighth. From 
 this latter version later renderings were made and found their 
 way into Europe. There was a Greek translation in the 
 twelfth century, a Hebrew and a Latin version in the thirteenth, 
 and finally a German translation of the latter in the fifteenth, 
 century, which ultimately passed into the French of La 
 Fontaine. The narrative of the development is briefly told by a 
 mere mention of the names, "KaUlahand Dimnah," "Bidpah 
 or Pilpay," the "Directorium Humanas Vitse," and "Das 
 Buch der Byspel der alten Wysen." Scores of illustrations 
 stand ready at hand to show this evolution. I need only re- 
 call to your mind the story of the girl who counted her chickens 
 before they were hatched, or the milkmaid who built castles 
 in the air before her milk reached market, or the Brahman 
 who married a wife in fancy before the rice in his bowl 
 found a purchaser. Let me summarize this latter one. 
 
 There the Brahman sat with the bowl of rice before him, 
 and he looked at it and thought what fine rice it was, and how 
 he should charge a good price for it. And then he began to 
 plan what he would do with his money. He decided in his 
 mind that he would marry, that he would even have four wives, 
 and that the youngest and prettiest of them he would love the 
 best. And he dreamed on and on, and thought that perhaps 
 one of the other wives might make him angry, and that if he 
 got angry he would kick her, and he kicked out, and over went 
 his bowl of rice. 
 
 This is but a single instan,ce of scores of these long literary 
 wanderings. 
 
 The next development of importance in Sanskrit Literature 
 is one upon which I would lay especial stress. I refer to the 
 Indian drama. This is considered by most scholars to be 
 independent of outside influence, for the theory that the Greek 
 stage influenced the classic drama of India is now reduced to a 
 minimum. India possesses a rich dramatic literature which 
 deserves far more attention than it has yet received from
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 53 
 
 the student of the history of the player's art. The biblio- 
 graphical lists of Indian dramas show titles of not less than 
 five hundred plays, a number that compares favorably with 
 the histrionic output of the English Elizabethan and Restora- 
 tion periods. Some of these compositions in prose and verse 
 presented before kings, as they were described by some of the 
 native scholars, may date back fifteen centuries or more, 
 and the movement reached its zenith when the Roman drama 
 had died out and before the rise of the drama in Europe, still 
 sunk in the Dark Ages, had yet begun. The Sanskrit drama 
 throughout is the romantic drama, the drama of Shakspere's 
 latter days, and not the classic drama of the Greeks. There 
 is, in fact, no tragedy, for though there is sometimes a very 
 close approach to it, a happy solution must always be found. 
 
 In the long line of Sanskrit dramatists the best known name, 
 familiar to many of you already, is Kalidasa, the Hindu Shak- 
 spere, as he is sometimes called, whose date cannot be placed 
 later than the beginning of the fifth century a.d., and who 
 may have flourished earlier. His "S'akuntala," when it was 
 translated by Sir William Jones more than a century ago, 
 gained the enthusiastic praise of Goethe and evoked the ad- 
 miration of Schiller, as it has won the appreciation of lovers of 
 good literature ever since. This will always be so, and Kali- 
 dasa's grasp of the dramatic conception, his skill in portraying 
 characters, his deft handling of incident and situation, his 
 delicacy and refinement of feeling, together with the beauty 
 of his language and style, will be admired as long as Uterary 
 taste exists. 
 
 If there were time, I should like to sketch some of the 
 scenes in one or other of his three plays, to set forth in Kali- 
 dasa's own words the story of S'akuntala's love, to picture her 
 dismay when the enchanted ring which binds her to her royal 
 lover is lost, their pathetic separation, and the almost Shak- 
 sperian scene where the fisherman who has found it is haled into 
 court, and to tell you how, after the long and painful separation,
 
 54 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 the loving oouple are united in the embrace of their princely 
 son : but that would carry us too far afield. 
 / Should we seek to parallel Shakspere, there is a still earlier 
 drama, the "Clay _Cart," attributed to King S'udraka, which 
 combines all the elements of an Elizabethan play, even to 
 comphcations through mistaken identity, disguise, the use of 
 stage properties, the introduction of a gambling episode and a 
 political sub-plot, together with a supposed murder and a trial 
 for life on the ground of circumstantial evidence, only to reach 
 a happy solution, in conformity with the laws of Hindu 
 dramaturgy, when the reformed gambler who has gone into a 
 monastery comes into court and tells his tale. I might cite the 
 names of a dozen gifted playwrights in early India. The list 
 would include King Harsha, a literary patron and himself an 
 author of other plays in the seventh century, and it would also 
 contain an indirect parallel to Romeo and Juliet by Bhava- 
 bhuti in the eighth century and a clever drama of Machiavel- 
 lian policy, a sort of Indian dramatic "Richeheu" by Vi- 
 s'akhadatta a century later; nor should I forget the admirably 
 constructed drama of the "Curse of the Angry Priest" by 
 Kshemis'vara, who wrote in the tenth century a play on the 
 sufferings of a good king, which has all the dramatic quahties 
 of the story of Job. Dozens of parallels might likewise be 
 drawn with the West in regard to scenic structure, style, action, 
 the use of dialect characters, inanimate objects, letters, pic- 
 tures, and rings, as a means to complicate the story, or the 
 introduction of pathos and despair, fun, humor, and surprise, 
 or even the supernatural, to bring about the desired result. 
 They all seem quite modern, although anticipating Shakspere 
 by a thousand or fifteen hundred years. 
 // But I must pass into that realm of lyric poetry which lies 
 so close to the dramatic. India possesses a number of poems 
 that are worthy to rank as masterpieces in the world's best 
 Literature. From the earliest times the Hindu has turned to 
 lyric strains; the vlnd, or lute, was in high favor. Even the
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 55 
 
 hymns chanted by the Vedic bards of old, may be regarded as 
 odes or rhapsodies. The great Sanskrit epics occasionally 
 contain lyric passages, and the Sanskrit drama shows the use 
 of the lyric in its perfection. Kalidasa has outbursts of 
 poetic passion in his plays that rival anything in Literature. 
 Sanskrit Literature includes long lyric poems as well as 
 short, and among India's authors of this type Kalidasa again 
 is peer, his passion rivaling anything in the world's lyric 
 Literature. Like his contemporaries, he is the child of an 
 Indian renaissance, if we understand that term broadly 
 enough, a kind of Sanskrit Marlowe, with all the richness and 
 exuberance, the fancy and imagination, that mark the true 
 poet. One of his poems, "The Seasons," may be compared 
 with Thomson's masterpiece, and the "Cloud Messenger," 
 or lover's greeting intrusted to a cloud about to float away 
 to the beloved, is as delicate as a poem of Shelley, and caught 
 the fancy of Schiller. Not to mention other minstrels, the 
 lyric measures of Jayadeva, who wrote as late as the twelfth 
 century, may be paralleled with the fire and passion of Shak- 
 spere's "Venus and Adonis." 
 
 Some of the Sanskrit lyrics are gems of poetic composition, 
 polished to an exquisite finish of refined workmanship. Those 
 attributed to Bhartrihari injthe siij:th- century, for example, 
 would well illustrate the point. Here is one, for instance, 
 that may be called "Cupid's Whirligig," showing that the 
 course of true love did not always run smoothly, even in 
 ancient India. It is the old case of the beloved not recipro- 
 cating: — 
 
 "She whom I dote on constantly 
 
 Coldly my wooing spurns : 
 Her heart pines for another man, 
 
 His for another burns ; 
 And yet that certain other maid 
 
 Madly for me doth languish ; 
 Fie upon her, him, her and me, 
 
 And Cupid, cause of anguish."
 
 56 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 Another, which Heine would have Uked, runs thus: — 
 
 "Thy face, a lovely lily; 
 Thine eyes, the lotus blue ; 
 Thy teeth are jasmine blossoms, 
 Thy lips the rosebud's hue, 
 The velvet touch of the champak 
 Thy tender skin doth own ; 
 How comes it the Creator 
 Hath made thy heart a stone? " 
 
 And here is still another, which one of my pupils has versified: 
 
 " In the heart of the sage there burneth a lamp 
 Clear shining by night and by day 
 With a flame so pure that he boasteth sure 
 There's naught its beams can stay. 
 
 " But a fawn-eyed maid comes gliding by, 
 And giveth one glance so bright. 
 That his flame once pure is all obscure 
 Through Love's more radiant light." 
 
 In another quatrain, which I may call " Cupid's Fishing Pond," 
 the god of love baits his hook with a fair maid; and in still 
 another we have an early parallel to Shakspere's "All the 
 world's a stage"; while in many a one a sly touch of humor 
 is found. Sometimes it may be only four lines, — the old 
 story of the boy, the stone, and the dog : — 
 
 "A dog in sight? — there's never a stone to throw ! 
 A stone at hand ? — no dog to hit, I trow ! 
 Both dog and stone at the same time in view ? 
 'Tis the King's dog ! pshaw ! what am I to do ? " 
 
 Prose fiction is capitally represented by Dandin in the 
 sixth century, whose "Adventures of the Ten Princes" is an 
 admirable example of the tale of roguery and picaresque 
 novel, and there are excellent examples of story-telling in 
 versified form to be found in the rich collection of the Katha-
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 57 
 
 Sarit Sagara, or "Ocean of the Streams of Story." The 
 romantic tale in the form of artistic language at least reached 
 its height in some of the court authors of the sixth or seventh 
 century, whose Kavya style, or courtly composition, out- 
 Lylied Lyly and out-Guevaraed Guevara in conceits, puns, 
 double-meanings, and other fanciful devices almost beyond 
 our comprehension and certainly beyond our taste. 
 
 If there were time, I might say much about the other 
 branches of Literature, like the codes of law and traditional 
 wisdom in verse, such as the great collection that bears the 
 name of Manu, the Solon and Lycurgus of Indian legislation. 
 Or I might touch upon poetic treatises dealing with astronomy, 
 mathematics, medicine, and their kin; but they would be 
 largely technical in character and not belong strictly to belles- 
 lettres. The only great literary domain which I can think of 
 at the moment as not represented is history. India is of all 
 nations the least historically inclined; her religion and phil- 
 osophy made her so. There is no Hindu Herodotus, Thu- 
 cydides, Livy, or Tacitus; what history there is, is largely 
 confined to legends, romantic tales, and the records on in- 
 scriptions and coins. 
 
 As for India's modern Literature, I may say that the lyric, 
 epic, and the dramatic have been fostered and are still cul- 
 tivated to-day, both in Sanskrit and in the native vernaculars, 
 for Literature is not a lost art among the Hindus. If called 
 upon to summarize my views, I should say that Sanskrit 
 Literature, through its long line of historic development, may 
 claim from the student of comparative Literature the same 
 attention that the Sanskrit language exacts from the student 
 of comparative philology. 
 
 II 
 
 The ever hurrying beat of time's footfall warns me that the 
 minutes are speeding on. And what shall I say of Persia —
 
 58 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 that other land of sunrise and dawn, whose Literature, though 
 far less extensive than that of India, has nevertheless exer- 
 cised a potent influence upon the world's Literature and the 
 world's thought. 
 
 In Iran, as in Hindustan, and as in Israel of old, the first 
 echo of poetry awoke in a prophet's song. This time it was 
 the voice of Zarathushtra, the great religious teacher of Persia, 
 in the seventh century B.C., chanting in fervid tones an an- 
 them of divine praise. His cry broke the silence of the night 
 perchance in some mountain cavern in northwestern Iran, or 
 heralded the morn as he wandered priestlike throughout 
 the borders of Persia, preaching the story of his communion 
 with Ormazd, the god, and the archangels. It is now a vision 
 of heaven and the future, next an appeal to mankind to repent, 
 to abandon the way of the wicked, and follow the path of 
 righteousness. For a moment there may be a note of de- 
 spondency in the tone, since deaf ears hearken not unto his 
 word; but comfort is always in God and the marvelous 
 works of creation, so the impassioned question rises to the 
 prophet's lips: — 
 
 "This I ask thee — tell me true, O Lord ! — 
 Who in the beginning by his generation was the father of Righteous- 
 ness? 
 Who established the path of the sun and the stars ? 
 Who is it, through whom the moon waxes and wanes ? — 
 This and yet more, O Mazdah, I desire to know. 
 
 "This I ask thee — tell me true, O Lord ! — 
 Who hath made firm the earth below and the sky 
 So that it falleth not? Who, the waters and the plants? 
 Who hath yoked swiftness to the winds and the clouds ? 
 Who is the creator, O Mazdah, of (the archangel) Good Thought ?'* 
 
 His own soul loiows the answer, since Ahura Mazdah and the 
 celestial hierarchy form ever the theme of Zoroaster's psalms. 
 These psalms — Gathas, "hynms, anthems," they are called
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 59 
 
 — give the outpourings of the seer's heart in rhythmic stanzas 
 that resemble in meter the verses of the Vedic bards, though 
 somewhat lat.er in time of composition. 
 
 Later than the Gathas in form and structure, but inspired 
 by Zoroaster, though doubtless the work of various hands, 
 are the Avestan Yashts, "praises." In matter of content, 
 however, some of their myths and legends may go back as 
 far as the Vedic age, or even to the primitive period of Indo- 
 Iranian unity, when the ancestors of the Persians and the 
 Hindus still formed an undivided community, a single branch 
 of the Indo-European stock. The majority of the Yashts 
 are composed in meter, and their measured stanzas glorify 
 the various divine personifications or the demigods and heroes 
 of the faith. Sometimes they rise to the height of real poetry, 
 as in the description of Mithra, the angel of truth and celestial 
 embodiment of the sun's light, as he rides forth majestic in 
 his chariot across the heavens, guiding and watching over 
 men, even in the battle which his mighty power sets a-going, 
 or sternly punishing the sinner that breaks his word and 
 pledge. All this is portrayed in the tenth Yasht, a composi- 
 tion devoted to extolling Mithra's grandeur, which is next 
 only to that of Ormazd. As for some of the other parts of 
 the Avesta, I confess that they are rather prosaic, although 
 always imbued with a deep religious feehng which commands 
 respect. 
 
 The aftermath that sprang up when the Avestan harvest 
 had been reaped, grew in the field of Pahlavi Literature during 
 the Sassanian period of Christian times; but it yields little 
 to the sickle of the gleaner. In character, for the most part, 
 it is supplemental to the Avesta, and bears much the same 
 relation to that earlier monument as the Patristic writings 
 do to our own Bible, or the Talmudic Literature bears to the 
 Old Testament. Among its products, however, we occa- 
 sionally gather a few good sheaves. There are compositions, 
 for instance, of a secular type, like the "Romance of King
 
 60 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 Ardashir," a narrative of the king's love for a fair princess, 
 his valor in slaying a dragon, and accomplishing other deeds 
 of prowess; and this one in particular has the quality of 
 imagination and deserves consideration as showing the begin- 
 nings of story-telling. There are likewise Pahlavi works that 
 contain philosophic discussions or kindred matter, based on 
 beliefs current in the earliest days. There is even something 
 as practical and commonplace as a treatise on the game of 
 chess ! But, taken as a whole, Pahlavi Literature is prosaic 
 in content as it is in form, and whatever may be its secular 
 or religious worth, I think we are justified in withholding 
 from it the title of literary merit. 
 
 Far different is the case with Modern Persian Literature, 
 which followed in the wake of Pahlavi Literature, overtaking 
 its slow course with rapid sweep, as early as the ninth or 
 tenth century a.d. Several distinct waves mark the begin- 
 ning of this new literary era. Paramount among them was 
 that of epic poetry, which broke into a crest nearly a thou- 
 sand years ago. 
 
 The great name in Persian epic poetry is that of Firdausi 
 (935-1020) who devoted his life to singing of the past glories 
 of Iran. His masterpiece, the "Shah Namah," or ''Book of 
 Kings," is a personal epic in the sense that it is the work of a 
 single rhapsodist, but it is a national epic because pulsing 
 with the, heartbeat of a people. Firdausi's trumpet tones ring 
 and re-ring with the note of the old-time pride of Iran, echoing 
 in clarion blasts the story of her ancient kings in their long 
 line of sovereignty, the valor of her heroes, and the stubborn 
 baseness of her inveterate foes. At times the kindled flame 
 burns high on the heights of epic grandeur, illuminating the 
 long poem with the fire of inspiration, so that its huge mass 
 of sixty thousand verses is aglow, and warms the reader's 
 heart. The fact that Matthew Arnold has given one of the 
 episodes of the "Shah Namah" an enduring form in English 
 verse through his free adaptation of the tragic story of "Sohrab
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 61 
 
 and Rustum" is among the proofs that the heroic poem is 
 entitled to a place in the circle of epic masterpieces. I wish 
 there were time to compare for you Firdausi's original rhap- 
 sody with Arnold's spirited refitting of this story of the fatal 
 combat between father and son, but I must hasten forward to 
 mention another genre in Persian Literature, the poetry of 
 adventure portrayed in the romantic epopee. 
 
 Nizami, in the twelfth century, is the acknowledged chief- 
 tain in the realm of the rhymed romance. Love, heroism, 
 and adventure formed the burden of his song as he tuned his 
 lay at the same moment when the trouveres and minnesingers 
 in the West were chanting their chansons in the very heyday 
 of chivalry. He is their peer, and in his romantic story of 
 " Khusrau and Shirin" I am not sure that he did not outdo his 
 unknowing European rivals. 
 
 One cannot lecture on Persian Literature without ringing 
 changes on the major key of mysticism, because the Sufi note 
 of veiled allegory and masked symbolism is a dominant chord 
 in much of its verse. To appreciate the spirit of Persian 
 poesy's very being, one must understand the fundamental 
 elements of its harmony, its emblematic nature, the delicate 
 interchange of sign and thing signified, subtle play of disguised 
 meanings, esoteric allusions, phraseology with hidden im- 
 plications that were understood of the elect, and all the refined 
 spiritualization of physical and material images, pseudo- 
 erotic in their nature. This Uterary species requires that 
 same delicate method of interpretation which may be illus- 
 trated by our own understanding of the "Song of Solomon," 
 or measured by our appreciation of the seventeenth-century 
 English poets, Donne, Vaughan, the Fletchers, and Crashaw. 
 
 The paragon of Persian mystic poets in the twelfth century 
 was Attar; in the thirteenth it was Rumi. These two mystics 
 overtop all the rest, even Jami in the early fifteenth century. 
 I wish I could illustrate both of them by examples, for I should 
 hke to take Jalal ad Din Rumi's long mystical poem, the
 
 62 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 "Masnavi," as a specimen of Persian emblematic Literature, 
 but I shall have to content myself with a few lines from the 
 masterpiece of his predecessor, Farid ad Din Attar, a com- 
 position that gives an allegorical portrayal of the longing of 
 the human soul for union with the Divine. The poem is 
 filled with the symbolic language of Sufism. FitzGerald 
 caught admirably its spirit in his free version of the "Bird- 
 Parhament" of Attar, with its catchwords of devotion, 
 hidden under seemingly commonplace terms, and its spiritual 
 ecstasy concealed beneath what appear to be mere offhand 
 allusions. Note the following, for example: — 
 
 "The Moths had long been exiled from the Flame 
 They worship ; so to solemn council came 
 And voted one of them by Lot be sent 
 To find their Idol. One was chosen — went, 
 And after a long circuit in sheer Gloom, 
 Seeing, he thought, the taper in a Room, 
 Flew back at once to say so. But the Chief 
 Of Mothistan slighted so slight Belief, 
 And sent another Messenger, who flew 
 Up to the House, in at the window, through 
 The Flame itself ; and back the Message brings 
 With yet no sign of conflict on his wings. 
 Then went a Third, who spurred with true Desire, 
 Plunging at once into the sacred Fire 
 Folded his wings within, till he became 
 One Color and one Substance with the Flame. 
 He only knew the Flame who in it burned, 
 And only he could tell who ne'er to tell returned." 
 
 Persia is the land of lyric poetry, the home of the nightingale 
 and the rose. What more need I say on this theme than 
 allow two or three of her minstrels to speak for themselves ? 
 Here is a fragment as early as 900 a.d. ; it is from Rudagi, 
 the father of later Persian song, and is full of lovelorn sadness :
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 63 
 
 "When dead thou shalt behold me, 
 
 My lips forever sealed, 
 Life from my body severed. 
 
 Passion ne'er more revealed ; 
 Then seat thyself beside me, 
 
 Whisper one soft word yet : 
 ' 'Twas I who slew thee, truly 
 
 Alas ! how I regret.' " 
 
 Our own Chaucer in his youth, four centuries later, could 
 not have turned the verse more gracefully, or more sadly. 
 Let us choose another from Rudagi, a lyric on wine, and 
 it has been rendered from the Persian by Professor Cowell, 
 tiie teacher of "Omar" FitzGerald: — 
 
 "Bring me yon wine which thou might'st call a melted ruby m its 
 
 cup. 
 Or like a simitar unsheathed, in the sun's noon-tide hght held up. 
 'Tis the rose-water, thou might'st say, yea thrice distilled for 
 
 purity ; 
 Its sweetness falls as sleep's own balm steals o'er the vigil-wearied 
 
 eye. 
 Thou mightest call the cup the cloud, the wine the raindrop from 
 
 it cast. 
 Or say the joy that fills the heart whose prayer long looked-for 
 
 comes at last. 
 Were there no wine all hearts would be a desert waste, forlorn and 
 
 black. 
 But were our last life-blood extinct, the sight of wine would bring 
 
 it back. 
 Oh ! if an eagle would but swoop, and bear the wine up to the sky. 
 Far out of reach of all the base, who would not shout ' Well done ! * 
 
 as I." 
 
 A dozen other lyric fragments from the same early poet 
 might be cited. It is sometimes an elegy, sometimes a eulogy, 
 or at times a whimsical quatrain in humorous vein. Some-
 
 64 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 body had twitted Rudagi, when old, on the vanity of dyeing 
 his hair. He playfully responded in improvised verse : — 
 
 "Black is the color when we mourn, 
 And hence there's reason where 
 An old man takes to wearing black 
 By dyeing black his hair ! " 
 
 Handling the quatrain with lyric skill belongs to all the 
 coterie of this same period and afterwards. Yet by none 
 was it brought to higher perfection than by a famous phil- 
 osopher, physician, and poet, a forerunner of Omar Khayyam, 
 the renowned Ibn Sina,who is better known to us of the West 
 through the Latinized form of his name, Avicenna. One of 
 his verses rings so much like Omar Kha5^am that it has 
 generally been ascribed to the later poet. It runs: — 
 
 "From Earth's dark Center unto Saturn's Gate 
 I've solved all problems of this World's Estate ; 
 
 From every Snare of Plot and Guile set free, 
 Each Bond resolved — saving alone Death's Fate." 
 
 A brother poet to Avicenna was Abu Said, lyrist and mystic. 
 In Abu Said the two moods, lyric and mystic, were so closely 
 combined that it is difficult to determine whether in some of 
 his verses the deep religious fervor for the divinity is actually 
 hidden under the passionate guise of love. But it is sup- 
 posed to be there. Here is one of these pseudo-erotic in- 
 stances : — 
 
 "Last night in my beloved's arms I lay, 
 My prayers she did with sweet caresses pay ; 
 The moon went down — the sun came up — 'twas day. 
 Blame not the moon ; we had too much to say." 
 
 This version of mine may be rough and imperfect, but it 
 conveys the sense and modernness of touch which mark some 
 of Abu Said's stanzas to a remarkable degree.
 
 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 65 
 
 Oft and again the lute strings were touched with lyric per- 
 fection by the fingers of Saadi, renowned poet, moralist, and 
 philosopher, who died at Shiraz in 1291. Here, for example, is 
 a verse with a pretty turn, bringing out the legend of the 
 origin of the pearl as an illustration of the virtue of humility. 
 I give it fairly closely after Saadi's own hues : — 
 
 "A raindrop fell from the heavens on high 
 
 And modestly said as it sped through the sky 
 Into vast ocean to be forgot, 
 'It is God's will that I be not.' 
 
 " While viewing itself with eye of disdain, 
 
 A mussel-shell caught up that wee drop of rain ; 
 Heaven's vaulted dome, then, did silently whirl, 
 And lo ! the raindrop became a pearl ! " 
 
 It would be difficult to imagine anything more delicate and 
 graceful. Heine would have reveled in such a verse. 
 
 The prince of Persian lyric poets, however, — and you 
 know his name well, — is Hafiz. I need not illustrate by 
 example either his beauty or his skill, because all lovers of 
 passionate poetry know something about his songs of the 
 nightingale and the rose. The very verse which this poet- 
 lover sings forms a part of his own being as Hafiz breathes 
 enraptured sighs over the dark musky tresses of his beloved, 
 or quaffs the ruby wine, red as the blood of the rose on her 
 lips, which transports his soul into an ecstasy, and makes 
 his pulse beat in rhythmic harmony with the throb of his 
 idol's heart. 
 
 But my time is up! I have not a moment to speak of 
 Persian prose, so I shall omit it, with a loss more or less small 
 or great. Nor can I say anything about the drama except 
 to state that it is a modern creation, hardly a century old. I 
 must dismiss it likewise, adding only that there may possibly 
 inhere in its crude attempts signs that florescence is ever
 
 66 THE LITERATURE OF INDIA AND PERSIA 
 
 possible in Persia. Yet it is neither through her embryo 
 drama nor through her older established prose that Persia is 
 going to live in Literature. It will be through her great poets 
 of the past and of the hoped-for future, for the soft trill of the 
 nightingale's song still lingers, and the delicate aroma of the 
 Persian rose will never depart from her perfumed atmosphere. 
 The rhythm of Persian verse, the charm of its poetic imagery 
 when not carried too far, the exquisite tenderness of feeling, 
 and the gentle effusion of eternal emotions will continue to 
 appeal to the heart, as in days gone by, as long as human 
 feehng remains unchanged and human sympathy abides. 
 
 The hastiest kind of a conclusion must serve as a close to this 
 all too rapid sketch. We have traced in turn the literary 
 development of India and Persia from the first gleam of the 
 sun at early dawn, through the rich crimson of the morning 
 light until it blends into the white splendor of the meridian 
 day, thence dipping with slanting golden rays into the west- 
 ern sea. And lo! the sun has already sped far downward 
 into the darkening West.
 
 IV 
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 By Friedrich Hirth, Professor of Chinese 
 
 The Literature which forms the subject of the present 
 lecture is more than that of China. As a foreign Uterature 
 it is studied also by the Coreans, the Japanese, and the 
 Annamites; and it may therefore be quite appropriately 
 called the Classic Literature of the Far East. The civiliza- 
 tion of all these nations has been affected by its study, per- 
 haps even in a higher degree than that of the nations of 
 Europe has been by the literatures of Greece and Rome. 
 Millions received from it, in the course of centuries, their 
 mental training. The Chinese who created it have through 
 it perpetuated their national character and imparted some 
 of their idiosyncrasies of thought to their formerly ilhterate 
 neighbors. 
 
 It would be difficult to describe in a few words the char- 
 acter of this Literature. As representing Chinese civih- 
 zation, it has been called Confucianist, and this term may hit 
 the truth if we look upon it as covering not only works of the 
 Confucian school, but also "Anti-Confucian" Literature 
 and a good deal of what is decidedly neutral. Certainly, the 
 personahty of the sage stands in closer relation to the de- 
 velopment of Chinese Literature than that of any other in- 
 dividual stands to any other national literature either in 
 Asia or in Europe. In its earhest development Chinese Lit- 
 erature was either Confucianist or anti-Confucianist; and 
 even in that conspiracy of silence characteristic of the oppos- 
 
 67
 
 68 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 ing schools, the one man treated with silence was Confucius. 
 If we consider Chinese Literature as it now exists in myriads 
 of volumes, works which may be called Confucianist in the 
 proper sense of the word are in the minority. 
 
 I need not dwell on the fact that Chinese Literature is ab- 
 solutely autochthonous. In this respect it may be called 
 unique, as scarcely any of the world's other national hteratures 
 worthy of such a name may be said to have taken its own 
 course without being influenced by the civilization of neigh- 
 boring nations. The development of Literature in China 
 corresponds with that of the nation itself. All attempts to 
 derive its origin from quarters outside the traditional cradle 
 of the Chinese race near the banks of the Yellow River should 
 be treated with suspicion. In all such problems which can- 
 not be supported by arguments derived from Literature itself 
 it is safer to admit our ignorance than to trust to the vaga- 
 ries of a Uvely imagination. I shall not, therefore, here enter 
 upon the question whether the Chinese race has immigrated 
 from Babylonia or some other part of the world; for I quite 
 agree with Professor Giles, who says, "No one knows 
 where the Chinese came from," and adds, "it appears to be 
 an ethnological axiom that every race must have come from 
 somewhere outside of its own territory." Similarities be- 
 tween certain phases of Chinese culture and ideas current 
 in India, Babylonia, and other seats of ancient culture may 
 be the result of the uniform organization of the human brain, 
 which cannot help arriving at the same inventions calculated 
 to make life more comfortable whether in the East or in the 
 West; or they may be the result of relationships of pre- 
 historic existence, which it would be hopeless to trace by the 
 means now at our disposal. Comparative folk-lore abounds 
 with problems which neither the most ancient literature nor 
 the prehistoric treasures of our museums can explain. Look- 
 ing at the full moon, I have often wondered why I could not 
 discover in its landscape the figure of a hare or a rabbit; and
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 69 
 
 yet in remote antiquity millions of Indians and millions of 
 Chinese saw it, as well probably as millions of pre-Columbian 
 Mexicans and Mayas. Such similarities can be traced be- 
 tween numerous characteristics of Indian folk-lore and what 
 appear as repetitions with but slight modifications in Chinese 
 Literature as early as the fourth century B.C. But, since no 
 intercourse has been shown to have taken place between 
 India and China at that early date, I am inclined to think 
 that the connecting link lies far back in prehistoric periods 
 when the foundations of popular tradition on both sides were 
 laid either in China, or in India, if not elsewhere. We need 
 not be surprised to find that these Indian traditions do not 
 appear in the earlier Chinese Literature. The reason may be 
 that all we know of Chinese history and popular life previous 
 to the fourth century B.C. has been transmitted by Confucian- 
 ist writers, who would not place on record ideas at variance 
 with their own. But for this one-sidedness of the earliest 
 historians the Chinese would perhaps appear to us entirely 
 different in character from what they seem to have been 
 when seen through the eyes of Confucianists. Those In- 
 dian reminiscences, first placed on record in the fourth cen- 
 tury B.C., may have been current in China from ages imme- 
 morial. Who can tell where and when they originated ? 
 Mythological and legendary ideas and folk-lore may have 
 been the property of a nation for a thousand years or more 
 before they make their appearance in its literature. The mere 
 fact of foreign ideas of any kind being thus traced in a litera- 
 ture need not, therefore, be looked upon as proof of their 
 having been imported from abroad, unless it can be shown 
 under what circumstances they traveled from one country 
 to another. This is, however, not the case with the foreign 
 allusions in the Chinese Literature of the fourth century B.C. 
 As late as the end of the second century b.c. India was a terra 
 incognita to the Chinese. Had it been known earlier, the ac- 
 count of Chang K'ien, the discoverer, whose attention was
 
 70 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 first drawn to the existence of such a country during his visit 
 to Bactria in 127 b.c, would not have been regarded as a dis- 
 covery. The traces of Indian lore found in Chinese Litera- 
 ture in the works of certam post-Confucian writers must, 
 therefore, either have soaked through that impenetrable 
 wall of the Tibetan highlands, or the deserts of Eastern 
 Turkestan, or have originated in prehistoric times. Certainly, 
 part of the Literature which the Chinese themselves consider 
 their best, the so-called "Chinese Classics," caimot be said 
 to have been influenced from any quarter. 
 
 This very term, "Chinese Classics," invented by foreigners 
 to designate the standard works of Confucianism, assigns to 
 Chinese Literature a distinctive character. If we speak 
 of Enghsh, French, or German classics, we think of works of 
 poetry. The Chinese apply a different scale to the estima- 
 tion of their Literature. The names which may be said 
 to stand first in English Literature, Shakspere and Milton 
 were those of poets; so were the names of Schiller and Goethe 
 in Germany, of Petrarch and Dante in Italy, and of Calderon 
 and Cervantes in Spain. The Chinese are probably quite as 
 fond of their great poets as we are of ours; but as the first 
 representatives of their Literature they would never hesitate 
 to point to Confucius and Lau-tzi, thinkers but not poets. 
 All together, the Chinese classification of Literature differs a 
 great deal from ours, and it will be worth our while to say a 
 few words on that subject. 
 
 The Chinese do not possess any work which might be called 
 "sb history of Chinese Literature." To make up for this 
 deficiency, however, they possess catalogues of standard Liter- 
 ature as represented in their Imperial hbraries. The oldest of 
 these catalogues was the one of the Imperial collection of the 
 earlier Han dynasty, which was destroyed by fire during the 
 insurrection of the usurper Wang-mang, about nineteen hun- 
 dred years ago. It consists mainly of a Ust of books, by 
 more than six hundred authors, arranged with some kind
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 71 
 
 of classification, and headed by the works of the Confucian 
 school. 
 
 The next great catalogue was that of the Sui dynasty, de- 
 scribing the state of Chinese Literature about 618 a.d., when 
 the Sui was displaced by the T'ang dynasty. This catalogue 
 has furnished the pattern for all future classifications of Liter- 
 ature up to the present day. The Imperial collection was then 
 for the first time divided as at present, into four great divi- 
 sions, called k'u, i.e. "storehouses" or "treasuries," the 
 arrangement of which may be said to correspond to the rela- 
 tive estimation in which the several branches of Literature 
 are held by Chinese critics. The "Four Treasuries" (ss'i-k'u) 
 are: — 
 
 (1) Classics (king), by which name the works of the Con- 
 fucian school with their extensions and commentaries are 
 understood ; 
 
 (2) Historians (sh'i), containing historical, biographical, 
 geographical, etc., works; 
 
 (3) Philosophers {tzl), with the exclusion of the Confucian 
 classics, including besides a host of miscellaneous philosophical 
 writers the entire Tauist Literature, works on agriculture, 
 military science, astronomy, divination, medicine, etc.; 
 
 (4) Belles-lettres, including the poetical literature and mis- 
 cellaneous prosaists. 
 
 Several later catalogues represent the state of Literature at 
 certain periods. Thus we have one, the Ch'ung-wdn-tsung-mu 
 in sixty-six volumes, published in the eleventh century, and 
 the description of the private collection of Ch'on Chon-sun, 
 a bibliophile of the thirteenth century, and similar records of 
 historical value down to the great catalogue of the Imperial 
 Library in Peking, published in 1782, now the principal 
 source of our knowledge of Chinese Literature. To give even 
 a faint idea of the contents of this great collection — con- 
 sisting of 3460 works in more than 75,000 volumes — is, of 
 course, impossible in a space of time calculated by minutes;
 
 72 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 I shall, therefore, have to confine myself to a discussion of a 
 very few of the more important works. 
 
 The first of the four treasuries into which the Imperial 
 Library, and with it Chinese standard Literature, is divided 
 treats mainly of Confucius and his school. Confucius sprang 
 from a family named K'ung, whose home was near K'ii-fou in 
 the present province of Shan-tung, where thousands of descen- 
 dants still survive, with their senior, the Duke of K'ung, 
 probably the oldest nobihty in the world. His personal 
 name was K'iu, but since he is often quoted with the epithet 
 Fu-tz'i, meaning "a philosopher," his name and title K'ung 
 Fu-tzl has in the early Latin translations of his works been 
 Latinized into Confucius. Being bom in 551 B.C., he was 
 almost a contemporary of Pythagoras. His life was mainly 
 devoted to moral and social reforms among his people; and, 
 in order to do as much good as possible in this respect, he 
 approached the dukes and princes of his state and its neigh- 
 bors, tendering advice wherever it was needed and acceptable, 
 though sometimes with ill success and hampered by the prej- 
 udices of adversaries. By the study of books containing 
 records of past periods he had constructed a moral stand- 
 ard, which he exemplified in his own life and which he, 
 by teaching, persuasion, and government, tried to cause 
 others to adopt, as long as he had the chance to prac- 
 tise it. As magistrate in a city and district of his native 
 state, and later as minister of justice, he enforced what he 
 considered good behavior among the population, and a great 
 deal of his teaching concerned the question what it is proper 
 for the ''superior man" (kiin-tzi), the real gentleman, to do, 
 or not to do. His efforts at moral reform were crowned with 
 great success; but intrigues brought about an estrangement 
 with his duke, which caused him to follow a wandering life 
 for fourteen years. At the age of sixty-eight he was recalled 
 to his native country, where he died in 479 B.C., leaving a 
 nimaber of disciples.
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 73 
 
 With all the disappointments he encountered in life, Con- 
 fucius has certainly had great influence on the development 
 of the Chinese national character. This influence was of a 
 threefold kind. It was based on his writings, on his sayings, 
 and on the example of his personal life. He did not write 
 much himself, but he did important editorial work; and his 
 sa3dngs were collected and placed on record for the benefit of 
 later centuries by the followers of his disciples, so that a num- 
 ber of works may be said to have seen the light under his 
 inspiration. These are the works which the late Professor 
 Legge, their translator and conmientator, has called the 
 "Chinese Classics." They consist of two series of books, the 
 so-called "Five Canons" (wu-king), works of pre-Confucian 
 origin, but partly edited or compiled by the sage himself, and 
 the "Four Books" (ssl-shu), texts connected with Confucius' 
 life and teachings, but written and edited by later authors. 
 
 The books to be included in or excluded from these classics 
 have in the course of centuries been subject to changes at the 
 hands of critics; but at present the following standard is 
 recognized. 
 
 A. The "Five Canons" (wu-king) comprise the following 
 works: — 
 
 (1) The "Canon of Changes" (I-king), now probably the 
 oldest book extant of the Chinese, mainly a work on divina- 
 tion, based on the so-called pa-kua, the Eight Mystic Dia- 
 grams, supposed to have been invented by the legendary 
 emperor Fu-hi. They consist of a series of combinations of 
 broken and unbroken hues, the former representing the female, 
 the latter the male, principle in Chinese natural philosophy. 
 
 It has always impressed me as one of the secrets of the 
 origin of language, as well as of mankind, why early man 
 assigned sex or gender — male, female, or neuter — to every 
 o}:)ject of nature. It must be one of the earhest traditions of 
 mankind that, for instance, a stone cannot be merely a stone 
 pure and simple, but that it must also be either a man or a
 
 74 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 woman. The English language, it is true, has almost eman- 
 cipated itself from that prejudice; but in quite a nmnber of 
 other languages even inanimate objects are represented as 
 being either masculine or feminine, if not neuter. In these 
 languages gender may be indicated by inflection or by the 
 article. The Chinese language loiows nothing of the kind; 
 but, to make up for it, the idea of gender has survived among 
 the people in its natural philosophy as a popular science. 
 For even the non-educated in China know that the sun is 
 male and the moon female; that heaven and earth, day and 
 night, north and south, white and black as opposites, are 
 respectively male and female. Mysterious influences are 
 attributed to the two sexes, and the preponderance and rela- 
 tive position of the one or the other in the " Eight Diagrams " 
 expresses conditions which it would require a complicated 
 commentary to describe. 
 
 The original "Eight Diagrams," each of w-hich consisted 
 of three lines, male or female, and which were held to denote 
 certain elements of nature, such as earth, water, etc., were 
 doubled up and made to consist of six lines each so as to jdeld, 
 with all the possible permutations, sixty-four combinations. 
 Each of these corresponded to a certain condition of life or 
 nature, which has been explained and extended in a copious 
 commentary. This somewhat complicated system of occult- 
 ism, if it may be so called, is ascribed to Won-wang, the heroic 
 duke of a palatinate on the western frontier, who is supposed 
 to have written its main text while being held in prison by 
 Chou-sin, the vicious last monarch of the Shang dynasty, 
 whose downfall was brought about by Won-Wang's son Wu- 
 wang, the first emperor of the Chou dynasty in 1122 b.c, 
 according to the Chinese standard chronology. The Chinese 
 have for thousands of years looked upon the "Canon of 
 Changes" as their chief instrument of auguration; but from 
 our point of view, it is merely the reverence with which it is 
 regarded in China and its supposed high antiquity that cause
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 75 
 
 it to figure as one of the most important products of the native 
 Literature. Confucius himself recommended it; hence it has 
 been received among the sacred books of his school. The 
 wildest speculations have been brought to bear on this ''noli 
 me tangere" by some European scholars without, as far as I 
 can judge, any palpable result. The "Canon of Changes" 
 may be looked upon as the literary basis of that mysterious 
 geomantic system known as Fong-shui, which, ridiculous 
 though it may appear to the European mind, has exercised 
 greater and more lasting influence over Chinese pubhc and 
 private life than thousands of volumes of sober common-sense 
 literature. Fong-shui, literally translated, means "wind and 
 water," a name full of mystery, said to have been chosen 
 "because it is a thing like wind, which you cannot compre- 
 hend, and like water, which you cannot grasp." To us 
 the "Canon of Changes" with all of its Fong-shui is nothing 
 more than a huge structure of systematized superstition; but 
 how serious the Chinese have at all times been in their study 
 of it may be gathered from the fact that, according to the 
 Imperial Catalogue, a library of not less than 317 works in 
 2371 volumes is devoted to commentaries upon it. 
 
 (2) The "Canon of History" {Shu-king), a collection of 
 documents describing certain sections of the most ancient 
 legendary history. In it the emperors Yau, Shun, and Yii 
 are held up as models of good monarchs, in contrast with cer- 
 tain bad rulers who brought about the fall of their dynasties. 
 It brings Chinese history down ,to the foundation of the 
 Chou dynasty in the twelfth century B.C., and refers to events 
 reaching well into the eighth century according to the Chinese 
 standard chronology, wliieh in the earlier period is, of course, 
 very doubtful. It is, however, backed by the coincidence of 
 certain eclipses of the sun mentioned in Chinese records with 
 those calculated by Western astronomers as having actually 
 occurred as early as 776 and 720 b.c. Unfortunately the 
 Shu-king is our only source of the most ancient history; and,
 
 76 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 though it reflects apparently the orthodox views of the gov- 
 erning classes, — emperors, feudal lords, and officials, — it is 
 one-sided as a purely Confucianist work. A few generations 
 after Confucius Chinese Literature reveals characteristics 
 of culture, folk-lore, and art which must have required cen- 
 turies to develop, and which are entirely lost in such works as 
 the Shu-king, because they did not fit into the orthodox 
 frame of a Confucian classic. The records regarding that 
 early legendary period of Chinese national life have, of course, 
 to be studied cum grano salis: the good men shown up in them 
 are much too good, and the bad men are much too bad, to be 
 considered as having been drawn from life. But this need not 
 condemn the book as entirely worthless. Hypercritical 
 minds, which can often be proved to be the least critical, have 
 tried to discredit the Confucian tradition to suit some sensa- 
 tional theory. Thus we hear that the early heroes of Chinese 
 tradition down to the time when undoubted history begins 
 were not Chinese at all, but were Indian gods grafted on the 
 real Chinese history; and another much too ingenious author 
 recently wrote a book with motives quite different from those 
 which resulted in Archbishop Whately's " Historic Doubts 
 relative to Napoleon Bonaparte," in which he tried to prove 
 that no such personage as Confucius ever lived, and that the 
 entire early Chinese history did not exist. 
 
 (3) The "Canon of Odes" {Shi-king), containing over 
 three hundred poems which have been current among the 
 people before Confucius' time. Some of these odes can be 
 fixed in connection with certain historical facts, and many 
 may have been sung by the nation and its bards centuries 
 before they were collected, arranged, and edited by Confucius, 
 who may be said to have done for them what the Grimm 
 brothers did for the German fairy tales. The odes of the 
 Shi-king are a mine of information for the most ancient culture 
 of the Chinese; but they are, of course, dry reading for those 
 who expect a literal translation. If the translation of poetry
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 77 
 
 from foreign languages generally is an unwelcome task, re- 
 quiring as it does a philologist and a poet combined in the 
 translator who is constantly subject to the conflict between 
 faithful adherence to the original and poetic hcense, the 
 rendering of a Chinese poem into English is a particularly 
 thankless one. For a literal translation the philological edi- 
 tion of the Shi-king by the late Professor Legge is the standard 
 work. However, Dr. Legge was anything but a poet. The 
 flavor of these ancient rhymes may appeal to a native thor- 
 oughly at home in Chinese ancient folk-lore, but will hardly 
 ever do so to a European reader. Readable translations, of 
 course, lose as much in philological accuracy as they gain in 
 poetical charm. There is an excellent German translation 
 by Victor von Strauss, in which the poetic spirit is occasion- 
 ally rendered without sacrificing too much of pliilological 
 accuracy; and among English translations the one that will 
 appeal most to Western readers is that of Mr, Clement F. R. 
 Allen. Such as it is, I look upon the venerable " Canon of 
 Odes" rather as a source of information on Chinese ancient 
 culture than of poetical enjojmient. 
 
 (4) The "Canon of Rites" (Li-ki), a collection of rules 
 describing, to the minutest detail, the ceremonial to be ob- 
 served by the Chinese gentleman on all occasions of daily life. 
 Similar in spirit is another work, which is not now comprised 
 among the "Five Canons," though fully as important as the 
 Li-ki. It describes under the title Chou-li the government 
 and its many subdi\isions with their functions during the 
 Chou dynasty. 
 
 (5) The "Spring and Autumn," in Chinese, Ch'un-ts'iu, 
 an historical work containing in the tersest possible language 
 the annals of the state of Lu, where Confucius was born. It 
 is supposed to have been compiled by Confucius himself; and 
 its style, consisting in the simple statement of events in 
 strictly chronological order, has become the pattern for numer- 
 ous later works on historical subjects. Much more important
 
 78 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 than the "Spring and Autumn" annals is the commentaty 
 upon them known as Tso-chuan, by Tso-k'iu Ming, which is 
 the chief source of our knowledge of Chinese history during 
 the period covered by it, 722-469 B.C. 
 
 The "Five Canons" do not contain any of the teachings of 
 Confucius; but, having been edited, compiled, or recommended 
 and approved by the sage, they have been received among 
 the Confucian classics. His teachings are embodied in the 
 "Four Books," or ssl-shu, the real text-books of Confucianism, 
 viz. : — 
 
 (1) The Lun-yiX, hterally translated "Conversations," 
 or "Discourses," because the master's views are set forth in 
 them in the form of dialogues. Legge calls the book "Con- 
 fucian Analects." The key-note of these discourses is that 
 virtue placed by the Chinese of all ages above every other, — 
 namely, filial piety. This is the source of all happiness in 
 family life; it covers the respect due to the senior by the junior, 
 and, in its widest sense, is applicable to society at large. The* 
 State with its government is merely family Ufe on a larger 
 scale. The sovereign and his assistants represent father and 
 mother, and the people, their subjects, may be called their 
 children, who owe them obedience as part of their filial piety 
 in the broader sense. Man in his relation to the world is con- 
 sidered from five points of view, hence the "five relations" 
 (wu-lun): (1) sovereign and subject, (2) father and son, 
 (3) husband and wife, (4) elder and younger brother, (5) friend 
 and friend. In each of these relations man has his duties, 
 the proper discharge of which determines the character of the 
 ideal good man, kun-tz'i, usually translated by "the Superior 
 Man" — the very reverse of Nietzsche's "super-man." 
 Every respectable Chinese of the Confucian school tries to 
 conform his character as nearlj^ as possible to that of the Su- 
 perior Man. We must, of course, look upon Confucius him- 
 self as an example of the Chinese model gentleman of all ages, 
 and so, indeed, he was, as regards purity of morals, loyalty to
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 79 
 
 his sovereign and government, and deep respect for the social 
 order of his time and nation. But he clearly went too far in 
 matters of detail. Imagine the subject of a small European 
 State carrying his loyalty so far as to don his dress-coat, white 
 necktie, and all his decorations even on his sick-bed because 
 his grand-duke had announced an intended visit to the pa- 
 tient. This is what Confucius is supposed to have done. 
 For we read: "When he was sick, and the prince came to visit 
 him, he had his face to the east (the correct position for a per- 
 son in bed), caused his court robes to be spread over him, and 
 drew his girdle across them." Quite a number of similar inci- 
 dents, illustrating his pedantic adherence to little acts of cere- 
 mony, and representing him as a man full of caprice, have been 
 placed on record in the tenth book of the Lun-iju, with an 
 amount of devotion not surpassed even by Boswell's regard 
 for the great Dr. Johnson's little weaknesses. 
 
 (2) "The Great Learning" (Ta-hio), a short treatise on 
 self-culture, based on knowledge as a means of reforming 
 society. 
 
 (3) "The Doctrine of the Mean" (Chung-yung) , also trans- 
 lated by "The Golden Medium." It recommends the middle 
 course in all walks of life. 
 
 (4) "The Philosopher Mong " (Mbng-tzi), i.e. Mencius, the 
 name invented, like that of Confucius, by European trans- 
 lators writing in Latin. Mencius flourished about two cen- 
 turies after Confucius; but he did more in working out the 
 Confucian system, and especially in applying it to practical 
 state and social life, than all the contemporaneous disciples 
 and even the master himself. This may have been due to 
 the fact that, to prove the correctness of his views against so 
 many rival philosophers who had been successful since Con- 
 fucius' lifetime, he had to double his efforts to make himself 
 understood by the masses. Mencius has thus become a real 
 educator of his people. Compared with Confucius he is 
 moderate in requiring the observance of outer formalities;
 
 80 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 but he insists on the perfection of the inner man. Benevo- 
 lence and justice are the great virtues which should govern 
 man's actions in all his relations, the most important of these 
 relations being that of sovereign and people; and sovereigns 
 should cultivate these virtues in the first instance. The great 
 lesson Mencius gives to mankind of all times and throughout 
 the world concerns the education of one's personal character. 
 Character is more important than cleverness. Man's life 
 ought to be a constant strife in subduing one's passions; 
 and all this striving for perfection should not be undertaken 
 for the sake of external rewards, but for the pleasure one takes 
 in perfection itself. 
 
 Like Confucius, Mencius was loyal to the traditional sov- 
 ereigns and the federal constitution of the Chou dynasty. 
 His zeal in this respect was boimd later to stigmatize the Con- 
 fucianist school as the chief enemy of the new order of things 
 under Shi-huang-ti, the first emperor of the Ts'in dynasty, 
 who had gained the throne of China by the utter disregard of 
 loyalty and legitimacy. This emperor, the celebrated "burner 
 of the books," resolved to blot out every trace of that school 
 which was bound both by tradition and by its entire character 
 to side with the ruined house of Chou and its ancestors. The 
 emperor's plan, suggested to him by his minister Li Ssi, to 
 destroy all existing Literature with the exception of works 
 on divination, agriculture, and mechcine, could not, of course, 
 prevent many books from being secretly buried, immured, 
 or otherwise concealed, and thus saved from oblivion. 
 
 The Confucian classics of which I have tried to give a faint 
 idea are, of course, not the only books forming the first of the 
 "Four Treasuries" of Literature. The greater part consists 
 of commentaries and expositions and some independent works 
 of ancient origin, not received among the number of canons, 
 such as the Hiau-king, or "Canon of Filial Piety," ascribed 
 to Tsong Ts'an, one of the disciples of Confucius, and the 
 ir-ya, a dictionary of terms used in the Classics, the oldest
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 81 
 
 work of its kind. The study of the Classics has given rise to 
 quite a number of glossaries and dictionaries published from 
 the beginning of our era down to the K'ang-hi period. In 
 some of these special attention is paid to the structm-e of the 
 ideograms representing the words to be explained, as in the 
 Shuo-won, published in 100 a.d.; others are chiefly devoted 
 to the description of sounds. The modern standard dictionary 
 is that published by a commission of scholars under the em- 
 peror K'ang-hi, a philological compilation of undoubted au- 
 thority somewhat like the ''Dictionnaire de I'Academie" in 
 France. Its definitions are supported by numerous quota- 
 tions from the entire standard Literature. Still more detailed 
 is another work, published by the same great emperor in 1711, 
 the P^e'i-w'6n-yun-fu, in more than a hundred volumes. This 
 is a concordance of many thousands of passages arranged 
 according to the rhyme of the last character in terms of two 
 or more syllables serving as catchwords: it is of the greatest 
 use to all students engaged in Chinese research work. 
 
 The second of the "Four Treasuries" is the one called 
 Shi, or "Historians." It comprises works on the history of 
 China and her neighbors in Asia, covering besides history in 
 the proper sense a number of cognate branches such as biog- 
 raphy, geography, etc. The historical works of Confucian 
 origin, such as the Shu-king, the Ch'un-ts'iu and their com- 
 mentaries, have been included among the Literature on clas- 
 sics and do not appear in the historical Treasury. 
 
 The first place in this division is given to the so-called 
 "Twenty-four Histories" {ir-shi-ssi shi), each of which is gen- 
 erally devoted to one of the several dynasties that have oc- 
 cupied the Imperial throne. Apart from the differences in 
 style and arrangement these quasi-official histories are dis- 
 tinguished from other historical works mainly by their origin. 
 They have all been compiled by government officials holding 
 the position of state historiographers ad hoc; and the records 
 on which they are based belonged to the secret archives to
 
 82 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 which only the confidential state historiographer had access. 
 He was supposed to withhold information on what he had 
 entered in these records from any one among his contempo- 
 raries, not excepting even the sovereign and his ministers. 
 The histories of the several dynasties were not written until 
 some time after their fall, when certain historians of the suc- 
 ceeding dynasty were commissioned to compile them from 
 materials taken over with their archives. This system has 
 worked well enough in China; and we have scarcely any more 
 reason to find fault with its results than we have with histori- 
 cal works in the West. We meet with exaggerated views, 
 of course; and differences of opinion have in China, as they 
 have with us, given rise to volumes of criticisms; but the 
 apologies for misjudged characters are probably not more 
 frequent in Chinese history than they are in that of Rome. 
 
 At the head of the twenty-four Histories stands as the 
 oldest and best the Ski-ki by Ssi-ma Ts'ien, the Herodotus 
 of China, who died about 85 B.C. It describes the history 
 of China as accepted by native scholars from the time of 
 Huang-ti, supposed to have lived about 2700 years B.C., 
 down to the time of the emperor Wu-ti. Ssi-ma Ts'ien was 
 a contemporary of the celebrated general Chang K'ien, the 
 Columbus of the Chinese, who traveled to the banks of the 
 Oxus, and, after a visit to the Indo-Scj^thian court and the 
 Greek kingdom of Bactria, was the first to tell his countrymen 
 that the world contained some other countries inhabited by 
 civilized nations like the Chinese. Chang K'ien's report is 
 reproduced in the Shi-ki. It inaugurates a new era in Chinese 
 art and culture, the era of foreign. Western Asiatic, and even 
 Greek influences by way of Bactria and the Tarim basin. 
 The gigantic work of translating the Shi-ki into French has 
 been successfully undertaken by Professor Ed. Chavannes 
 of Paris. 
 
 The remaining djniastic histories are arranged on an almost 
 uniform plan. They are mostly introduced by a series of
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 83 
 
 chronological accounts, recording day by day the events 
 that had occurred under each of the several emperors of the 
 dynasty. "Court chronicles" we may call them as distin- 
 guished from the second part, in which we find valuable 
 material for the study of certain phases of cultural life, such as 
 astronomy, ceremonial, music, criminal law, political econ- 
 omy, literature, etc. The greater part of the entire history, 
 however, is devoted to the biographies of the remarkable men 
 of the time, to which are added accounts of the foreign nations 
 known to the Chinese. These accounts are of the greatest 
 value to the investigator of Asiatic history and geography. 
 They contain ethnographical sketches of the Tartar nations in 
 the north and west of China, chief among whom there were 
 in ancient times the Hiung-nu, the Huns of Western history, 
 whose migrations to the confines of Europe can be traced to 
 periods as early as the first century B.C. Their place during 
 the earl}'^ part of the Middle Ages was taken by the Eastern 
 and Western Turks, their blood relations, whose history ap- 
 pears in lapidary style in Old-Turkish characters on some 
 famous stone slabs discovered by Russian travelers in Mon- 
 golia. The work of deciphering these mysterious inscriptions, 
 formerly believed to be runes, has been greatly facilitated 
 by the detailed ethnographical accounts found in the dynastic 
 history of the period. These accounts are also our chief source 
 of information for the later Turks known as Uigurs and down 
 to our own times of the Mongols, Tunguses, etc. Even por- 
 tions of the Roman Empire are described in contemporaneous 
 accounts, the identification and interpretation of which has 
 become an unexpected, helpful source for our knowledge of 
 ancient trade and traffic with the Far East. 
 
 Another class of historical works has been created in imita- 
 tion of Confucius' "Spring and Autumn" annals. The 
 oldest of these was discovered in 284 a.d. in a tomb dating 
 from about 300 B.C. It deals in chronological order with the 
 most ancient history of China, and since it was written on
 
 84 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 bamboo tablets, the old style of writing, it was called the 
 "Bamboo Book" annals. But the most important work in 
 the "Annals" style is the "Mirror of History" by Ssi-ma 
 Kuang, who died in 1086 a.d. A century after him it was 
 republished with copious amplifications and commentaries 
 under the title T'ung-kien-kang-mu. The substance of this 
 work has been reproduced in Father de Mailla's celebrated 
 French "Histoire de la Chine." 
 
 These are the principal divisions of the historical section, 
 which is, of course, very far from being exhausted by the few 
 works I have named. The Imperial Catalogue contains 
 hundreds of titles of books of great importance, though not 
 included in the standard histories, works on biography 
 and geography, descriptions of ancient capitals, and accounts 
 of foreigns nations. Among geographical works China can 
 boast of thousands of local gazetteers, resembling each other 
 in general arrangement, the so-called chi. Provinces, pre- 
 fectures, magistracies, famous hills, lakes, and rivers, even 
 convents and temples, have their chi, giving accounts of their 
 history, topography, antiquities, local literature, etc. The 
 water-courses of the empire in its widest extent are repre- 
 sented by detailed accounts, one of the best known among 
 which is the Shut-king, or "Water Classic," with its com- 
 mentary, a most valuable source of historical geography in 
 about 500 A.D. Reports on their journeys by celebrated 
 Buddhist devotees, such as Fa Hi^n and Hiian Tsang, each of 
 whom spent about fifteen years in India in the fifth and 
 seventh centuries respectively, also appear among historical 
 books. So does the political cyclopedia of 800 a.d., the 
 T'ung-tien, and its continuation by Ma Tuan-lin, the W'on- 
 hien-t'ung-k'au of 1322. Works on government and law, 
 the several catalogues of public and private libraries, together 
 with quite a long list of works on stone and bronze inscrip- 
 tions, contain titles of great importance. 
 
 The third Treasury is that of the Philosophers (tzl). This
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 85 
 
 is the literal translation; but it should be understood that a 
 great many writers are represented in it whom we should call 
 anything but philosophers, while others who might deserve 
 that name, such as Confucius and Mencius, have been dealt 
 with in the "Treasury of Classics." Its first subdivision, called 
 that of the "Literati" {ju-kia), comprises a large number of 
 writers on Confucianism, the best known among which is the 
 great defender of this doctrine, Chu Hi. He and quite a num- 
 ber of his literary friends were the disciples of Chou Tun-i, 
 the founder of a kind of rationalism based on the theory of the 
 male and female principles of the "Book of Changes," which 
 he says emanate from one common source, the "Great Ex- 
 treme," the ultimate immaterial principle of all things. 
 
 Special sections are devoted to writers on "Mihtary Sci- 
 ence" (ping-kia), on "Legislation" (fa-kia), "Agriculture" 
 (nbng-kia), "Medicine" (i-kia), and other branches. The 
 "Military Science" Literature is, of course, destined to be set 
 aside in order to be replaced by the more useful translations 
 of works on European warfare. Similar experiences will be 
 made in other branches, such as legislation, astronomy, and 
 mathematics. The modern reform movement, initiated by 
 the labors of K'ang Yu-wei and Liang K'i-chou, has already 
 created a Literature of its own, and wall open up a new world 
 to the Chinese mind within the next few decades. The re- 
 shaping of old methods in China is bound to affect Chinese 
 Literature as much as political and social life itself, and many 
 of the time-honored works figuring now on the shelves of the 
 philosophical "Treasury" will serve as a source for historical 
 studies only. In this respect, however, they will retain their 
 eternal value. The philosopher Kuan-tzi will at all times hold 
 his position as the politician who applied the statistical method 
 to practical statesmanship as early as the seventh century 
 B.C.; and works like the great Chinese pharmacopoeia, the 
 Pon-ts'au-kang-mu of the sixteenth century a.d., as repre- 
 senting the entire stock of Chinese science reviewed histori-
 
 86 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 cally from the earliest time will not be set aside for genera- 
 tions to come. 
 
 Works on medicine, of which subject the Chinese have a 
 very extensive Literature, and those on divination will be 
 studied as long as the "Book of Changes" is considered the 
 source of all wisdom; and foreign science with all its superior 
 methods will find it hard to drive them out of the field. 
 Works on Art, like Art itself, are always sure to have their 
 eternal value; and Chinese Literature, unlike the literatures 
 of Western Asia, is quite rich in such works throwing light on 
 the development of pictorial art, calligraphy, music, archery, 
 etc. Archeeology, too, has its literature in a long series of 
 special works, and there are few varieties among the celebrated 
 objects of vertu coming from China which are not described 
 from the historical and technical point of view in some general 
 work, or some monograph. Such monographs we have on 
 ancient swords, tripods, and other sacrificial bronzes, bricks 
 and tiles, ink -stones, ink cakes, coins ; and not only the chinoi- 
 series of our museums have been described in special notices, 
 but almost every important phase of cultural life has its mono- 
 graph. Thus we have special books on tea, on wine, on 
 bamboo trees, oranges, chrysanthemums, mushrooms, on 
 soups, on diet, etc. 
 
 The class of writers that seems to justify the name of the 
 "Treasury" are the "Philosophers." We have scarcely 
 time to mention their names. One of the best known is Mo 
 Ti, also known by his Latinized name Micius, the philosopher 
 of mutual love, who presented an almost Christian altruism, 
 as opposed to Yang Chu, whose pessimism was of the most 
 ignoble kind; to call him "the philosopher of egotism" 
 would sound like an apology. 
 
 Among the most useful classes of books are the several 
 cyclopedias containing under certain classified heads extracts 
 about almost any subject treated upon in the recognized stand- 
 ard Literature. The most extensive work of this kind is
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 87 
 
 the T'u-shu-tsi-ch'ong in more than 5000 volumes. It is 
 the most bulky printed book in the world and, when set 
 up, fills the walls of a well-sized room. It was printed with 
 movable copper type and pubUshed in 1731, only a hundred 
 copies being struck off at the time. Columbia University 
 owns a copy of this remarkable work, a reprint in the size of 
 the original, of which 250 copies were made a few years ago 
 at the expense of the old Tsung-li-yamen. The "Treasury 
 of Philosophers" closes with the two very important and 
 voluminous divisions "Buddhism" and "Tauism." Thou- 
 sands of works are devoted to that religion which came from 
 India and which has taken possession of the masses probably 
 more than any other teaching. The greater part of these 
 Buddhist books consists of translations from the Sanskrit. 
 These translations were prepared between the first and ninth 
 centuries a.d., partly by Chinese devotees who traveled to 
 India and returned to China laden with formerly unknown 
 sacred books, and partly by Indians who had studied Chinese 
 in China. Through these translations thousands of religious 
 technical terms have been introduced into the Chinese lan- 
 guage from some Indian prototype, and all Chinese Buddhist 
 texts bristle with Sanskrit words transcribed in Chinese char- 
 acters. In the Buddhist divine service these foreign words 
 are not understood by the masses; but the priests study them 
 carefully with the assistance of glossaries ; Sanskrit is thus to 
 Chinese Buddhists what Latin is to the Roman Catholics, 
 a sealed book to the masses and an object of study to the 
 clergy. The Imperial Catalogue ignores this class of Litera- 
 ture as a foreign element; but Buddhist works of purely 
 Chinese origin are duly recorded. Among these the Fa-yuan- 
 chu-lin, a work of the seventh century in 100 sections, ex- 
 plaining the Buddhist philosophy to Chinese readers, and a 
 series of learned works containing the biographies of over a 
 thousand celebrated Buddhist saints and priests under the 
 title Kau-song-chuan deserve to be mentioned.
 
 88 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 The worlcs on Tauism are much better represented in the 
 great Catalogue than those on Buddhism. The Tau-to-king, 
 that incomprehensible text ascribed to Lau-tzi himself, with 
 all its many editions and commentaries, claims, of course, 
 the chief attention of Chinese literary circles. The work has 
 been declared a forgery by Professor Giles, who has also trans- 
 lated that most important Tauist work of the philosopher 
 Chuang-tzi, which may be looked upon as by far the best and 
 most intelligible exponent of early Tauism. All together the 
 Imperial Catalogue discusses 144 works under the head of 
 "Tauism." 
 
 To do justice to the last and by far the most voluminous 
 among the "Four Treasuries," that of Belles-Lettres, with 
 the polite Literature of the Chinese, I should have been obliged 
 to set insufficient store by the Classics, the Historians, and the 
 Philosophers, more important in shaping the Chinese national 
 character, though perhaps less interesting from the foreign 
 point of view. Of its five subdivisions the first deals with the 
 so-called "Elegies of Ch'u," because they take precedence 
 on account of their high antiquity. Their author, K'ii Yiian, 
 had been the intimate friend and adviser of his sovereign, the 
 King of Ch'u, a large and powerful country on the banks of the 
 Yang-tzi, about 314 b.c, but fell into disgrace through the 
 unjust denouncement of a set of jealous courtiers. His mel- 
 ancholy outbursts of feeling over the unjustness of his fate 
 formed the subject of a poem by him, entitled "Li-sau," "In- 
 curring Misfortune," or "Under a Cloud." When his enemies 
 continued their persecutions, he drowned himself. This sad 
 event is commemorated throughout China on the anniversary 
 of its occurrence in the midsummer by a kind of regatta known 
 as the dragon-boat festival. K'ii Yiian's world-weariness, 
 traces of which may be discovered in the early ballads of the 
 still more ancient "Canon of Odes" as well as in later poems, 
 may be due to a kind of emotional susceptibility that we may 
 even now have occasion to observe as a characteristic among
 
 CHINESE LITERATURE 89 
 
 the Chinese. K'li Yiian's poetry set the example to some of 
 his contemporaries, whose effusions were miited to his under 
 the title "Elegies of Ch'u." 
 
 The second subdivision is entitled "Individual Collections," 
 the "ffiuvres completes" of certain writers. They contain 
 Literature of every description, and some of China's greatest 
 poets, especially those of that classical eighth century a.d. 
 Among these we find the Chinese Anacreon Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, 
 Po Kii-i, and other poets of the T'ang dynasty. Professor 
 Giles, to whose judicious collection of extracts called "Gems 
 of Chinese Literature," I would refer, says of this period: 
 "It was the epoch of glittering poetry (untranslatable alas!), 
 of satire, of invective, and of opposition to the strange and 
 fascinating creed of Buddha. Imagination began to flow 
 more easily and more musically, as though responsive to the 
 demands of art." 
 
 This poetry is chiefly of the lyrical kind; and if I were asked 
 to find a characteristic word for some of its characteristic 
 specimens, I would select that untranslatable German word 
 "Stimmung." Chinese poems are often pointless; but they 
 introduce us into some distinct frame of mind as the picture of 
 a clever landscapist introduces us to some distinct condition of 
 nature. The little poems of Wang Wei, who was one of the 
 greatest artists as well as a distinguished poet of that period, 
 may be called typical in this respect, and Su Tung-po, the great 
 poet of the eleventh century, could not have expressed this idea 
 better than when he indorsed one of his paintings with merely 
 two lines : — 
 
 "Hark to Wang Wei's odes, and ye will behold his pictures; 
 Look at Wang Wei's pictures, and ye will hear his odes." 
 
 The Chinese have no epic, and the drama did not originally 
 exist in China. It was introduced by the Mongols, who held 
 the throne of China for a century (1264-1368), and during
 
 90 CHINESE LITERATURE 
 
 this time all the best works were written for the stage. 
 Novels, too, were not indigenous in China, but are said to have 
 been introduced from Central Asia. Both novels and theat- 
 rical plays are written in a style approaching the colloquial 
 language and are, therefore, not considered to form part of 
 serious Literature. Nevertheless novels are devoured by 
 the people, and plays are performed all the year round.
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 
 By Edward Delavan Perry, Jay Professor of Greek 
 
 Among the many apocryphal stories of the puzzled school- 
 boy one of the most delightful tells of a youth who was asked 
 to give a brief account of the Ancient Greeks. He wrote: 
 "The Ancient Greeks were that marvelous nation that lived 
 all at the same time, and all in the same place, and always 
 thought just alike." And as I think of certain widely prevalent 
 ideas about the ancients a picture comes into my mind: an 
 engraving entitled "The Age of Pericles," showing the great 
 Athenian haranguing (no other word will do) a motley group 
 of heroic figures, all quite undisturbed by the hammering 
 and pounding of masons and carpenters close by, who are 
 busily engaged in erecting the Parthenon and the Propylsea. 
 
 We hear much loose talk of "The Greek Spirit" and "Greek 
 Ideals"; but if we ask what they were, we often find concep- 
 tions not very different from those of the puzzled schoolboy and 
 the artist of "The Age of Pericles." And really it is no won- 
 der. The oldest literary monuments in the Greek language, 
 the Homeric Poems, must, it seems to me, have assumed 
 practically their present form by 800 e.g. On the other hand, 
 about the latest of the authors who preserved or reproduced in 
 imitation the truly classical spirit, Lucian, may have lived 
 till about 200 a.d. That is a stretch of a thousand years 
 during which countless minds of the greatest keenness worked 
 at the creation and perfection of new types of literary form, 
 or the perpetuation of the types that had best stood the test 
 
 91
 
 92 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 of use. But those thousand years by no means represent the 
 whole Hfe of ancient Greek Literature. The Homeric Poems 
 mark the close, not the beginning, of a long literary epoch. 
 Their language is not entirely homogeneous, — far from it. 
 It gives us no true picture of a dialect really spoken by any 
 community, at any one period or in any one region; it con- 
 tains elements of several dialects, fused with great skill into 
 an artistic blend. Indeed, there is something to be said for 
 the famous theory of Fick, that the Homeric Poems were 
 originally composed in a non-Ionic (or "^Eolic") form of 
 Greek, and afterwards transposed (to use a musical term) 
 into a new form, of prevailingly Ionic type. But whatever 
 may be the genetic history of this wonderfully rich and supple 
 Homeric language, its subsequent career is fairly well known. 
 For hundreds of years it was in constant use as a conven- 
 tional literary language, undoubtedly committed to writing, 
 yet designed chiefly for oral use, and certainly through many 
 generations of men employed principally in this way. Of it 
 Professor Gilbert Murray truly says: "The ordinary au- 
 diences must have understood it as well as, for instance, our 
 audiences understand the authorized version of the Bible, 
 though the differences between Jacobean and Victorian Eng- 
 hsh are utterly trifling compared with those between Homer 
 and the prose speech of the earliest Ionic inscriptions. And 
 how wonderfully the poets themselves knew it ! Even under 
 the microscope of modern philology the Epic dialect appears, 
 in the main, as a sort of organic whole, not a mere mass of 
 incongruous archaistic forms. And this language has been 
 preserved and reconstructed by generations of men who never 
 spoke it except when they recited poetry. It was understood 
 by audiences who never heard it spoken except when they 
 listened to poetry. And not a man among them had any 
 knowledge of the laws of language; they had only a sense of 
 style." 
 
 A sense of style ! In the last analysis an utterly inexplic-
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 93 
 
 able possession, a Heaven-sent gift, capable of development 
 but hardly to be produced where it is not found existing 
 already. It was the incomparably good fortune of the Greeks 
 to possess that sense, as it is the heritage of the Irish people, 
 and, in a different phase, of the French, in the modem world. 
 The Greeks, moreover, possessed the knack of turning it to 
 account, of following its promptings and heeding its warnings, 
 in endless details of hfe. " Greek dramas and Greek temples," 
 says Professor Percy Gardner, "are parallel embodiments of 
 the Greek spirit, and he who would understand that spirit 
 must know something of both. Greek history, whether of 
 politics or colonization or trade or rehgion or literature or art, 
 is all one; and every branch throws back light on the other 
 branches." 
 
 This sense of style shows itself in full bloom in the Homeric 
 Poems, and has entire mastery of the language developed 
 under its guidance. It is already a chastened and sober style 
 when it first appears to us, for all its intensity and variety; 
 remarkably free from extravagance or violence, abhorring 
 ugliness and clumsiness. It is a thoroughly sophisticated 
 style, far removed from a mere untutored grace, completely 
 conscious of the means by which it produces its effects. It is 
 essentially the style of a school. At its previous history we 
 can only guess; but we may safely guess that generation after 
 generation of poets worked over it, choosing elements here 
 and there, smoothing down any roughness, and replacing 
 unmanageable forms by those of some other dialect not too 
 different to seem congruous. The day has gone forever 
 when it could be believed that such poems, in such a style, 
 represented a primitive stage of Greek civilization; and such 
 terms as "The Dawn Age" and Mr. Gladstone's "Juventus 
 Mundi " are as misleading as they are pretty. The "Dawn 
 Age" of Greek civilization lies far back of any period that we 
 have yet been able to reach, or even to approach. 
 
 The posterior limit of ancient Greek Literature is hardly
 
 94 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 less difficult to set with accuracy. The current of Greek 
 language continued to flow with less abrupt turns, and far 
 fewer actual interruptions, than was the fate of Latin; and 
 though the ancient variety of dialects disappeared under the 
 dominating influence of the so-called KOLvrj, or universal dia- 
 lect, developed out of the Attic, this universal dialect became 
 and remained the idiom of a widely spread though very heter- 
 ogeneous population. As the medium through which the 
 gospel of Christianity was at first preached, and as the vehicle 
 of the highest civilization thus far developed, the later form 
 of Greek gained a prestige that insured its persistence through 
 many centuries down to the present time. This persistence 
 through persecution and political decay, through scattering 
 and isolation of conmiunities, and through theological dis- 
 sensions of unexampled bitterness is one of the most striking 
 phenomena of history. 
 
 But the creative power of the Greeks underwent a notable 
 change in the centuries immediately preceding and following 
 the birth of Christ. The vigorous imagination, the keen 
 power of analysis, the insatiable thirst for knowledge, the 
 eagerness to work out new forms, gradually disappeared. 
 The literary treasures of past centuries were already over- 
 whelmingly abundant, so that preservation became of prime 
 importance, and creation succeeded best when it took the form 
 of imitation of the great models. This is why, for all except 
 the professed scholar, the history of ancient Greek Literature 
 is as good as ended with Lucian. The literature of Byzantium 
 or Constantinople is like that of another people, though the 
 language is nearly the same as before. The sense of style is 
 not indeed dead; the ancient models were too good to lose 
 their usefulness or attractiveness ; but external conditions are 
 altogether different. A new faith, with an authoritative 
 creed resting on revelation, with an organized and central- 
 ized hierarchy, and a political world of absolutism, contrast 
 sharply with the extremely elastic religious belief and prac-
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 95 
 
 tices and the kaleidoscopic variety of constitutions and states 
 prevailing down to the time of Alexander the Great. The 
 pious Fathers of the Church saw in the intensely human 
 deities of their ancestors but devils and demons and fallen 
 angels still dangerous to the soul of the good Christian. Yet 
 a fortunate tolerance and an admiration, sometimes outspoken, 
 sometimes no doubt prudently concealed, for the great works 
 of antiquity, led to the preservation and copying of these. 
 
 With very few exceptions, almost no existing Mss. of an- 
 cient Greek classical works were written before 900 a.d. 
 There is one large fragment of papyrus in Berlin, which may 
 have been written as early as 330 e.g.; it contains a portion 
 of the "Persians" of Timotheus, a poet who died in 357 b.c. 
 The ''Persians" was probably composed about 400 b.c, 
 so that the Ms. may come within seventy years or so of the 
 first publication of the poem; but even this degree of ap- 
 proach is unique. Of Bacchyhdes we have since 1897 a papy- 
 rus Ms. that may have been written within 450 years after 
 the poet's death. In almost every case many hundreds of 
 years lie between the original composition of a classical Greek 
 work that has come down to us in its entirety and the actual 
 writing of the oldest Ms. in which it is preserved. In the case 
 of Euripides, for instance, not less than 1300 years intervene. 
 The actual production of such Mss. as we have is due chiefly 
 to the patience and devotion of learned monks in the monas- 
 teries of Eastern Mediterranean and ^gean countries. 
 
 With the Mss., however, of ancient Greek authors fortune 
 has played some strange pranks. Out of the hmidreds of 
 tragedies produced at Athens between 500 and 400 b.c. only 
 thirty-two have come down to us: seven of iEschylus, seven 
 of Sophocles, and eighteen of Euripides. But -lEschylus is 
 known to have written at least eighty plays, Sophocles over 
 a hundred, Euripides over ninety. Of what must have been 
 a vast mass of early heroic epic poetry only the lUad and the 
 Odyssey survive, no doubt the noblest of the whole body of
 
 96 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 epic poems, yet differing only in degree of excellence, not in 
 kind, from the others. The field of Greek lyric poetry is like 
 the surface of the Acropohs at Athens as one sees it to-day, 
 a bewildering accumulation of fragments, many of exceeding 
 beauty, but broken and battered, sometimes almost beyond rec- 
 ognition. Greek lyric is known to us nowadays chiefly through 
 quotation in later Greek writers; quotation either in the body 
 of an independent work for illustration or argument (so, for 
 example, the longest fragment of Simonides's poetry that exists 
 is quoted piecemeal in the * ' Protagoras ' ' of Plato, and discussed 
 and pulled to pieces by the persons of the dialogue), or in 
 collections of "Elegant Extracts," preserved without explana- 
 tory framing, like jewels without setting. From this state- 
 ment Pindar and Bacchylides must be excepted; we have 
 many Mss. of Pindar, and the one of BacchyUdes just now 
 referred to. The whole body of historical works of the fourth 
 century B.C., and the entire Middle and New Comedy, has 
 as good as perished except in so far as the latter has survived 
 in the "adaptations" of Plautus and Terence; and in the 
 works of Aristotle are huge gaps. One particularly valuable 
 fragment of Aristotle (not universally acknowledged as 
 genuine), containing the greater part of his "Constitution of 
 Athens," was found in 1890, and it contains a number of 
 previously unlaiown verses by Solon. Of Plato, on the other 
 hand, we seem to have all that he ever published, in fact 
 more, as some of the extant dialogues ascribed to him are 
 certainly spurious. 
 
 When so much is lacking from the Literature once in exist- 
 ence it is well to be cautious in making sweeping statements 
 about it. The discovery of a piece of papyrus in an Egyptian 
 tomb may suddenly upset many carefully formed theories. 
 I remember well the passionate ardor with which the professor 
 of Greek archjeology at Leipsic many years ago used to argue 
 against the theory, then beginning to be seriously maintained, 
 that Greek statuary of the best period was conmionly painted.
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 97 
 
 He proved to his own complete satisfaction, and I must say- 
 to ours), too, for he was very eloquent and had a wonderful 
 gift of seeing only one side of a question, that the painting 
 of marble statues was utterly unthinkable. Yet within a 
 very few years the soil of Greece yielded to the spade of the 
 archaeologist statue after statue most elaborately and care- 
 fully painted ! 
 
 However, even after all the vast losses from the once ex- 
 isting body of Greek Literature, enough remains to reveal to 
 us the range and power and originality of the Greek genius. 
 We are still far from understanding all that we have of that 
 Literature; and what has been interpreted to one generation 
 of moderns needs reinterpretation to the next, for the point 
 of view inevitably shifts with the lapse of years. Even the 
 individual scholar finds, in his old age, a meaning and a mes- 
 sage in his beloved authors which he had failed to find, or had 
 viewed with half-seeing eyes, in his youth. There is hardly 
 an ancient Greek author whose works, carefully and thor- 
 oughly studied, will not throw light upon those of all other 
 Greek authors. Moreover, within the last thirty years such 
 advances have been made in archaeology and anthropology that 
 the whole problem of comprehending the vast structure of an- 
 cient civilization, Greek as well as Oriental, has been prac- 
 tically restated, and wholly new factors have entered into the 
 equation. Greek Literature is too completely an outgrowth 
 of Greek life to be intelligible except as that life is intelligible; 
 and for the comprehension of that life new helps are furnished 
 on every side, new sources of knowledge are available to the 
 student of to-day of which our fathers never dreamed. The 
 Greek-speaking peoples, formerly thought of as a pure and 
 homogeneous race, are now seen to have been rather of ex- 
 tremely mixed parentage, held together in a very precarious 
 union perhaps quite as much by pressure from without as by 
 natural and mutual attraction. Greek civilization we might 
 describe as a new and splendid pattern worked upon a back-
 
 98 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 ground of older and quite different forms of culture, and the 
 old forms often show through and between the lines of the 
 later design. "Purity of race" is a phrase that is anthropo- 
 logically discredited: "Greek is as Greek does." 
 
 It will be best, considering the extent and variety of this 
 Greek Literature to which I am directing your attention, to 
 choose a few of its chief characteristics, as they appear to me, 
 for closer examination. 
 
 The first characteristic is that of extreme variety. Adopt- 
 ing the traditional division into poetical and prose Literature, 
 we find that the Greeks gave artistic development succes- 
 sively to epic poetry both heroic (Homeric Poems) and didactic 
 (Hesiod) ; to philosophical poetry, in which the external form 
 is that of the epic, that is, the hexameter; to elegiac and 
 iambic poetry, both named from the form of verse, not from 
 the subject-matter or mode of treatment; to a very elaborate 
 form of choral lyric, employed at festivals and on other public 
 occasions, and by the side of this to a purely personal, subjec- 
 tive lyric, in a form admirably suited to the expression of in- 
 tense emotion; then to dramatic poetry, both tragic and comic 
 (there is no prose drama in ancient Greek Literature that has 
 survived, though the famous "mimes" of Sophron would doubt- 
 less fall under that head); and to bucolic or pastoral poetry of 
 Theocritus and his school, the last independent form of poetry 
 to be cultivated among ancient Greeks. 
 
 Turning to prose, in every sense a secondary form of litera- 
 ture, we may follow the development in succession of philo- 
 sophical, historical, and oratorical prose. Out of the fusion of 
 these originally separate forms issues what may well be called 
 the universal prose style — of course showing many varia- 
 tions and modifications at the hands of individual writers — 
 which becomes the pattern for the prose of the whole Western 
 world. 
 
 The origination and development of all these forms of
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 99 
 
 literary expression were not the achievement of the Greek- 
 speaking people as a whole, still less of any one part of them. 
 We come now to one of the most notable phenomena in literary 
 history: the traditional divergence of dialect between the 
 different branches of Greek Literature. In the glory of hav- 
 ing assisted to perfect the many forms of literary Greek many 
 different communities or "tribes" — to use a conventional 
 but very misleading term — had a share. These various 
 communities spoke widely different forms of Greek, some of 
 which are only very imperfectly known to us, whether from 
 scanty literary remains, or a few unimportant and half-deci- 
 pherable inscriptions, or the incomplete accounts given by 
 grammarians and lexicographers of Alexandrian and Roman 
 times. The speech of outlying communities hke iEtolians, 
 Macedonians, many of the Cretan towns, and the like must 
 have been nearly unintelligible to the more highly civilized 
 and refined people of the central cities; even the dialect of 
 Elis, the region of Olympia, where thousands upon thousands 
 of Greek-speaking people congregated every four years 
 throughout many centuries, was always regarded as particu- 
 larly crabbed and difficult. A modern parallel is the case 
 of Oberammergau, in the Bavarian Highlands, whither the 
 decennial Passion Play brings myriads of Germans to whom 
 the untempered speech of that region is as strange as Dutch 
 or Flemish. 
 
 This literary development by regions or localities — I in- 
 tentionally avoid the word "tribes" — had a striking result: 
 a certain "dialect" became so to speak obligatory for each of 
 the great classes of Literature. That is to say, when a particu- 
 lar branch of Greek-speaking people gave typical develop- 
 ment to a particular species of Literature, the dialect in use 
 among them, their vernacular, served as the material out of 
 which a linguistic vehicle of expression for that form of Litera- 
 ture was wrought. Furthermore (and this is the point to be 
 chiefly remembered), that vehicle, thus created, was adopted
 
 100 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 by Greeks of other regions and other vernaculars when they 
 composed works of a similar kind. For example, the elabo- 
 rate and artificial epic dialect seems to have received its final 
 form among Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor; but in succeed- 
 ing ages whoever composed epic poetry, whatever might be 
 his native dialect, used as a matter of course this same epic 
 dialect, so far as he had mastered it. So, again, the language 
 of choral lyric, conventionally a sort of fusion of several non- 
 Ionic dialects, but chiefly Doric, was employed as well by the 
 Ionic-speaking Simonides and Bacchylides as by the natu- 
 ralized Lacedemonian Alcman and the Boeotian Pindar. A par- 
 tial exception to this rule is seen in the case of the Lesbian 
 dialect employed by Alcseus and Sappho, which hardly 
 appears again in Greek Literature; partly because that style 
 of poetry went out of fashion, partly, doubtless, because the 
 dialect was so distinctively and peculiarly local that it was too 
 difficult of acquisition, and not rich enough for general use in 
 the expression of a wider range of ideas. 
 
 A curious literary enthusiasm, a harmless but barren 
 Schwdrmerei, prompted a certain bellettristic lady of Ha- 
 drian's court, over seven hundred years after the time of 
 Sappho, to compose four poems in an imitation of the 
 Sapphic dialect, on the occasion of Hadrian's visit to 
 Egypt in the year 130 a.d. These poems are still to be 
 seen, engraved on the colossal statue of Memnon in Egyp- 
 tian Thebes. Balbilla — that was the ambitious lady's 
 name — was but moderately successful with her Lesbian 
 dialect, and wisely held aloof from the more difficult 
 Lesbian meters. 
 
 The various local dialects, however, thus taken for use as 
 literary mediums, underwent many modifications. They were 
 most severely pruned and trimmed, and on the other hand 
 em-iched by borrowings from other dialects of Greek. It must 
 be remembered that the literary language is essentially an 
 artificial language. The vernaculars are the real living Ian-
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 101 
 
 guage, not mere corruptions of the literary speech. But a mere 
 vernacular tongue is rarely suited to serious literary production; 
 for one reason, because it is of very limited range. At an 
 early period in their literary history the Greeks felt this to be 
 true. They developed not one indeed but several literary 
 languages. It is interesting and instructive to compare the 
 language of Pindar with that of his countrywoman and elder 
 contemporary, Corinna, so far as the latter is known and ac- 
 cessible from a few short fragments. Corinna's language is of 
 an extreme dialectal type, and must have been very difficult 
 to Greeks not already acquainted with the Boeotian dialect; 
 while Pindar employs a vocabulary and forms which can have 
 offered but little trouble to any educated Greek, difficult as 
 his train of thought must often have been to follow. 
 
 The several principal forms of Greek Literature, then, grew 
 up in the environment of different parts of the Greek-speaking 
 world, and preserved to the last many linguistic peculiarities 
 of their originators. To the lonians belongs the chief share 
 of the glory of having put the Homeric Poems into their final 
 shape, of developing a somewhat different vocabulary and 
 inflection for use in the elegiac and iambic poetry, and of work- 
 ing out for the first time, not only in the history of Greek Lit- 
 erature but so far as we know in the history of Literature at 
 all, a really artistic prose style. What Greek prose might 
 have continued to be but for the artistic feeling of Ionian 
 writers, we may see from the clumsy, disjointed deliverances 
 of some of the earlier philosophers, as preserved to us in de- 
 tached quotations by later authors. This Ionic prose was 
 eclipsed by the greater Attic style, but not before it had found 
 in the incomparable Herodotus an exponent whose narrative 
 exerts an undying charm. 
 
 The choral lyric, or poetry designed to be sung at occasions 
 of public ceremony or worship, seems to have been cultivated 
 most successfully as a whole among Dorian communities, and 
 its characteristics are in the main those traditionally ascribed
 
 102 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 to Dorian Greeks: sobriety, stateliness, dignity. Yet the 
 two greatest names in Greek choral lyric are those of a Boeo- 
 tian and an Ionian, of Pindar and Simonides; and the lan- 
 guage of choral lyric is not really Dorian any more than it is 
 iEolian. The Dorian character comes out most plainly in the 
 meters employed, the most stately to be found anywhere in 
 Greek poetry. A striking illustration of this persistence of 
 literary dialect is afforded by the Attic drama. In Greek 
 tragedy, as is of course well known, certain interludes or 
 entr'actes were sung by a trained chorus who executed a sort of 
 pantomimic dance in accompaniment. The language of these 
 interludes differs from that of the rest of the play by admitting 
 certain forms of non-Attic type, but only in passages intended 
 to be sung ; a sort of reminiscence of an earlier period when 
 the drama consisted of little else than a series of choral odes. 
 The so-called "Doric forms" of certain words, as used in these 
 odes or interludes, are in reality not specifically Doric at all. 
 The drama is essentially an Attic product. Very possibly 
 the beginnings of dramatic development are due to non-Attic 
 Hellenes, but the Attic people, the Athenians, succeeded in 
 making the drama so completely their own that their claim 
 to inventorship is practically undisputed. In fact, from about 
 500 B.C. onward, Athens often plays the role of appropriator 
 of other states' goods, and gets much credit for introducing, 
 as new, ideas which had really been first broached elsewhere. 
 So with the comic drama: there is good reason to believe that 
 it was composed and performed among certain Dorian peoples, 
 particularly at Megara and in Sicily, long before it was taken 
 up at Athens; but the skill and cleverness of Athenian writers, 
 and the transcendent genius of an Aristophanes, aided by the 
 freedom of speech which was far greater at Athens than else- 
 where, secured to Athens the monopoly, one might almost say, 
 of this form of drama. Thus it comes about that the history 
 of Greek drama is the history of Athenian drama. So again 
 with oratory, a point to which I shall revert presently. And
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 103 
 
 it is worth while to remember that the population of Attica 
 was probably one of the most mixed in Greece, and the dialect 
 better suited than any other to be the medium of dramatic and 
 prose Literatme, as uniting in itself elements of many others. 
 Of all the Greek dialects known to us the Ionic-Attic group 
 shows the fewest archaic forms. 
 
 After Athens had thus gained the spiritual leadership of 
 Greece no important new species of poetry seems to have been 
 developed, though old forms underwent some important 
 modifications, until after 300 B.C., when Theocritus, of whose 
 life singularly little is knowTi, introduced a new type, the 
 bucolic or pastoral poetr3^ A Sicilian by birth, he lived on 
 the island of Cos and at Alexandria. With wonderful skill 
 he brought into Literature the pastoral motives of his native 
 country, idealizing the goatherds and shepherds into a form 
 in which they became presentable at court, yet leaving them 
 their depth and intensity of emotion and in the main their 
 broad and homely dialect. The combination of this dialect 
 with the hexameter verse, which had been hitherto almost 
 exclusively Ionic in form, was in itself a notable contribution 
 to literary art. 
 
 As the second salient characteristic of Greek Literature I 
 would posit its particularly close and intimate connection, 
 down to about 300 B.C., with the everyday life of the Greeks 
 themselves. Mr. R. R. Marett, in his preface to a collection 
 of very valuable lectures delivered in 1908, at Oxford, en- 
 titled ''Anthropology and the Classics," says: "To use the 
 language of biology, whereas Greek Literature is congenital, 
 Roman Literature is in large part acquired." No right under- 
 standing of either substance or form of Greek Literature is 
 possible to one who regards it in the light of modern literatures, 
 that is, views it as consisting chiefly of works composed to be 
 read to oneself. On the contrary, Greek prose-writer and
 
 104 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 Greek poet alike had in mind an audience, persons who Hstened; 
 their appeal to the intelligence of those whose attention and 
 approval they sought was made chiefly through spoken sounds, 
 not directly through written symbols. Even in the time of Plato 
 manuscripts of literary works were not abundant, and the 
 possessor of one would ordinarily read it aloud to a circle of 
 friends; nay, when reading to himself a Greek of Plato's time 
 is likely to have read aloud. The poet, indeed, originally 
 went farther than the prose-writer in his appeal to the ear; 
 he made it not only through words in metrical arrangement, 
 but largely through musical melody as well. The epic poet, 
 composing in the long and stately hexameter; the elegiac poet, 
 using alternately the hexameter and the verse misnamed 
 "pentameter"; and the iambographer, using the trimeter, or 
 verse of normally twelve syllables — these three seem to have 
 designed their verses to be chanted or intoned rather than 
 sung; but the whole character of this versification points to a 
 mode of delivery very different from that of the usual spoken 
 language. The verses of the " lyric " or, to speak somewhat 
 more technically, of the ^' melic " poets, were undoubtedly 
 always sung to melodies in which the length of each note was 
 accurately determined by the time-value of each syllable as 
 used in actual speech. Our modern forms of verse seem to me 
 to give an extremely false idea of the ancient meters. Un- 
 fortunately we cannot, with our present fragmentary knowl- 
 edge of ancient music, safely go beyond this negative state- 
 ment. If we had but one fairly good phonographic record 
 of an ancient Greek song, how much better off we might be 
 than we are with several treatises that have come down to us 
 from ancient times on music and meters ! 
 
 The successive types of Greek Literature reflect faithfully 
 the external conditions out of which they sprang. In some 
 few cases we are fortunately able to trace the process of growth 
 from almost the beginning to the full bloom; but not so in the 
 earlier types. If we could follow out the earlier stages we
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 105 
 
 should, I believe, find in the Literature what has been found 
 so often in the history of Greek art: a working-out of popular 
 models previously long current in simpler forms. Unfortu- 
 nately, the phrase "mushroom growth" has acquired a by- 
 meaning which makes it nearly incapable of use in a good 
 sense; yet something very like that process must have gone 
 on in the earlier centuries of Greek Literature, as in many 
 other literatures. As the spawn of the fungi permeates the 
 soil in almost invisible filaments, to be suddenly roused to 
 fertility by favoring conditions of moisture and atmosphere, 
 so the .subtle growths of popular songs and tales spring up 
 into brilliant productiveness under the forcing of the master 
 mind. 
 
 The earliest stage of Greek society revealed by the archae- 
 ologist is plainly of an aristocratic type. Chieftains great 
 and small live in castles that are at once the palaces and the 
 sanctuaries, and often the strongholds and places of refuge, of 
 the various communities. The Homeric Poems display a con- 
 dition of society in which the rule of the nobles and princes 
 is nearly absolute, though tempered by the advice of coun- 
 selors, smaller chieftains, lesser nobles; but the man of low 
 station in life hardly counts in war, except as rower of ships 
 and desultory fighter in the field, and in peace not at all. 
 Not only in the rare intervals of peace — petty warfare must 
 have been nearly incessant — but in camp, bards sing the 
 KXca dvBpw, the glory of men, that is, their prowess in war, 
 their strength, their cunning. But it is only the nobles that 
 are thus glorified. The poems embodying these praises are of 
 singularly dignified and stately form, in the sonorous dactylic 
 hexameter verse, a verse of simple structure, yet susceptible of 
 manifold modulation. The previous history of the hexameter 
 is still unknown, and probably will remain so; but we may 
 reasonably consider it a development out of simpler forms 
 which gave rise on the one hand, by mere coupling, to the 
 "pentameter," on the other, by coupling and some modifi-
 
 106 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 cation, to the "hexameter." The style is deliberate and 
 circumstantial, in no haste to finish its descriptions; the 
 hearers could sit all night if necessary, feasting and listening 
 to the song and chant of the bard. Nor is only prowess in 
 arms extolled; the power of eloquent speech is praised and 
 admirably exemplified. Nestor and Odysseus are real orators 
 from whose utterances one might gather many an example to 
 illustrate principles of style laid down by rhetoricians of later 
 centuries. Everjrthing is astonishingly human, the gods most 
 of all ; indeed, they are rather a species of superman, but with 
 the added advantages of distant sight, and instantaneous loco- 
 motion, and power of sudden disappearance. They are es- 
 sentially Greek nobles projected upon the sky. The Greek 
 chieftains portrayed by Homer were most interested, perhaps 
 exclusively so, in tales of the doings of their own kind. The 
 persistence into historical times of such a type of civilization 
 may be observed in Thessaly, where political power seems to 
 have been monopolized by a few great clans. 
 
 The other side of the picture is drawn by Hesiod, of whose 
 personality extremely little was known by the Greeks of his- 
 torical times. To judge from that little, he was a man of 
 humble origin, born in Boeotia as the son of an immigrant 
 from Asia Minor. In his ''Works and Days" we are in- 
 troduced to the man of the people, the weary toiler for his daily 
 bread, whose sordidness, curious canniness, and boundless 
 superstition are all most strikingly revealed. The hexam- 
 eter is still employed, and seems often too stately a medium 
 of expression for the subject-matter; but probably it was still 
 the only form of verse sufficiently developed to be worth 
 considering. 
 
 The eighth century before Christ, in which Hesiod may 
 well have lived, was a time of singular unrest in the Greek 
 world. Everywhere the aristocratic form of community was 
 disappearing, and societies of more democratic type coming 
 into existence, through the middle stage of the tyranny, a
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 107 
 
 form of state in which some individual, usually of noble birth, 
 gained such ascendancy over the commoners that he was able 
 to proclaim himself sole ruler, and often to maintain himself 
 in power for many years. This century is also preeminently 
 the period of colonization, when nearly every Greek town of 
 importance, torn by civil dissensions (which regularly ended 
 with the actual expulsion of the defeated party) and perhaps 
 overpopulated for the small extent of territory which it con- 
 trolled, established settlements in distant parts of the Mediter- 
 ranean and the Black Sea, each of them a new center of Greek 
 life and customs. 
 
 In such surroundings the man who had something to say, 
 and could say it well, came to the front. The noble still had 
 many advantages over the meaner man. But the humble 
 man was getting his opportunity; he had at least the privi- 
 lege of being heard, and might on occasion even turn the issue. 
 How was such a man, or any man for that matter, to win the 
 attention of his fellow-men ? There were no newspapers for 
 him to write to, no body of readers to be reached by cheap 
 editions of campaign documents. In fact, the total number 
 whom he needed to influence cannot have been, according to 
 our ideas, very great; even at Athens, most democratic of 
 Greek states, when the total population, including all Attica, 
 must have been six to seven hundred thousand, the number of 
 voters was not over thirty thousand. Those whom he wished 
 to influence had to be reached by the spoken word. In public 
 assemblies every one who gained a hearing might of course 
 hold forth with such native eloquence as he possessed; but 
 how could he be sure that his words would be remembered ? 
 There was a better way: to put his ideas into a form easily 
 memorized, and thus adapted to repetition, and suitable to be 
 passed along from man to man. Two forms were chosen in 
 preference to others : the elegiac distich, and the iambic trim- 
 eter. Both are forms suited to compact and forcible ex- 
 pression. The iambic trimeter, in particular, approaches
 
 108 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 nearer than any other form of verse, according to ancient 
 authorities, to the actual spoken language; it lends itself 
 particularly to satire and invective, which must have played 
 a large part in the public speaking of those days. The most 
 notable figure in the earlier part of this period is Archilochus, 
 a native of the island of Paros, whose life was probably en- 
 tirely included within the limits of the seventh century B.C. 
 The fragments of his poems show a mind of extraordinary 
 virility and versatility, unmatched in vituperation, yet keenly 
 alive to the joys and graces of life, and (what chiefly con- 
 cerns us here) with a perfect mastery of the technique of ver- 
 sification. Not even Sappho plays more varied melodies 
 upon her lyre. In particular, his handling of the iambic 
 measures shows the skill of thorough control of his art. The 
 perfection of his trimeters makes it likely that many poets 
 before him had helped develop this measure, or at least that it 
 had already a long history in popular use, simultaneously with 
 the more dignified and splendid dactylic hexameter. The 
 hexameter, indeed, was put to many more uses than merely 
 for epic poetry. Hesiod's use of it for the homely "Husband- 
 man's Calendar" has already been mentioned. There was as 
 yet no art of composing good prose, prose that could stand 
 comparison with the highly developed poetical forms. These 
 forms in fact took the place later occupied by prose; the 
 relation which they bore to the more elaborate and compli- 
 cated forms of verse, the "lyric meters," was practically the 
 same as that of prose to poetry as a whole. Set, formal ex- 
 pression was still only possible in verse; and verse was really 
 better suited to the needs of those times than prose. 
 
 It would be worth while, if time and your patience allowed, 
 to point out the other fields in which the flowers of Literature 
 seem indigenous to the soil. It is everywhere as though we 
 were viewing a garden the flowers in which were only better 
 bred specimens of the sorts to be found all about, outside the 
 wall. One might show, for example, how the growing splendor
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 109 
 
 of the great national games at Olympia, Delphi, and elsewhere 
 made a victory at one of them so glorious that no ceremonies 
 were too elaborate for the celebration of it, and how, some- 
 time before 500 b.c, the fashion arose among those who could 
 pay handsomely of ordering a triumphal ode from some 
 famous poet, to be sung by a trained chorus at the formal 
 celebration. The fashion seems not to have lasted more than 
 a hundred years, if as long as that; but that hundred years 
 includes Simonides and Pindar and Bacchylides, besides lesser 
 lights of whom we know but little. How, again, the whole 
 history of the tragic drama falls between about 550 and 375 B.C., 
 only a hundred and seventy-five years or so; how the worship 
 of Dionysus or Bacchus, which had spread rapidly among 
 Greek peoples, had been made one of the most important 
 features of the state religion at Athens, and how, after the 
 impulse given by the famous Thespis, the ruder forms of 
 dramatic art, which must have been practised for centuries 
 before his time, were transformed into the lofty and austere 
 beauty of ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; how the 
 satire of Archilochus and others found its real successor in 
 comedy as developed at Athens — a vehicle more terribly 
 effective than even the savage iambics could be, when the 
 stinging words were reenforced by the action, the music, and 
 the pantomimic dance of the public performance. Aristoph- 
 anes and his contemporaries, the remote ancestors of the 
 modern satirical press, are hardly more remote in time than in 
 the distance which separates their skilful and graceful, if often 
 ribald, verses from the haEomer-and-tongs caricatures of 
 to-day. The "Old Comedy" of Athens contains some of the 
 bitterest, most unsparing lampoons that are known in Litera- 
 ture, fully equal in gall to those of Archilochus; and, like his, 
 they are couched in verse of great beauty of form, varied by 
 lyrics worthy to be paired with those of any age or land, a 
 combination essentially and characteristically Greek. 
 
 The best example of all, however, to show the singularly
 
 110 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 close connection of classical Greek Literature with contem- 
 porary Greek life is the second great contribution of Athens 
 to the literary eminence of the Greeks, — Greek oratory. It 
 brings us also naturally to the consideration of the third great 
 characteristic of that Literature: the appropriateness of the 
 style to the subject-matter, and as a corollary the permanent 
 value of the types of form thus worked out. Appropriateness, 
 in fact, may be called the key-note of the best Greek art, liter- 
 ary as well as plastic and architectural. Ornament is chiefly 
 "structural," i.e. naturally growing out of the disposition of 
 the material to meet its needs. Nor was the Greek greatly 
 impressed by mere size; the "big thing" as such did not 
 appeal to him. As Ben Jonson expressed it, so he believed: 
 
 "In small proportions we just beauties see; 
 And in short measures life may perfect be." 
 
 The endless epics of India would have been artistic horrors 
 to the Greek. 
 
 During the first three quarters of the fifth century B.C., 
 Athens had been growing with unexampled speed, and her 
 intellectual development kept pace with her advance in ma- 
 terial resources and in military and naval power. She had 
 become the head of a great confederacy of city-states, the 
 members of which presently found themselves in the position, 
 not of aUies, but of subjects. A very harsh and unjust regu- 
 lation established by Athens required all lawsuits between 
 citizens of alhed states and Athenian citizens to be tried at 
 Athens. This of course not only enormously swelled the 
 calendar of the Athenian courts, but created (or helped create, 
 for it was in the blood already) a positive mania at Athens for 
 lawsuits, comparable only to that for theatrical performances. 
 Each party to a lawsuit moreover had to appear in court and 
 plead his own cause; naturally many litigants felt themselves 
 unequal to the task of preparing and presenting their own 
 cases, and were forced to learn by heart and deliver speeches
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 111 
 
 written for them. There were thus at Athens three powerful 
 causes at work to bring about the perfection of a serviceable 
 prose, of a good oratorical style: first, the daily occupation 
 of the courts of law, which were theoretically each the sov- 
 ereign people itself sitting in judgment, and practically often 
 consisted of a very large number, sometimes several hundreds, 
 of citizens sitting as jurymen; second, the frequent meetings 
 of the assembly, in which the policy and government of the 
 State were discussed with great freedom of speech; and third, 
 the frequent occasions of pubUc celebration when a "set 
 speech," an oration, formed a prominent and favorite part of 
 the ceremonies. Not that most Greek States did not furnish 
 abundant examples of all three; in Sicily, for instance, the 
 turbulence and constant political upheavals of the Greek 
 towns put a premium upon skilful speech-making, and it is 
 very significant that two of the earliest among the celebrated 
 teachers of oratory, Corax and Tisias, and the pompous and 
 flamboyant Gorgias, who carried on their tradition, were 
 Sicilian Greeks. But Athens appropriated the new art, made 
 it over to suit her own conditions, and impressed upon it her 
 own indelible stamp. 
 
 It is not difficult for us to-day to understand how the great 
 public festivals, with thousands of spectators eager to hear as 
 well as to see, should have fostered the growth of a sonorous 
 and imposing style of composition and declamation, nor yet 
 how the exigencies of debate in the public assemblies should 
 have taught men to speak to the point, to exhort with fire, 
 and to warn with impressive earnestness. It is more difficult 
 to see how the business of law courts should have tended to 
 develop a chaste and sober literary style, and equally so to 
 understand how the only part of the proceedings in court that 
 was committed to writing and thus preserved was the speeches 
 of the litigants and their supporters; but that is exactly 
 what took place, and the fact is the strongest testimony to the 
 surpassing fondness of the Greeks for beauty and appropri-
 
 112 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 ateness of form. It happens that we can trace the early his- 
 tory of artistic oratory with some completeness and detail. 
 The earlier specimens that have come down to us are very 
 elaborate and artificial; we find all sorts of tricks of style, 
 aUiteration, rhyme, inverse order, exact balance of clauses, 
 even to correspondence in the number of syllables, and so on. 
 The so-called "Sophists," particularly Gorgias and Protagoras, 
 both non-Athenians, are the chief examples of this tend- 
 ency. But the Athenian taste is severer; Antiphon, the 
 earliest example of a really Attic orator known to us, is 
 formal and stiff, with a prim exactness that reminds us con- 
 stantly of the archaic sculpture that had been out of fashion 
 at Athens and elsewhere for seventy-five years. How the 
 famous orators of the earlier fifth century spoke, Themistocles, 
 Pericles, and the rest, we have no means of knowing. Thu- 
 cydides in his History of the Pelopormesian War gives several 
 speeches as by Pericles; but they are not hkely to be even 
 remotely of the style of Pericles, for Thucydides makes all his 
 characters speak essentially alike, all in his owti involved and 
 complicated, though often forcible and impressive, style. 
 Thucydides was banished from Athens in 424, and remained 
 in exile twenty years. While he was away the style not only of 
 oratory but of all prose writing underwent an amazing change. 
 It seems hardly possible that the speeches composed by Thu- 
 cydides for the characters in his history and those written by 
 Lysias can belong to nearly the same period. In actual time of 
 composition they are nearly contemporaneous; in spirit they 
 are a whole generation apart. 
 
 By the beginning of the fourth century b.c, the ascendancy 
 of Attic prose was so complete that poetry, while still produced 
 in great quantity, was not only no longer the dominant fea- 
 ture in Greek Literature, but showed no realty new types. 
 The fourth century is thus essentially an epoch of prose. 
 Unfortunately we cannot judge fairly of the many eminent 
 historians of that epoch, because their works have mostly
 
 GREEK LITERATURE 113 
 
 perished; but of the greatest orators we have abundant re- 
 mains, the most completely representative being Isocrates, 
 who may well be called the father of the essay and the po- 
 litical pamphlet, and the incomparable Demosthenes. And a 
 happy chance has preserved the works of Plato practically 
 complete. 
 
 Plato, again, brilliantly illustrates the Greek, specifically 
 the Attic, ability to appropriate and utterly transform ideas 
 from foreign sources. Sophron of Syracuse had given literary 
 form to the Mimos, or dramatic sketch in the form of simple 
 dialogue, in which the chief stress was laid upon the delinea- 
 tion of character. Antique tradition has much to say of 
 Plato's fondness for these mimes; a malicious legend even says 
 that his "Dialogues" are mere copies of Sophron. This of 
 course is impossible, though Plato may have owed much to his 
 Sicilian models. It is inconceivable that any such produc- 
 tions can have approached the beauty of Plato's style. That 
 is unique, as the man himself stands alone in the history of 
 Literature, the poet who eschews verse and on moral grounds 
 objects to the whole tribe of poets, the aristocrat of aristo- 
 crats who despises the social and political distinctions of 
 his own time, the mystic and seer who makes his characters 
 talk in the everyday language of the elegant Athenian world. 
 Santayana is, I think, right when he says: "It was after all 
 but the love of beauty that made him censure the poets; for 
 like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to see beauty 
 flourish in the world." The speech is of a kind possible 
 only in a highly cultivated urban society, which prides itself 
 on perfect control of a subtle and idiomatically difficult 
 medium of intercourse. It shows the Attic language at its 
 very best: wonderfully flexible, abounding in particles to 
 show the subtlest changes of meaning, sensitive to the shifting 
 moods of the speaker, averse to bombast and involved con- 
 structions, apparently careless yet always entirely conscious of 
 itself. The possibilities of such a language, and Plato's
 
 114 GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 command of it and of all the resources of style as well as his 
 marvelous drawing of character, are best shown in the 'Sym- 
 posium,' that matchless dialogue in which one after another 
 of the most prominent men of the literary circle at Athens is 
 made to speak in his own favorite manner, only to be out- 
 done by Socrates, who lifts the whole discussion of the nature 
 of Eros to an immeasurably higher plane. 
 
 Of all Greek prose authors, Plato seems to me to lose most 
 in translation. The very elements which make his style so 
 interesting are those least reproducible in a modern language 
 except at the sacrifice of other elements hardly less important. 
 At times one of the easiest writers to comprehend, he is again 
 m.ost difliicult and elusive; his moods change as rapidly as 
 those of Chopin, and the interpreter of the one needs as exact 
 knowledge and as profound and intimately sympathetic 
 understanding as the performer of the other. 
 
 After the Macedonian conquest literary production indeed 
 went on unchecked; and the post-classical Literature, i.e. 
 the Literature from 300 B.C. to 200 a.d. or thereabouts, 
 that has survived equals or surpasses in extent all that we 
 have received of the older Greek Literature. In substance 
 a great deal of it is of the first importance ; Plutarch alone 
 would suffice to acquit Greek Literature of the Roman period 
 from the charge of being uninteresting. But the task of Greek 
 writers, poets and prosaists alike, as molders of style and creators 
 of types, was practically done when Demosthenes, in flight from 
 the Athens he had loved and struggled for so well, ended his 
 life in 322. How well that task had been performed we may 
 understand when we reflect that the types and forms of their 
 creation have proved to be no mere cold and unapproachable 
 show-pieces, but patterns susceptible of modification and 
 adaptation to the needs of age after age, and so, with all their 
 changes, have remained ever the same living force.
 
 VI 
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 
 By Nelson Glenn McCrea, Professor of Latin 
 
 It has been commonly recognized that Latin Literature 
 has two distinct claims upon the attention of the modern mind. 
 It records on the one hand the interpretation of human life 
 reached by a great nation, whose disciphned bravery conquered 
 the known world and whose juristic and administrative genius 
 then slowly worked out the idea of a single imperial nation- 
 aHty for all the diverse peoples of its wide domain. This con- 
 ception of the possible political unity of mankind, first partially 
 and but momentarily realized in the empire of Alexander the 
 Great, was discerned again by Polybius as he sought to under- 
 stand the reasons why in half a century the civilized world 
 had fallen under the sway of Rome. In the train of conquest 
 followed organization, and with two exceptions, the Greek 
 and the Jew, ultimate assimilation. A common language 
 sufficiently flexible to adjust itself to the new demands made 
 upon it, a common law whose development had long been 
 profoundly influenced by the Stoic doctrine of an eternal law 
 of nature superior in its authority to any specific human 
 legislation, the movements of trade and commerce made 
 possible by the widespread pax Romana, all tended to bind 
 closely together the manifold elements of the Empire. Cara- 
 calla's extension of Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants 
 of the Roman world, though not so intended, was but a nat- 
 ural recognition of existing conditions, "The Syrian, the 
 Pannonian, the Briton, the Spaniard, was proud to call him- 
 
 115
 
 116 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 self a Roman." And presently with this idea of a civil unity 
 there came to be most intimately associated the idea of a 
 religious unity, so that for centuries the belief in the eternal 
 existence of the Church carried with it as a necessary con- 
 sequence a belief in the endless duration of the Empire. 
 For thousands of human beings Rome thus came to be a 
 spiritual idea rather than a definitely localized city. Strange, 
 indeed, it would be if thetLiterature of a nation so virile, so con- 
 structive, whose career determined the whole subsequent 
 course of Western European history, were not at least suffi- 
 ciently expressive of the national genius to command our 
 most serious consideration. 
 
 But there is another aspect of Latin Literature of the greatest 
 historical importance. It was Rome who assimilated and 
 transmitted to the western world the culture of Greece. 
 During those five hundred years in which the city on the 
 Tiber gradually fought her way from the position of a strug- 
 gling little community in the midst of menacing neighbors to 
 the assured .control of the whole Italian peninsula, the Greeks, 
 already possessed of their Homer, invented and brought to 
 perfection in various parts of the Greek-speaking world the 
 fundamental types of literary expression in poetry and in 
 prose. It was practically inevitable that when, upon the 
 conquest of Magna Grsecia and through the later wars in 
 Greece and in the Hellenized East, the ruling class at Rome 
 became acquainted with the masterpieces of Greek art and 
 letters, captive Greece should, in Horace's phrase, take cap- 
 tive her rude conqueror. A generation succeeded whose edu- 
 cation from youth up was full of Greek influences. The 
 younger Scipio Africanus, a man of wonderful ability, many- 
 sidedness and taste, possessed of a most winning person aUty, 
 became the leader of a circle of statesmen and writers who 
 were confident of the nation's future, enthusiastic over the new 
 culture, and convinced that the language might most surely 
 and most swiftly be molded into the medium for a great na-
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 117 
 
 tional literature by the close study of Greek models. The tide 
 of Hellenism came to its flood in the prose of Cicero and the 
 poetry of Vergil, the one the most widely cultivated mind 
 of all antiquity, the other, in Bacon's words, "the chastest 
 poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known," 
 and both, in the influence which they exerted alike upon the 
 minds of the generations which immediately followed them 
 and in the intellectual life of Western Europe since the Re- 
 naissance, as all pervasive as Latinity itself. The unity of the 
 Empire and the ease of conamunication between its parts 
 led to the wide diffusion of this Graeco-Roman culture 
 throughout the provinces. It was an integral element in the 
 life of the new nationalities, and even the reentrance upon 
 the scene in the fifteenth century of the Greek originals them- 
 selves failed to deprive it of its primacy as a formative power. 
 It was still the Latin writers who were models of style and 
 whose ideas swayed the development of art and letters. Not 
 until the eighteenth century did Greek come really into its 
 own. 
 
 One of the fruits of the nineteenth century was the formu- 
 lation and wide apphcation of the historical and comparative 
 method in the study of all the results of human activity. 
 To the investigators and critics who thus followed the stream 
 of Literature back to its fountain heads this second aspect 
 of Latin Literature seemed to be of paramount significance. 
 The unquestioned indebtedness of Rome to Greece in all the 
 technique of form, the constant and, at times, even minute 
 use by the Latin writer of the rich material gathered in the 
 earlier Literature seemed to these students to make Latin at 
 the best but a pale and ineffectual reflex of the Greek. But 
 already there is evidence that a different and saner view will 
 presently obtain. It is being pointed out that we cannot 
 thus estimate Latin Literature without including in the same 
 condemnation much of that which is most justly admired in 
 our modern literatures. When once the literary types have
 
 118 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 been worked out, there remains but one possible originality, 
 an originality of personality and spirit. Man is inevitably 
 the, heir of the ages, and "with the process of the suns" the 
 elements for which he is indebted to the past become as in- 
 evitably ever more and more numerous. Even the " Iliad " is 
 now recognized to be a highly artificial production and to 
 presuppose a long anterior period of poetic activity. It 
 has been proven again and again, as, for instance, in the case 
 of the plots of Shakspere's plays, that a poet may borrow 
 material from others without in any way impairing his own 
 claim to eminent or even preeminent merit. For the supreme 
 test of a great work of art must be found in its unfailing 
 power to give noble pleasure to minds that are sensitive to 
 such beauty, and not in the answer to the question whether 
 the artist has gotten from existing sources the material into 
 which he has himself put this subtle magic. Judged by such 
 a standard rather than by that of their genetic relation 
 to their predecessors, the place of the names that are the 
 glory of Latin Literature may be regarded as having long 
 since been fixed by the consensus of opinion of successive 
 generations. More than this, recent studies are revealing 
 with increasing clearness that, while not only in form and 
 rhythm but also (especially in the case of the poets) in idea, 
 phrase, and color they drew freely upon their models, the 
 spirit and total effect of their work is essentially Roman and 
 not Greek. With some striking exceptions, chiefly in the 
 field of the drama, this work reflects the environment of the 
 writer, social, political, or religious, and gives expression to 
 the spirit of the time, its moods, gay or severe, its aspirations, 
 self-criticism, or despair. Nsevius and Ennius both fought 
 for Rome in the field before they composed their national 
 epics. Horace, in the opinion of a distinguished French critic, 
 M. Pierron, " est, si je I'ose ainsi dire, le siecle d'Auguste en 
 personne." The appeal of Vergil's " -^Eneid " to his country- 
 men was so immediate that to them not -^Eneas but the Roman
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 119 
 
 people itself was the real hero. We walk the very streets of 
 Rome and note the manner of the passing throng with Juvenal 
 and Martial. Even Lucretius, who seems so detached a 
 personality, and who is so proud, after the manner of all true 
 Epicureans, of his absolute dependence upon the scrolls of his 
 revered master, produced a poem which is, as Professor John 
 Veitch said some time ago, "a type in the world of thought of 
 the irrepressible Roman spirit of absolute sovereignty and 
 love of orderly rule in the world of practical life and action." 
 And this Roman spirit shows itself not only in the conquering 
 toil with which the masses of disparate phenomena that 
 prove to him the invariable order of natural law are finally 
 marshaled in a coherent and interrelated series of arguments, 
 but even more in the manner and temper with which this 
 result is achieved. The literary movement of the time was 
 already Alexandrine, with its love of carefully polished work 
 in miniature, learned, romantic, and sentimental. But from 
 the group of young poets of this school to which Catullus, 
 Calvus, and Cinna belonged, Lucretius stood quite aloof. To 
 his eager mind, intensely absorbed in the presentation of 
 that philosophy which would insure in every recipient soul 
 the dethronement of illusion, the reign of reason, most of 
 their work must have seemed mere studied prettiness. How 
 should a poet whose verse reveals an instinctive sympathy 
 with forces that operate on a grand scale in illimitable space 
 and in unending time concern himself with the ephemeral 
 passions and ambitions of the moment? Catullus himself, 
 who immortahzes this moment, was possessed of too vigorous, 
 too Roman, a temperament to be fettered by his Alexandrian 
 technique. Impassioned alike in love and in hate, whether 
 personal or political, he uses a diction extraordinarily lucid 
 and direct. In the longer elegies and in the epyllion on the 
 "Marriage of Peleus and Thetis" there is unmistakable evi- 
 dence of deliberate art and even artifice. But in the poems 
 that are expressive of his own feeling — and no poet is more
 
 120 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 egoistic — there is a spontaneity which cannot be matched 
 in any other Latin poet, and the verse is most exquisitely 
 adapted to the shifting phases of emotion. 
 
 The poem of Lucretius is in another way characteristically 
 Roman. Epicurus had indeed "traversed throughout in 
 mind and spirit the immeasurable universe whence he re- 
 turns victorious to tell us what can, what cannot come into 
 being — on what principle each thing has its powers defined, 
 its deepset boundary mark." But this quest had not been 
 undertaken through any desire to enlarge the boundaries of 
 science for its own sake. He had, on the contrary, a social 
 aim, to secure the necessary foundation for the most indis- 
 pensable and universal of all arts, the art of living. Such 
 knowledge as was contributory to this end was of vital im- 
 portance ; all else might, at the best, serve to amuse an idle 
 hour. In this limitation Epicurus is in no wise distinctively 
 Greek. But with the normally constituted Roman the ques- 
 tion of the practical results of his labors was always primary. 
 Like Mr. Kipling's typical American, he turned his face natu- 
 rally to " the instant need of things " and turned it too with 
 much the same " keen, untroubled " gaze. Horace, in the 
 Epistle to Augustus in which he champions the modern school 
 of Latin poetry as against the indiscriminate laudation of the 
 classic dead, makes at one point a defense of poetry itself on 
 purely utilitarian grounds. With characteristic irony, but in 
 full appreciation of the current standard of value, he claims 
 that the poetic temperament brings in its train many prac- 
 tical advantages. The poet is, at least, apt to be free from 
 many conmion faults : — 
 
 " Rarely does avarice taint the tuneful mind." 
 
 And in all seriousness he does good service to the State. 
 In the education of the young and the comforting of the old, 
 in the commending of a noble yet practicable rule of life, 
 in the worship that wins for man the favor of heaven,
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 121 
 
 the poet plays a part that must secure him against the crit- 
 icism of being a drone in the busy hive. 
 
 Cicero, too, found it necessary to justify on Uke grounds 
 his interest and work in philosophy. That delight in the 
 intellectual life for its own sake, that passion for inquiry and 
 knowledge as the natural food of the human mind which 
 Cicero so enthusiastically describes in a great passage in the 
 last book of his ''De Finibus, " was by no means native in 
 the Roman mind, and to the majority always appeared to 
 be a vain thing. One recalls with amusement the story told 
 about the proconsul Gellius, a contemporarj'^ of Cicero. 
 This progressive governor, with a love of order truly and 
 admirably Roman, called before him upon his arrival at 
 Athens the representatives of the various schools of philos- 
 ophy and, urging upon them the propriety of making a final 
 adjustment of their differences, offered in perfect good faith 
 his service as mediator. Panajtius, the friend of the younger 
 Scipio, and by far the most influential of all Greek thinkers 
 in winning converts to Stoicism at Rome, gained his success 
 by emphasizing, not the lofty but wholly theoretical concep- 
 tion of virtue held by the earlier Stoics, but an ideal which 
 might be realized in actual life. The new doctrine found con- 
 genial soil, for the heroes of Roman tradition were, as has 
 been pointed out, unconscious Stoics. It was found that this 
 view of life, in its idea of a world order to which the individual 
 was bound to conform, in its treatment of the deities of pop- 
 ular belief as manifestations of the one divine Being, in its 
 insistence on the duties which every man owed to society 
 and the State, was in essential harmony with some of the 
 strongest elements in the national character. This theory 
 could be definitely helpful in solving the problems of daily 
 life. It might be used to reinforce the constraining power of 
 the mos maiorum, as this was still felt in the organization of 
 the family and the State. And if presently "the way of the 
 fathers" should cease to be able to provide adequate sanction
 
 122 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 for personal and civic morality (the Empire saw this danger 
 realized in the extinction of liberty), philosophy might take 
 its place altogether in maintaining the standard. Cicero is 
 much concerned to make clear this practical value of its own 
 labors in this field, to relate them not so much to human life 
 in general as to the particular needs of his countrymen and 
 their historical traditions, to show that, because of the dis- 
 cipline and breadth which it alone could give, the study of 
 philosophy was for a self-governing people, and especially 
 for the statesman and the publicist, a necessary complement 
 of the regular training in literature, law, and oratory. In 
 the series of volumes which appeared in rapid succession in 
 the years 45 and 44 b.c, dealing in part with the criterion 
 of knowledge, in part with the ethical standard, Cicero was, 
 he conceived, meeting a practical need as certainly as in his 
 earlier works on rhetoric and political science. 
 
 One of these earher works, the treatise "On the State," has 
 come down to us in a very fragmentary condition, but enough 
 remains to enable us to form a definite idea of Cicero's po- 
 litical philosophy. The book offers a most instructive con- 
 trast to the famous " Repubhc " of Plato on which Cicero mod- 
 eled his own work. The aim of both inquirers is substantially 
 the same ; namely, to ascertain the moral principles of an 
 ideal polity and to describe its governmental form. But 
 the earlier thinker, approaching the problem in the spirit of a 
 speculative philosopher in search of the absolute good, works 
 out with inflexible logic the consequences of that principle 
 of justice which must be realized both in the State and in its 
 citizens. The result is the construction of a marvelously 
 intricate and interrelated social organism, a book crowded 
 with ideas and ideals of permanent value. But the State, 
 as specifically constituted, is wholly theoretical, at variance 
 with all human experience and incapable of realization. The 
 Roman, though he has a most engaging enthusiasm for great 
 ideas, is far too completely the child of his race to put any
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 123 
 
 faith in a series of abstract ethical propositions and their nec- 
 essary corollaries. He, too, describes an ideal State, but he 
 is evidently, after all, idealizing an actually tested form of 
 government ; namely, the constitution of Rome as it existed 
 in the time of the younger Scipio Africanus. He would fain 
 in his own age have played the part of a La^lius to the Scipio 
 of Pompey, and, as he looked back to those golden days, so 
 different from the lowering present, it seemed to him that 
 Polybius was right in thinking that Rome then possessed 
 "the most beautiful framework of government of all that are 
 in our times known." 
 
 Important as it was in Cicero's judgment that his country- 
 men should be made familiar with the subject-matter of Greek 
 philosophy, it was no less important that these ideas should 
 be presented in a style that would serve both to win for them 
 a readier hearing and to enrich the Literature with an artistic 
 form not hitherto represented. The undertaking bristled 
 with difficulties. There was as j^et in existence in Latin no 
 treatment of philosophy in prose of the slightest scientific 
 or literary value. Lucretius indeed had lived; but his work 
 was in poetry, and dealt with one single school of thought 
 and in the main with only one aspect, the physical and 
 mechanical, of the teaching of even that school. It was 
 necessary to create a philosophical vocabulary; and, while 
 even the plastic Greek had only in the hands of a long suc- 
 cession of thinkers become wholly adequate for the expression 
 of abstract thought, Latin, a language which finds perhaps 
 the most striking monument of its purely native capacity 
 in the objective concreteness of Csesar's ''Commentaries," had 
 to be made through the genius of a single worker an instru- 
 ment of like power. The notable success which was achieved 
 would no doubt have been impossible if Cicero had not profited 
 to the utmost by the terminology already worked out in 
 Greek. Even so considered, it was an amazing feat, the far- 
 reaching importance of which did not appear until long after
 
 124 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 his death. For, as the event proved, it was Cicero who 
 made possible the Latinity of the Church Fathers from Minu- 
 cius Fehx to Saint Augustine, and to whom the scholastic 
 philosophy of the Middle Ages owed the medium requisite 
 for its expression. 
 
 Whence came this marvelous power over language, which 
 from the days of Quintihan, his ardent admirer, made Cicero 
 the most potent influence in Roman education, which in 
 the Renaissance captivated Petrarch, and, through that 
 great movement in which Petrarch was the leader, placed 
 Cicero in his commanding position as a Uterary artist ? The 
 answer must be found in the development of oratory at Rome. 
 In Tacitus's " Dialogue " on this subject, it is pointed out in 
 defense of the oratory of the Republic and of Cicero as its 
 greatest representative that "it may be said of eloquence, 
 as of a flame, that it requires motion to excite it, fuel to feed 
 it, and that it brightens as it burns." For " the mental powers 
 of the orator rise with the dignity of his subject and no one 
 can produce a noble and brilliant speech unless he has an 
 adequate case." As Tacitus was only too well aware, great 
 eloquence is most intimately connected with the vigor and 
 freedom of national life. When that life is instinct with 
 great ideas and principles, when the minds and passions of 
 men are deeply stirred by political and social movements of 
 grave import to the commonwealth, the conditions are most 
 favorable for a native eloquence, and, if training be added, 
 for a great style. In the survey of the development of Roman 
 oratory which Cicero has given to us in the " Brutus," it is 
 clear that, from the day when Appius Claudius Caecus made 
 against the conclusion of a peace with Pyrrhus the first pub- 
 lished speech in Roman annals, the fiercely disputed ques- 
 tions of internal and foreign policy and the sessions of the 
 law-courts resulted in a continuous improvement of a practical 
 art, which was most congenial to the Roman temperament. 
 The elder Cato, Gains Gracchus, Crassus and Antonius, the
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 125 
 
 teachers of Cicero in his youth, Hortensius, his great rival 
 at the bar, "the king of the courts," mark the steps of a 
 progress from rude natural effectiveness to artistic excellence 
 that we can ourselves trace even in the tantalizingly few 
 fragments of their speeches which have been preserved. 
 With Cicero our data become abundant, for there are extant 
 fifty-seven out of over one hundred speeches which he delivered. 
 These speeches, studied in connection with his masterly 
 treatises on the ideal orator, prove that not only did he bring 
 Latin prose style to the highest point of formal development, 
 but also that in one very real sense he may actually be called 
 its founder. The earlier orators, it is true, had learned much 
 from Greek rhetoricians, alive and dead, about the harmony 
 which should exist between form and content, but Cicero 
 was the first to work out and to use on a large scale a com- 
 prehensive theory of oratory as a fine art, in so far as it might 
 be capable of realization in Roman life and in the Latin 
 tongue. This theory was the slow fruition of close study 
 of Greek masters and masterpieces, and he is peculiarly in- 
 debted to Isocrates, to whom, in fact, in Greek Literature 
 also all subsequent prose-writers were ultimately indebted 
 for the rhytlmaical swell of the periodic sentence. By the 
 most intense and unremitting application, by the devotion 
 of a lover to his art, Cicero made himself a consummate master 
 of rhetorical structure, of phrase, and of cadence. Neither 
 Flaubert nor Stevenson ever worked more passionately than 
 he to achieve style, to cast his thoughts into such a form as to 
 satisfy at once the critical mind and the critical ear. The 
 prose which he thus perfected was naturally the prose of the 
 orator, the prose of one who addressed an actual audience. 
 When later he began to adapt it to meet the needs of the 
 treatise and the essay, it was still a prose that was shaped to 
 yield its meaning and its charm on the first reading. In fact, 
 even those of his works that were intended to be read rather 
 than to be heard are cast in the form of the dialogue. The
 
 126 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 same tone naturally appears in his Letters. Their vivacity 
 and changing moods reproduce the movement of animated 
 conversation, and in nothing that he has left to us is the 
 sureness and ease of his control of the language more strik- 
 ing. His correspondents, men of distinction though they 
 were, fall markedly below his level. 
 
 In that dialogue of Tacitus to which I have already re- 
 ferred, it is claimed by the admirer of the republican oratory 
 that, "while the style of Caesar is the more transparent, 
 the style of Cicero is the more impassioned, the richer, the 
 more forcible." As none of Csesar's speeches has survived, 
 we have no means of verifying the estimate of Cicero, who 
 places him in the very first rank, but we are probably justi- 
 fied in forming some idea of the secret of his success through 
 his "Commentaries" on the Galhc and Civil wars. These 
 "materials for the study of history" are presented in a manner 
 that, for its purity of idiom, lucidity, and terseness, is, as 
 Cicero says in the " Brutus," the despair of professed histo- 
 rians. Still, unadorned as is the style, the sentences flow and 
 are woven together into a continuous web. But already a 
 different ideal of writing had found its great representative. 
 Historical composition had begun at Rome with the " Origins " 
 of the elder Cato, whose motto had been "make sure of the 
 sense, and the words will follow." The practical value of 
 history was evident to the Roman mind, and this field was 
 accordingly much cultivated. Under the Empire, indeed, 
 the historians became the foremost representatives of prose. 
 But historiography developed slowly ; and Sallust, contem- 
 porary with Cicero and Csesar, was the first to use a scientific 
 method and an artistic form. Attracted by Thucydides 
 rather than by Isocrates, he worked out a new type of Latin 
 prose stjde, highly compressed in thought and in expression, 
 abrupt and epigrammatic. He is a lover of the words 
 and phrases of a bygone age, with a special fondness for 
 Cato. His sentences, for the most part short and simple in
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 127 
 
 their structure, follow one another staccato fashion. Quin- 
 tilian speaks admiringly of his "immortal swiftness." It 
 is a style quite conscious of its own art, which it by no means 
 attempts to conceal. Next to Cicero, Sallust is the chief 
 model in prose for the following centuries. Tacitus learned 
 of him, and still later, in an archaizing age, he is highly re- 
 garded by Fronto and by GelHus. 
 
 The two fundamentally opposed ideals of form which 
 came to expression in the prose of Cicero and of Sallust, re- 
 spectively, were destined to receive under the Empire a most 
 characteristic and most splendid realization in the historical 
 work of two geniuses of the first rank. The governing factor 
 in the development of republican prose had been the need, 
 imperative in spoken discourse, of being understood at once, 
 as the words succeeded one another. The style had to be 
 fused with the thought, and, like it, had to be such as to win 
 instant appreciation. But with the loss of freedom and the 
 decline of oratory conditions changed. The appeal was then 
 made even more to a reading than to a Ustening public. 
 The gentle reader might linger over the art of the 
 writer, and this art in turn might be made so intricate in 
 its nice balance of phrase and clause, so daring in the com- 
 pactness of its thought and structure, so subtly suggestive 
 in the literary associations of its diction, as to reveal its full 
 charm and power only after some attentive consideration. 
 It is in this fashion that Livy continues the Ciceronian tradi- 
 tion, and Tacitus the Sallustian. The two men are as wide 
 apart in temperament and method as they are different in 
 manner. Judged by modern standards, Livy is in no sense 
 a scientific historian. To examine, whenever possible, origi- 
 nal sources, to sift with a critical and open mind a mass of 
 conflicting evidence, to search for the truth with an austere 
 disregard of the possible resultant destruction of one's own 
 cherished opinions, all this was alien to his enthusiastic soul. 
 He never consciously misrepresents the facts, but he is es-
 
 128 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 sentially a hero-worshiper, and his greatest hero is the Roman 
 Commonwealth itself. "Fallen on evil times," as he thinks, 
 he idealizes the great past, and, conceiving, as we read in his 
 famous preface, that it is the fmiction of history to teach 
 good citizenship, he is unconsciously predisposed to accept 
 that form of the story which will enable him to point his 
 moral most effectively. Yet such is his innate sympathy 
 and kinship with the elements of character which made Rome 
 great that, notwithstanding grave deficiencies, his work has 
 an enduring truth and value. It is really a prose epic, written 
 in a style of extraordinary eloquence and picturesqueness. 
 To the historian and to the lover of Literature alike the loss 
 of over three-quarters of the entire work is certainly the great- 
 est which Latin Literature has sustained. 
 
 A great modern historian, Leopold von Ranke, says of 
 Tacitus : "If one yields to the impression made by his works, 
 one is carried away by it. There is no trace in him of the 
 manner and method of Greek historiography. He is Roman 
 through and through, and indeed the master of all who have 
 written before or since." Unlike Livy, Tacitus brought to the 
 help of his historical investigation the practical training gained 
 in a long and distinguished official career. In the opening 
 paragraphs of the " Histories " and the " Annals " he avows 
 his intention to write with perfect freedom from prejudice. 
 A thorough aristocrat and lover of the old order, he saw, 
 nevertheless, that the Empire was definitively established. 
 He could even fully appreciate the enlightened rule of a Trajan. 
 But the fifteen years of "silent servitude" under Domitian had 
 permanently embittered his soul, and despite his best efforts 
 the prevailing somberness of his thoughts profoundly influ- 
 enced his judgment as a historian. Though by no means 
 unerring in his analysis, he was endowed by nature with a 
 marvelous power to trace the hidden springs of thought and 
 action. His portrayal of character is subtle and vivid. The 
 phrases bite as does the acid in etching. The style is charged
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 129 
 
 with imagination, and everywhere in the diction one sees the 
 influence of Vergil, to whom alike as artist and as patriot 
 his own personahty was so closely akin. 
 
 Nothing in the whole range of Latin Literature illustrates 
 more strikingly its close connection with the national char- 
 acter and the need of the time than the work of Rome's 
 greatest poet. The long years of civil strife that terminated 
 in the battle of Actium had exhausted Italy, had substituted 
 factional bitterness for the sense of a common country and 
 had made of slight effect the traditional moral and religious 
 sanctions of civic conduct. Augustus and his ministers, 
 confronted by the urgent need of reconstruction, called into 
 play remedial forces of very varied kinds. Among these 
 was Literature. Vergil's " Georgics " is not a poem born of the 
 love of Nature for her own sake, — though Vergil shows such 
 love, — nor does it treat of the life of man in the country in 
 any cosmopolitan way. Italy is the theme and the Roman 
 virtues and strength of character fostered by the hard struggle 
 with the reluctant yet bountiful earth. For agriculture 
 was, if possible, to be again honorably esteemed, as in the 
 days when Cincinnatus left his plow to guide the State. 
 The poem is the quintessence of long musing on the subject 
 in one of the loveliest parts of Italy and of a study of the 
 effects of word and phrase that was almost microscopic. The 
 fruit of seven full years of labor was a poem of 2200 lines — 
 less, on the average, than a line a day. But this poem at 
 once made its author the object '' of a people's hope." And 
 this hope was justified in the "^neid." Here Vergil shows 
 himself to be one of that very small number of poets who 
 appeal to the universal heart of man. No other poem in 
 the world's Literature is more many-sided, no other has played 
 so large a part in the mental life of so many generations of 
 men. Yet Vergil was far from consciously writing for any 
 such audience. He " sounds forever of Imperial Rome," whose 
 finer fife he strove adequately to express and to quicken.
 
 130 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 Possessed in the highest degree of that catholic receptivity 
 which both Polybius and Posidonius noted as among the 
 admirable qualities of the Roman mind, he used as by natural 
 right the imaginative interpretation of human life of his great 
 predecessors, whether Greek or Roman. But he puts upon 
 all the stamp of his own personality, essentially Roman in 
 his purpose and totality of effect, even where the material 
 is most Homeric. 
 
 " Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." It would 
 be impossible to define here the full significance of the 
 "^Eneid." Professedly a poem of action, it is in fact a 
 musing upon the mystery of human life, upon its infinite 
 pathos, its uncertain issue, its permitted greatness. To the 
 modern world, with its apotheosis of the individual man, 
 iEneas, as Vergil has drawn him, is apt to seem rather a 
 concept than a real human being. Yet he incarnates the 
 virtues upon which, to the poet's mind, depended the real- 
 ization of the high hopes of the new order. The age had 
 learned to its cost the meaning of personal ambition. Ver- 
 gil held up to it the contrasted picture of patience, self- 
 control, and obedience to the divine call. Through such 
 forgetfulness of self, and through this alone, it had been pos- 
 sible to lay the foundations of the State ; through the same 
 high devotion Rome had grown great. In no other way 
 could her life be preserved and enriched for the generations 
 to come. 
 
 Horace, Vergil's contemporary, is in another way equally 
 the child of his age and responsive to the movement of the time. 
 Between the Homeric Odysseus and the Vergilian ^Eneas, 
 says Sainte-Beuve, "I'urbanite etait nee." Horace, as 
 ready in his address as Vergil was shy and awkward, is, in 
 a special sense, the representative in Latin Literature of this 
 temper and manner. It is not, of course, peculiar to his 
 works. We admire it also, for instance, in the distinguished 
 Romans who figure in Cicero's dialogue " On the Orator." In
 
 LATIN LITERATURE 131 
 
 the poet's familiar " Talks " and " Letters " we are listening to 
 an accomplished man of the world. Fully aware of the diffi- 
 culties which beset the pathway of hfe, he criticizes with 
 kindly humor and tolerance the foibles and errors of others, 
 and derives from his own an amusement which he shares 
 with his readers. Yet, with all this gaiety of tone, he pursues, 
 true Roman that he is, a very practical end; namely, the 
 determination of the principles by which one may order one's 
 life aright. The teaching of the schools gave him, no doubt, 
 greater breadth of view, but Horace's philosophy of life is 
 ultimately the outcome of that habit of shrewd observation 
 of courses of action and their results which his father had so 
 sedulously fostered. It finds expression even in his lyric 
 poetry, on which his fame as a great literary artist chiefly 
 rests. ''The hght that never was on sea or land" comes not 
 to him. But if, even in the " Odes," we have "the light of 
 common day," it is none the less a world touched with the 
 hues of fancy and with man's finer tastes and hopes. Like 
 Vergil, he is in full sympathy with the efforts of the new 
 regime to restore the ideals of the past. The noble series 
 of odes that opens the third book is in effect a single poem 
 in which Horace commends "virginibus puerisque" the moral 
 qualities that should be theirs, both as individuals and as 
 citizens of Rome. 
 
 "The marked peculiarity of Roman constitutional history," 
 says Professor James S. Reid, "is its unbroken evolution, 
 whereby a mode of government which originally sprang up 
 in connection with a small town community was gradually 
 adapted for the direction of a widespread empire. No violent 
 breach of continuity is to be found in the whole course of the 
 changes which passed over the pohtical existence of Rome 
 from the dawn of its history to its latest phases." One may 
 and one should, I think, find in Latin Literature the reflection 
 of the same continuously developing national life. A number 
 of instances have been discussed to show the intimate rela-
 
 132 LATIN LITERATURE 
 
 tion that existed between these two things. But a few cases 
 only have been taken out of a possible many. One might 
 go farther and point out how in the early days of the Litera- 
 ture the rollicking fun and wit of Plautus assume forms 
 which could not possibly have been derived from his Greek 
 originals and whose spirit is truly Italian ; how Terence gave 
 to the still undisciplined language a polish that delighted 
 even the critical taste of the Ciceronian age and justly prided 
 himself upon being a well of "Latin undefiled." One might 
 note the brilliancy with which Ovid's verse mirrors the gay, 
 cultivated, and cynical society of the world's capital in the 
 beginning of the Imperial era. Juvenal's pitiless indictment 
 of his time must be corrected by the cheerful optimism of 
 the younger Pliny, who is as circumstantial in his praise 
 of the persons and things that were good as is Juvenal in his 
 indignation with the persons and things that were evil. And 
 so one might deal with many a name. The language, too, 
 shows a homogeneous growth from the writers of the third 
 century before Christ to Boethius in the sixth century a.d. 
 Inherently sonorous and dignified, inherently logical in the 
 structure of its sentences, as, for instance, in the predomi- 
 nating use of the principle of subordination as against that 
 of coordination, it reflects in point after point the mental 
 traits of the people that used it. If it is ever true that " ie 
 style est Thomme," then one must see in the Latin language 
 and its Literature the unmistakable impress of the race whose 
 consummate genius was for law and order and government. 
 
 " Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento — 
 Hae tibi erunt artes — pacisque imponere morem, 
 Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos."
 
 VII 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 By William Witherle Lawrence, Associate Professor 
 OF English 
 
 When we attempt to summarize the literary achievement 
 of the Middle Ages, we are forced by cruel necessity to begin 
 with a definition. What is meant by "the medieval period," — 
 that is to say, within what limits of time shall it be inclosed ? 
 While we cannot settle the question dogmatically, it is im- 
 portant that we should be agreed at the outset, and have a 
 perfectly clear idea of what we are discussing. Our fore- 
 fathers would have felt no doubts about this matter. They 
 viewed the Middle Ages as a dreary void, destitute of litera- 
 ture or art worth serious consideration, extending from the 
 decay of classical letters to the revival of learning. "The 
 fierceness of Gothick humours," as Sir WiUiam Temple quaintly 
 put it, was supposed to have stifled culture completely. 
 But since we have come to see in the poetry of the early Ger- 
 manic peoples a grave beauty and simplicity rivaling that of 
 the classics, and in the feudal period following, a splendor and 
 picturesqueness which the Elizabethan Age can hardly 
 equal, we must acknowledge that "the Middle Ages" is indeed 
 a misleading title. These ten centuries from 500 to 1500 are 
 worthy of a better name, although the old one still survives in 
 common use. We are dealing not merely with a transition 
 period, preparing the way for better things to come, but 
 with an age containing a rich and varied literature of its 
 own. 
 
 133
 
 134 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 It is, furthermore, most unsatisfactory to treat this interval 
 of a thousand years or so as a single era. For it is not a homo- 
 geneous whole; it falls into two periods distinct from each 
 other in almost every way. The Norman Conquest of Eng- 
 land may stand as a boundary line, marking the turning-point 
 of those far-reaching changes in Western Europe with which 
 we are all familiar. The phenomena were complex, and not 
 merely those of literary evolution. European history, 
 political, social, religious, linguistic, and literary, was begin- 
 ning afresh. The whole structure of society was shifting; 
 the feudal system, which had been gradually supplanting the 
 old social order, now revealed its full strength, and sharp 
 caste distinctions began to prevail. Christianity united men 
 in a common interest as never before, through the splendid 
 folly of the Crusades. As a political institution, the medieval 
 church attained the summit of its glory in the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries. Its idealism, in the midst of much 
 material prosperity, was fittingly symbolized in its cathedrals, 
 the noblest achievements of medieval architecture. Radical 
 changes were taking place in the languages of the Western 
 nations; it is hardly necessary to speak of the beginning of 
 the Middle English and Middle High German periods, and 
 the emergence of the Romance dialects in literature. In 
 brief, the twelfth century marked an advance in almost every 
 branch of human activity. 
 
 Particularly striking is the leadership of France. After 
 1100, she became the acknowledged sovereign of the literatures 
 of Western Europe. For the next five centuries the sister 
 nations, now settled in approximately their present positions 
 after long years of unrest, were content to listen to stories 
 from her lips. Never was there a better illustration of that 
 social quality, that element of universality, which Brunetiere 
 found the most striking characteristic of French Literature. 
 France borrowed much from abroad, but she purified it of 
 its dross, and returned it, transformed and transfigured,
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 135 
 
 to the people whence it came. The Middle English metrical 
 romances were mere imitations of French models; the great 
 Middle High German masters, Gottfried, Wolfram, and Hart- 
 mann, looked avowedly to France for their material; Roland 
 was hardly less celebrated in Italy than in his native land; 
 and far-away Iceland translated into its vernacular the ro- 
 mantic stories of Chretien de Troyes and Marie de France. 
 In form as well as in subject-matter France had much to teach. 
 From Provence in the south came the poetry of elaborate 
 rhyme and graceful compliment; from the north came epic 
 verse, with its marching assonances and stately movement. 
 The old alliterative measures had run their course. In a 
 word, the imaginative Literature of Europe in the feudal period 
 is largely the reflection in the surrounding countries of the 
 achievements of France. 
 
 It may be said, then, that at this time, a little after the 
 Norman Conquest, the medieval period had, in the truest 
 sense, its beginning. The most characteristic productions of 
 the Middle Ages sprang from the fusion of the Germanic and 
 the Romance peoples, from the union of what was best in bar- 
 barian and in classic stock. Much of what preceded, in the 
 so-called Dark Ages, was really a survival of classic thought, 
 as in Boethius, or of Germanic paganism, as " Beowulf." 
 That was the true transition period. The richest treasures 
 of Medieval Literature came later, in the more complete 
 amalgamation of the two elements which had long struggled 
 for supremacy. Both had gained the victory. The bar- 
 barian triumphed over Roman power, i3ut later, in the emer- 
 gence of the Romance nations, the old Latin stock was "born 
 again " into a new vigor. And it is this rebirth, three centuries 
 or so earlier than the time we call the Renaissance, which 
 gives the era its peculiar distinction in art, in architecture, 
 in philosophy, and in religion, as well as in literature. 
 
 In the following discussion, then, I propose to consider this 
 second division of the Middle Ages, extending from about the
 
 136 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 year 1 1 00 to the full Renaissance. This period is fairly homo- 
 geneous and distinct; it is possible to sum up its more striking 
 characteristics in a definite way. Its close, however, is not so 
 satisfactorily determined as its beginning. The passing of 
 the medieval spirit takes place at different times in different 
 countries; in Italy about a hundred years earlier than in the 
 sister nations. No rigid division is possible; medievalism 
 fades gradually in the dawn of the Renaissance. But its 
 essential qualities are none the less clear on this account. 
 So well defined are they that common usage is more and more 
 coming to regard this later time as "the medieval period." 
 As Professor Ker says, "When the term 'medieval' is used in 
 modern talk, it almost always denotes something which first 
 took shape in the twelfth century." So, too, when Professor 
 Beers gives as one definition of romanticism "the reproduc- 
 tion, in modem art or literature, of the life and thought of 
 the Middle Ages," he means, if I understand him aright, the 
 life and thought of the feudal period. It is on the Age of 
 Chivalry, then, that we shall fix our attention here. 
 
 The literature of the aristocracy illustrates best the changes 
 from the age preceding. Medieval romance, which swept 
 everything before it as a literary fashion, was determined 
 mainly by the upper classes. The literature of the clergy 
 and that of the commons represents less of a break with 
 earlier traditions. To understand the characteristics of the 
 medieval romantic spirit, as distinguished from the romantic 
 spirit in other times, whatever that elusive quality may be, 
 one must look at the work of such writers as Chretien de 
 Troyes, Benoit de Ste. More, or Marie de France; a far cry 
 irideed from the poetry of the Dark Ages. The difference 
 lies partly in externals, and partly in social ethics. On the 
 one hand is a society more or less like that described by Taci- 
 tus in the " Germania " ; on the other, one similar to that in 
 the pages of Froissart. Unlike as were the times of Clovis
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 137 
 
 and Charlemagne, they belong together as against those of 
 William the Conqueror and St. Louis. The very sumptu- 
 ousness of the later age reveals this, the increased splendor 
 of dwellings, of garments, of feasts, of churches. The court 
 of an Edward the Third, with its rich costumes, its ladies 
 in silk and cloth of gold, its music of many instruments, its 
 glittering armor, its tapestries, its painted windows, — all 
 this is far more "romantic" than that of an Alfred, where 
 everything was simpler and cruder, less for show, and more 
 for use. A certain studied picturesqueness is a constant 
 characteristic of the later period. Not so in the earlier age; 
 when Sigurd came to the halls of Gjuki and received Gudrun 
 as a bride, the ''Poetic Edda" merely tells us that her dowry 
 was rich, and that men drank and caroused for days. Con- 
 trast such scenes in the "Nibelungenlied," where the old 
 story has been decked out with feudal magnificence, Arabian 
 stuffs and dazzling gold on every hand. The earlier poets 
 were chiefly interested in the action and its consequences; 
 the later ones quite as much in the stage-setting and the 
 accessories. Chaucer even anticipates blame for omitting 
 such descriptions, when a wedding comes into the story : — 
 
 " Now wolden som men seye, para venture, 
 That for my necligence I do no cure 
 To tellen yow the loye and al tharray 
 That at the feste was that like day." 
 
 And in the "Knight's Tale," we feel, as we do in reading 
 its source from the pen of Boccaccio, that the whole is not so 
 much a story as a series of gorgeous tapestries. It is not, 
 then, so much the addition of strangeness to beauty, upon 
 which Pater and other critics have insisted, as the addition 
 of sumptuousness to beauty, which characterizes the romantic 
 narratives of this age. There was magic and mystery enough 
 in the earlier period; Mirkwood, through which the swan- 
 maidens flew, was as much enchanted as the forest of
 
 138 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 Broceliande. The swan-maiden was a primitive sort of lady, 
 however, content with a garment of feathers, while the 
 starry-eyed damsel of Arthurian story is quite inconceivable 
 without her robes of azure and gold. 
 
 But it is not chiefly in externals that the romantic spirit 
 of this period lies. The sj^stem of chivalry introduced the 
 most striking changes in social ethics. Now, as before, the 
 natural occupation of the hero was war, but war carried on 
 in a far different spirit. An age which had thought disloyalty 
 of a warrior to his chief the deepest disgrace was succeeded 
 by one in which obedience was secured mainly by brute force, 
 and treachery was held venial sin. This change is well seen 
 in the chansons de geste. In the "Song of Roland," devotion 
 to land and sovereign is second orJy to duty to God, while 
 the later chansons are full of the struggles of the barons 
 against the king. Roland fought for God and sweet France; 
 the knight of later days for Woman and his own sweet self. 
 And that brings us to the second great change, the transforma- 
 tion of the love-element. It is sometimes said that affairs 
 of the heart were less regarded in the earlier age. There was 
 love-interest enough in Germanic poetry, however; one thinks 
 of Brynhild, Hilde, Gudrun, Hildeguthe, — but theirs was a 
 love devoid of sentimentality and affectation. And no mat- 
 ter how ardent the devotion of the Germanic hero, he always 
 felt himself the master. It was the woman's part to give 
 obedience. Even the Valkyrie Brynhild forfeited her suprem- 
 acy by marriage. On the other hand, a greater exaltation 
 of Woman than that accorded her in the feudal period could 
 scarcely be desired by the most ardent modern champion of 
 her rights. Beautiful, haughty, and disdainful, she demanded 
 that man be her servant and her slave. Her consent was 
 finally granted out of pity for her lover, frequently as a sort 
 of remedial measure, lest his love-sickness should prove 
 fatal. Roland himself, the most unsentimental of heroes, 
 became in a later age Orlando Innamorato or Orlando Furioso,
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 139 
 
 —raging mad for love ! Both in love and war, then, the man of 
 the later Middle Ages was an individualist, while the earlier 
 hero fixed his simple thoughts on the larger issues, bloody and 
 bestial though they sometimes were. 
 
 One of the strangest features of the feudal period is its 
 passion for form and convention, which we are wont to con- 
 sider antithetic to the romantic ideal. In the romantic 
 revolt of the eighteenth century, for instance, the reaction 
 against formal rules of poetry and life is most striking. Such 
 a protest as this was no part of the medieval romantic pro- 
 gram. As far as convention was concerned, the Middle 
 Ages were far more hampered than classic times, though in 
 a different way. One might, indeed, almost call the key-note 
 of the era of chivalry its love of system. In the deepest 
 interests of life it was controlled very largely by conven- 
 tion, careful of the esteem of the world, anxious to have 
 the universe reduced to rule. 
 
 This formalism manifests itself strikingly in the two mo- 
 tives most prominent in its narrative literature, love and 
 war, and equally so in a third motive, religion. Chivalry and 
 sacerdotal celibacy imposed their unnatural restrictions on 
 the three most vital relations of life: man's attitude towards 
 his fellow-men, towards women, and towards God. Chivalry 
 was in some ways immoral; it exalted illicit passion, and 
 confined healthy love in a strait-jacket of etiquet. More- 
 over, the typical love-affair was often a ridiculously affected 
 procedure, a mixture of valentine sentimentality and erotic 
 grandiloquence. Its formulas crystallize into allegory in such 
 a work as the "Romance of the Rose," where set rules for 
 making love are to be found. 
 
 "It is the Romance of the Rose, 
 Which doth Love's gentle art inclose." 
 
 The tremendous vogue of love-allegory is typical of this arti- 
 ficiality in the later Middle Ages. Even such healthy and
 
 140 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 natural spirits as Chaucer and Dunbar were deeply affected 
 by it. Hand in hand with this went the passion for more 
 realistic though not less formal analysis of the heart. Rous- 
 seau was not more minutely painstaking in the self-searchings 
 of his "Confessions" than was Dante in the "Vita Nuova." 
 The great Italian did not disdain to set forth the physio- 
 logical manifestations accompanying his passion for Beatrice, 
 to explain the operations of "the natural spirit," and "the 
 animal spirit," or to dissect the songs which he composed in 
 her honor. 
 
 Again, consider the formalism of medieval warfare and 
 medieval religion. There is not a little analogy between the 
 unwieldy armor in which the knight ensconced himself, and 
 the absurd conventions which weighed him down. The arti- 
 ficial rules of the tournament were observed in many cases 
 even in serious fighting. This lasted until the rise of the 
 yeoman infantry, when mounted knights, those huge unwieldy 
 iron towers, were hopelessly at a disadvantage. As Froissart 
 says of the battle of Poitiers, "whenever any one fell, he had 
 little chance of getting up again." In one engagement the 
 warriors were aggrieved, we are told, because their opponents 
 did not clothe themselves in defenses as cumbrous as their own. 
 They had not "played fair" in the game of war. The 
 same passion for system is observable in the Church. The 
 Scholastic philosophy aimed to justify theology by the exercise 
 of pure reason. Even in the Mystic movement, that plea for 
 emotion in religion, which became in later times a protest 
 against Scholasticism, there was a strange artificiality. The 
 very stages by which the soul was to attain perfect communion 
 with the Divine were exactly determined. The reaction of 
 liberalism against formalism could not escape formalism 
 itself. This persistence of allegory is one of the most con- 
 spicuous characteristics of Medieval Literature. While often 
 employed ineffectively and inartistically, it was used by 
 master hands with tremendous effect. And this effect was
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 141 
 
 gained partly because the metaphorical habit of thought 
 was natural to the writer, and in no wise inconsistent with 
 perfect sincerity. There is no better illustration of this 
 than the "Divine Comedy." In other ages the allegory is 
 generally frankly a convention. Consider, for example, 
 the work of Boethius or Bunyan. The maiden who brings 
 consolation to Boethius in his affliction is never felt to have 
 any real existence. She is a mere abstraction personified. 
 In "Pilgrim's Progress," Mr. Worldly Wiseman and the Giant 
 Despair are, excepting for juvenile readers, only symbols 
 of the materialism and despondency which assail the Christian 
 hero. But to Dante the circles of Hell had a reality of their 
 own; could one actually visit the abodes of the dead, such 
 might be the sights he would see. The wonderful thing is, 
 then, that the Middle Ages were sometimes actually convinced 
 of the existence of the artificial conventions which they had 
 themselves developed, whether in love, in war, or in religion. 
 The symbol had become a reality. 
 
 In criticizing the artificiality of the feudal period we must 
 not forget its virtues. It represented a very real advance over 
 the Dark Ages in all the refinements of life. Gentleness, 
 courtesy, and humility were its watchwords. It had high 
 ideals, partly shaped by the Christian faith, which are well 
 symbolized by the Quest of the Holy Grail. None but 
 the knight who was pure of heart could behold the sacred cup. 
 It was forever denied to Launcelot, because of his sinful love 
 for Guenevere. And as the story developed, one hero was 
 found too worldly, and another set up in his place. Twice 
 this happened: Gawain was dethroned to make way for Per- 
 ceval, who in his turn was succeeded by Galahad, the saint- 
 liest of medieval knights. There is no better summary of 
 the ideals of the best romances than a passage in Caxton's 
 preface to the " Morte Darthur." It may well stand as a 
 refutation of old Roger Ascham's accusation that the whole 
 pleasure of the book "standeth in open manslaughter and
 
 142 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 bold bawdry." Caxton says his work has been done "to the 
 intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of 
 chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights 
 used in those days, by which they came to honor, and how 
 they that were vicious were punished, and oft put to shame 
 and rebuke; hiunbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies, 
 with all other estates of what estate or degree they been 
 of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they 
 take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to 
 follow the same. Wherein they shall find many joyous and 
 pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, 
 gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble 
 chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, 
 friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do 
 after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good 
 fame and renommee." These virtues which Caxton em- 
 phasizes are typical of the advance of the ideals of the feudal 
 period over those of Germanic heathendom. The Anglo- 
 Saxon chief exulted with bitter and mocking mirth in the 
 defeat and death of his foe; such courtesy and deference as 
 Gawain's would have sickened him, and Gawain's attentions 
 to women would have appeared still less in keeping with the 
 character of a great warrior. As for the optimistic view that 
 good prevails in the end, the earlier age knew little of it, hold- 
 ing rather to the pagan formula "Fate goeth ever as it will." 
 Despite its defects, then, the era of chivalry made a great 
 advance towards that delicacy of feeling, that ability to ap- 
 preciate the point of view of others, which are characteristic 
 of the gentleman of modern times. Its manners were arti- 
 ficial, but these very artificialities suppressed the headstrong 
 violence of pagan days, and made true courtesy ultimately 
 possible for the heart as well as for the head. 
 
 For sincerity and realism, however, we must look elsewhere 
 than to the literature of the higher classes. When we speak 
 of narratives of chivalry, we think first of those told for the
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 143 
 
 gentle-born, but it would be a grave mistake to judge medie- 
 val story mainly from the tales in the castle hall. The fellow 
 in russet under the walls had a greedy ear for a story, and 
 imspoiled feelings for sentiment and pathos. He loved 
 a tale of his betters, and told it with an appealing vigor which 
 the most heroic of the romances lack. There is no better 
 way of realizing the sincerity of popular literature than by 
 comparing the romances, full of the artificial elaborations 
 which we have just been observing, and the ballads, with 
 their poverty of description and simplicity of form. Let us 
 take a familiar ballad, "Child Waters": — 
 
 " Childe Watters in his stable stoode 
 And stroaket his milke-white steede ; 
 To him came a faire young ladye 
 As ere did weare womans weede." 
 
 No description of the knight, and the lady and the horse 
 disposed of in three lines ! When the heroine has her say she 
 speaks from the heart: — 
 
 "Shee sales 'I had rather haue one kisse, 
 Child Waters, of thy mouth. 
 Than I wold haue Cheshire and Lancashire both, 
 That lyes by north and south. 
 
 " 'And I had rather haue a twinkling, 
 Child Waters, of your eye. 
 
 Than I wold have Cheshire and Lancashire both, 
 To take them mine oune to bee ! ' " 
 
 The high-born lady acts otherwise. Listen to the coquetry 
 of the heroine of Chretien's " Yvain." She says to the knight : 
 
 "'Pray tell me why you are so humble.' [He answers] 'Lady, 
 I am subdued by my heart, which is wholly yours ; to these desires 
 it has brought me.' [She replies] 'And what has subdued the 
 heart, fair friend?' 'Lady, my eyes.' 'And what the eyes?' 
 'The great beauty which I see in you.' 'And how has beauty
 
 144 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 transgressed?' ' Lady, inasmuch as it has made me love.' [The 
 Lady, much surprised] 'Love, and whom?' 'You, dear lady.' 
 ' Me ? ' ' Yea, truly.' ' In what way, then ? ' 'So that it cannot be 
 greater, so that my heart ever follows you, ... so that I am 
 ever your humble slave, so that I love you more than myself, so 
 that I am wholly yours, to live or die for you.' " 
 
 After this, and more conversation like it, the poet naively 
 remarks, "And so they quickly came to an understanding." 
 
 Again, it is in ballad literature that the deeper notes of 
 tragedy are struck, which one misses in aristocratic narrative. 
 Even in the "Morte Darthur" the pathetic scenes, fine as 
 they are, sometimes betray a certain stiffness, like the con- 
 straint of medieval paintings. Observe, too, how little 
 Chaucer cared for tragic effect in narrating the death 
 of Troilus. But a deeply moving theme like that in the 
 ballad "Edward" bites into the heart with acid poignancy. 
 The mother asks in horror the meaning of the blood on her 
 son's sword. After he has vainly tried to evade the question, 
 the dreadful truth comes out : — 
 
 " ' Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, 
 
 Edward, Edward, 
 
 Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, 
 
 And why sae sad gang yee O ? ' 
 ' O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, 
 
 Mither, Mither, 
 O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, 
 And I had nae mair but hee O.' 
 
 " * Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, 
 
 Edward, Edward, 
 Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, 
 
 My deir son, I tell thee O.' 
 'O I hae killed my reid-roan steid, 
 
 Mither, Mither, 
 O I hae killed my reid-roan steid. 
 That erst was sae fair and frie O.'
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 145 
 
 " ' Your steid was auld, and ye hae got mair, 
 Edward, Edward, 
 Your steid was auld, and ye hae got mair, 
 
 Sum other dule ye drie O.' 
 'O I hae killed my fadir deir, 
 
 Mither, Mither, 
 O I hae killed my fadir deir, 
 Alas, and wae is mee ! ' " 
 
 Here one feels the power of Nemesis as much as in Greek 
 tragedy. This art the romance writers seldom gained. They 
 borrowed much from popular narrative, but they never 
 learned the value of restraint. A metrical romance would 
 have preferred to multiply Edward's father into a thousand 
 Saracens, and to dwell with glee on their thousand harrowing 
 deaths. Apart from popular poetry, there is little true pathos 
 in Medieval Literature. 
 
 One of the greatest charms of this poetry is its haunting 
 rhythms. Made to be sung, and sung by unlettered folk, 
 it lingers in the memory when the elaborate artifices of Min- 
 nesinger and Troubadour are forgotten. Its simple measures 
 are often adjusted to the subject with a delicacy that is only 
 felt after many readings. These measures are not always 
 smooth and polished, as art-poets would have made them, 
 and inldiorn copyists have kept them, but they produce 
 effects that many a modern poet has vainly tried to reproduce. 
 Even such poets as Rossetti, Scott, Keats, Coleridge, and 
 Kipling have had only partial success. We are too artistic 
 and too mannered nowadays to attain true ballad simplicity. 
 But the peculiar coloring of this poetry is unforgettable. 
 Its characteristic sadness comes out in the popular lyric 
 as well : — 
 
 " Winter wakeneth all my care, 
 
 Now these leaves are waxing bare, 
 
 Oft I sigh and mouru full sore 
 
 When it cometh in my thought 
 
 How this world's joy goeth all for naught." 
 
 L
 
 146 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 And when we turn to Comedy, we find the popular Muse 
 again supreme. The hearty laugh and the merry jest most 
 often come, as might be expected, from the full throats of 
 the lower classes. For the Hogarth picture of the Middle 
 Ages we must turn to the fabliaux, those coarse and witty 
 tales unfit for the ears of dames. It is a thousand pities that 
 such masterly bits of narration, short stories in verse at a time 
 when there were so few in prose, are so indecorous as to be 
 impossible for modern readers. The romances show the age 
 as it imagined itself to be; the fabliaux, as it really was. 
 They ridiculed hypocrisy in the church and immorality in 
 the relations of the sexes with biting irony, and took a wicked 
 delight in the frailties of the smugly virtuous. They were 
 essentially a French product, other nations lagging behind 
 the brightness of Gallic wit. And they exercised a strong in- 
 fluence on more studied literary productions. When we trace 
 medieval humor to its origins, even when a great artist has 
 shaped it, we generally hear the voices of the people. Such 
 men as Chaucer, Pulci, Rabelais, illustrate this admirably. 
 In Chaucer's tales of the Reeve and Miller we recognize the 
 technic of the fabliau. Rabelais shows book-learning re- 
 fracted by popular irreverence, the same spirit which set 
 wandering scholars, men of the middle classes, to parodying 
 the offices of the Church. Pulci, really outside the limits of 
 our period, takes the unromantic view of romantic characters 
 current among the people, and makes the burlesque "Mor- 
 gante Maggiore. " The cruder fun is of medieval origin; the 
 more delicate facets in the story belong to the Renaissance. 
 As for Chaucer's dry humor, that belongs to him and not to 
 his age. His whimsical vein, something like the spirit we see 
 to-day in the work of Mr. Barrie, is rare indeed in the Middle 
 Ages. Too seldom is medieval humor subtle; too often it is 
 of the slap-stick order. This is true even of the greatest 
 achievement of medieval wit, the beast-epic of "Reynard 
 the Fox." It is not without its subtleties, particularly if the
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 147 
 
 allegory is made elaborate, but the real joy of the piece comes 
 from the tricks of the rascally Reynard, who successfully 
 defies the king and the laws, offends against morality, ridi- 
 cules the Church and its rites, and yet comes out unscathed 
 in the end. Reynard is the prize rogue of medieval times, 
 but he is more than this, he is a kind of sublimation of bour- 
 geois villainy. The people, smarting under the oppressions 
 of the king and the nobility, took a glorious revenge in the 
 creation of Reynard the Fox. 
 
 The greatest single force in Medieval Literature remains 
 to be considered, the Church. For high and low alike, 
 religion was no remote abstraction, to be confined to Sun- 
 days; it was a most practical and ever present issue. Its 
 tremendous importance in the life of the whole people can 
 scarcely be sufficiently insisted upon. The Canterbury 
 Pilgrimage, comprising practically every rank of society, 
 illustrates this admirably, although the devotion of some 
 of the company is hardly greater than that of the modern 
 lady who goes to church to display an Easter bonnet. We do 
 not get the true essence of medieval religion from the easy- 
 going Canterbury pilgrims. The terrors of the Last Judg- 
 ment were frequently in the mind of the medieval man, 
 coloring all his thoughts and acts. God and the Devil were 
 not theological conceptions, they were very near and real 
 beings. In those days any one might, perhaps, be startled 
 at meeting an angel or a fiend in the midst of some every- 
 day occupation, but no one would have considered it strange. 
 The supernaturalism of heathen times was still strong in the 
 minds of the people, although transformed according to 
 Christian beliefs. At every mom.ent in life the powers of 
 good and evil were waiting to aid or to destroy mankind. 
 
 We can understand something of this permeation of every 
 human interest by religion when we observe how deeply 
 it affected every type of Medieval Literature. Since the 
 Church, in theory at least, held sway over things temporal
 
 148 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 as well as things eternal, she fostered and perpetuated both 
 secular and religious Literature. Far less than in other 
 periods is it possible to distinguish the two. The monk in 
 the scriptorium copied romances as well as the lives of saints; 
 the abbot read his breviary and his Ovid with equal frequency. 
 Occasionally a theological discussion intrudes into a romance. 
 Roland, in one of the later Charlemagne stories, discourses 
 to Vernagu, a black giant forty feet tall, about the doctrine 
 of the Trinity and other points of Christian dogma. The 
 homiletic note was sounded at every turn, no matter what 
 the subject. History, beginning with the Creation, was made 
 to set forth the relations between God and man, and point 
 a series of moral lessons. In the bestiaries the qualities of the 
 lion recalled the virtues of Christ; the whale, decoying mariners 
 to disembark on its back, and then engulfing them, illustrated 
 the treachery of the devil. The lapidaries revealed virtues 
 and vices through the medium of jewels. Disputed questions 
 of various kinds were decided by reference to the Bible. The 
 doctrine of the Trinity was important in teaching arithmetic ; 
 the Scriptures fm-nished proof of astronomical hypotheses. 
 Medical science was a curious jumble, full of charms in which 
 the saints had taken the places of heathen divinities. Gen- 
 uine science was likely to meet the reception accorded to the 
 labors of Roger Bacon or later to the discoveries of Galileo. 
 Truly, the Church left no type of Literature untouched, 
 and touched nothing which it did not color with its own 
 beliefs, and transform for its own purposes. 
 
 Within the Church itself, two contrasting tendencies are 
 noticeable. On the one hand, the utmost naivete in the rela- 
 tion of religion to life, and on the other, the utmost subtlety 
 in theological speculation. Medieval religion was frequently 
 gloomy, as we have seen, and heaven a place to be forfeited 
 by what we should now consider venial sin. Normal and in- 
 nocent human desires were looked upon as inspirations of the 
 Devil. This led to placing exaggerated value on a virtue, no
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 149 
 
 matter how manifested, or how far carried to excess. There 
 was no "golden mean" in the Middle Ages. A thing was bad 
 or it was good, and that was an end of it. That evil may 
 consist in the misuse of things capable of good is an ethical 
 proposition foreign to habits of medieval thought. Griselda, 
 resolving to be a patient wife, and sacrificing to this her happi- 
 ness, her health, her honor, and the lives of her children, or 
 Amis, exalting friendship to such a degree that he murders 
 his little boj's to cure his friend Amiloun of leprosy, — 
 these are examples of the sort of conduct the Middle Ages 
 found admirable. Again, no sympathy was extended to 
 those outside the fold of the Church. The converted Saracen 
 princess in the romance of "Ferumbras," in the ardor 
 of her new faith, exhorts the Christian knights to kill her 
 aged father, who still sticks out for his old god "Mahoun." 
 "You ought to have killed him last night, when you captured 
 him," she says. Every consideration of natural feeling and 
 womanly tenderness is made subordinate to this revolting 
 type of Christianity. Such puerile and short-sighted con- 
 ceptions of ethics and religion are abundantly illustrated in 
 the medieval lives of the saints and apostles, and in the 
 pious tales and exempla. While many are offensive to our 
 modern feelings, most of them make a strong appeal through 
 their sincerity and childlike simplicity. The popular element 
 is further noticeable in their love of a good story, and in the 
 tendency to embellish it, as a shrine is hidden beneath the 
 votive offerings of the faithful. Much professedly religious 
 Literature in the Middle Ages, put into shape by ecclesiastics, 
 is almost as truly the product of the people as the ballads. 
 
 It is astonishing to contrast with this the keenness and 
 minuteness of philosophical speculation. Philosophy in the 
 Middle Ages meant theology, of course, since all philosophy 
 not in accord with the doctrines of the Church was heresy. 
 Within the Church arose Scholasticism, the effort to make 
 religion a thing of reason as well as of revelation. This was
 
 150 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 the noblest intellectual task open to the medieval thinker, 
 to reveal the mind of God in terms of human logic. Never 
 was authority more reverenced than in this age, yet many of 
 its most brilliant intellects sought to establish by argument the 
 reasonableness of ecclesiastical dogma. But Scholasticism, 
 like alchemy, ended where it began. Bolder spirits, men of 
 unimpeachable devoutness, like Saint Bernard, dared to pro- 
 claim dogma incapable of logical analysis, and turned to the 
 sensuous interpretation of religion which we call Mysticism. 
 The speculative tendency within the Church really gave way 
 long before the shattering blows of the Reformation. 
 
 Viewing the Literature of the later Middle Ages as a whole, 
 one is particularly struck by its singular variety and richness. 
 Germanic poetry had degenerated in the age preceding into a 
 senile mouthing of meaningless alliterative formulas. It had 
 little true originality; it could not store new wine save in old 
 bottles, and the later vintages were indeed tasteless. When 
 Christianity came, there were no poets to give it fitting expres- 
 sion. Caedmon and Cynewulf, if we may allow these names 
 to stand for their respective schools, produced incongruous 
 work. The poetic stock-in-trade of Germanic heathendom 
 was ill suited to Biblical stories or to the lives of saints and 
 martyrs. The Continental Saxon epic, the " Heliand," written 
 some two centuries before the Conquest, represented no ad- 
 vance in poetry. The rise of scaldic verse in Scandinavia 
 marks the waning of the heroic spirit of the " Edda." While 
 the new learning within the Church was producing much that 
 was valuable, the Literature of Western Europe in the tenth 
 and eleventh centuries was constricted indeed as compared 
 with what followed. The new Romantic spirit, however, 
 brought with it an intense interest in a great variety of sub- 
 jects. Stories' were drawn from every quarter of the known 
 world, — from the Celtic peoples, from the classics, from the 
 East. The old poetic technic was discarded; the bard now 
 played a lyre of many strings. The thirst for learning was
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 151 
 
 insatiable; it was a bishop of the fourteenth century who 
 wrote, "A library of wisdom is more precious than all wealth, 
 and all things that are desirable cannot be compared with it." 
 This abundance of material gives the age an appearance of 
 confusion which goes far toward explaining our ancestors' 
 notion of it as a literary chaos. Classification, even to-day, is 
 a task of the greatest difficulty. The individual author 
 counted for little ; it was seldom that he told his name. Pos- 
 sibly the striking absence of the personal element in medieval 
 letters is due to the fact that they were so largely in the hands 
 of men under ecclesiastical rule. The Church discouraged 
 individuality, and emphasized tradition and authority. So 
 it was with Literature. A medieval author was far more 
 willing to attribute the best elements in his work to some 
 well-known writer dead and gone than to claim them himself. 
 The notable exceptions are authors standing outside the 
 Church, — minstrels like Chretien, for example. And one 
 can forgive the feminine pride of the authoress of the charm- 
 ing Breton lais when she says, ''I will tell my name that 
 I may be remembered; I am called Marie, and I am of France." 
 Such exceptions prove the rule of anonymity. Classification 
 of this enormous mass of Literature by types is almost equally 
 difficult, since this kaleidoscopic array of poetry and prose 
 is constantly shifting and recombining, the lights from one 
 group coloring another, stray fragments becoming detached 
 and coalescing anew, in a different pattern. Here again the 
 influence of the Church is prominent. Since her business was 
 with all men, she stood as a link between the gentle and the 
 lowly, helped each to perpetuate their songs and stories, and 
 lent to each her aid in the more serious branches of letters. 
 In short, so varied and inconstant is this mass of material 
 that one is sometimes tempted to agree with the Italian critic 
 Croce, who maintained the arrangement of literary produc- 
 tions according to types to be an impossibility. 
 
 And so the attempt to trace even the most prominent char-.
 
 152 THE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 acteristics of this period in a single hour becomes absurd. 
 A realization of the attitude with which we ought to approach 
 it is perhaps most necessary, and this I have attempted to 
 suggest ; that we are to expect in the poetry of the aristocracy 
 a reflection of their new social ideals, of their love of magnifi- 
 cence, of their formality and artificiality; in the poetry of 
 the people a freedom and emotional quality now appearing 
 as tragic pathos and now as pure comedy; in the Church, 
 which cultivated every form of letters, both a reflection of the 
 simplicity of popular literature and a tendency to theological 
 subtlety, and all too often the blighting chill of a dreary 
 didacticism. 
 
 In any survey of Medieval Literature we are forced to 
 speak harshly of it now and then. It is often lacking in re- 
 straint and proportion. Never was there a greater passion 
 for telling everything and a little more too. Never was there 
 less sense of historical perspective; medieval, classical, and 
 Biblical heroes and heroines ran joyously along side by side. 
 Time and space were forgotten. Medieval literature is like 
 medieval painting, out of perspective and proportion, the men 
 and women as tall as the towers, all sides of the castle visible 
 at once, God in the heavens above, and the yawning jaws of 
 Hell below. Despite all this, there is a wonderful fascination 
 about seeing the world at an angle so different from our own. 
 Such was the universe to the medieval man, and if we put our- 
 selves thoroughly in sympathy with his point of view, we gain 
 something of an experience wholly new, the sensation of living 
 in another age than our own. In closing, then, it is this 
 strange charm, this fascination about the Middle Ages which 
 I would emphasize. Critics are perfectly right in saying that 
 there is too little romance as we commonly conceive it in the 
 period of chivalry, too little of the poet's vision of 
 
 *' Charm 'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES 153 
 
 It is, indeed, often an awkward and creaky universe that we 
 behold, but it has its spell, nevertheless, and this, once felt, 
 is not soon forgotten. Its incongruities, its artistic lapses, 
 fade in the magnificence of the whole, as in a cathedral the 
 cramped figures in the separate panes of a great rose-window 
 are lost in the splendor of its brilliant coloring, 
 
 "I walked in an enchanted land, 
 Chaucer and Dante took my hand ; 
 I saw the garden kept by Mirth, 
 I heard Crusaders shake the earth ; 
 Scotus and Bernard guided me 
 To pierce beyond mortality ; 
 I burst the fetters of the years, 
 And knew the music of the spheres. 
 
 And faintly yet the visions stay 
 To shame the garish world to-day."
 
 VIII 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 By Jefferson B. Fletcher, Professor of Comparative 
 Literature 
 
 "Out of this thick Gothic night, our eyes are opened to the 
 glorious torch of the sun," So at the dawning of the sixteenth 
 century wrote Frangois Rabelais; so felt the illuminated ones 
 of his generation. To their eyes, dazzled by unaccustomed 
 light, the nearer past seemed darker than it really was; they 
 saw the Middle Ages stretching as a shadow between them 
 and the effulgence of the antique world; men, they thought, 
 were one long "sleep" away from true civilization. 
 
 Their fallacy of vision is obvious to us. My predecessor 
 in this course has shown how far from "thick" or nocturnal 
 was that medieval, or "Gothic," atmosphere. I need not 
 retell his tale. Yet while Rabelais exaggerated the chiaro- 
 scuro of his contrast, contrast there nevertheless was. To 
 pass in thought from the medieval mood to the Renaissance 
 mood is like passing with the eye from band to band of color 
 in a rainbow; as the eye travels, brightest yellow leads by 
 imperceptible gradation to purest green. Just where yellow 
 leaves off, and green begins, is hard to say ; but that the color 
 so changes only the color-blind would deny. So is it with 
 successive stages of civilization. The color of the common 
 life changes, constantly but imperceptibly, from moment to 
 moment. Looking backward, we can see that, so to speak, 
 green has succeeded to yellow; but we can see the epochal 
 colors at all only at long range. To mark off the Renaissance 
 
 155
 
 156 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 by precise dates would be about as hopeful an undertaking as 
 to measure the green band of a rainbow with a footrule and 
 an aeroplane. Enough for the moment to say that by Re- 
 naissance color is meant the color of European civilization dur- 
 ing, broadly speaking, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 
 
 As Rabelais implies, the Renaissance felt itself to be, in 
 some sense or other, the rebirth of a spirit that had been dead, 
 or sleeping, since Rome fell before the northern barbarians. 
 For a thousand years the barbarian spirit had prevailed; but 
 now 
 
 "Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 
 
 Redeunt Saturnia regna." 
 
 "The great cycle of the centuries returns upon itself; the 
 Saturnian, the golden antique, age is come again. " Such was 
 the faith. What led to it? Why, justly or not, did Rabelais, 
 Christian as he called himself, dub these ten centuries of 
 Christianity a "thick Gothic night," a night of ignorance and 
 barbarism ? 
 
 To answer these two questions fully is to define the ideals 
 of the Renaissance. 
 
 To the first, the answer at long range is in the paradox that 
 the Renaissance faith in the possible revival of antiquity 
 sprang from a denial of the persistent faith of the Middle 
 Ages that antiquity had never died. The German barbarians 
 disrupted the Roman Empire without meaning to disrupt it, 
 or realizing that they had disrupted it. All they wanted was 
 land and booty and glory; the splendor of Roman civilization 
 itself awed and won them ; they preserved that civilization by 
 adapting themselves to it, or they thought that they preserved 
 it. They ruled where Rome had ruled, calling themselves 
 Romans, pretending themselves the legitimate successors of 
 the Caesars, "as if," as Petrarch scornfully exclaimed later, 
 "saying so made it so!" This "legitimist illusion" deceived 
 the whole Middle Ages. Dante urged its divine right, alleg-
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 157 
 
 ing that "Christ dying confirmed the jurisdiction of the Roman 
 Empire over the whole human race." And in the "Divine 
 Comedy," the Emperor Justinian celebrates the triumphal 
 progress of the Roman Eagle from ^neas to Charlemagne, 
 and prophesies the perpetuity of its glory. 
 
 As the Middle Ages held to the unbroken continuance of the 
 Roman Empire, so they held to the Roman Law as their com- 
 man law, to the Roman language as their common language, 
 believing Latin what Dante sought to make his "noble verna- 
 cular" ^ — "illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial." 
 
 This medieval legitimist illusion was possible, however, only 
 in the shadow of ignorance of what had been the real Roman 
 State. The conquest of the real Roman Empire by Teutonic 
 barbarians had meant the interpenetration of two peoples, 
 of two forms of family and society. The resulting social web 
 was woven, warp and woof, of these two diverse threads, and 
 it changes in color as one or the other thread here or there 
 thickens; but in the shadow of historical ignorance the party- 
 coloring of the social pattern was invisible; past and present, 
 Roman and German, blended into one monochromatic blur. 
 When a warrant of legitimacy was wanting and wanted, it 
 was forged, like the documentary "Donation of Constantine " ; 
 where a record of antiquity showed contrary to current prej- 
 udice or opinion, a corrective subintention was read into 
 it. So might Ovid's "Art of Love" be construed as an 
 allegory of love divine, and be dedicated to the Virgin Mary, 
 So came the antique formulas of life to be " gothicized " ; 
 antique law, at least in Italy, to be feudalized ; antique litera- 
 ture to be moralized; antique language to be barbarized. 
 
 The Renaissance was, in the first instance, a realization 
 that this medieval faith in the perpetuance of the Roman 
 Empire was an illusion; in the second instance, an aspiration 
 to make the illusion a reality, to revive the Roman State, 
 though preferably the Roman Republican State, as it had 
 been, unpolluted by barbarian commixture. The realization.
 
 158 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the aspiration, was Italian. However much German emperors 
 might boast themselves legitimate successors of the Csesars, 
 Italians felt themselves the sole blood-heirs of the Romans; 
 the Imperial City was their birthright. One day yet, as their 
 poet sang: — 
 
 " Prowess against savagery 
 Shall take up arms ; and the battle be quick-sped ; 
 For the ancient bravery 
 In our Italian hearts is not yet dead." 
 
 Even while Dante, in his idealist illusion was hailing Henry 
 the Luxemburger as "the most clement Henry, Divine, Au- 
 gustus, and Caesar," his fellow-Florentines at home were urg- 
 ing Robert of Sicily to make no terms with that upstart 
 "German King." For them that "German King" was but a 
 make-believe Caesar, an up-country ass in the imperial lion's 
 skin. Vainly might Dante reproach them, for that they 
 "first and alone . . . have raged against the glory of the 
 Roman prince, the monarch of the earth and the ambassador 
 of God . . . and, deserting the legitimate government, seek 
 like new Babylonians to found new kingdoms, in order that 
 the Florentine may be one polity and the Roman another." 
 
 Dante was mistaken. The Florentines were not standing 
 out in order that the Florentine might be one polity and the 
 Roman another; it was the German polity from which they 
 argued secession. They wrote to their Brescian allies: "The 
 Latins must always hold the Germans in enmity, seeing that 
 they are opposed in act and deed, in manners and soul; not 
 only is it impossible to serve, but even to hold any intercourse 
 with that race." This is the sentiment that inspired the 
 Latinistic revival in Italy. Four decades after this letter was 
 written, Petrarch in 1351 exhorts not merely to secession, but 
 to a reconquest of the Empire by Latins. This bolder dream 
 of what may be called Pan-Latinism was revealed in a letter 
 to the "Roman People," who are urged to intervene in the
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 159 
 
 trial of the luckless Rienzi. "Invincible people," wrote 
 Petrarch, "to whom I belong. Conquerors of the Nations ! 
 . . . The supreme crime with which [your former Tribune] is 
 charged ... is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire 
 is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. . . . 
 If the Roman Empire is not at Rome, pray where is it ? If it 
 is anywhere else than at Rome it is no longer the Empire of 
 the Romans, but belongs to those with whom an erratic fate 
 has left it. . . . But believe me, if a drop of the old blood still 
 flows in your veins, you may yet enjoy no little majesty and no 
 trifling authority. . . . You have but to speak as one; let 
 the world realize that the Roman people has but a single 
 voice, and no one will reject or scorn their words; every one 
 will respect or fear them." 
 
 Illusion for illusion; no legitimist pretension of German 
 Caesar could be more fantastic than this naive taking of the 
 mongrel and helpless populace of medieval Rome for the 
 Populus Romanus, the "invincible" Roman people; as well 
 call a nettle a rose for growing where a rose once grew. Such 
 self-deception as Rienzi's and Petrarch's could not last; yet 
 the enthusiasm of Petrarch was contagious; and the Italians 
 were infection-ripe. If not materially, at least spiritually, 
 they might, so they dreamed, reenter into the heritage of their 
 forefathers, might be again an "invincible people," the Roman 
 people reborn. "We have lost Rome," wrote Lorenzo Valla 
 two generations after Petrarch, "we have lost our dominion, 
 we have lost our possessions, through fault not of ourselves 
 indeed, but of the times; yet by a more splendid supremacy 
 we rule even now the greater part of the earth. Ours is Italy, 
 ours France, ours Spain, Germany, . . . and many other 
 nations. For there the Roman empire is, wherever the 
 Roman language prevails." 
 
 The so-called "revival of learning" in Italy was not for the 
 mere sake of learning. Browning's "Grammarian," 
 
 " Soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst"
 
 160 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of knowledge, is false to the type Browning meant to depict. 
 For no Faustus-like curiosity the Italian grammarians of the 
 fifteenth century grew lean over " hoti" and the "enclitic de." 
 They sought with passionate eagerness from old books no mere 
 knowledge of old books, but recovery of an old life, poring 
 over the records of antiquity as a man whose thread of mem- 
 ory has been snapped might seek from old letters and diaries 
 to tie together his present and past selves. When the anti- 
 quary Ciriac of Ancona was asked why he spent his substance 
 and risked his life in far journeyings to gather musty manu- 
 scripts and broken bits of carved stone, he is said to have 
 replied, "I go to awake the dead." 
 
 "There the Roman Empire is, wherever the Roman lan- 
 guage prevails." These proud words were addressed by a 
 grammarian to fellow-grammarians, quirites of the new 
 Rome, indeed "not the seat of empire, but the mother of 
 letters. " " Shall ye suffer, O Quirites, your city to be captured 
 by the Gauls, Latinity to be corrupted by barbarism?" 
 Valla's appeal was heard. These patriot-grammarians de- 
 clared themselves, and were accepted as truly the quirites 
 of the city of culture, custodians, like the Brahmin priest- 
 hood, of a sacred speech, key to the past and, as they confi- 
 dently believed, to the future. For Dante, only a Pope might 
 say, 
 
 "Heaven I can unlock and lock again, 
 
 As thou dost know; for mine are the two keys." 
 
 But the grammarian Filelfo coolly claims the key to a rival 
 immortality; "I am one of those who celebrating with elo- 
 quence illustrious deeds render immortal those who, by nature, 
 are mortal." Well might the future Pope Pius II write to 
 an English bishop: "Great is Eloquence; nothing so much 
 rules the world." Eloquence, especially Ciceronian and Ver- 
 gilian eloquence, became the common aspiration of articulate 
 Europe; Valla's dream of a Pan-Latinistic empire of the spirit
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 161 
 
 was well-nigh realized: "the Word was with Rome, and the 
 Word was God." In the middle of the sixteenth century 
 Latin Eloquence received one more interesting apotheosis, 
 and illustration, from an Englishman, Gabriel Harvey, Spen- 
 ser's friend. His pride is not merely patriotic, but almost 
 religious. "Behold," he exclaims (though not in plain, or 
 rather base, English), "Behold (not unexpectedly) Her whom 
 ye so much desire, for the sake of seeing whom ye so eagerly 
 flock together, upon whom in hope and mind you have fixed 
 most constant eyes so long — of incredible majesty, in 
 royal attire, of almost angelic aspect, my most illustrious 
 Hera, my most august Heroine, ELOQUENCE, a divine crea- 
 ture. . . . See, by the immortal God, how beautiful she is ! 
 ... I pass over her golden hair, and her curled locks; I pass 
 over her serene and most lovely brow; I pass over her shining 
 eyes and dark-colored eyelids; I pass ..." well, he passes 
 over several other things to "cry out, like the lover in the comic 
 poet: O lovely face! henceforth I blot out all other women 
 from my mind; I am weary of these everyday forms." 
 
 So "weary of these everyday forms," Boccaccio had de- 
 clared that "composition in the vulgar tongue cannot make 
 the man-of-letters ' ' ; and he came to blush for his ' ' Decameron ' ' 
 not because its moral tone, but because its vernacular, was 
 base. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Dante him- 
 self was relegated by a Florentine man-of-letters to the com- 
 pany of "butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers," "for 
 by his choice of language he seems to have wished to be the 
 intimate of such folk." With the gradual withdrawal of the 
 nations into their own boundaries, however, national pride 
 began to assert the national against the imperial, the Latin 
 eloquence. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries 
 echoes of Dante's plea for the "noble vernacular" made them- 
 selves heard in every country. But the "noble vernaculars" 
 must still disdain "everyday forms" of speech, must receive 
 their accolades of ennoblement from the classic "grammars,"
 
 162 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and so become classic vernaculars. The contention was the 
 opposite of Wordsworth's; literary language was to be a 
 special mintage of classically trained artists, and no mere 
 matter of common currency; was to be, as Dante said, a 
 "secondary speech," not acquired "without any rule, by imi- 
 tating our nurses," but by conscious eclectic art. "The ver- 
 nacular," says Dante, "followeth use and the Latin Art." 
 When Edmund Spenser, as Ben Jonson declared, "in affecting 
 the ancients, writ no language," he was but following the 
 Renaissance tradition, begun with Dante, of so compounding 
 "the illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial language" in 
 England, the Platonic Idea of English, in which all customary 
 English participates, and to which, as it were, all customary 
 English aspires. By such indirection. Valla's oracle, "there 
 the Roman Empire is, wherever the Roman language pre- 
 vails," came true; in all the nations throughout the Renais- 
 sance, this ideal of the Roman language as an "artefact" pre- 
 vailed, and was followed by literary reformers of the national 
 tongues. The first great literary achievement of the Renais- 
 sance was the refining of language, the literary medium, ac- 
 cording to the canons of the classics, and as a fine art. Thus 
 it happened that an Italian patriotic revival passed into 
 general esthetic reform. 
 
 For their profession of "humane letters" (literce humaniores) 
 the Italian grammarians, at least by the beginning of the six- 
 teenth centur}'", were called umanisti or Humanists. Whether 
 originally or not. Humanism, the profession of the "human- 
 ities," came to be considered as dividing with theology, or 
 "divinity," the field of knowledge. Thus in 1483 Caxton 
 speaks of one who "floured in double science . . . that is to 
 saye, dyuynyte and humanyte"; and in 1596 Sir John Haring- 
 ton declares of a certain person, "I might repute him as a 
 good Humanist, but I should ever doubt him as a good De- 
 vine." In the latent conflict between Humanism and 
 Divinity, between the worldly and the other-worldly concerns
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 163 
 
 of men, lies, I think, the answer to the second of my original 
 questions: Why did Christian Rabelais stigmatize the ten 
 Christian centuries before him as "a thick Gothic night"? 
 
 In Grteco-Roman Literature the Humanists, reading with 
 a new open-mindedness, found a valuation of human life 
 strangely at variance with that of medieval Christianity. Be- 
 tween the angelic announcement of "On earth peace, good will 
 towards men" and highest pagan thought might indeed be no 
 essential disparity. Vergil's Messianic Eclogue made a strik- 
 ingly similar announcement, and actually was supposed to 
 have unwittingly intended the Christ, Vergil being, as Dante 
 makes the converted Statius declare, 
 
 "like one who goes by night, 
 Carrying the light behind him, self-unserved. 
 But making all who follow after wise." 
 
 Socrates, again, as well as Jesus, had affirmed love to be the 
 sun of wisdom and the source of good. But whatever of 
 ascetic morality and of transcendental mysticism may have 
 been implicit in the teaching of Jesus himself, these moods of 
 negation had become later dominant in Christian doctrine. 
 Early persecution, and afterwards the continuing miseries of 
 barbarian conquest, had made this world seem to civilized 
 Europeans a place of horror. To ignore it, to yearn to es- 
 cape from it into the promised peace, were counsels perhaps 
 less of perfection than of desperation. The vengeance of God 
 was invoked upon the persecutor, being the only vengeance 
 possible. The thought of Hell was a comfort to outraged im- 
 potence; sight of God's enemies, and their own, tortured ever- 
 lastingly was not the least of the anticipated joys of paradise. 
 But the mischief returned upon the heads of those who had 
 devised it; like a child, scared by its own make-beUeve, Chris- 
 tendom quailed before the monstrous horror of its own im- 
 agining; its age-long anxiety was to avoid falling into the 
 spectral pit it had, in fancy, dug for its enemies. And its
 
 164 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 moralists were quick to use this terror for edifying ends; they 
 taught that the fear of Hell is the beginning of wisdom; they 
 particularized infernal punishments with unction. This 
 world becomes a trap to catch the unwary; while there is 
 life, there is danger. Parallel-wise, and almost from its begin- 
 nings, Christianity, further to aggravate a morbid distrust of 
 life, had absorbed mystic and ascetic doctrines originating in 
 Oriental minds. "Man is a spirit dragging around a corpse," 
 Plotinus of Alexandria had said in Rome two centuries after 
 Saint Paul had taught there; Christian Europe went on repeat- 
 ing the saying, and like sayings, and Christian fanatics did 
 their best to make such sayings come true. Burdened with 
 the body as so very literally a dead weight, no wonder the con- 
 sistent medieval soul preferred the contemplative to the active 
 life. 
 
 "Imitation of Christ" thus meant renunciation of the in- 
 terests of this world. "Truly," exclaims Thomas a Kempis, 
 "truly it is misery even to live upon the earth." "Thou art 
 deceived," he declares, "thou art deceived if thou seek any 
 other thing than to suffer tribulations." No natural impulse 
 is other than evil; therefore his conclusion that "the more 
 nature is depressed and subdued, so much the more is grace 
 infused." Now the burghers of the free Communes of Italy, 
 hard-headed, practical business men, 
 
 " Men of the world who know the world like men," 
 
 might, so long as they remained merely business men, listen 
 to such doctrine with indifferent docility; even talk it them- 
 selves — business men are conservative — on Sundays. But 
 as the infection of pagan ideas spread, as these burghers listened 
 to Humanists, or became Humanists, they found aligned against 
 such ascetic renouncements and mystic prostrations not only 
 the standards of life they really lived by, but backing up these 
 standards of theirs all the sanity of Rome, all the graciousness 
 of Greece. These democratic Italians had learned to ignore,
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 165 
 
 when they chose, constituted authority; they were too far 
 away from the Emperor, too close to the Pope, to stand in awe 
 of either; and both Powers were in the Communes' debt. In 
 Italy thought and speech were free this side heresy, and the 
 borders of heresy were not over-vigilantly patrolled. Wlien 
 in 1433 Lorenzo Valla, in his dialogue "On Pleasure, or the 
 Highest Good," transparently preferred pagan joy-of-life 
 before medieval Christian distrust-of-life, there was no official 
 censure. Valla's argument has paradoxes worthy of Bernard 
 Shaw, audacities manifestly pour epater le bourgeois; but his 
 central idea is serious and significant. Men naturally seek, 
 he argues, not "tribulations," but pleasure; and whatever 
 is really and truly natural, is right : " what Nature has created 
 and shaped cannot be other than right and praiseworthy." 
 On this sentence hang the law and the prophets of the Renais- 
 sance, indeed of Modernism. The Utopians, those most typi- 
 cally Renaissance folk, reaffirm it; "they define virtue thus," 
 Sir Thomas More tells us, "that it is a living according to 
 Nature," and "they imagine that Nature prompts all people 
 on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do." "Physis 
 (that is to say, Nature)," writes Rabelais, "at her first burthen 
 begat beauty and harmony, being of herself very fruitful. 
 Antiphysis (who ever was the counterpart of Nature), imme- 
 diately, out of a malicious spite against her for beautiful and 
 honorable productions, in opposition, begot Amodunt and 
 Dissonance," who, as Rabelais amusingly describes them, 
 went counter to normal humanity, to Nature's offspring, in 
 every respect. "Their heads were round like a foot-ball, and 
 not gently flapped on both sides, like the common shape of 
 men. Their ears stood pricked up, like those of asses; their 
 eyes as hard as those of crabs, and without brows, stared out 
 of their heads, fixed on bones like those of our heels; their feet 
 were round fike tennis balls; their arms and hands turned 
 backwards towards the shoulders; and they walked on their 
 heads, continually turning round like a ball, topsy-turvy, heels
 
 IQQ THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 over head." True type of the children of Nature, begot in 
 "beauty and harmony," is Pantagruel himself, the "all- 
 thirsty," as Rabelais says his name implies, born when "the 
 world was a-dry." It is natural and right to be all-thirsty 
 for life, to be "good Pantagruelists, that is to say, to live in 
 peace, joy, health, and be always of good cheer." 
 
 This doctrine of good cheer was by no means merely a re- 
 turn to paganism. Pagan thought doubtless helped to inspire 
 it; some who preached it were at heart virtually pagan; but in 
 Rabelais, and in the greater men of the sixteenth century, it 
 meant simply a cheerful, manlier Christianity. To this re- 
 formed Christianity Death is no longer the scarecrow mon- 
 ster of the "Danse macabre." To Ronsard Death appears 
 as the benignant surgeon of the soul: — 
 
 "I salute thee, glad and profitable Death ! " 
 
 Francis of Assisi indeed had also said : — 
 
 " Praised be thou, Lord, for our sister corporal death ! " 
 
 But Saint Francis speaks for himself; Ronsard for an age of 
 hope. To the dreary refrain of the late Middle Ages, "Fear 
 of death perturbeth me," Ben Jonson sturdily retorts: — 
 
 "He that fears death or mourns it in the just, 
 Shows of the Resurrection little trust." 
 
 Shakspere, no more than Dante, doubts that "man is made 
 eternal " : — 
 
 "So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, 
 And Death once dead, there's no more dying then." 
 
 But Shakspere's interest is all with the actual humanity, not 
 with the potential divinity, of mankind; his ideal, the Renais- 
 sance ideal, is the realization by man of full manhood. His 
 highest tribute to a human being was to affirm perfect hu- 
 manity, to say that
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 167 
 
 "His life was gentle, and the elements 
 So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up 
 And say to all the world, 'This was a man ! ' " 
 
 To deny Nature, to strain above her, to seek, a second 
 Adam, to be as God, — such had been the aspiration of eremite 
 and monk and mystic ; such to the Renaissance seemed a pre- 
 sumption not of rising above, but of falling below, Nature; 
 and an Italian poet of the Renaissance so declares : — 
 
 "I am a man, and pride m^^self 
 On being human. . . . And if perchance that name 
 You hold in scorn, take care 
 Lest, making you unhuman, 
 You grow not more a monster than a god. " 
 
 This is not paganism, not a worship of false gods, not a 
 denial of God, but the conviction that man's present business 
 is to live his life as roundly, bravely, beautifully, as he can, 
 leaving the rest to God; that such 
 
 " Virtue's a faint green sickness of brave souls," 
 
 as womanishly shrinks from life; that true virtue should in 
 effect be derived not only from vir, man, but also from vis, 
 vim. "Virile vim" is in fact not far from what Renaissance 
 Italians meant by virtu, and the meaning, if not the word, 
 was translated into action throughout Europe. 
 
 And this regained sense of harmony between man and his 
 world of action, between virtue and natural impulse, between 
 goodness and happiness, was, I think, what most of all moved 
 Rabelais to hail the dawning of a new sunshiny day for man- 
 kind. The gist of his message is in Pippa's song : — 
 
 "The year's at the spring 
 And day's at the morn . . . 
 God's in His heaven — 
 All's right with the world ! "
 
 168 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 And the darkness of the "thick Gothic night" lay for him 
 
 in its wailing: — 
 
 "God's in His heaven," 
 
 far, far away; therefore 
 
 "All's wrong with the world !" 
 
 No doubt Rabelais' jubilation — as Pippa's — was pre- 
 mature. To his greeting of the dawn one is tempted to retort 
 Shakspere's pensive antiphony: — 
 
 "Full many a glorious morning have I seen . . . 
 Anon permit the basest clouds to ride 
 With ugly rack on his celestial face." 
 
 For his "Abbey of Theleme" Rabelais could make the rule 
 which was no rule, "Do as you please," because those only 
 admitted there, "free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant 
 in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that 
 prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them 
 from vice, which is called honor." The Thelemite idea was 
 good; but the Thelemite membership must have been small. 
 In Renaissance Italy, however, many were virtual members 
 of the Order, self-elected and credentials waived. There the 
 career was open, wide open, to all the talents, and all the appe- 
 tites. God had said to Adam, according to Pico della Miran- 
 dola, "I have made thee free to shape thyself at thine own 
 sweet will (quasi arhitrarius) . Thou mayst sink thyself into 
 a beast; thou mayst uplift thyself godlike, at thy choice." 
 Italians were exercising this choice, thoroughly. Following 
 the maxim "Do as you please," they made themselves 
 thorough saints and thorough devils, even thorough trimmers 
 and moral weathercocks joyously gyrating with every shift of 
 mood. The hero of the moment was the virtuoso, the man 
 thorough in whatever he undertakes ; and the resulting society 
 of virtuosi might be compared to medieval society as a fan- 
 tastic " capricdo" to a "plainsong." Whether in thought or
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 169 
 
 action, the average medieval man must play his part in the 
 general orchestra; to change the tune was treason; to get off 
 the key heresy. Now the solo was the thing. Society was 
 indeed by no means, as acid Protestant reformers and some 
 rhetorical historians would have us believe, wholly "off 
 color"; it was indeed many-colored, high-colored. When 
 Roger Ascham later sourly called Renaissance Italy "Circe's 
 Court," he should at least have remembered that also the 
 "wise Ulysses" found "Circe's Court" homelike. Still, the 
 medieval caution, "Remember, man, that dust thou art, and 
 unto dust thou shalt return," was very generally made pre- 
 miss to the conclusion, therefore carpe diem, Enjoy thyself 
 now; and the syllogism was rhymed by the representative 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent : — 
 
 " Youth, how beautiful it shows, 
 Yet how little while will tarry ! 
 Let who would be, now be merry ; 
 Of To-morrow no one knows." 
 
 It was but filial for Lorenzo's son to exclaim at his election, 
 "Now let us enjoy the papacy which God has given us." 
 Leo X and his generation did enjoy it, to the scandal of the 
 rest of Europe. Contemn the pleasures of sense ! had cried 
 Valla, why, "the shame is, not that we have five senses, but 
 that we have not fifty." Certainly, in default of the desirable 
 fifty, the generation of Leo worked with tenfold energy the 
 actual five, reflecting its life in an Art and Literature like it- 
 self, now sensuous and elegant, now sensuous and brutal, but 
 whether elegant or brutal, idealistic or realistic, decorative 
 or didactic, always and in all sensuous. Its fullest self-ex- 
 pression is in pictures; its finest poetry is picture-poetry. 
 Northern Europe surrendered herself to the sensuous charm of 
 Italian art, accepted the new Italian Literature as a model 
 on almost a parity with Grseco-Roman Literature, yet at the 
 same time reprehended the free and sensuous living which
 
 170 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 only could produce such Art and Literature. A century nearly 
 after Leo, Ben Jonson was to say of his own time: — 
 
 "Humor [individual caprice] is now the test we try things in; 
 All power is just; nought that delights is sin." 
 
 Luther — not first indeed, but first effectively — so accused 
 Leo and his Italy. Savonarola, Erasmus, orthodox Catholics 
 all over Europe, had protested against Humanism turned cynic 
 as well as against asceticism turned hypocrite; but these had 
 been reformers on the inside; Luther was revolutionary, 
 openly invading the one "forbidden land" of the faith, which 
 even the audacious Valla, "wont to spare no one," had dared 
 to approach only under the disguise of a faithful subject. 
 Rabelais had said to his Thelemites, "Do as you please"; 
 Luther in his tract "On the Liberty of a Christian Man" said 
 to all his readers also, "Do as you please." Rabelais had 
 presupposed the restraint of "honor," Luther presupposed 
 the restraint of Scripture; but the religious restraint proved 
 as easy of evasion or waiver as the moral. And from liberty 
 turned license, Luther, like Sir Thomas More, shrank back. 
 Individual reason, Luther came to say, without knowledge of 
 the divine grace, is a "light that is only darkness," "a poison- 
 ous beast with many dragons' heads," "an ugly devil's bride," 
 "the all-cruelest and most fatal enemy of God." Reaction 
 spread ; for Protestantism Calvin, for Catholicism the Council 
 of Trent, reasserted against the liberty of the private con- 
 science the authority, with power, of dogma. 
 
 In literature, conflict between liberty tending to license 
 and authority tending to dogma manifested itself parallel- wise. 
 Successively, in Italy, France, England, Spain, in the genera- 
 tions represented by Ariosto, Ronsard, Spenser, Lope de Vega, 
 literature was in a state of unstable equilibrium, weighted 
 more or less equally with romantically free, and with classi- 
 cally restrained, forms and moods. Creative genius was 
 acceptedly a breath from the gods, blowing whither it listeth,
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 171 
 
 provided it be willing — noblesse oblige — to blow through 
 only tubes and stops of classical manufacture. Typically 
 romantic would seem the mood of Ariosto's humoresque 
 fantasia of 
 
 "The ladies and cavaliers, the arms and loves, 
 
 Courtesies, and daring deeds that were, what time 
 
 The Moors from Africa came oversea." 
 
 Yet Ariosto carefully followed by anticipation the injunction 
 of Du Bellay "to soak himself in the classics, to devour them, 
 and having well digested them, to convert them into his own 
 flesh and blood." For relative observance of classic epic 
 structure, for purism of diction and harmony of style, for 
 studied clarity and moderation, Ariosto has been called the 
 founder of the classic tradition in Italian poetry. Ronsard 
 and his "Pleiade" strove with might and main after the classic 
 models; but it is their natural Romantic lyrism that has lasted, 
 that has led to their rehabilitation from the slurs of the Classi- 
 cist Malherbe by the attorney of Romanticism, Sainte-Beuve. 
 If Du Bellay formulated the classic canon in his elaborate 
 "Defence and Ennoblement of the French Language," in a 
 single line of his "Regrets" he epitomized the Romantic con- 
 fession, 
 
 " I write naively all that touches me at heart." 
 
 Spenser, accepted by his own age as the English Vergil, was 
 disdained by the English "Augustan" age as a fantastic 
 "Goth," and hailed by the generation of Keats as "the bright 
 Lyrist" "blasphemed" by the "rocking-horse" school of 
 Boileau. Lope de Vega, writing plays in defiance of all classic 
 rule, protests that in deference to the childlike public, he sins 
 against his own lights. 
 
 But throughout Europe the gradual inclination in Church 
 and State, in Art and Literature, was towards centralized 
 authority. By the mid-sixteenth century Italian critics 
 had already formulated the Classicist canon by which seven-
 
 172 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 teenth-century French Literature was to be governed, and 
 to govern. Harmoniously conforming private reason with 
 established authoritj' in Church and State and society, imita- 
 tion of "nature" with imitation of the classics, the poetry 
 of Racine and the criticism of Boileau realized, as never had 
 been realized since Augustus ruled, the Roman ideals of sanity, 
 clarity, temperance, subordination. Speaking thus in the 
 spirit, if not in the letter, a Roman language, such poetry and 
 criticism might be said to verify Valla's prophecy, "The 
 Roman Empire is there, because there the Roman language 
 prevails." 
 
 But if this French classic Literature fulfils the Roman mood 
 of the Renaissance, it negates what in a rather special sense I 
 may call the Greek mood of the Renaissance. I mean the 
 mood of individual self-assertion, of restlessness, inquisitive- 
 ness, of the " all-thirstiness " of Pantagruel. As the jealous 
 self-assertion of the individual Greek states at once developed 
 their distinct personalities and at the same time left them, like 
 the loose twigs of the traditional faggot, to be easily broken 
 by the concentered strength of Macedonia and of Rome, 
 so the jealously self-assertive Italian states were broken by 
 the solid force of France and of Spain. Dream as Italians 
 might of a new Roman Empire, or at least of a new Italian 
 Nation, in their waking, working hours they refused the one 
 sacrifice needful, the sacrifice of individual and local self-in- 
 terest. After all, their blood was mixed; their mixed Ger- 
 manic and Roman institutions were but outer manifestations 
 of mixed inheritance. When Humanist patriots inveighed 
 against alien rule ("this barbarian dominion smells to heaven!" 
 cried Machiavelli), when the Florentines argued that "the 
 Latins must always hold the Germans in enmity, seeing that 
 they are opposed in act and deed, in manners and soul," 
 all forgot that these liberty-loving barbarians, these indi- 
 vidualistic Germans, asserted empire not only over Italian 
 borders, but as well within Italian breasts. The Machiavelli
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 173 
 
 who exhorts his imagined Prince, Dante's Veltro redivivus, to 
 unite Italy though the heavens fall — and liberty, morality, 
 humanity, fall with them — this Machiavelli as Florentine 
 Secretary has no other thought than for the selfish aggrandize- 
 ment of Florence. For him as Italian patriot, Caesar Borgia 
 is the great pacificator; for him as Florentine citizen Caesar 
 Borgia is a "basilisk" and an enemy of mankind. For 
 Machiavelli's Italy, the solid "grandeur that was Rome," 
 grounded on unity and subordination, was obviously not again 
 to be; but seeking, even in imagination, this Roman solidarity, 
 studying Roman wisdom, yet restless, inquisitive, "proving 
 all things," freely expanding and sensuously expressing her 
 multiple personality in the knowledge of good and evil. 
 Renaissance Italy did in some measure achieve again "the 
 glory that was Greece," and like Greece, in the field of the 
 spirit conquer her conquerors. 
 
 If the French Racine most nearly realized the Roman ideal 
 of Italian Plumanists, it is no mere paradox to declare the 
 Greek mood of the Renaissance at its richest in the English 
 Shakspere. His writings hold the mirror up to his nature, 
 and reveal it supremely "restless, inquisitive, 'proving all 
 things,' freely expanding and sensuously expressing a multiple 
 personality in the knowledge of good and evil." Because he, 
 as Ben Jonson said, "knew little Latin, and less Greek," 
 Shakspere thus reincarnates the Greek spirit; more of a 
 scholar, he had been more a slave to the letter and the rule, 
 like the "learned Grecians" of his time. As it was, his- Hu- 
 manism derived vastly less from the authority of "humane 
 letters," ex Uteris humanioribus, than from the appeal of hu- 
 man concerns, ex moribus humanis. And such, if I may so 
 say, was the "Humanism" of the Greeks themselves. 
 
 Shakspere's genius is not merely unperplexed between 
 liberty and authority in art, it is also hardly divided in interest 
 between earth and heaven. Sufficient unto the earth are the 
 interests thereof. "Shakspere," Carlyle noted in his Jour-
 
 174 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 nal, "seems to have had no religion but his poetry." Maybe, 
 and maybe not; but in any case his thought, his poetry, is 
 turned to secular ends. All manner of human men and women 
 he draws, and some monsters, but never an embryo saint or 
 theological doctor. In this complete Humanism, this whole- 
 souled absorption in humanity, Shakspere gives the pure 
 color, marks the precise center of that band in the historical 
 spectrum of European civilization which we call the Renais- 
 sance; as his contemporary Edmund Spenser, on the other 
 hand, illustrates the pervasive tendency away from Human- 
 ism, gospel of humanity, towards a new "divinity," a new 
 asceticism. Spenser's own mood is one of compromise. In 
 his youth he wrote two "Hymnes in Honour of Love and 
 Beautie," perfervid with praise of "Beauties glorious beame" 
 and of Love, "Lord of truth and loialtie." Nothing could be 
 chaster than these Platonizing pseans, yet their author came to 
 feel them pernicious, "finding," he says, "that the same too 
 much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being 
 too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather 
 sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to then- 
 honest delight"; wherefore, unable to call them in, he re- 
 solved "to reforme them, making, in stead of those two 
 Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others 
 of heavenly and celestiall." If the watchword of the progres- 
 sive Renaissance was Valla's affirmation of the trustworthi- 
 ness of Nature, here in Spenser's distrust of Nature, in his 
 resolve to "reforme . . . earthly or naturall" moods into 
 "heavenly and celestiall" moods, is in principle the negation 
 of the Renaissance. As for Dante, Vergil and Reason yield to 
 Beatrice and Dogma; so for Spenser, Plato gives place to 
 Calvin. Spenser may well call his two reformed Hymnes 
 "two honorable sisters," for they have indeed taken the veil; 
 Cytherea has passed her Calvinistic novitiate, and now as 
 Sister Sapience retires to her cell, "the closet of her chastest 
 bower. " Nor in
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 175 
 
 "... those, whom shee 
 Vouchsafeth to her presence to receave, 
 . . . thenceforth doth any fleshly sense, 
 Or idle thought of earthly things, remaine" ; 
 
 but through her they are led to 
 
 "... looke at last up to that Soveraigne Light, — 
 Even the love of God ; which loathing brings 
 Of this vile world and these gay-seeming things.'' 
 
 The "Faerie Queene" is, under its garment of sensuous im- 
 agery, but a long sermon on the same world-renouncing text. 
 Rabelais' sun of nature is setting on the eve of the Puritan 
 Sabbath, which, in effect, Spenser's last line acclaims, 
 
 " that great Sabbaoth God graunt me that Sabaoths sight ! "
 
 IX 
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 By John Erskine, Associate Professor of English 
 
 The eighteenth century is the period of the Classical Rule. 
 Between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the 
 Romantic movement accompanying the French Revolution, 
 the literatures of Europe were under the almost despotic 
 influence of the classics. It may seem an error to speak of 
 the "end of the Renaissance" and the ''beginning of the Ro- 
 mantic movement/' as though the Renaissance in some of 
 its ideals were not still vital with us, and as though the Ro- 
 mantic movement had not been felt in man's earliest imag- 
 inings. It may seem an error also to imply that the Classical 
 influence was at its absolute height in all the European lit- 
 eratures at the same time, whereas such an influence is a wave, 
 surging out of Italy into France, from France into England 
 and Germany, and recoiling in a spent form from England 
 back into Italy.. But even tentative dates are convenient. 
 For English Literature, if Milton be considered the last writer 
 of the Renaissance, his death in 1674 may be taken as the 
 starting-point of the Classical period; and the end of the period 
 may be found just before the revolutionary writings of Blake 
 and Burns. And this arbitrary century, 1675-1775, which 
 in English Literature includes the mature power of the Classi- 
 cal period rather than its origin or its decay, may serve as well 
 for the approximate boundaries of the period in the continental 
 literatures. 
 
 A far greater need for definition is in this word "Classical." 
 N 177
 
 178 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 With its companion term, Romantic, it bids fair to supply 
 criticism with one of its perpetual quarrels. Who ever did 
 define Romantic so as to satisfy all his hearers ? It is with 
 deep pleasure, therefore, that I consign that horn of the di- 
 lemma to the next lecturer. Classical is an easier term to deal 
 with. It is vague largely because, like other literary terms, 
 it serves many meanings, and has a trick of suggesting several 
 of them at once. It originally meant simply, the best of a 
 kind or class. Those Roman citizens were dassici who were 
 at the head of their classus. When the word, still in Roman 
 times, was first applied to writers and their works, "Classical" 
 meant the best of the particular kind. In the same sense 
 we still speak of a new book as a classic; and it should be 
 noted, in this use is implied no opposition to "Romantic." 
 In our common American speech to-day perhaps this oldest 
 meaning of the word is the one we usually intend; with us a 
 classic is a masterpiece, a finished work, secure of its fame. 
 
 But for the European mind the classics have been pre- 
 eminently the literatures of Greece and Rome, and the term 
 applied to individuals has meant those Greek or Latin authors 
 who excel and set the standard in their kind of writing. The 
 very fact that they were considered models for later writers 
 would have implied sooner or later a body of formulas or rules 
 deduced from their practice. But the enormous vitality of 
 the Aristotelian tradition in criticism happened to supply 
 such formulas as a chief part of the classical heritage, so that 
 the Renaissance scholar conceived of a classic as a master- 
 piece of ancient Literature, produced in conformity with recog- 
 nized laws. Herein the opposition is plain to the lawlessness 
 of Romantic art. 
 
 In the content of the Greek and Latin masterpieces the 
 medieval world, emerging into the Renaissance, found to its joy 
 clarity of spirit and sanity of mind. The world as the an- 
 cients saw it was comparatively simple and whole, and their 
 technically perfect and transparent expression was in accord
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 179 
 
 with an inward balance and order. That the ancient writers 
 were not always sane; that they now seem to us at times 
 romantic in technic and in mood, more modem in certain 
 aspects than some of our contemporaries, need not disturb 
 us here. At least to the early Renaissance they furnished 
 ideals of sanity, clearness, and order, which still are strongly 
 implied in the word "Classical." 
 
 Out of this meaning of the word comes a final meaning, 
 which we are somewhat prone to use as a reproach. That 
 Literature which is perfect in order, sanity, and restraint is 
 likely to seem to highly emotional natures mechanical and cold. 
 The Romantic movement in England, at least, managed to 
 throw back some such opprobrium upon the writers of Queen 
 Anne's time, and it may be doubted if many young students 
 of English Literature think of the eighteenth century much 
 more happily than as a slough of despond through which the 
 national genius wallowed and waded, and emerged at the 
 wicket gate of the "Lyrical Ballads." And too proverbial, 
 unfortunately, is the difficulty an Anglo-Saxon of our time has 
 in discovering any charm in the Classical writing of France. 
 
 A classic, then, as we must use the word, is a Greek or 
 Latin author whose work is standard in its kind, and there- 
 fore gives the law to later wTiters in that kind. His view of 
 life is large and sane, his emotion is held in balance by reason, 
 and his technic is perfect. And perhaps we should remember 
 too that Classical Literature, so defined, suggests composition 
 under happy auspices, in a golden age, under a Maecenas or 
 Louis XIV or Queen Anne, in a period when Literature is 
 least reformatory or evangelical, and most contemplative, 
 most in accord with its age. Such a period craves national lei- 
 sure and peace and much learning. It comes only after years 
 of more rapturous but less coherent endeavor, for it needs a 
 large background of material to work upon. It is a time when 
 the race sets its house in order and realizes its imaginative 
 wealth. It is therefore thoroughly conscious and calculating,
 
 180 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 not given to ecstasies, and to that extent it is a period which 
 seems to suppress the race's imagination. But it is always a 
 cUmax, and marks a desirable accomplishment of culture. 
 We may borrow Sainte-Beuve's image and say of a literature, 
 as he said of the individual, that there comes a season, after 
 its journeys and experiences are accomplished, when its live- 
 liest joy is to ponder and fathom what it has learnt, and feel 
 again its old emotions, as one might love to visit and revisit 
 old friends. That is the spirit of a Classical period. 
 
 Although 1675 may be taken for the first arbitrary date, 
 the influence of the classics upon European Literature begins, 
 of course, in the earliest movement of the Renaissance, when 
 the new-found treasures of Greece started the imagination of 
 Italy, and then of the whole cultured world. When we read 
 of the devotion and the sacrifice with which the Italian col- 
 lectors brought together the priceless libraries which became 
 the well-heads of inspiration for modern Literature, we may 
 well suspect that those old manuscripts, so perishable, so ex- 
 tremely difficult to find, had for the popes and princes and 
 their emissaries a romantic appeal, the lure that takes hold of 
 collectors. But from the beginning it was the substance of 
 the classics that was praised. The sanity of the world they 
 descril^ed, the wisdom and the justice of their speculations 
 upon life, fitted them to be at once the basis not only for lit- 
 erary study, but for all education. In the Renaissance to read 
 and write Latin and Greek was the first discipline of the 
 mind. 
 
 The honor in which the old languages were held, and the 
 masterpieces they contained, produced at once a conflict not 
 to be decided until the Romantic revival, perhaps not de- 
 cided then. The Middle Ages were of course rich in literary 
 expression, and the coming of Classical ideals found each 
 nation with a mass of poetry on its hands, and in most cases 
 an incipient drama, to which Greek and Roman standards of
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 181 
 
 taste could not apply. Since this national, idiomatic Litera- 
 ture did not conform to the Classical law, the scholars were 
 for discarding it. Give up, says Du Bellay, all such foolish- 
 ness as rondeaux, ballades, virelais, and chants royaux, which 
 serve only to prove our ignorance ; give your attention to the 
 epigrams of Martial, and the elegies of Ovid, and imitate the 
 odes of Horace. And as for comedies and tragedies, you 
 would know where to look for their models, if only kings and 
 commonwealths would restore them to their ancient dignity, 
 now usurped by farces and moralities. A few years later 
 Sidney had his famous condemnation to make of that English 
 drama which is the chief glory of the Elizabethan age, finding 
 fault with it because it was not in accord with the models of 
 Seneca and Plautus. Here the conflict between the national 
 folk-literature and the scholarly, Classical ideal is sharply 
 defined. It makes little difference that Sidney happens to be 
 in sympathy with some highly unclassical section of English 
 poetry, as where, confessing his own barbarousness, he says 
 he never heard the old song of ''Percy and Douglas" but he 
 found his heart moved more than with a trumpet. The point 
 is that he allows himself this praise of the Romantic ballad 
 only because there is no Classical precept to forbid him; and 
 he bolsters up his self-accusing taste by reminding us that the 
 incomparable Lacedemonians carried ever that kind of music 
 with them into the field. So Addison explained the beauty of 
 the same ballad, by showing that it resembled the classics. 
 "If this song had been written in the Gothic Manner, which 
 is the Delight of all our little Wits, whether Writers or Readers, 
 it would not have hit the Taste of so many Ages, or have 
 pleased the Readers of all Ranks and Conditions. I shall 
 only beg Pardon for such a profusion of Latin Quotations; 
 which I should not have made use of, but that I feared my own 
 Judgment would have looked too singular on such a Subject, 
 had I not supported it by the Practice and Authority of 
 Virgil." And earlier in the same paper he wrote, "The
 
 182 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 Thought is altogether the same with what we meet in several 
 Passages of the '^Eneid ' ; not that I would infer from thence, 
 that the Poet (whoever he was) proposed to himself any 
 Imitation of those Passages, but that he was directed to them 
 in general, by the same kind of Poetical Genius, and by the 
 same Copyings after Nature." In attempting to justify 
 their love of a great poem not derived from Greek or Latin, 
 Sidney and Addison were larger minded than the stricter 
 Classicists; they were seeking instinctively that modern defini- 
 tion of a classic which Sainte-Beuve proclaimed, a definition 
 generous enough to include all masterpieces of every school 
 and time. 
 
 But for a century or two the conflict was to be waged 
 between the national genius of each country and the common 
 Classical ideal. We are accustomed to think that the Ro- 
 mantic, native Literature was destined to supremacy from 
 the first, simply because it has been in the ascendant for the 
 last hundred years. But it was equally natural for the 
 eighteenth century to believe in the Classical ideal, and for 
 the same reason. The Classical qualities appealed to the 
 world then, and seemed as firmly planted as Romance seems 
 now. If Sidney was mistaken in condemning the Elizabethan 
 drama for its unreasonable extravagances, at least it was more 
 than two hundred years before scholars thought he was wrong; 
 and the drama to-day is nearer to his ideal than to Shak- 
 spere's. 
 
 Besides this conflict between the national folk-literatures 
 and the superimposed Classical ideal, the acceptance of Latin 
 and Greek models induced another conflict. To a large 
 degree the Renaissance mind, inheriting the medieval delight 
 in formulas, was disposed to imitate the Classics by imitating 
 their outward form. Only the more fortunate grasped the 
 truth that the inner spirit of Classicism could be poured into 
 the native molds of French or English Literature. Du 
 Bellay, as we have seen, would discard the Provengal verse
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 183 
 
 forms for the Classical odes, and Gabriel Harvey would have 
 the young Spenser and Philip Sidney write their rhymeless 
 verses in a prosody painfully close to Latin rules; and later 
 Campion was to make his admirable plea for the Classical, 
 quantitative verse, regardless of his own fame in rhyme. 
 Out of this absolute temper, prone to dogmatic formula, 
 evolved the rigid tradition of the eighteenth century in France 
 and England. In France the Pleiade, that group of poets 
 around Ronsard, had sought to improve their Literature and 
 their language by Classical imitation; although they did less 
 violence than Harvey or Campion to the genius of their native 
 tongue, they bound it by rules as strict, formulating the uses 
 of the alexandrine, of rhyme and assonance, of the hiatus, of 
 strophe-form. If they did not practise the artificial hexam- 
 eters and quantitative stanzas that greet us to our astonish- 
 ment in Sidney's ''Arcadia," they at least gave to their Lit- 
 erature the Classical tradition of formula and law, and by their 
 own great lyric gifts made the formulas seem vital. But in 
 protest to this tradition other critics emphasized the sub- 
 stance rather than the form of Classicism, and so uncon- 
 sciously preserved in their respective countries that native 
 strain which was to have its day in Romanticism. After a 
 writer has mastered all the rules of the Pleiade, says Regnier, 
 he is still not necessarily a poet. 
 
 " All he knows 
 Is to write prose in rime, and rime his prose." 
 
 And the vigorous Elizabethan speech stirred itself to do 
 justice to Harvey's "Ram's home rules of direction," that 
 "rable of scholastical precepts which be tedious." 
 
 These, then, are the two literary problems which Classi- 
 cism held out to the Renaissance world, and which continued 
 to divide the practice of English Literature till the Revolu- 
 tion, and which has divided the practice of French Literature 
 still later. Should or should not the Classical standards super-
 
 184 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 sede the indigenous forms of art ? And should the imitation 
 of the Classics be through external rules or through the spirit ? 
 
 The rule of the Classicists was strongest in France. A 
 nation that has an effective Academy, for the regulation of its 
 language and literature ; a nation that loves reason and order 
 and excels in the formal things of art, would naturally wel- 
 come a literary tradition based upon authority. The French 
 genius, as we think of it now, is nearest to the intellectual 
 clarity of the Greek, and the Classical tradition, as it touched 
 the Literature of each country, called out in response from that 
 Literature those qualities most in accord with it. Because 
 the French genius had a tendency toward the formal things 
 of art, — technic and structure, whatever can be developed by 
 precept and practice, — French Classicism emphasized those 
 elements, somewhat to the exclusion of other traits. It is im- 
 portant to remind ourselves that had there been no Classical 
 tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France 
 would still have set store by some of the characteristics we 
 find in Racine or Voltaire. But in the ancient tradition the 
 French spirit found itself ennobled and reenforced, so that 
 France became the natural stronghold of Classicism. 
 
 What aspects of the Classical tradition France was destined 
 to make prominent, were sufficiently indicated by the found- 
 ing of the Academy in 1635. Its forty members were resolved 
 to strive for the purity of the French tongue, and to make it 
 fit for the highest eloquence, a purpose that was induced by 
 patriotic motives. But in the further plan of the Academy 
 to compose an authoritative Dictionary, Rhetoric, and system 
 of poetics, we see at once the implication so easy for the Latin 
 mind and so difficult for the Anglo-Saxon, that imaginative 
 Literature can be fostered to any great extent by a system of 
 rules. The Academy was also to pass judgment upon the 
 writings of its members, for the further promulgation of its 
 literary principles. Without any direct dependence upon the
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 185 
 
 ancients, then, it was evident that through this institution 
 France would put its Literature in order and fashion recipes 
 for the continued production of the kind of art it hked. 
 
 Two years after the founding of the Academy, Descartes 
 pubHshed his ''Discours de la Methode," written not m Latin 
 but in French, through the same impulse of patriotism as 
 interested the Academy in the native tongue. How great the 
 influence of Descartes is upon Boileau, Corneille, Racine, and 
 the other less typical writers of the period can hardly be de- 
 termined here; but he must be mentioned as illustrating, along 
 with the purely literary men, the worship of reason in French 
 thought of that time, and his attempt to explain the universe 
 according to mechanical laws is of a kind with the literary 
 attempt to reduce the creations of the imagination to laws as 
 absolute. 
 
 Criticism has pointed out one important influence of Des- 
 cartes upon Corneille, or at least a parallel between them. 
 In Descartes' system of ethics the chief emphasis is upon the 
 will. Passion, in his philosophy, should be directed to good 
 actions by the will, and the will should be restrained and taught 
 by reason. In Corneille's tragedies, such as "Horace" and 
 "Polyeucte," the dramatic struggle is between passion and 
 the will, guided by reason. For the exploitation of such a 
 subject the form of the Classical tragedy would have been a 
 convenient model, even if critical opinion had not forced 
 Corneille to adopt it; whatever else this kind of theme de- 
 manded, it demanded a presentation that should be intense, 
 logical, and complete; every step in the struggle between the 
 will and passion should be represented, not as an episode, 
 but as a term in a scientific demonstration. The so-called 
 Classical unities of time, place, and action were acceptable 
 to Corneille because they helped to develop his philosophical 
 themes with the precision he desired. 
 
 It was not Corneille, however, but Racine who gave French 
 tragedy once for all its Classical form. In his case it is easy
 
 186 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 to trace the influence of the ancient Uteratures. He was an 
 accomplished Greek scholar, saturated with the spirit of that 
 lofty drama which he tried to realize once more on his native 
 stage, and to some extent he was a philosopher; the broad 
 idealizations which fill out so austere a form as Classical 
 tragedy were native in his cast of thought. But he teaches 
 us how impossible it is for a man or a nation to think in 
 t^rms of the past; much as he thought himself Greek, he 
 was essentially French. His very limitations make appre- 
 ciation of him a test of one's appreciation of the French genius. 
 In the reasonableness of his dramatic theory far more than 
 Comeille he is the child of his age. Where Comeille held 
 that the extraordinary subject, improbable but heroic, was the 
 true material for tragedy, Racine insisted that its true material 
 was ordinary, commonplace life. Where Comeille's drama 
 was complex or subtle, Racine's was simple to the point of 
 bareness. Commonplace character in the most usual crises of 
 life was his subject, and most of his plots were love stories, 
 because love, he considered, is the commonest test of character. 
 In other traits besides his reasonableness Racine may well 
 be considered the most typical of the Classical writers in 
 France. More absolutely than Comeille, he adopted with- 
 out protest those rigid precepts for the drama which the 
 criticism of his time thought it derived from the ancients, 
 the unities, for example; and since he was a poet of great 
 genius, he obeyed with consummate ease those laws of ver- 
 sification with which the Pleiade had bound the alexan- 
 drine. In his obedience to rigid laws, and in the ease with 
 which he moves within narrow limits, he is the supreme monu- 
 ment of French taste. But he illustrates also only too 
 well the sacrifices by which Classicism arrived at this sort 
 of perfection. He could treat only such subjects as suited 
 the form he practised, and such subjects were few. He looked 
 at life not with curiosity to see what it was, but to find such 
 characters and situations as could be included in his formula.
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 187 
 
 Therefore whatever was ignoble or crude or subtle or modem 
 was rejected, if he ever perceived it, for what was in his sense 
 tragic. That Racine might, under other influences, have 
 been a great comedy-writer, is proved by his delightful 
 "Les Plaideurs"; but even in that play he follows the an- 
 cients, borrowing from Aristophanes. 
 
 It is usual to say that Racine's characters are types rather 
 than characters. This criticism of one who took the Greek 
 dramatists for his masters is not surprising; for in its ele- 
 mental simplicity the ancient tragedy, like the ancient sculp- 
 ture, presented life in types rather than in individuals. In- 
 deed, the theater of Racine's time had this advantage, that 
 the acted part, no matter how faintly individual the char- 
 acter seems on the page, must have fixed itself in the per- 
 sonality of the actor; whereas in the Greek theater the scale 
 of the performance must have prevented much individual 
 interpretation. But there is this profound difference between 
 the Greek type and the persons in Racine's plays. The 
 Greek character is made a type by a process of idealization; 
 Prometheus or Antigone is the quintessence of the Greek ideal 
 of unselfish patience or filial devotion. Because they are 
 based in life, and reach their concentrated form through no 
 influence of esthetic rules, but through the instinctive work- 
 ings of the human imagination, they stand for more than 
 they incarnate, they seem native to other ages and other 
 lands than ancient Greece. But the Classicist formula for- 
 bade Racine to deal with life broadly; his characters are not 
 idealizations so much as they are definitions. They suggest 
 nothing more than they say; they are Classically "finished," 
 in the sense that they rouse no emotion they do not satisfy; 
 and they have meant very little, as expressions of life, to 
 other nations than the French. The Greek tjq^e is life made 
 clear by wonder and love; the Racine type is life set in order 
 by rule. 
 
 If the verdict seems to be against Racine, let us remember
 
 188 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 that the portion of human experience which is thoroughly 
 manageable in prescribed art-forms is very small indeed. 
 Only the experience that has been lived over till it is com- 
 monplace can be counted on, with any surety, to let itself 
 be demonstrated, and come out even. In this central core 
 of much-lived wisdom types are easy to find, but they are 
 not likely to be very fresh or very suggestive. If character 
 is suggestive, it is so by virtue of the mystery of life which 
 does not come out even. Therefore we must not blame Ra- 
 cine if his heroes and heroines seem to many minds some- 
 what lacking in significance. For those who find truth most 
 readily, as the French genius does, in the formal grasp of 
 things, who would rather see life clearly than see it whole, 
 Racine's art remains justly the most consummate expression 
 of Classicism. 
 
 With Racine one naturally associates his friend Boileau, 
 satirist and critic after the example of Horace. Satire and 
 burlesque flourish in a Classical age, because they appeal to 
 the intellect, to the wit, in the limited sense, and also because 
 an age which reduces itself to formulas, which conventional- 
 izes itself, is easily satirized. In this century belongs the 
 precieux movement, which sought to govern by legislation 
 the emotion and the conduct of lovers, and which reduced 
 the course of true love to geographical accuracy in the carte 
 du tendre. That this particular movement was susceptible 
 of satire Moliere showed us in his immortal "Precieuses Ri- 
 dicules," but life in other aspects was sufficiently convention- 
 alized to deserve the same treatment. It is natural per- 
 haps to think of the period of Classicism as expressing itself 
 in stately, formal way. It is worth while to remind our- 
 selves that in French Literature as well as in English and 
 Italian the Classic attitude of mind in its most intellectual 
 manifestations led naturally into satire and burlesque, 
 whether the writers were Scarron or Boileau or Dryden or 
 Pope.
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 189 
 
 But the name of Boileau is associated not with satire, al- 
 though he made his reputation first in that kind of writing, 
 but with formal criticism. His famous imitation of Hor- 
 ace's "Ars Poetica" is the creed of the age, stated with the 
 clarity and definiteness of its best manner, and with its 
 characteristic limitations also. It is the recipe that a sci- 
 entist might formulate for Literature, using Jno other guide 
 than common sense and good taste. Indeed, the treatise 
 is an exposition of good sense rather than of imagination: — 
 
 " Whate'er you write of pleasant or sublime, 
 Always let sense accompany your rime. 
 Falsely they seem each other to oppose, — 
 Rime must be made with reason's laws to close ; 
 And when to conriuer her you bend your force, 
 The mind will triumph in the noble course ; 
 To reason's yoke she quickly will incline, 
 Which far from hurting, renders her divine ; 
 But if neglected, will as easily stray. 
 And master reason, which she should obey. 
 Love reason then, and let whate'er you write 
 Borrow from her its beauty, force, and light." 
 
 After stating this principle, Boileau illustrates it by a de- 
 scription of the various kinds of writing, and the decorum 
 required in the style of each. There is little in the principle 
 of common sense that a Romanticist might object to; Words- 
 worth himself might use the general statement in support of 
 his theory of natural diction. But Boileau, like other Clas- 
 sicists, does not necessarily mean "natural" when he says 
 "reasonable"; reason, to his way of thinking, is a matter of 
 convention, so much so that he represents to the less formal 
 Teutonic mind the depth to which unimaginative prose in 
 verse may fall. But to the French lover of restrained form 
 and decorum in art, he is for criticism what Racine is for 
 tragedy, the absolute model.
 
 190 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 There is hardly space in this lecture to more than name the 
 other appearances of the Classical tradition in seventeenth- 
 century France, the numerous would-be Vergilian epics, 
 such as the " Moise Sauve " of Saint-Amand and the " Alaric " 
 of Georges de Scudery, a school of artificial writing suffi- 
 ciently known to fame through the ridicule of Boileau, and 
 indirectly through Scarron's burlesque of Vergil. Nor is 
 there time to speak of the rich vein of worldly wisdom which 
 always rims through Classical periods, and which gave France 
 La Rochefoucauld's "Maximes,"and which Gallicized ^Esop in 
 La Fontaine. Nor can we discuss the quarrel among poets 
 and critics as to whether the ancient writers, the original 
 Classics, were or were not better than their imitators, a sur- 
 prisingly widespread discussion exemplified in Charles Per- 
 rault's "Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes." But some 
 mention must be made of the man who in the eighteenth 
 century became one of the dictators, not only of French 
 Literature, but of European thought, and who sums up in his 
 character and achievements practically all that has been 
 said of Classicism in France. 
 
 In Voltaire and his work the chief traits of Classicism 
 found expression, the technical skill, the obedience to lit- 
 erary law and form, the predominance of intellectual over 
 emotional interests, and the wealth of worldly wisdom. If 
 his character seems hard and unlovely, his wit cruel as well 
 as keen, his reputation as a Classicist has not suffered; for 
 the English reader, at least, is usually prepared to accept 
 intellectual hardness as a natural accompaniment of Classi- 
 cism. And if his sojourn with Frederick the Great serves 
 to make both himself and the Prussian ruler in some lights 
 ridiculous, it should be remembered that through him, more 
 than through any other writer, Classical France spoke to 
 Europe. 
 
 The importance of so many-sided a man cannot be re- 
 corded adequately here. But we should note that he repre-
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 191 
 
 sents, what is usually forgotten in literary histories, the 
 liberating power of Classicism. He was trained in the 
 strict school; he could write facile verse according to the 
 approved rules; in "Zaire" and "Merope" he showed him- 
 self a master tragedian in the difficult tradition of Racine; 
 intellectually, he was without a glimpse of the illusion of 
 Romanticism. But history remembers him as a champion 
 of liberty, a friend of the oppressed, a spokesman for the new 
 causes that were to bring on the Revolution. It is customary 
 to speak of Romanticism as fostered largely by revolu- 
 tionary ideas; and many chronicles of Literature seem to 
 imply that the human spirit, perceiving itself about to be 
 smothered in Rationalism, by a violent effort broke loose 
 from Classicism to breathe the free Romantic air. It is 
 easier in English Literature than in French to show that this 
 view is incorrect. But even in French Literature Voltaire 
 illustrates the valuable accomplishment of Classicism. Out 
 of the infinite rules of artifice comes a style disciplined into 
 a natural simplicity; out of the constant and rigid exercise 
 of the intellect comes that curiosity and skepticism that 
 means freedom; and out of the worship of common sense 
 comes a trust in the human race that means democracy. It 
 is well enough, if we choose, to despise the stiff formulas 
 through which Classicism hoped to manufacture true Clas- 
 sics. But the training was wholesome; so much so that 
 without it Romanticism, it may be, would have been but 
 an inarticulate sentiment. The mind that had learned to 
 think and speak with absolute clearness had fully as much to 
 do with the Revolution as the soul that had learned to feel 
 vaguely. 
 
 It is by the heroic couplet that the casual reader recog- 
 nizes Classicism in England, and if versification be the test, 
 then Dryden was right in thinking that the age began with 
 Edmund Waller. But the real beginning came from France
 
 192 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 ■unth the Restoration, when the French models of good taste 
 and wit encouraged the reaction England for some time had 
 felt against the extravagances of Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 Literature. If Wordsworth protested later against the 
 unnaturalness of Pope's diction, that diction itself had once 
 evolved from a protest against other diction quite as stilted. 
 The Elizabethan vocabulary, characteristically voluble rather 
 than precise, had been warped out of all common sense by 
 the fantastic writers, from Donne to Cowley, those little 
 poets whose aim in diction was to hit upon something that 
 had never been said before. To be absolutely original in 
 your language just after a period as rich as the Elizabethan, 
 meant that you must be odd beyond all imagining. Even 
 Robert Herrick, the almost faultless craftsman, was touched 
 by the disease, and in his two-line or four-line experiments 
 frequently uses language which the world had not heard 
 before, nor has cared to hear since. Therefore when Dryden 
 and his school restored the epithet of common sense to poetic 
 diction, speaking of the organ as the "vocal organ," or of the 
 command of Heaven as the "dread command," they were 
 delighting their readers with a novel truth to nature, trite as 
 their simple epithets later became. 
 
 In other things than diction Dryden is the important 
 figure at least for the beginnmg of the Classical period. In 
 the seventeenth century both verse and prose had developed 
 into various schools, all of them interesting but none of 
 them great. Milton may be disregarded, as his place for 
 many reasons is with the great Elizabethans. But the lesser 
 men — cavaliers, fantastics, puritans, diarists, satirists — 
 carried the Literature into divergent and often decadent 
 paths, where it bade fair to waste itself utterly. In Dry- 
 den's large nature most of those strands were gathered up. 
 He gave English Literature once more unity and force; and 
 the secret of his power was in that genius for law and order 
 which results in Classicism.
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 193 
 
 Dryden's indebtedness to French criticism was great. In 
 Corneille and Racine he recognized a logical faculty not to 
 be found in Shakspere; in the decorum of French narra- 
 tive he thought he saw an immense improvement over 
 Chaucer. We are sometimes prone to credit Dryden with 
 an unclassical genius, if we happen to dislike Classicism, and 
 if we do like his reworkings of Shakspere and Chaucer. It 
 would be fairer to the age, of which in England he is the 
 greatest and earliest figure, to admit that his genius was 
 largely intellectual, and that its power came largely through 
 discipline. The man who wanted to tag Milton's verse had 
 nothing of the Elizabethan about him. That he should be 
 first of all a satirist is, as we have seen, a natural effect of the 
 period. That he was a satirist of generous proportions was 
 probably due to the importance of the things he satirized. 
 When he stooped to make fun of Shadwell, he displayed no 
 more of the Elizabethan largeness often attributed to him 
 than did the author of "Hudibras" in that highly partizan 
 burlesque. But in "Absalom and Achitophel" the political 
 crisis and the personages portrayed were of sufficient mo- 
 ment to render his genius noble. 
 
 The Classical tradition was, of course, nearer akin to the 
 Latin races than to the Anglo-Saxon. To the French, as we 
 have seen. Classicism meant simply new emphasis upon 
 traits they already possessed. To English Literature Classi- 
 cism meant an importation of foreign ideas, a new fertiliza- 
 tion of the national genius. Beginning with Dryden, we 
 can still detect the foreign flavor of the eighteenth century, 
 first the French flavor, and then the Latin. To say this is 
 not to imply that the foreign influence was in any way unfor- 
 tunate. English Literature has never been great except 
 as it has been inspired from abroad, in Alfred's time, in 
 Chaucer's, in the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen- 
 turies. The French influence gives charm to Dryden's prose 
 in the note of social grace, ease, lightness, and courtesy. 
 o
 
 194 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 What admirer of Milton's prose, noble as it is, would credit 
 it with social grace? If Voltaire could write history in the 
 manner of well-bred gossip, Dryden could write literary crit- 
 icism with a sense of social contact, having in mind an audi- 
 ence of artists, to whose taste and keen repartee his ideas 
 must be submitted. Before such an audience an author does 
 not appear in slovenly undress. Dryden 's thought has the 
 clarity and the finish of the Classical tradition largely because 
 he presents himself, French fashion, as a man of the world 
 conversing with his peers, and not, like Milton, as a cham- 
 pion against all comers, prepared for mortal combat. Milton's 
 attitude is the English one; for that reason Dryden's French 
 decorum has for the English mind a special permanent charm, 
 as of something Romantically strange. 
 
 The Latin charm of Dryden is found in Pope and Addison, 
 also in all the eighteenth-century masters. No language, 
 not even Greek, has quite the haunting power of Latin. In 
 Dryden we find for the first time those echoes of Vergil and 
 Horace and Lucretius and Martial and Juvenal, which for 
 many an English gentleman have called up memories of his 
 own academic youth, and of the youth of the world. A 
 truth expressed in Vergil's lines seems always more perfect 
 and more profound than in any other later speech, such 
 fragrance has the classic poet acquired from the age-long 
 veneration and habitual quotation of the civilized world. It 
 is as a man of the world, as a cultured gentleman rather than 
 as a professional scholar, that Dryden echoes the Latin poets, 
 and from this fact comes their magic in his work. 
 
 SuchadeUght in the Classics is almost a Romantic pleasure, 
 there is so much elusiveness, so much suggestion in it. Some 
 such suggestion there was for the eighteenth century in those 
 Latin epithets in Pope's verse, which to Wordsworth and his 
 school seemed empty of poetic content. It would be profit- 
 able to examine as a whole the Classical quotations which 
 head the "Spectator" papers; they form a precious an-
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 195 
 
 thology of Latin quotations, chosen by the best-trained 
 minds and the richest spirits of their time, and so they repre- 
 sent in a unique way the haunting power of Latin verse in 
 the spirit of cultured England. Or we can find that same 
 power beautifully reproduced in Thackeray's "Henry Es- 
 mond," in the Horatian allusions and quotations. Or for a 
 very modern instance, proving the vitality of this classical 
 strain, we can find it in Stephen Phillips' fine lines to Glad- 
 stone : — 
 
 "Thou didst love old branches and a book, 
 And Roman verses on an English lawn." 
 
 To speak of the Latin echoes in Dryden and the other 
 English poets is to speak of something quite apart from their 
 translations. From the beginning of the Elizabethan 
 period England had been taking possession of all other lit- 
 eratures through translation, and naturally the Classicists 
 turned especially to the ancients. By what steps the Clas- 
 sical tradition became naturalized, so that it was a thing of 
 spirit rather than an external influence, may be traced through 
 the changing fashions of translation. At first the translators 
 hoped to reproduce the sense of the original; later they were 
 content to reproduce its spirit; in some cases they were 
 indebted to the original only for the initial idea, and the 
 resulting work, whether from Boileau's pen or Pope's, was 
 for all purposes original. Dryden was considered among the 
 legitimate translators, though by our standards he is very 
 free with the text; Dr. Johnson thought him, for truth to 
 both letter and spirit, a prince of translators. But the fact 
 that both he and Pope won so much fame by their transla- 
 tions in an age when many of their readers must have been 
 as familiar as they were with the originals, would lead us to 
 think that even in their translations the cultured reader 
 found that foreign flavor of Classic allusion which I have 
 spoken of as the power of the Latin Muses over the English 
 mind.
 
 196 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 Dryden was the first of the eighteenth-century wits. He 
 recognized the turn of words or ideas, of all intellectual "con- 
 ceits," as an important part of a writer's equipment; his 
 masterly use of the heroic couplet, that natural weapon of 
 Enghsh wit, exhibited the manifold capacity of rimed verse, 
 and made this form the Classical standard. His practice of 
 the Cowley ode, that loose, meandering stanza supposed to 
 be Pindar's measure, gave what was hitherto only a fad, a 
 place of true dignity among English l5rric forms. After him 
 the free stanza was the natural mold of the English ode, 
 serving first, though incorrectly, as the standard of ancient, 
 really Classical song, and afterwards as the acceptable me- 
 dium of the Romantic lyrists. In the drama and indeed in 
 all departments of Literature, Dryden had a strong leaning 
 toward the principles of French criticism, with its unities of 
 one kind and another, and its restraining laws. But he was 
 Enghsh at heart, and in his critical writing there is great 
 reluctance to commit himself altogether to a tradition of 
 formalism and definiteness. 
 
 But if Dryden did not give himself up absolutely to Clas- 
 sicism, there were some lesser men who did. Thomas Rymer, 
 for example, whose criticism is made important by his method, 
 then new, of illustrating his principles by quotation, is often 
 strangely effective when he uses his common sense, and 
 strangely foolish when he allows himself to be guided blindly 
 by the practice of the ancients. His discussion of "Othello" 
 illustrates the incongruity of strict Classicism on English soil. 
 "This Fable," he says, "is drawn from a novel composed m 
 Italian by Geraldi Cinthio, who also was a writer of tragedies ; 
 and to that use employed such of his Tales as he judged proper 
 for the Stage. But with this of the Moor he meddl'd no 
 farther. 
 
 "Shakespear alters it from the Original in several particu- 
 lars, but always, unfortunately, for the worse. He bestows a 
 name on his Moore, and styles him the Moor of Venice, a
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 197 
 
 Note of pre-eminence which neither History nor Heraldry 
 can allow him. Cinthio, who knew him best, and whose 
 Creature he was, calls him simply a Moor. We say the 
 Piper of Strasbm-gh, the Jew of Florence, and, if you please, 
 the Pindar of Wakefield; — all upon record, and memorable 
 in their places. But we see no such cause for the Moor's 
 preferment to that dignity." Rymer also objects to the 
 killing of Desdemona, who did not deserve death, and to 
 the important part the handkerchief plays: "The meanest 
 woman in the play takes this Handkerchief for a trifle below 
 her Husband to trouble his head about it. Yet we find it 
 entered into our poets head to make a Tragedy of this Trifle." 
 As a more proper ending for the play, Rymer suggests that 
 Desdemona should have dropped the handkerchief some 
 place where it might turn up again naturally just as Othello 
 is about to smother her. "Then might the Fairey Napkin 
 have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious 
 mouth. Then might she (in a Traunce for fear) have lain 
 as dead. Then might he, believing her dead, touched with 
 remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good 
 leave and with the applause of all the Spectators; Who 
 might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, admir- 
 ing the beauty of Providence, fairly and truly represented 
 on the Theatre." 
 
 If Rymer shows us the worst that Classicism can do in 
 judging a literature that does not answer to its notions of 
 decorum, we can find happier illustrations of its best in Addi- 
 son and Gray, true heirs of the Classical tradition, yet wise 
 readers of all literatures. Addison's papers on "Paradise 
 Lost " are the foundation of Milton's modern fame. Although 
 he approves of the epic largely because it conforms to the 
 ancient models, Addison approaches it also in that spirit of 
 free common sense in which Sidney had allowed himself to 
 like "Chevy Chase." Addison finds in Milton truth to life 
 quite as often as he finds truth to the bookish traditions;
 
 198 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 and when we praise him for this breadth of sympathy we 
 should remember that he is no early Romanticist, but a 
 Classicist, and he illustrates the triumph, not of intuition, 
 but of disciplined good taste. So the still more scholarly 
 Gray discovered the charm of early English, the Gothic 
 charm, if you please; in him too Classicism and Romanticism 
 are Truth, which is one thing. The lure of romance, and all 
 that appeal of the Classics which has been described here, 
 is in his perfect Latin poem, "O lacrimarum fons," which 
 the eighteenth century admired, and Byron loved. 
 
 The world that Addison and Steele show us in the "Spec- 
 tator" should perhaps be compared with the world Pope 
 portrays, if we are to see what that most polite society was 
 like. If Pope is nasty, Addison very obviously is a kindly 
 idealist, and neither picture is the whole truth. And both 
 writers are essentially prose men; both build their art upon 
 conversation, though Pope is a master of glittering versifi- 
 cation, and Addison is the artist of simple speech. They 
 portray a Classical, therefore a highly conventionalized, 
 society; and they are therefore both satirists. Pope de- 
 pends more obviously upon foreign models. He suggests 
 the Latin Satirists, not only by the conventional subjects 
 and the familiar forms, but by the scurrility of his tongue. 
 Seventeenth-century England, even the ministerial part of 
 it, was conscientious to a fault in rendering Latin frankness, 
 and Pope held to the tradition, with incongruous occasional 
 soarings into pohte speech. In the "Rape of the Lock" he 
 is nearer to the French models of burlesque. No poem is 
 more characteristic of a Classical age, which craves leisure 
 and learning, and implies a great background of Literature. 
 It is hardly too much to say that no one can appreciate the 
 "Rape of the Lock" who is not, in the technical sense of 
 both words, a scholar and a gentleman. In every line is 
 some quaint or brilliant suggestion of old Literature, some 
 sly thrust at conventional manner, or some incomparable
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 199 
 
 turn of the social phrase; the story that on the surface is the 
 burlesque, is but a small part of the poem's message. Only 
 a learned age or a polite society could produce or enjoy this 
 monument of worldly wisdom and wit. 
 
 The mention of eighteenth-century satire brings Swift to 
 mind, but one hesitates to rank him, or Goldsmith either,- 
 with the children of Classicism. Swift's enormous force is 
 indeed intellectual, but for obvious reasons his work lacks 
 sanity and discipline, the foremost traits of Classicism. In 
 Goldsmith too there is small sense of a literary tradition, noth- 
 ing to compare with the literary tradition in Dryden or Pope; 
 and even the worldly wisdom which gives his masterpiece is 
 not Classical but Irish, a wisdom which, being Irish, is quite 
 undisciplined. 
 
 The man who sums up English Classicism most broadly, as 
 Voltaire sums up French Classicism, is Dr. Johnson. He is 
 English to the core, but he is trained in the school of common 
 sense, and order, and literary precept, and absolute stand- 
 ards based on the Classics. He is England's nearest approach 
 to a national academy. In his own person he laid down the 
 law for language, literature, and manners; he wrote the 
 official dictionary and the official biography of his age; and 
 by his immense personal force he held the public taste to the 
 path he beheved English letters should take. Romanticism 
 had no charms for him; he ridiculed Bishop Percy's new- 
 found ballads with terrible effectiveness. On the other hand 
 he despised the French, and when in Paris, he talked Latin 
 so as not to give the Frenchmen an advantage over him 
 every time he opened his mouth. The true Classics were 
 his teachers, the sages of Rome and Greece. Yet in Johnson 
 too we feel that Classicism for the English nature was an arti- 
 ficial mood. In him, as in Dryden, we feel the lure of the 
 ancient tongues, here in a majestic prose that suggests Rome. 
 But its charm was vagrant, and has kept no abiding place in 
 English speech.
 
 200 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 Classicism ought to have been at home, if anjrwhere, in 
 Italy; but for various reasons it meant almost as little to 
 Vergil's country as it did to Germany. Political tyranny 
 had chained the Italian inspiration, until its only activity 
 was in imitation. Something like the French institution 
 was formed in 1692, in the Arcadian Academy, whose mem- 
 bers, for the more natural composition of poetry, masked 
 themselves as Arcadian shepherds. Their purpose was to 
 keep alive the best poetic tradition by their own insatiable 
 writing. Other academies, less famous, existed in various 
 cities at an earlier date, and before some of them the youth- 
 ful Milton, as he tells us, read his verses and won ap- 
 plause. 
 
 A few Italian writers found their inspiration in England. 
 Baretti, friend of Johnson and Reynolds, imitated the "Spec- 
 tator," as did Gaspare Gozzi, brother of the dramatist; and 
 Parini wrote his ''Giorno," borrowing from Thomson and 
 Pope. In the drama it was natural, perhaps, that the Classic 
 tragedy, reinforced by the example of Comeille and Racine, 
 should give the model. Maffei's "Merope," admired by 
 Matthew Arnold, but otherwise little known to English 
 readers, preceded Voltaire's play on the same theme. And 
 in Alfieri the Classic tragedy became vitalized, not so much by 
 the spirit of Classicism as by a passion for freedom, a patri- 
 otic idealism that suggests the new Romantic age. 
 
 In Germany Classicism was a late development, and it 
 fared ill. The close of the Thirty Years' War saw the ex- 
 hausted country overrun with foreign influences, chiefly 
 French; and it might have seemed as if the traditions of 
 Louis XIV would have spread easily into a country that had 
 just then little literary impulse of its own. But the love of 
 the fatherland rendered neutral all foreign influence. The 
 so-called language societies, not unlike the French or Italian 
 academies, were organized to drive foreign terms from the 
 German tongue. Opitz pleaded for the restoration of Ger-
 
 THE CLASSICAL RULE 201 
 
 man as a literary instrument, and reformed its versification, 
 unfortunately introducing the French alexandrine. A few 
 generations later Bodner, the translator of "Paradise Lost," 
 was pleading the cause of English Literature, while Gottsched 
 was discountenancing Shakspere and admiring Corneille 
 and Racine, because in them nature was disciplined by 
 reason. But whether they admired English or French mod- 
 els of taste, the German poets had little recourse to the true 
 Classics, Latin and Greek; and their Literature, m spite of 
 their Classical scholarship, was to become great, like the 
 modern Italian, through patriotism. With Klopstock's 
 hexameters and Voss' translation of Homer Classicism 
 might seem to give evidence of itself; but Klopstock's popu- 
 larity was founded on his lyric genius as much as on his 
 Miltonic epic, and the hexameter in German is as truly an 
 exotic as it is in English. Indeed, when Lessing finally dis- 
 posed of two of the three famous unities, showing that only 
 unity of action is necessary in the drama, Classicism in Ger- 
 many was practically dead. The Classical influence in 
 Goethe, for example, came rather from contact with antique 
 art, and from his Italian journey, than from the body of 
 literary tradition we have been considering. The national 
 spirit was growing in Germany, a Gothic spirit, and French 
 Classicism never gave more than a veneer to the rugged 
 German imagination. 
 
 Perhaps this brief glance over several literatures has shown 
 us what was the influence of Classicism in the eighteenth 
 century. It was an age of reason, schooled in very definite 
 tenets, which were based, or supposed to be based, on the 
 practice of the Roman and Greek writers. It was an age of 
 severe literary discipline ; it gave its attention to the externals 
 of technic more than to the mystery of life; and on its worst 
 side it ran to dead formula and meaningless phrase. Against 
 this outworn paraphernalia of expression the Romanticists
 
 202 THE CLASSICAL RULE 
 
 rebelled; but we have seen that it is a mistake to think of 
 Romanticism as altogether a reaction from the Classic spirit. 
 The discipline of the eighteenth century gave England the 
 poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson and Arnold, by 
 as natural an evolution as that by which it gave France 
 her modern masters. If it is the spirit, the soul of life, for 
 which we now seek to discover laws, it was formerly for the 
 expression of life that Classicism formulated its principles; 
 but we cannot say which point of view is older, or which is 
 right. In time we shall be Classicists, setting reason above 
 emotion; and afterwards we shall rediscover Romanticism, 
 whatever Romanticism may be. Already, perhaps, there is 
 a perceptible turning back to the world's great books for 
 standards and models; much of the criticism, for example, of 
 Mr. Howells or Mr. James appears to set up rigid and narrow 
 measurements for the novel, in the very spirit of Classicism, 
 and in the same spirit scholars seek to define the short-story. 
 Perhaps our children's children will hearken to a new Words- 
 worth, who will bid them take for their teachers, not books, 
 but "the silence that is in the starry sky." Doubtless they 
 will think the message new. But for the comfort of Classi- 
 cists we may reply that this is no newer than the message 
 of a poet-herdsman, bred like Wordsworth among the hills, 
 two thousand years ago: "Seek him who maketh the seven 
 stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the 
 morning."
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 By Curtis Hidden Page, Sometime Adjunct Professor 
 OF the Romance Languages and Literatures 
 
 You may remember that my predecessor in this course of 
 lectures left me impaled upon the longer and sharper horn of a 
 very serious dilemma — the definition of Classicism and Ro- 
 manticism. He defined Classicism clearly and finally, and 
 left to me what he admitted to be the harder task of defining 
 Romanticism. It would be simple enough to answer that the 
 Romantic is in every respect the opposite of the Classic ; 
 but such a definition would not be altogether true, even so far 
 as it goes, and it certainly would not go one tenth so far as it 
 ought. It would hardly be fair to wriggle off the dilemma- 
 horn in such fashion ; but I think I am justified in pulling 
 myself from it by grasping at another statement which does 
 seem to me altogether true ; namely, that if the Classic, as 
 he has so well described it, is the clear, the orderly, the definite, 
 then the Romantic is the vague, the unconfined, the indefinite 
 and indefinable, "the light that never was on sea or land, the 
 consecration, and the poet's dream." Therefore I am not 
 only under no obfigation to define it, but if I did, I should by 
 that very act be denying and destroying it. I may, however, 
 attempt, not to define, but to describe the Romantic, as op- 
 posed to the Classic, by some or, better, by many of its promi- 
 nent characteristics (for it has many). Perhaps the error of 
 most critics who have attempted thus far to define or describe 
 
 20.3
 
 204 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 Romanticism has been that of fixing upon some one, or some 
 two or three, of these characteristics, as the essential definition 
 or adequate description of the whole movement. 
 
 Certain it is that many of the definitions thus far given 
 are unsatisfactory and inadequate. Brunetiere, with his sys- 
 tematizing method, makes the expression and even exaggera- 
 tion of the ego — le moi — to be the whole of Romanticism. 
 Professor Beers and others, following Heine, make medieval- 
 ism its central motive, though it must be noted that Professor 
 Beers admits the inadequacy of this. Those who descend 
 directly from Rousseau, or who love most of all the nature 
 poets, make the "return to nature" — itself a vague phrase 
 with many meanings — to be the essence of Romanticism. 
 Those who feel most deeply the philosophical and ethical 
 significance of the movement will agree with Brandes when he 
 says that the preference of progress to attainment, of the 
 search for truth to the possession of it, of the quest to the goal, 
 is the foundation of Romantic poetry. Those to whom 
 artistry and the esthetic impression mean most will follow 
 Walter Pater in making a certain "strangeness added to 
 beauty," by contrast with the classic "order in beauty," its 
 essential characteristic. This, by the way, and I think the 
 point has never been noted, should remind us directly of the 
 definition of Romanticism originally given by NovaHs him- 
 self, as "that which brings us a sensation of agreeable sur- 
 prise" ("Was in angenehmer Weise uns befremdet"). Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton, in his masterly article introducing the third 
 volume of Chambers' "New Encj^clopedia of English Litera- 
 ture," has in his very title given the briefest and perhaps the 
 most nearly adequate definition of Romanticism, in the phrase 
 "The Renascence of Wonder." A proper emphasis should be 
 given to the first as well as to the second of the two chief words 
 in this phrase. The Romantic movement is in fact another 
 Renaissance, as full of freshness and newness of life, as in- 
 tense in its vigor and its energy, as that of the sixteenth cen-
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 205 
 
 tury ; and even more than that of the sixteenth century it is 
 not only a rebirth but a new birth, the beginning of what will 
 in future ages be called modern hfe. If I were to repeat 
 what I have spoken of as the error of previous students in 
 attempting to make one characteristic of this movement the 
 essential or the most prominent one, I should choose an aspect 
 which I think has not even been mentioned before; namely, 
 that it is the beginning of democracy in Literature, of the ex- 
 pression in Literature of the life of every man and of all the 
 people ; that it at last transformed the ancient Aristocracy of 
 Letters, which had been made even more aristocratic than ever 
 by the Renaissance and by the Classical Rule, into a true 
 Republic of Letters ; and prepared the way for the democratic, 
 the ail-inclusively realistic, and even the social, literature of 
 the future. 
 
 Looked at from the height of the centuries, what did the 
 change from feudalism to nationalism and royalism, made in 
 the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, amount to, 
 as compared with the change from aristocracy and royalism 
 to democracy made by the French Revolution? What 
 broadening of life to include more of humanity was effected 
 by the Humanists? What abolition or even curtailment of 
 special privilege? And since hfe and Literature necessarily 
 go together, if the historian of two or three centuries from 
 now, having attained his perspective, will look back to the 
 French Revolution and alhed movements as the beginning of 
 modern life, vnW not the hterary historian of that future 
 century likewise necessarily look back to the Romantic 
 movement as the beginning of Modern Literature? This is 
 the first of many points which I must only suggest, briefly 
 and dogmatically. 
 
 To come back now to the purely literary question, and even 
 to the somewhat technical and academic question of what 
 Romanticism is, I shall describe it, first, technically and 
 academically, as distinguished from Classicism ; and second.
 
 206 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 historically, as a movement which swept over the whole 
 western world during the last half of the eighteenth and first 
 half of the nineteenth century, almost completely dominating 
 English and French Literature from about 1800 to about 
 1848, entering as a chief element into the greatest, and even 
 the so-called Classical, period of German Literature, giving 
 Italian Literature its Leopardi, Manzoni, and others, and 
 American Literature its Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, 
 and, considered as the Uterature of democracy, its Whitman. 
 The technical distinction between Classicism and Roman- 
 ticism is one of the eternal contrasts of Literature, both in 
 theory and in fact, exactly as is the contrast between ideaUsm 
 and reahsm. The first of these distinctions is as universally 
 apphcable as the other ; it can be used in judging, describing, 
 and characterizing any race, nation, epoch, or individual, in 
 the history of Literature, just as well as in describing the 
 beginnings of the nineteenth century and the contrast of 
 that period with the preceding one. If the distinction between 
 Romanticism and Classicism is not as commonly used and as 
 popularly understood as that between realism and ideahsm, 
 this may be due in large part to the varied meanings which 
 have been given to the words Classic and Romantic. Varia- 
 tions in meaning of the word Classic have been pointed out 
 in the preceding lecture. Not to go back over the origins of 
 the word and its most popular use in modern times and even 
 to-day, as designating the best in the literatures of Greece and 
 Rome, we must note that its secondary use, as designating 
 the best in any Hterature, is not only popular, but has been 
 clearly sanctioned by the authoritative critics of England, 
 France, and Germany ; by Matthew Arnold, when he defines 
 Classic as "that which belongs to the class of the very best 
 (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, 
 classical)," and, on the whole, by Sainte-Beuve in his essay 
 entitled "Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?" where he describes it 
 in the words so often quoted, and so curiously mistranslated
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 207 
 
 by Walter Pater, as that which is "energique, frais,et dispos "; 
 that is, work which has the fullness, freshness, and vigor of 
 Hfe that make it worthy and able to live, down through the 
 centuries ; and by Goethe, before Sainte-Beuve, in almost the 
 same terms and I think with exactly the same conception. 
 Both these meanings of the word Classic must be dismissed 
 as completely as possible from the mind in order to appreciate 
 its technical and universally applicable meaning, as contrasted 
 with Romantic. Failure so to clear the mind of convention 
 has given rise to some amusing blunders and still more amus- 
 ing paradoxes in the history of literary criticism. There is, 
 for instance, Stendhal's famous and often-quoted definition of 
 Classic taste as liking that which our grandfathers hked, and 
 of Romantic taste as liking that which we really like ourselves. 
 Deschanel has written several volumes on "Le Romantisme 
 des classiques," his very title being based on this confusion in 
 the use of the word Classic as, on the one hand, that which is 
 now accepted as good in Literature, and, on the other hand, 
 that which has certain definite characteristics as opposed to 
 the Romantic ; and of the Romantic as primarily that which 
 revolts against the accepted Classic standards, as well as hav- 
 ing certain definite characteristics of its own. He shows very 
 cleverly that the writers now accepted as classics (in the 
 popular sense) were almost always rebels and even leaders of 
 revolt in their own time, and by the very originahty of their 
 achievements imposed themselves upon the admiration of 
 future times ; as was the case with Corneille, Moliere, Pascal, 
 and even Racine, in the seventeenth century, or Chateau- 
 briand and Victor Hugo in the nineteenth. That is to say, 
 those whom we call Classics to-day are merely Romanticists 
 who have arrived, des romantiques arrives. On the contrary, 
 the works which in their own day were considered classics, 
 conforming to all the accepted rules and conventions, possess- 
 ing that "order in beauty" which Pater speaks of, and lack- 
 ing just that "strangeness added to beauty" which any new
 
 208 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 revelation of beauty, whether Classic or Romantic in type, must 
 have — these works, being classics for their own day, are not 
 so for posterity. Plentiful examples may be found, such as 
 the dramas of Voltaire, the novels of Mile, de Scudery, the 
 lyric poetry of Jean-Baptiste (not Jean-Jacques) Rousseau, 
 and the host of minor poets in any epoch who follow the fash- 
 ions of the day. For lack of being Romantic enough in their 
 own time, they have failed to become classics for future ages. 
 It is a pretty paradox, useful chiefly for showing the need of a 
 clearer and more technical understanding of the words used. 
 
 This, then, is the real contrast : the Classic appeals to the 
 reason ; it seeks proportion, harmony, completeness, perfec- 
 tion of form, clearness, universality, the typical and the eter- 
 nal, — in short, beauty finished and absolute. The Romantic 
 appeals to the imagination : it seeks effectiveness rather than 
 completeness, emotion or sensation rather than thought, color 
 and richness rather than form, suggestion rather than clear 
 and full expression, melody rather than harmony, the indi- 
 vidual rather than the typical, the accidental rather than the 
 universal, the concrete rather than the general, the transitory 
 rather than the eternal, the fragmentary rather than the 
 finished, — in short, beauty relative and transient, with the 
 charm, suggestiveness, and poignancy of its very incomplete- 
 ness. 
 
 The Classic temper seeks for calm, the Romantic for 
 excitement. The Classicist may have passions as intense as 
 the Romanticist, or more so ; but the Classicist controls his 
 passions, while the Romanticist dehghts to be carried away by 
 his. One beheves in self-possession, the other in enthusiasm. 
 The Classicist's motto is /Ar/Sev ayav, ne quid nimis; he 
 has the sense of measure, as well as the sense of form ; tem- 
 perance in the whole, and balance of all the parts, are his 
 ideals for a life or for a work of art. The Romanticist is 
 unconfined by any of these hmitations ; gladly he exaggerates, 
 so he may ]jut move you ; he seeks extreme effectiveness in
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 209 
 
 each part of his work, each moment of his Hfe or of the hfe he ' 
 depicts, without much regard to the whole ; he knows not 
 when to stop, not having considered the parts with relation to 
 the whole, nor seen the end from the beginning. Power and 
 not perfection is his ideal. His work is imcontrolled, over- 
 flowing, confused, but rich in Ufe, energy, aspiration. The 
 Classic ideal has been briefly summed up in a passage of Mon- 
 taigne : " The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, 
 but in walking orderly ; its grandeur does not exercise itself 
 in grandeur but in mediocrity ; . . . nor so much in mounting 
 and pressing forward, as in knowing how to govern and cir- 
 cumscribe itself . . . demonstrating itself better in modera- 
 tion than in eminence." As against this, we may set the 
 Romantic conception condensed into a single phrase by 
 Madame de Stael : "The greatest things that man has done, 
 he owes to the torturing sense of the incompleteness of his 
 fate." The Classicist finds his ideal in the real, his achieve- 
 ment in the possible, his highest aspiration in a reasoned sub- 
 mission to fate or to "whatever gods there be." The Roman- 
 ticist strives to snatch his ideal from some distant star, to 
 catch not time but eternity by the forelock, to grasp the infi- 
 nite with finite hands ; he necessarily fails in his attempt, but he 
 heartens himself with the belief that life or art should be 
 judged not by its achievement but by its aspirations, that "a 
 man's reach should exceed his grasp." He says with Brown- 
 ing's Rabbi Ben Ezra : — 
 
 " What I aspired to be 
 And was not, comforts me." 
 
 Philosophically, this aspect of Romanticism finds its most 
 characteristic expression in Fichte's "Science of Knowledge"; 
 poetically, in the works of Shelley and Browning. 
 
 A few examples of the contrast may be suggested. It is 
 the Greek Drama as against the Elizabethan ; Lear, Hamlet, 
 Cordelia, with their unsolved tragic problems, as against
 
 210 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 CEdipus, Orestes, Antigone. Taking examples within the 
 literature of one nation, we may set Racine's Andromaque 
 against Victor Hugo's Triboulet, as examples of parental 
 devotion ; or Milton's Satan against Bjo-on's Manfred and 
 Browning's Caliban, as embodiments of revolt. As examples 
 of prose style we may set that of Thucydides against De 
 Quincey's. Of the two elements which make up plastic 
 beauty — form and color — the first is Classic, the second Ro- 
 mantic ; so we may set Greek sculpture over against modern 
 painting as typical Classic and Romantic arts ; within each 
 art, however, we may distinguish Classic and Romantic 
 epochs ; in French painting, for instance, the seventeenth as 
 against the nineteenth century ; in sculpture, Phidias as 
 against Michelangelo ; or in music. Bach and Haydn as against 
 Schubert, Chopin, and BerUoz. 
 
 Classic art is the highest ; for its end is perfection. Its ideal 
 is beautiful reasonableness, and the creation of a reasonable 
 beauty, an ideal worthy especially to be considered by the 
 Northern peoples, who are not in the habit of uniting beauty 
 and reason, either in their conceptions or in their practice ; 
 relying as they do on a supposed separate faculty, which they 
 vaguely call the imagination, for the creation of beauty. 
 But Classic art attains its peculiar end more rarely than the 
 Romantic. True Classic work must be shaped from within 
 outward, must grow in the mind of the artist to perfect form, 
 must be fused by the fire of his genius before it can be run into 
 the perfect mold. Only baser metal can be bent and shaped 
 without the aid of that fire. 
 
 Suppose that Classic art, with the characteristics which I 
 have mentioned, be taken as a model for imitation. Try to 
 be orderly, and you will be tame ; to be calm, self-possessed, 
 measured, and you will be dull ; to be typical, universal, and 
 you will be commonplace ; to be finished, and you will only 
 be polished. Art becomes artifice, form becomes formality,
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 211 
 
 order becomes narrowness, reason becomes rationalism ; in 
 short, the Classic or the neo-Classic becomes pseudo-Classic. 
 It is against the pseudo-Classic, not agamst the true Classic, 
 that the so-called Romantic revolt of the end of the eighteenth 
 century is directed. This is a very important point, and 
 one which brings us to the historical aspect of our subject. 
 
 For, as we have classified different arts and individuals by 
 the classic-romantic criterion, so we can classify different 
 nations and epochs in the history of Literature. The Greek 
 and Latin Literatures are Classic ; so, on the whole, are the 
 more recent Literatures of the nations of the South of Europe, 
 while the nations of the North are Romantic ; this is of course 
 the distinction first made by Madame de Stael in 1800. 
 France occupies a middle position, though naturally and by 
 inheritance tending rather toward genuine Classicism. Tak- 
 ing the whole of European Literature by epochs, we may say 
 that the Middle Ages were a Romantic period. The Renais- 
 sance is more difficult to define, but may perhaps be called a 
 Classical epoch with a Romantic temper ; in England the 
 Classical character of the age was almost obhterated by the 
 strong Romantic spirit of the nation. In the seventeenth 
 century the Romantic temper of the Renaissance was sub- 
 dued, and Classicism gradually came to dominate all Europe, 
 under the leadership of France. In the eighteenth century 
 Classicism itself became imitative and second-hand. The 
 late seventeenth century was a genuine Classical epoch, espe- 
 cially in France. The eighteenth century was pseudo-Classic. 
 
 Historically considered, therefore, the Romantic movement 
 of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is first of all 
 a revolt against the pseudo-Classic, against rationaUsm, con- 
 vention, artifice, dullness, narrowness, formality, and rules of 
 all kinds. This revolt soon becomes revolution, emancipation, 
 and the complete creation of a new society. Freedom is its 
 war-cry, individual feeling its basis of citizenship in the new 
 republic of letters. The liberty of the individual, and the
 
 212 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 right to expression in Literature of each individual's inmost 
 and most peculiar feelings, whether typical or not, whether 
 rational or not, whether social or anti-social, — in short, the 
 rights of the individual ego to complete independence and self- 
 expression, — that is what the Romantic movement first of all 
 stands for. So, very definitely, it is the French Revolution 
 in Literature. Pascal had said, "the ego is hateful." Rous- 
 seau begins his "Confessions" by saying, "I am like no man 
 that I have ever seen ; I dare to believe I am unlike any man 
 that exists." For this very reason he feels justified in writing 
 his Confessions. That book, from the amazing address to 
 the Supreme Being which we find on the first page, to the 
 insanity of the end, is egotism run mad. Montaigne has been 
 called an egotist ; but he was a social egotist ; he wrote for 
 companionship; "if there be any person in need of good com- 
 pany, in France or elsewhere, who can like my humor, let him 
 but whistle, and I will come running." Rousseau, on the 
 other hand, is an unsocial and anti-social egotist. Yet this 
 emphasis upon individual feeling and its expression, of which 
 Rousseau is the extreme example, renewed Literature. It 
 brought back the lyric mood, and it brought back sentiment, 
 which had been banished for more than a century. At first 
 sentiment and sentimentality were not distinguished from 
 each other ; we find sentimentahty disagreeably predominat- 
 ing in the whole tribe of Rousseau's successors ; but it was the 
 return of sentiment which made possible Goethe's early lyric 
 and all that followed in Germany ; Musset, Lamartine, Victor 
 Hugo, and the rest in France ; and Enghsh poetry from Burns 
 to Tennyson. 
 
 The love of nature, or the return to nature, is usually, and 
 rightly, spoken of as one of the chief characteristics of the 
 Romantic movement. To follow nature had, however, been 
 one of the chief precepts of the Classicists from Aristotle to 
 Boileau and Pope. It might be better to say that the 
 Romantic movement is characterized by a complete change
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 213 
 
 in the sense of the word nature. To the Classicist, nature 
 meant, to be sure, the whole universe of created things ; but 
 his universe was anthropocentric. Man, the end and aim 
 of all things, the center and type of nature, the microcosmos, 
 held for him a false place in the universe. The Romanticists 
 went to the other extreme, as when Wordsworth said 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 
 Tlian all the sages can. 
 
 This false tendency was soon corrected, however. Not to 
 mention Scott and Byron, Goethe and Balzac, it was not long 
 before Browning came with his intense interest in "Man's 
 thoughts, loves, hates," and with his whole emphasis laid 
 upon "The incidents in the development of a Soul." Mean- 
 while the love of nature, in the Romantic sense, had not only 
 produced Wordsworth, but had been the inspiration of so 
 many poets and prose-writers that the mere list of their names 
 would take more time than we can afford. 
 
 After personal feeling, and after observation of the world 
 about us, the chief source of inspiration for Modern Literature 
 is to be found in the accumulated treasure of the race — in 
 the ideals and stories, the myths and religions, of the past; 
 and in the literary and artistic models in which this life of the 
 past has expressed itself. This source of inspiration and 
 imagery is for modern Europe threefold : the literatures of 
 Greece and Rome, with their mythology ; Biblical Literature 
 and the Christian religion; and the Middle Ages with their 
 chivalric ideals and romantic stories, some of these coming 
 down from still earlier ages and bringing with them the body 
 of northern mythology and folklore. The last of these was 
 perhaps the most important for our modern Romantic move- 
 ment; but its relative importance has been greatly over- 
 emphasized. Not only medievalism, but a renewed and
 
 214 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 broadened interest in all the past, characterized the Romantic 
 movement. It was not reactionary; it had no desire to go 
 back and hve in the Middle Ages, or even to follow closely 
 their hterary models. It was merely freeing itself from a 
 narrow tutelage, and demanding that all three of these chief 
 sources of inspiration and imagery, not the classical alone, 
 should be its free and full possession. The neo-classic period 
 had willfully impoverished itself. The Romantic movement 
 reclaimed its natural heritage and entered upon the enjoy- 
 ment of all the riches of the past. There was no diminution 
 of interest in the classics during the Romantic period ; on the 
 contrary, there sprang up a more intelligent enthusiasm for 
 them and a truer knowledge of them ; so much so that a 
 genuine classic revival is a part of the Romantic movement 
 itself, which in its revolt against the pseudo-classic appeals 
 to the true classic for justification. This, and the awakening 
 of the historic sense which goes with it, help to account for 
 the classical period of German Literature after Goethe's 
 " ItaUenische Reise"; for the "Voyage d'Anacharsis," and 
 for Andr^ Chenier, in France; for the classical aspects of 
 Keats and Shelley, and for Landor, in England ; and for the 
 transformation of art criticism and history, beginning in Eng- 
 land with Stuart and Revett, and in Germany with Winckel- 
 mann. The renewed importance of the Bible and Christian 
 story as an inspiration for art and Literature is a point which 
 we need not dwell on, simply noting the wide influence of 
 Milton, and the fact that even France repudiated Boileau's 
 rule against using "les mysteres chretiennes " as material, 
 and produced in Chateaubriand's "Genie du Christianisme " 
 the chief plea for such use. 
 
 At the same time there came, in all Europe, a deep 
 spiritual "revival," in revolt against the rationalism, the 
 utilitarianism, the superficial intellectuality, and the general 
 " matter-of-f act-ness " of the eighteenth century. There 
 came a new sense of the wonder and glory of the universe, of
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 215 
 
 the spiritual essence of all things, of the immanence of divine 
 life in 
 
 . . . the light of setting suns 
 And the round ocean, and the living air. 
 And the blue sky, and m the mind of man. 
 
 This is the "Renascence of Wonder," and it is more. It re- 
 news religion and transforms philosophy. To it belongs all 
 "subjective" thinking, which, just as much as subjective 
 feeling and lyric expression, is of the "Romantic" school, in 
 the technical sense of that word. It informs all that is most 
 significant in thought, and in the literary embodiment of 
 thought, from the German idealistic philosophers, through 
 almost all the poets of Germany and England, to great prose- 
 rhapsodists as different as Novalis and Lamennais, or Carlyle 
 and Emerson. 
 
 On the less noble side, the "Renascence of Wonder " mani- 
 fested itself as a childish interest in the supernatural, of what- 
 ever kind. Some loved it for its faery beauty, some for its 
 mystic symbolism ; some, as Coleridge and later Poe, made 
 of it a psychological allegory; others merely revelled or 
 groveled in its horrors or grotesqueness. It was the chief 
 stock-in-trade of minor writers too numerous to name, and 
 even of most of the greater writers of the period when follow- 
 ing the conventions of their age, till, as some one has suggested, 
 Pope's famous line seemed to have been revised to read 
 
 The proper study of mankind is — spooks. 
 
 Even if this supernaturalism seems to most of us to-day 
 a httle cheap and tawdry — the wonder-light having gone 
 out of it, or of our eyes — we should not forget that it produced, 
 among other things, Goethe's "Faust" ; and that in "Faust" 
 all of its different characteristics are embodied. 
 
 Just as the Romantic movement turned back to the past,
 
 216 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 especially to the Middle Ages, seeking there the period to 
 which it could most easily appeal in its revolt against the neo- 
 classic and pseudo-classic rule, the nearest epoch of compara- 
 tive freedom and irregularity, spontaneity and naturalness, 
 and an epoch of mystery, less known even than the older 
 classical epoch, in the same way during the Romantic period 
 each nation of Europe turned to the others, to find that free- 
 dom and newness, that strangeness and suggestiveness, that 
 escape from the humdrum commonplace of ever present 
 reality or convention which all desired. Exotism is almost 
 as much a characteristic of the Romantic movement as me- 
 dievalism. Each nation found in foreign lands not a " con- 
 temporary posterity," but a contemporary past. The men 
 of letters sought there not critics but models, not living chil- 
 dren of their spirit but adoptive ancestors. The Romanti- 
 cists, especially in France, rather felt the lack of ancestors; 
 the French poets took Andre Chenier, who was half of the 
 eighteenth century and the other half pure Greek, for their 
 adoptive father, and another thorough-going Classicist, Ron- 
 sard, for the founder of their line. But they sought their 
 maternal ancestry, so to speak, in Young, Thomson, Ossian, 
 even Richardson, and found in Byron a long-lost elder half- 
 brother; while the French dramatists adopted Shakspere 
 as the grandfather of a "hterary progeny" that he would 
 hardly have recognized. Germany had Ukewse adopted 
 Shakspere, Milton, Richardson, Macpherson, and the rest for 
 literary ancestors. To drop the metaphor, we may say that 
 Germany during the early part of the Romantic movement 
 drew its inspiration from England, and from the France of 
 Rousseau and Diderot, far more than from the German Mid- 
 dle Ages ; that England, in the end of the eighteenth century 
 down to about 1795, drew largely on France for its thought 
 and inspiration, and in the first half of the nineteenth century 
 on Germany for many of its literary impulses and for all that 
 was of any value in its philosophical thought. France in the
 
 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 217 
 
 eighteenth century let its strongest political thinking, as well 
 as its newest Uterary impulses, follow England's, and in the 
 nineteenth century, while drawing some inspiration and 
 suggestions from Germany, let its literary ideals be charac- 
 terized by nothing less than rampant Anglomania. 
 
 Both medievalism (or, as I have suggested we should say, 
 more broadly, interest in the past) and exotism helped to 
 overthrow the rules, and to make standards of taste relative 
 where they had been absolute. Not only the conventions 
 of neo-classic drama, such as the famous unities of time, place, 
 and action, and the still more important fourth unity of tone, 
 together with many other conventions, such as the limiting 
 of the characters to a few noble or ignoble types, but also the 
 whole aristocratic structure of Literature, divided into classes 
 or genres between which intermarriage was forbidden, were 
 all overthrown together. Wordsworth's quiet, persistent, 
 successful battle for the rights of the humble and the simple 
 — whether words, feelings, characters, or literary forms — 
 was paralleled in France by Victor Hugo's spectacular "put- 
 ting a red Uberty-cap on the old Dictionary," as he called it, 
 and setting the rabble in place of the nobles, the valet and 
 bandit in place of the courtier and king, as heroes of serious 
 drama. All words, all feelings, all characters, all classes of 
 life, all aspects of nature, all ages of history, all types of lit- 
 erary form, received equal rights as citizens in the new Repub- 
 hc of Letters. And so Modern Literature, in its all-inclusive 
 democracy, was made possible. 
 
 Perhaps in the future this will be looked back on as the 
 most important service of the Romantic movement — that 
 it cleared the way for the Literature that was to come. But 
 as we look back on it to-day, we seem to see that it produced, 
 in Germany, the greatest epoch of the nation's Uterature; 
 in Italy, truer poets than had been known since Tasso's time, 
 or perhaps since Petrarch's, and a new school of prose romance ; 
 in France, a new form of drama, where the tragic and comic,
 
 218 THE ROMANTIC EMANCIPATION 
 
 cleverly juxtaposed in Hugo's plays, were truly fused in 
 Musset's, whom " the Muse of Comedy had kissed upon the 
 lips, and the Muse of Tragedy upon the heart"; in France 
 it also produced three great poets, one of them the greatest 
 master of verse-expression that modern times have known, 
 and another the greatest poet of passion since Catullus ; two 
 historians perhaps unmatched for lyric power in narrative; 
 and two novelists, the range and inclusiveness of whose pic- 
 turing of life, from their different points of view, make sub- 
 sequent attempts at so-called realism seem narrow and petty. 
 In England, finally, it produced a renaissance of poetry that 
 makes this period comparable, or even superior, to the Eliza- 
 bethan age itself, in all departments except the most important 
 one, poetic drama; a revival, or rather a new creation, of 
 the romance, culminating in Scott ; and a new school of prose, 
 which bears the same relation to the Spectator as Keats 's 
 poetry to Pope's ; and incidentally, it gave America Cooper 
 and Longfellow, Hawthorne and Poe. 
 
 As the century developed, there came an inevitable reaction 
 against many of the tendencies of Romanticism; but the 
 greatest poets of the mid-century, Tennyson, Browning, 
 Leconte de Lisle, Carducci, are all Romanticists, grown to 
 maturity with the growth of the century itself — though 
 one of them, Leconte de Lisle, represents also the classical 
 side of the reaction, which naturally was strongest in France. 
 Preraphaelitism in England, and the narrower school of art 
 for art's sake in France, are Romanticism gone to seed ; the 
 very seed got frost-bitten in the age of science, and symbolism 
 is perhaps the stunted winter crop that grows from a few of 
 the scattered kernels. Meanwhile the roots of Romanticism 
 survive, deep in the human heart, where no kind of frost can 
 reach them, and may send forth strong, new shoots at any 
 moment.
 
 XI 
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
 By Carlo L. Speranza, Professor of Italian 
 
 Only of late years, scholars, mostly Italian, have made the 
 Settecento, as the Italians call the eighteenth century, an 
 object of assiduous study as to its literary culture, but the 
 general pubhc knows little or nothing about it. Hence it is 
 ordinarily assumed that the eighteenth century is a continua- 
 tion of its immediate predecessor, which means a continua- 
 tion of a period of decadence, come to its close not any earUer 
 than the invasion of Italy by the French army towards the 
 end of the century. As a matter of fact, however, the Sette- 
 cento was throughout a period of gradual recovery, memo- 
 rable in Italian history for great intellectual activity, for great 
 scholars, for political reforms, and for the rise, in its second 
 half, of modern Italian Literature. 
 
 The scientific movement, started and carried on for years 
 in Italy by Galileo Galilei, was never allowed to stop. After 
 the death of the great master, his immediate disciples and then 
 their followers, from Torricelli to Galvani and to Volta, from 
 Redi to Morgagni and to Spallanzani, from Cassini to Oriani 
 and to Piazzi, continued to apply Galilei's experimental 
 method to the investigation of other phenomena of nature 
 and of the human body, thereby enriching with new dis- 
 coveries, or otherwise advancing, physics, anatomy, physiology, 
 zoology, astronomy, and the other natural sciences. 
 
 219
 
 220 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Philosophy, too, which religious intolerance and the des- 
 potism of princes had stifled with the lives of Giordano Bruno 
 and of Tommaso Campanella, was now revived by the solitary 
 genius of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who, rising to high 
 and new speculations upon the ideal life of mankind, its pro- 
 gresses and regresses, created the "Scienza nuova" (1730), 
 the most original work of the time in Italy, or, indeed, in 
 Europe. And, while Vico was absorbed in the contemplation 
 of a remote past and in the discovery of the great laws of 
 history, the jurist Pietro Giannone (1676-1748) wrote with 
 political intent his "Storia civile del reamedi Napoli" (1723), 
 tracing not only the succession of events, but also, and more 
 particularly, the changes in legislation, customs, and public 
 institutions from the Roman days to the beginning of the 
 eighteenth century. With his history Giannone preluded the 
 movement, which brought to him persecution and imprison- 
 ment, and to the Church, later on, subjection, in temporal 
 concerns, to the civil power. 
 
 At the same time with Giannone, Antonio Muratori(1672- 
 1750), of the province of Modena, devoted his prodigiously 
 active life to conscientious and critical search for historical 
 truth in nearly every branch of human knowledge, uniting 
 in a well-organized body all the historical sources of his nation, 
 and revealing of this the whole life during the Middle Ages, 
 till then shrouded in mystery, thereby deserving to be ac- 
 claimed the father of Italian historiography. 
 
 Contemporary with Muratori, to whom he suggested the 
 idea of his monumental work, "Rerum italicarum scriptores," 
 was the Venetian Apostolo Zeno (1669-1759), the initiator 
 of the reform of the lyrical drama, and a very meritorious 
 scholar and bibliographer. By the keenness of his historical 
 criticism, Zeno, with his ''Dissertazioni Vossiane," shed floods 
 of light on the humanists and their works; with his ''Note" 
 to Fontanini's "Eloquenza italiana" corrected numberless 
 errors, and with his scholarly " Giornale dei letterati"
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 221 
 
 endowed Italy with a periodical of positive science of great 
 worth and influence. 
 
 Literary history had also its cultivators in Gian Mario 
 Crescimbeni (1663-1728) and Saverio Quadrio (1695-1756), 
 who were both greatly distanced by Girolamo Tiraboschi 
 (1707-1773) of Bergamo. Tiraboschi's great "Storia della 
 letteratura italiana," embracing the whole Itahan culture 
 since Etruscan times, is still on many points to be confidently 
 and advantageously consulted by the student. 
 
 Besides Tiraboschi, I should mention, at least, Giovan 
 Maria Mazzuchelli (1707-1765) for his collection of the biogra- 
 phies and bibliographies of all the Italian authors of every 
 century, which death compelled him to leave very far from 
 completion. Scores of other erudites and critics did for each 
 one of many ItaHan cities or provinces what Mazzuchelli 
 had designed to do for the whole of Italy. 
 
 In other branches of history, Scipione Maffei (1675-1755), 
 the sovereign archeologist, and Luigi Lanzi (1731-1811), 
 the Etruscan scholar, gained other claims to honor, the former 
 by his "Storia diplomatica" and his "Verona illustrata," 
 the latter by his "Storia pittorica d' Itaha," in which he sub- 
 stituted the division by schools of painting for the biographical 
 method of Vasari and the annalistic one of Baldinucci. 
 
 Indeed, the great advance in all departments of historical 
 study, so fruitful of lasting benefits to science, made the 
 eighteenth century in respect to the modern age, what the 
 fifteenth had been in regard to the Italian Renaissance. Both 
 the eighteenth and the fifteenth were centuries of erudition 
 and criticism, only the fifteenth was more exclusive in its 
 Classicism, and the eighteenth more comprehensive in the 
 universality of its culture, and in its criticism broader, more 
 positive, and more skilful. 
 
 It will not be amiss at this point to notice that the intel- 
 lectual movement which I have tried briefly to delineate, 
 began to gain impetus soon after the elimination in 1714
 
 222 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 from Italy of the execrable Spanish domination, and that it 
 greatly expanded after 1748, when the treaty of Aix-la- 
 Chapelle had at last put an end to the incessant wars that had 
 ravaged the country, and secured for it the blessings of peace 
 for nearly fifty years. 
 
 Concerning Literature in general, aside from history, and 
 more particularly concerning poetry, the Settecento opened and 
 remained long under the sway of the Academy of Arcadia, which 
 was established in Rome ten years before the end of the seven- 
 teenth century. That Academy, which soon spread offshoots 
 all over Italy, by inculcating the maxim that noble poetry 
 does not consist in loftiness of concepts, but in excellence of 
 imitation, made of art a mere mechanical play. Moreover, 
 by catering to petty ambitions and vanities, it fostered the 
 evil plant of dilettantism. Consequently, there sprang up 
 everywhere in the coimtry swarms of poetasters ever ready 
 to effuse their amorous or religious languors, or their enthu- 
 siasms, over the most futile occurrences, such as an invitation 
 to dinner, the death of a cat, and the like; and as the drift 
 ran in Italy, as it did in France and in Germany, toward 
 pastoral subjects, the outcome was a deluge of madrigals, 
 canzonette, and sonnets, empty of thought and of sentiment, 
 nerveless, oversweet, and, in their affectation of simplicity, 
 naturalness, and innocence of shepherds' feelings and man- 
 ners which had no existence in life, essentially false. 
 
 However, Arcadia obtained the object for which it was 
 founded, by successfully leading the reaction against the 
 crazy extravagances and the bombast of the Seicento; in 
 the course of the years it changed its ways for the better, 
 showing more measure and correctness in concepts; it intro- 
 duced fine new metres; through Paolo Rolli (1687-1765) it 
 produced canzonette of an enchanting grace; through Inno- 
 cenzo Frugoni's sonorous verse its songs took up some sem- 
 blance of force, and, finally, Arcadia could boast of having
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 223 
 
 nourished with its own milk a real poet, Pietro Metastasio 
 (1698-1782). 
 
 Educated by his patron, the illustrious jurist Giavincenzo 
 Gravina, in the austerest Classicism, Metastasio, after his 
 benefactor's death, went to Naples, where he learned music 
 from the composer Porpora, and in 1724, with the perform- 
 ance of his first lyrical drama, "Didone abbandonata," ob- 
 tained an immense success. New triumphs followed through 
 his "Siroe," "Catone," "Semiramide," and other dramas, 
 which on the wing of song carried his name beyond the Alps, 
 and in 1730 secured for him the position, till then held by 
 Apostolo Zeno, of imperial court poet at Vienna. From 
 Vienna Metastasio actually swayed the gentle hearts of all the 
 nations, so fascinating were his dramas in their perfect corre- 
 spondence to the artistic ideal of his days, in the soft harmony 
 of their verse, and the gentleness of their sentiments. Indeed, 
 Metastasio's lyrical dramas were, and can still be, enjoyed in 
 themselves without the music to which they were set. 
 
 Besides the dramatic, the comic opera then flourished, to 
 which composers like Cimarosa and Paisiello gave the musical 
 notes, and which culminated in Gahani and Lorenzi's "Socrate 
 imaginario" (1775), one of the most genial artistic produc- 
 tions of dramatic hterature in Italy. Soon, however, the 
 literary text lost its importance, and the lyrical drama de- 
 cayed as if overpowered by the music, into which the words, 
 now empty of meaning, evaporated. 
 
 A kind of poetry largely cultivated during the first decades 
 of the century was the burlesque, a fatuous kind, to be sure, 
 but acceptable to the society of that time, frivolous, thought- 
 less, weak, and, in spite of its pseudo-heroic and sentimental 
 attitudes, not averse to hearty laughter. It was then that 
 Niccolo Forteguerri (1634-1735) of Pistoia, entirely outside 
 of Arcadian influence, continuing Bemi's classical tradition, 
 with his " Ricciardetto," created the mock-heroic poem, amidst 
 the merriment of which the Italian chivalric epic died.
 
 224 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 The " Ricciardetto" was published posthumously in 1738, 
 and not many years afterwards, the dogmatic rationahsm 
 of Descartes found its way to Italy, where it fed and hastened 
 the course of the national thought. Later on, after the 
 middle of the century, there became manifest in Italy a deep 
 and general interest in the philosophical and reforming move- 
 ment which from France irradiated all over Europe. Then 
 it was that such serious and vigorous, if not always original, 
 Italian thinkers, economists, jurists, philosophers, as Antonio 
 Genovesi, Ferdinando Galiani, Gaetano Filangeri, Mario 
 Pagano, all Neapolitans, Niccolo Spedalieri, a Sicihan, Pietro 
 Verri, and Cesare Beccaria, both of Milan, formed a worthy 
 counterpart of the French Encyclopedists. They directed 
 their studies to the phenomena of the moral and of the eco- 
 nomical world, as well as to the forms of law for the practical 
 purpose of promoting the welfare and improving the govern- 
 ment of the people. And since, by the already mentioned 
 treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the many states into which Italy 
 was formerly divided were reduced to ten, and, except for 
 Lombardy (still remaining in the possession of Austria) these 
 had been restored to independence, those new doctrines 
 spread more easily, and helped the formation of an enlightened 
 public opinion. Led by this, and still more by their own 
 interest, the Italian rulers accepted those doctrines, and, with 
 the advice and aid of liberal and competent ministers, realized 
 them in penal and administrative laws, abolishing privileges 
 and immunities, freeing commerce and industry from absurd 
 legal hindrances, encouraging agriculture, inaugurating, in 
 short, a new era of progress in Italian history. 
 
 Of this progress the best evidence was furnished by the 
 great innovation which almost at once took place in Italian 
 Literature, and which had beneficent effects upon society. 
 The signs of the innovation became visible in literary criti- 
 cism, in the broadening of the culture, in the great fondness
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 225 
 
 for music and disregard for the words, the importance of which 
 was preferably appreciated in writings of philosophical char- 
 acter and of practical purpose; and, above all, in a desire to 
 get into touch with the thoughts and sentiments expressed 
 in the literatures of other nations, whose influence upon the 
 Literature of Italy had begun to make itself felt here and 
 there since the beginning of the Settecento, or even somewhat 
 earlier. 
 
 This influence became more intense and universal with 
 the advancing of the century, and, favored by the prevailing 
 of a cosmopolitan spirit, by the travels, and the intercourse 
 of many Italian diplomats, men of letters, and adventurers 
 with the peoples of other countries, became, after the peace 
 of Aix-la-Chapelle, one of the characteristics of the national 
 culture. An immense number of works, French, English, 
 Spanish, in prose or in poetry, were translated into Italian 
 by illustrious, mediocre, and obscure men of letters; a new 
 ecclecticism accustomed the minds of readers to like and to 
 appreciate the most widely different literary products, which 
 were eagerly studied, imitated, or assimilated. 
 
 Thus Italy, who in the time of her Renaissance had been the 
 teacher of Literature to the other nations, little by little adapted 
 herself to become in her turn their disciple, happy whenever 
 some of her men, as Vico, Beccaria, Galiani, Maffei, and others, 
 enabled her by their productions to make some new returns for 
 what she was receiving. At all events, from the communion 
 with other European literatures, new blood was tranfused into 
 the enfeebled frame of Italian Literature, that is, ideas, senti- 
 ments, and tendencies. 
 
 The most potent instrument of renovation was literary 
 criticism; which, formerly used with his usual fehcitous intui- 
 tions by Vico, by the jurist Gravina, and by Muratori, wasnow 
 vigorously taken up by a number of writers in order to combat 
 imitation of the classic Italian Literature, and to promote in- 
 novation in form as well as in substance both in prose and in 
 
 Q
 
 226 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 poetry. And, in order to spread more widely their ideas, the 
 critics gave preference to agile and current forms, similar to 
 those of the periodicals of our own day, adopting, consciously 
 or unconsciously, a style and a language more closely resem- 
 bling the French, then familiar to everybody in Italy, than the 
 Italian commonly used by the literati. Indeed, one of the 
 many periodicals, "II Caffe " of Pietro Verri, openly and proudly 
 proclaimed that its writers would never allow themselves to be 
 hampered by rules of Italian granmiar, or by care to preserve 
 the purity of the national language. 
 
 The critics were often at variance and quarreled with each 
 other, as the philosophers did ; but they were all actuated by 
 one spirit, one purpose, namely, emancipation from rules and 
 from authority save that of reason and of nature. First to 
 start criticism upon the new road was, probably, the Venetian 
 Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764) with some of his "Lettere" 
 and of his " Saggi," though he is best known through his " New- 
 tonianismo per le dame," which was soon translated into 
 the principal European languages. A much traveled man of 
 varied learning, a miscellaneous writer, -a friend of Voltaire 
 and of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who made him a count, 
 Algarotti felicitously typified in himself the more characteris- 
 tic forms of the Italian thought of the Settecento. 
 
 In his critical work he was followed by the Mantuan Jesuit, 
 Saverio Bettinelli (1718-1808), noted for his ''Storia del Ri- 
 sorgimento d'ltalia dopo il mille," by far the best of his works, 
 written under the influence of his greatly admired friend 
 Voltaire. As a critic Bettinelli did not entirely lack construc- 
 tive ideas, but, except in political matters, seemed to be driven 
 by a mania to demolish everjrthing. Thus, in his "Lettere 
 virgiHane," and next in his "Lettere inglesi," under color of 
 combating blind worship of Italian classics, he repudiated the 
 greater part of the past and present poetry of the nation, begin- 
 ning with Dante's "Commedia," of which he disapproved 
 everything save a few fragments. The confuters of Betti-
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 227 
 
 nelli's invective were many, but Gaspare Gozzi (1713-1786) 
 of Venice excelled them all with his brilliant ' ' Dif esa di Dante ' ' ; 
 and, as Gozzi, mainly through his " Osservatore " — the first peri- 
 odical of manners in Italy, in form and moral purpose similar 
 to Addison's Spectator — had won the reputation of a man of 
 good taste, of liberal ideas, of impartial judgment, and as an 
 excellent prose- writer, his ''Dif esa" carried the more weight 
 and contributed considerably to the great revival, already under 
 way, of the till then long neglected study of Dante; another 
 sure indication this that the national culture and character 
 were on the rise. 
 
 Of a temperament wholly different from Gozzi's was the 
 Piedmontese Giuseppe Baretti ; restless, impetuous, presump- 
 tuous, an ardent admirer of free England, where he resided 
 between 1751 and 1760, and where, in close friendship with 
 Johnson and Reynolds, he spent the last twenty years or so of 
 his life. In 1763 Baretti began in Venice the publication of 
 his "Frusta letteraria," orliterary whip, which he wielded mer- 
 cilessly right and left, hitting Petrarchists, Arcadians, and all 
 sorts of empty writers, and making it a potent instrument of 
 sound innovation in literary criticism and literature in general, 
 although not infrequently letting it fall in the wrong direction. 
 In practice Baretti adhered to his theories, writing his most en- 
 tertaining familiar letters from Portugal, Spain, and France, 
 as well as his " Frusta," in a prose as solid and robust as his 
 convictions, and of a clearness and pictorial efficacy worthy 
 of serving as a model. 
 
 Last among the more conspicuous critics of the period came 
 the Paduan Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730-1808) with his " Saggio 
 sulla filosofia delle lingue" (1785). In this carefully thought- 
 out work, Cesarotti, following the inspiration of French thinkers 
 and philologists, turned his fine speculations on the nature of 
 human speech against the despotism of the "Accademia 
 della Crusca," which presumed to restrict the whole Italian 
 language within the narrow compass of its own vocabulary,
 
 228 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 registering, almost exclusively, the language used by some of the 
 Tuscan writers of the Trecento. It cannot be denied that on 
 the whole Cesarotti with his "Saggio" helped to emancipate 
 the language from the caprices of fashion, and of incompetent 
 authority, and to substitute for them the legitimate guidance 
 of reason and of good taste. 
 
 A few years before Cesarotti had published his Italian transla- 
 tion, in harmonious blank eleven-syllable hues, interspersed 
 with lyrical strophes, of James Macpherson's so-called Ossianic 
 poems, and the public had received it with enthusiasm. Such 
 an enthusiasm was quite natural; for the Itahans, now im- 
 bued with the emancipating and humanitarian ideas of the 
 new philosophy, and more or less acquainted with foreign liter- 
 atures, had grown tired of the idyls and pastorals of Arcadia, 
 and of the rhetorical composure and monotonous hght of the 
 literary art of the classic type. They had grown so eager for 
 new forms and new subjects, that they now took delight even 
 in the extravagant and absurd romances and plays of Pietro 
 Chiari (1711-1785) ; they took dehght in the nursery-tales and 
 in the fairy-tales which Carlo Gozzi, Gaspare's brother, ar- 
 ranged for the actors of the extemporaneous comedy of masks 
 to develop and enact. No wonder, then, if the Italians so 
 eagerly welcomed the heroic deeds, the misfortunes and loves 
 narrated, and the frightful storms described, in the Ossianic 
 poems. 
 
 When the first part of Cesarotti's translation of Ossian was 
 pubhshed, in 1763, Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) of Venice had 
 already ushered in the new Italian Literature; new, for he had 
 at last led it back to nature and real life, after it had been so 
 long divorced from them. 
 
 At first, to please the taste of the public, or to obey the 
 commands of the impresarios, Goldoni produced lyrical dramas, 
 historical dramas, tragedies, that is to say, things for which his 
 genius was not fitted. However, he never abandoned his long-
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 229 
 
 cherished ideal of superseding the now decrepit extemporane- 
 ous comedy of masks, and that of intrigue, which he thought 
 could only be achieved by the creation of good plays based 
 on character and life. 
 
 So, as soon as an opportunity offered itself, he seized it, and 
 set about his reform. At the beginning he proceeded cautiously 
 and gradually, changing this or that feature of the improvised 
 comedy, but when his first entirely written out play, and then 
 the second and the next, were applauded by the audiences, 
 feehng sure of his ground, he poured out comedy after comedy, 
 some twenty in verse, the rest, perhaps eighty or more, in 
 prose, either in the Venetian dialect or in the national lan- 
 guage. These plays are of various degrees of merit, but all to- 
 gether actually reproduce Italian life as it had then narrowed 
 itself down in Venice. They are rich in comical situations, 
 naturally springing from everyday occurrences, and admi- 
 rably lending themselves to the natural development of the 
 characters. These are invariably living men and women, 
 ordinarily simple, rather common and superficial, consistent 
 with the author's fundamental conception of his reform, and 
 with the constitution of his mind, which, unlike Moliere's, 
 seemed to shrink from deep thinkuig or too keen analyzing of 
 sentiments. Certainly Goldoni's plays leave something to 
 be desired in point of language and literary style, which are 
 careless, but in clearness of conception, inexhaustible wealth, 
 and variety of inventions, in the gay grace and happy bril- 
 liancy of the dialogue, in absolute faithfulness to nature, and 
 in the comicity and humanity of the characters, are yet un- 
 matched. No wonder, then, if in Germany Goldoni's comedies 
 enjoyed great popularity, if in France they were imitated by 
 Diderot and by Voltaire, and if in our own day many of them 
 delight Italian audiences, for, while true to the manners of a 
 past age, they still retain all their original freshness. 
 
 In poetry the great innovator was a Lombard priest, 
 Giuseppe Parini (1729-1799). With him truth, justice, hu-
 
 230 ITALIAN LITERATURE 
 
 manity were not an idle ideal, as was the case with many of his 
 contemporaries, but a religion. Actuated by this, Parini trained 
 his natural artistic powers in the study of the ancient classics, 
 especially of Vergil, and used them in his lyrics and his satire 
 to make poetry resume her mission of civil and moral education, 
 and at the same time gaining for himself a place among the 
 great poets. 
 
 His odes are the poetry of the humanitarian sentiments of 
 his time. As to form, though preserving the meters of what 
 the Italians call melic poetry, for rapidity of movements and of 
 touches, for sweet and temperate melody, lucidity and efficacy 
 of expression, they are, with very few exceptions, works of 
 singular beauty 
 
 Of his satire, the "Giomo," the first two parts, the 
 "Mattino" and the " Mezzogiorno " came to light in 1763 and 
 1765, the two others, " Vespro" and "Notte," only after the 
 poet's death and unfinished. 
 
 The poem is a vast picture of the whole degenerate con- 
 temporary society, such as no other satirical literature, Italian 
 or foreign, had ever till then produced. In it Parini gave the 
 satire forms and movements entirely new, representing in a 
 truly masterful way the manifold action of that society in its 
 continuous development, and creating what has aptly been 
 called the "epic of satire." 
 
 Of the lyrical, didactic, or satirical poets of Parini's time it 
 may suffice to say that in endeavoring to imitate classical 
 examples, they more or less contributed to the rejuvenating of 
 poetical forms and to infusing into them new life and vigor. 
 Of such poets I mil only mention Giovanni Fantoni (1755- 
 1807) and Aurelio Bertola (1753-1798). The former, because 
 by his rhymes he announced the death of Arcadia and the 
 beginning of a new era ; the latter, because in his " Poesie cam- 
 pestri e marittime" he wedded the Spirit of Gessner's German 
 idyls with the tradition of the classic bucolic poets; he trans- 
 lated into Italian Young's "Night Thoughts," and was the first 
 to make the Italians acquainted with German Literature.
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE 231 
 
 Tragedy, owing to the excellence it had achieved in France 
 with Corneille, Racine, and their followers, had, in the period 
 I have been speaking of, become the fashion in Italy. But time 
 has long buried in oblivion the innumerable tragic compositions 
 then produced; it has only spared the "Merope" of Maffei, 
 the " Giovanni Giscala " of Alfonso Varano, and perhaps one or 
 two more. Real tragedy rose in Italy only when the poet 
 came, who within the weary classic frame then in vogue, could 
 rouse the throb of life by the heat of his own passion. 
 
 That poet came at last, and was the Piedmontese nobleman 
 Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) : a resolute heart, good, generous, 
 rebellious to force, pliant to kindness, impetuous, of a strong, 
 imperious will, in short, a very complex character, swayed by 
 two passions, a profound abhorrence of tyranny, and an ardent 
 love of country and of liberty. The conflict between these 
 two passions he made the center round which runs the rapid 
 action of all his tragedies, except his "Mirra" and "Saul," 
 the latter of which is not only Alfieri 's masterpiece, but also 
 one of the most notable dramatic conceptions in the modern 
 theater. 
 
 All the faults, as also all the excellences, of Alfieri's tragic 
 productions are a necessary outcome of his conception of trag- 
 edy, constantly intended by him to make his fellow-country- 
 men "free, strong, and generous." 
 
 It has been said that the Alfierian tragedy is the French 
 tragedy stripped of its flesh. This is true in one respect, that 
 of form. For Alfieri, seeing that the classic form of the 
 French tragedy was universal, adopted it without discussion 
 as legitimate and regular. But into it he cast his own mighty 
 individuality, wholly modern, and thereby created poetry, 
 created the national conscience, and pre-announced the Italian 
 revolution of the next century. 
 
 A new Literature that at its very beginning can boast of 
 three such names as Goldoni, Parini, and Alfieri, gives promise 
 of becoming once more in time a factor in European culture.
 
 XII 
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 By Henry Alfred Todd, Professor of Romance 
 Philology 
 
 Like more than one of those who have preceded me in this 
 series of lectures, I stand abashed at the unwonted difficulty 
 of presenting within a single hour anything like an adequate 
 appreciation of the spirit of one of the world's great literatures. 
 Nothing but a consciousness that listeners and speaker 
 must be alike imbued with a sense of the limitations of such 
 an undertaking could give requisite courage for the attempt. 
 Yet it is fitting to reflect that, apart from the Literature 
 of our mother English speech, there is no Literature of modern 
 times that so richly deserves sympathetic and illuminating 
 consideration as does the Literature of Spain, in a course 
 such as this, given at the metropolitan gateway of two new 
 continents, both of which have been so largely occupied and 
 developed by populations of Spanish race and traditions 
 and of Hispanic speech, in a country whose own Literature 
 has been enriched by the monumental works of an Irving, a 
 Ticknor, and a Prescott in the past, and in a city stirred in 
 the present by the vitalizing activities of so broadly conceived 
 an institution as the Hispanic Society of America. 
 
 At the outset of this study, let us remind ourselves briefly 
 of the historic background of the subject with which we have 
 to deal. Most interestingly and curiously situated at the 
 extremity of its own continent, close to the desert-bounded 
 strip of a strangely alien neighbor continent, and at the limits 
 
 233
 
 234 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the great intercontinental sea, about which have fluctuated 
 a long succession of civihzations, the territory of the Hispanic 
 Peninsula contains stored up within itself relics of successive 
 strata of races, incursions, migrations, and traditions. It will 
 be sufficient for our purpose merely to mention the names of 
 the earliest races, the problems of whose history on Spanish 
 soil are no less real than they are obscure — Iberians, Basques, 
 and Celts. Even for the Phoenicians, the date of their ar- 
 rival and the precise points of their establishment in the 
 Peninsula are unknown, but we reach the more accurate data 
 of history with the incursions of their colonial children, the 
 Carthaginians, who, after the First Punic War, had demon- 
 strated to them the importance of the more complete posses- 
 sion of Spain, accomplished under Hamilcar, the father of 
 Hannibal, virtually the entire conquest and occupation of 
 the country. It was the Second Punic War that brought the 
 Roman conquest of Spain, under which we find standing forth 
 individual exemplars of that high-minded force and dignity 
 of bearing that has ever since been significant of the Spanish 
 character. It is said that the first foreigner who ever rose 
 to the Roman consulship, as well as the first to gain the honors 
 of a public triumph, was Balbus, from Cadiz; while Trajan, 
 from Seville, was the first foreigner to sit on the throne of the 
 Roman world. Of particular interest to us is it to note that 
 from an early period Latin writers and orators begin to be 
 produced in Spain. It was Portius Latro, of Cordova, who 
 was the first to open in Rome a school for rhetoric, at which 
 he enjoyed the patronage of no less distinguished disciples 
 than Octavius Csesar, Maecenas, and Ovid. The two 
 Senecas, father and son, were both natives of Cordova, 
 Lucan, author of the " Pharsalia," was a Spaniard, and so were 
 Quintilian the rhetorician, Florus the historian. Martial the 
 epigrammatist. Columella the writer on agriculture. 
 
 With these indications of the prevalence of Latin speech 
 and civilization in Spain, we can well understand the pre-
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 235 
 
 paredness of the country for the gradual introduction of the 
 Christian rehgion through its accredited medium of instruc- 
 tion and ritual, the Latin tongue. Whatever may be the true 
 account and date of the introduction of Christianity, it 
 seems established that by the year 300 the age of persecution 
 was passed, and Christian churches were openly supported. 
 Next follows the long story of the invasions and migrations 
 of the Northern barbarians, Franks, Vandals, Alans, who 
 were driven forward by the oncoming Tartars from Upper 
 Asia. Later follow the Goths, until by the end of the fifth 
 century the Visigothic dynasty was established and acknowl- 
 edged throughout the greater part of Spain. The Visigoths, 
 it is important to note, had been already converted to the 
 Christian faith by the venerated Bishop Ulfilas, so that this 
 invasion served only to confirm the hold of Christianity on 
 the people of Spain, while at the same time bringing into 
 the Spanish language the vigorous admixture of Germanic 
 elements which have ever since continued to characterize 
 it. 
 
 But the tale of endless incursions is not yet told. Still 
 another momentous invasion was to burst all unforeseen upon 
 Spain, threatening to carry before it, not indeed cultivation 
 and refinement, which could scarcely have existed in such trou- 
 blous times, but the Christian institutions that had been so long 
 and so laboriously built up — the tremendous inpouring of 
 Arab hordes, who came bringing with them into the doomed 
 Peninsula all the weird picturesqueness, the patriotic zeal, 
 and the religious intensity that had been so rapidly gathering 
 momentum. Indeed, within less than a century's time the 
 trembling balance of Mohammed's fate had turned in favor of 
 his cause in nearly all of Western Asia and Northern Africa. 
 So sweeping a victory as that which attended the descent 
 of the Moors near Gibraltar in 711, and which had in three 
 years' time spread over all of Spain excepting the mountain 
 fastnesses of the Northwest, is scarcely recorded in history;
 
 236 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 and when we reflect that for four centuries the dommation 
 of fShe Moors contmued unabated, and for three centuries 
 longer struggled and continued to linger on Spanish soil, we 
 can well understand that we are in presence of a factor in the 
 social and intellectual development of the Spanish people that 
 counts strongly in all their early history. It was Theophile 
 Gautier, I believe, who remarked that Africa begins at the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 Precisely in the midst of this crucial period of the 
 great conflict between the Christians and the Moors in Spain 
 there emerges the earliest and most majestic literary monu- 
 ment of the heroic era of her history — a poem of matchless 
 simplicity and dignity, the " Poem of the Cid " — "El poema 
 del Cid." Though preserved but rudely and imperfectly in a 
 single manuscript dating long subsequent to the original com- 
 position of the work, and constituting to this day, as far as 
 the problems connected with the technique of its composition 
 are concerned, the despair of the most competent scholars, 
 this heroic composition of something like four thousand lines 
 may well serve for all centuries to come to stand as a noble 
 torso of the earliest surviving literary expression of the Spanish 
 spirit in the vernacular speech of Spain. Impressively archaic 
 in language, earnestly unaffected in style, by turns familiar 
 and lofty in expression, exemplifying all the human passions 
 and virtues of a race striving for the expulsion of a powerful 
 invader, this single poem might well be studied in detail as 
 embodying, actually and prophetically, the genius of the 
 people whose long preparation for greatness we have been 
 rapidly reviewing. 
 
 Ruy Diaz de Bivar — that is to say, Rodrigo, son of Diego, 
 of Bivar, known alike to Christians and Moors by the Arabic 
 title of Cid or Lord — was the doughty warrior whose exploits 
 excited at times the admiration, but more often the jealousy 
 and suspicion, of his king, Alfonso. Thus, in the mutilated 
 opening lines — which are not the beginning — of the poem.
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 237 
 
 we find the Cid under the ban and interdict of his sovereign, 
 starting into exile : — 
 
 "De los SOS ojos tan fuerte mientre lorando 
 Tornava la cabega e estava los catando. 
 Vio puertas abiertas e uqos sin cafiados, 
 Alcandaras vazias sin pielles e sin mantos 
 E sin falcones e sin adtores mudados. 
 Sospiro myo Cid, ca mucho avie grandes cuydados. 
 Fablo myo Cid bien e tan mesurado : 
 ' Grado a ti, senor padre, que estas en alto, 
 Esto me an buelto myos enemigos malos.' " 
 
 "The following translation of these lines is taken from 
 Professor James Fitzmaurice-Kelly's recent " Chapters on 
 Spanish Literature," p. 17 : — 
 
 " With tearful eyes he turned to gaze upon the wreck behind : 
 His rifled coffers, bursten gates, all open to the wind : 
 No mantle left, nor robe of fur : stript bare his castle hall : 
 Nor hawk nor falcon in the mew, the perches empty all. 
 Then forth in sorrow went my Cid, and a deep sigh sighed he ; 
 Yet with a measured voice, and calm, my Cid spake loftily — 
 ' I thank thee, God our Father, thou that dwellest upon high, 
 I suffer cruel wrong to-day, but of mine enemy.' " 
 
 Followed by a troop of faithful friends, the Cid betakes him- 
 self to the regions held by the Moors, captures their castles, 
 and finally gains their city of Valencia. By all this prowess he 
 wins again, hke David from Saul, the favor of his jealous 
 prince, and wins in marriage for his two daughters the hands 
 of two noble suitors, the infantes de Carrion, who prove, alas, 
 all unworthy of this honor, and are punished for their cruelty, 
 while the daughters of the Cid are in turn wedded, with still 
 greater honors, to the royal princes, respectively, of Navarre 
 and Aragon. 
 
 Thus, in words too few to give more than a vague impression
 
 238 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the poet's story has been brought before us the image of 
 Spain's earhest heroic figure. That he was probably a historic 
 and not a purely mythical character matters little to us here. 
 Although the facts have been much disputed, the historians of 
 Literature tell us who his father was, that he himself was born 
 about the year 1040, that he was married to Jimena, a cousin 
 of King Alfonso VI, in 1074, that he was exiled by his king in 
 1081, with still fuller data for the remainder of his career. 
 But what concerns our purpose is to know that this was 
 the poetic hero who fired the imaginations, and filled the 
 memories, and embodied the ideals of the Spanish peo- 
 ple at the earliest period of their surviving Literature. To 
 us it signifies that so great was the part he played and the 
 place he filled in the heroism of his time, that by the Arabic 
 historians he is constantly spoken of as *'Al-Kambeyator," 
 the Arabic transliteration of his Spanish title "El campeador," 
 "the Champion"; while, on the other hand, by the Spanish 
 chroniclers and poets he is more frequently called by the 
 Arabic designation "Sid," "Lord," early attached to him and 
 everywhere recurr ng in the "Poema del Cid." For us, as in- 
 vestigators of the spirit of heroic Spanish verse, the moving 
 impulse is to discover, if we may, in the rugged ''Poema del 
 Cid" the vital spark that kindled, five centuries later, through 
 the intermediary of the "Mocedades del Cid" of Guillen de 
 Castro, in the brain of the Frenchman Corneille (in his drama 
 of the "Cid") the glowing picture of Spanish chivalry that 
 typifies more widely and more perfectly than any other non- 
 Spanish production the heroic genius of the Spanish race. 
 
 We have spoken of the spirit of the '* Poem of the Cid " ; what 
 is there to say of its origin and form? Scholars have been 
 ready to find in it evidences of the influence of the French 
 " Chansons de geste," notably, of course, of the "Chanson de 
 Roland." That the " Roland " was known in Spain at the time 
 of the composition of the " Poema del Cid" is virtually certain; 
 that the author of the "Cid" had heard sung or recited
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 239 
 
 the "Song of Roland" is even probable. But, granting the 
 correctness of this view, what is surprising is that the tone, the 
 touch, the swing, the vigor of the "Poema del Cid," should all 
 be so palpably different from the same characteristics of the 
 " Roland " ; while it is no less true that the tone and spirit of the 
 Spanish poem are as truly and distinctively Spanish as that 
 the tone and touch of the Frankish poem are distinctly French. 
 But, this being true of the "Cid," what was after all the 
 destiny on Spanish soil — where indeed the very scene of the 
 poem was laid — of the marvelous legend of "Roland" that 
 made its way triumphant throughout all the rest of Europe ? 
 It is a noteworthy fact, and significant of the comparative 
 independence of the epic spirit in Spain, that the "Chanson de 
 Roland, " which various scholars believe to have influenced the 
 unknown author of the "Poema del Cid," found no direct 
 imitation, so far as we know, in Spain. It is not until a 
 much later period, that of the Spanish "roraancero," the 
 great collection of Ballad poetry in which so much of the 
 genius of the Spanish people is embodied, that we are able 
 to discover the true spiritual descendants in Literature of 
 the paladins of the French epic who fought under Charle- 
 magne and Roland in the defiles of Roncevaux. In 
 the Spanish ballads the defeat of Roland, as the army 
 of Charlemagne was withdrawing through the passes of the 
 Pyrenees, is attributed by the native folk-poets, not to the 
 treacherous Basques, to whom it was in reality due, nor, as in 
 the French epic, to the overwhelming number of the Saracens, 
 but to the patriotism of the Christian Spaniards, who con- 
 sidered their country to have been invaded, and who joined 
 their forces to drive out Charlemagne and all his hosts. To 
 meet their ideas of national and poetic justice a native hero 
 must be exalted, and such a one was found in the person of a 
 character, Bernardo del Carpio, who seems to have been purely 
 imaginary, or at most one who had distinguished himself, 
 in the far-off past, by fighting against the Arabs and not against
 
 240 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 the French, and around this national hero there grew up a 
 wealth of Ballad Literature in which the fictitious exploits of 
 Bernardo are exalted, culminating in a personal combat 
 between Roland and Bernardo del Carpio, in which of course 
 it is the latter who is victorious. Thus, while Italy, Germany, 
 Scandinavia, and England are satisfied in turn to take 
 up without notable alterations the story of the victories 
 of Charlemagne and his paladins, Spain, on the lips of 
 her poets, turns the situation to the enhancement of her 
 own national renown. Nor let it be supposed that the 
 older and more traditional glories of the "Cid Cam- 
 peador" were suffered to grow dim in this epico-lyric 
 period of the Spanish "romancero," a form which there is the 
 less need here to illustrate by quotations, even were there time 
 to do so, because of the well-known and spirited English ver- 
 sions by Lockhart, Southey, and Gibson. 
 
 It is time to point out, what indeed is so universally felt to be 
 true as to sound like a commonplace, that throughout all the 
 Middle Ages Spain was the most naturally chivalresque of all 
 the Christian nations, which has well been attributed to the fact 
 that, while the other Western nations were seeking an outlet 
 for their chivalrous energies by carrying the Cross to Constan- 
 tinople, the Holy Land, and Egypt, Spain was for seven hun- 
 dred years shut up to internecine conflict for political and 
 religious supremacy with a highly civilized as well as a brave 
 and fanatical intruder; while, on the side of Literature, all 
 the sources of enchantment and refinement that prevailed else- 
 where in Europe poured into Spain their refreshing streams. 
 In addition to the French "Chansons de geste, " there came 
 with the pilgrims of Saint James of Compostella (Santiago de 
 Compostela) the weird and charming tales of the Celtic cycle 
 of King Arthur and Merlin, tales of love and mystery, of giants 
 and of dwarfs, of fairies and of sorcerers, of enchantments and 
 of love philters. 
 
 This was the efflorescence of joyous gaiety that followed
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 241 
 
 the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the glorious 
 discovery of a new world by Christopher Columbus at the end 
 of the fifteenth century. The course of the sixteenth saw the 
 exuberant spread in Spain of the chivalrous romance in prose, a 
 form of which the other nations were indeed beginning to tire 
 a little, but which between Ferdinand the Catholic and Philip 
 II developed in Spain with an amazing richness that de- 
 generated speedily into all manner of imaginative excess and 
 literary extravagance. In this orgy of unbridled productive- 
 ness personages of most incongruous origin were brought 
 together and mingled in strange confusion: heroes of an- 
 tiquity, Joshua and David with Alexander and Julius Caesar, 
 King Arthur with King Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon 
 with Robert the Devil, Lancelot of the Lake with Amadis of 
 Gaul and Palmerin d'Oliva. For these fantastic tales the rage 
 grew so intense that Guevara, the learned courtier of Charles 
 the Fifth, declares that "men did read nothing in his time 
 but such shameful books as 'Amadis de Gaula,' 'Tristan,' 
 'Primal eon,' and the like," and the works of this class were 
 finally accounted so pernicious that '' in 1553 they were prohib- 
 ited by law from being printed or sold in the American colo- 
 nies, and in 1555 the same prohibition, and even the burning 
 of all copies of them extant in Spain itself, was earnestly asked 
 for by the Cortes." Ticknor, in one of the notes to his history 
 of this period, cites the following anecdote as evidence of the 
 fanaticism of the upper as well as of the lower classes on the sub- 
 ject of books of chivalry ! "A Knight came home one day from 
 the chase, and found his wife and daughters and their women 
 crying. Surprised and grieved, he asked them if any child or 
 relation were dead. 'No,' they answered, suffocated with 
 tears. 'Why then do you weep so?' he rejoined, still more 
 amazed. 'Sir,' they replied, 'Amadis is dead.' They had 
 read so far." 
 
 On October 9, 1547, was baptized Miguel de Cervantes Saa- 
 vedra. To have proceeded so far without having made any
 
 242 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 direct allusion to his life or work has only been accomplished 
 by deliberate intent; for while very much that comes after 
 his time remains to be considered, his name and his influence 
 so overshadow other Spanish names for the historian of 
 Literature that to leave him even temporarily obscured comes 
 only of conscious effort. If we pause for a moment to reflect, 
 we shall perceive, without analysis or penetration that while 
 the other great and universal works of Literature — the " Iliad," 
 the "Divine Comedy," the dramas of Shakspere — make 
 their appeal chiefly to the mature and conscious lover of Litera- 
 ture, the immortal story of the good knight of La Mancha is 
 the joy and consolation alike of young and old, of grave and 
 gay, of lettered and unlettered, a work unique in the circimi- 
 stances of its inception, its purpose, and its execution. 
 
 It was charmingly said of Cervantes in this University not 
 long ago by Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly that "some men live their 
 romances, and some men write them. It was given to Cer- 
 vantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the impersonal 
 order, it is scarcely possible to read his work without a desire 
 to know more of the rich and imposing individuality which 
 informs it." With a boyhood apparently much like Shak- 
 spere's, containing a fair amount of schooling but no university 
 training, his later life was at once far more troublous and far 
 more romantic than that of his great contemporary. As he 
 came to manhood, he could look back upon the glorious reign 
 of the Emperor Charles the Fifth in which his childhood had 
 been passed, and be stirred with the spirit of adventure that 
 took him to Rome as a member of the household of Cardinal 
 Acquaviva, at the time when Spain, Venice, and the Holy See 
 were combining in a league against the Sultan of Turkey. 
 He was in the hottest of the fight, on board one of the galleys 
 of Don John of Austria, at the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, where 
 he was seriously wounded. Four years later, on shipboard 
 near Marseilles, he was captured by Moorish pirates and 
 carried off to Algiers. There he became the slave of a Greek
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 243 
 
 renegade ; made three most exciting but unsuccessful efforts to 
 escape; and finally, in 1580, and in his thirty-fourth year, after 
 five bitter years of slavery, was ransomed for five hundred 
 ducats, settled in Madrid, and of necessity as well as by predilec- 
 tion betook himself to Literature as a congenial but precari- 
 ous means of livelihood. Harsh vicissitudes and only partial 
 success attended his endeavors, until, when approaching the 
 age of sixty years, he became the author of one of the most 
 famous books in the history of the world, quite probably 
 begun and perhaps also ended in Seville jail, "The Ingenious 
 Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha." The first part was 
 published in 1605, the second in 1615, many important works 
 having intervened. A little later, in the preface to his final 
 composition, the romance of "Persiles and Sigismunda," 
 he writes: "And so, farewell to jesting, farewell my merry 
 humors, farewell my gay friends, for I feel that I am dying, 
 and have no desire but soon to see you happy in the other life." 
 And in a few days he was dead. 
 
 What was Cervantes' purpose in writing "Don Quixote"? 
 The question has been much disputed, and many strained inter- 
 pretations have been offered, one cirious suggestion being 
 that the book set forth "some of the undertakings and gallan- 
 tries of the Emperor Charles V," while Daniel Defoe declared 
 it to be an emblematic history of, and a just satire upon, the 
 Duke de Medina Sidonia, "a person," as he says, "very 
 remarkable at that time in Spain." But Cervantes himself 
 has really answered the question as to the purpose which he 
 had in view, when at the outset of the book he exclaims that 
 " he looks to nothing but to undoing the vogue and authority 
 throughout the world and among the common people, of the 
 books of chivalry," while at the end of the second part, ten 
 years later, he repeats that "he had had no other desire than 
 to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories con- 
 tained in the books of chivalry." 
 
 And yet it cannot but be true that these declarations are
 
 244 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 to some extent whimsical, or, as we might say in the waggish 
 language of a later day, "Pickwickian." If ever there was a 
 book in the world that, from the earliest chapters, grew and 
 grew bej^ond its author's ken and first intention, surely that 
 book is Cervantes' "Don Quixote." One can scarcely 
 help believing that in the author's brain pretty much all the 
 stock in trade for the new story were the gaunt figures of the 
 ingenious gentleman and of Rocinante, and the holocaust of the 
 books of chivalry in the courtyard under the attentive watch- 
 care of the niece, the barber, and the curate. The return of 
 the sprightly Don after the adventure with the traders of To- 
 ledo may well have been, in the writer's mind, the culmina- 
 tion of a mere short story,, and the beginning for the worthy 
 gentleman of a monomania cured and a life of better things. 
 In fact, having got only a little farther on, at the end of Chap- 
 ter VIII, the author concludes "Part First," so-called, and 
 begins Part II of his expanding tale, a division altogether disre- 
 garded when, ten years later, he publishes a sequel to the work 
 of 1605, called Part II. 
 
 How shall we sum up the qualities of so great a book ? • In 
 despair of succeeding in the attempt, I shall have recourse to 
 the simple, unvarnished record of its effect on the mind of one 
 of the most clear-visioned of American men of letters, Mr. 
 William Dean Howells, as recounted in his book of remi- 
 niscences entitled " My Literary Passions " (p. 26): — 
 
 "The reading of 'Don Quixote' went on throughout my boy- 
 hood, so that I cannot recall any distinctive period of it when I 
 was not, more or less, reading that book. In a boy's way I knew it 
 well when I was ten, and a few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it 
 up in the admirable new version of Ormsby, and found it so full of 
 myself and of my own irrevocable past that I did not find it very 
 gay. But I made a great many discoveries in it ; things I had not 
 dreamt of were there, and must always have been there, and other 
 things wore a new face, and made a new effect upon me. I had my 
 doubts, my reserves, where once I had given it my whole heart with-
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 245 
 
 out question, and yet in what formed the greatness of the book it 
 seemed to me greater than ever. I beheve that its free and simple 
 design, where event follows event without the fettering control of 
 intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and condi- 
 tions, is the supreme form of fiction ; and I cannot help thinking that 
 if we ever have a great American novel it must be built up on some 
 such large and noble lines. As for the central figure, Don Quixote 
 himself, in his dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his 
 fearless devotion to them, he is always heroic and beautiful ; and I 
 was very glad in my latest look at his history that I had truly con- 
 ceived of him at first and had felt the sublimity of his nature. I 
 did not want to laugh at him so much, and I could not laugh at all 
 any more at some of the things done to him. Once they seemed 
 funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so that it was strange to 
 realize his qualities and indignities as both flowing from the same 
 mind. But in my mature experience, which threw a broader light 
 on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an author who had 
 been almost personally dear to me. . . . Cervantes made his 
 race jDrecious to me, and I am sure that it must have been he who 
 fitted me to enjoy and understand the American author who now 
 stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy in Spanish air — 
 Washington Irving. . . . 
 
 " I read the ' Conquest of Granada ' after I read ' Don Quixote, 
 and ... I loved the historian so much because I had loved the 
 novelist more. Of course I did not perceive then that Irving 's 
 charm came largely from Cervantes . . . but I dare say that this 
 fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. ... I really 
 cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more. 
 I fought on both sides ; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, 
 and yet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them ; and when 
 the poor young King Boabdil . . . heaved the Last Sigh of the 
 Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, it was as much 
 my grief as if it had burst from my own breast." 
 
 Listen also to another voice in praise of Cervantes' im- 
 mortal work (Fitzmaurice-Kelly, " Spanish Literature," 
 p. 232). 
 
 " Small wonder if the world received ' Don Quixote ' with delight ! 
 There was nothing like it before ; there has been nothing to eclipse
 
 246 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 it since. It ends an epoch and begins another ; it intones the dirge 
 of the mediaeval novel ; it announces the arrival of the new genera- 
 tions, and it belongs to both the past and the coming ages. At the 
 point where the paths diverge, 'Don Quixote' stands, dominating 
 the entire landscape of fiction. Time has failed to wither its va- 
 riety or to lessen its force, and posterity accepts it as a masterpiece of 
 humoristic fancy, of complete observation, and unsurpassed inven- 
 tion. It ceases, in effect, to belong to Spain as a mere local posses- 
 sion, though nothing can deprive her of the glory of producing it. 
 Cervantes ranks with Shakspere and with Homer as a citizen of the 
 world, a man of all times and countries, and ' Don Quixote,' with 
 'Hamlet' and the 'Iliad,' belongs to universal Literature, and is 
 become an eternal pleasaunce of the mind for all nations." 
 
 Of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Literature, 
 perhaps indeed the highest and most significant of all, no word 
 has yet been spoken. I mean the Drama. In the latter half 
 of the sixteenth century the theater was still in a rude and un- 
 developed condition in Spain. It remained for Cervantes' 
 greatest contemporary and only real rival, Lope de Vega, to 
 place the Spanish stage on a higher plane, and render it illus- 
 trious throughout the world. Lope de Vega was a genuine 
 example of what is called "a youthful prodigy." At a mo- 
 ment when our own country is said to have produced, in a 
 single university, no less than four youthful prodigies, it 
 may be interesting to remind ourselves, by the notable case 
 of Lope de Vega, that youthful prodigies occasionally redeem 
 in their maturer years the precocious promises of their infancy. 
 According to his friend Montalvan, Lope de Vega not only 
 read Latin as well as Spanish at the age of five, but before he 
 had learned how to write, was wont at school to share his break- 
 fast with the older boys, in order to get them to take down for 
 him the verses that he dictated. To some who have children 
 of the unprodigious type it may be a comfort to be informed 
 that Lope, as he himself tells us, at this interesting period of 
 his career "avoided the mathematics, which he found unsuited
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 247 
 
 to his humor." His earUest surviving play, "El Verdadero 
 Amante," written at the age of twelve, is to be found in the 
 fourteenth volume of his dramatic works, and was actually put 
 upon the stage. At the age of fifteen he was already a soldier 
 in the wars, and later spent some time at the University of 
 Alcala, and was still later attached to the Duke of Alva, grand- 
 son of the remorseless Duke. In 1 588 he served at sea in the 
 Invincible Armada, where he found time to write his long poem 
 entitled the " Hermosura de Angelica," purporting to be a con- 
 tinuation of Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." But it is only of 
 the dramatic output of Lope that there is time at present to 
 speak, except, indeed, to mention his epic poem called the 
 "Dragontea," the name and subject of which are taken from 
 Sir Francis Drake, whose prominent share in the defeat of the 
 Armada caused him to be chosen as the special object of Lope's 
 bitter poetical attack. 
 
 Of Lope's place in the Literature of Spain it may be said 
 that, as Shakspere is the real founder of the English theater, 
 so Lope is the founder of the Spanish ; as Cervantes is the 
 representative citizen of the world for Spain, Lope de Vega 
 is the typical genius of the Spanish character. His produc- 
 tivity was enormous; his facility of invention and expression 
 almost incredible; his intellectual endowment incomparable, 
 leaving nothing unattempted: short tales, eclogues, epistles, 
 sonnets, pastorals, the epic poem, the romantic novel. Of 
 plays he is said to have written eighteen hundred. Hazlitt 
 denies the tale of his having composed a play before breakfast, 
 but it is believed to be a fact that on scores of occasions he 
 finished an entire play within the twenty-four hours. Under 
 such conditions an author cannot but suffer from the defects 
 of his qualities. A writer by some accounted greater than 
 Lope was to arise on the dramatic horizon. The generation 
 that had for a time been carried away by Lope turned to the 
 rising star of Calderon, the preeminent representative of 
 Spanish literary genius in the seventeenth century. Though
 
 248 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 he was not precocious like Lope, he was at least good-naturedly 
 spoken of by the latter, when the youthful Calderon had 
 carried off a prize, as one "who in his tender years earns the 
 laurels which time is wont to produce only with hoary hairs." 
 Alike successful with plays secular, religious, and philosophical, 
 he was so indifferent to the fate of his secular pieces that it 
 is almost by a fortunate chance that they have been iden- 
 tified and preserved to us. Of the formal plays the number 
 is one hundred and twenty, of the one-act pieces, or "autos 
 sacramentales," we may count something like seventy. 
 Though the "autos" are now little read in Spain and almost 
 not at all outside of it, it was the opinion of Shelley, and 
 of various others since his day, that one of the strongest sides 
 of his dramatic art is displayed in these little pieces, a form of 
 composition peculiarly typical of the Spanish temperament, 
 being intended to present symbolically the mystery of the 
 Eucharist by representation in the open air at the festival of 
 Corpus Christi. But after all it is by such philosophical 
 plays as that entitled "La Vida es Sueno " that Calderon is 
 known, and will continue to be known, as the stately, earnest, 
 loyal, and imposing dramatist of the seventeenth-century 
 Spanish stage. 
 
 The step is a long one from the times of Calderon to the 
 Hving or recently living writers of the present day, but the 
 necessity of taking it is imposed by the advancing hour. 
 What has the Spain of to-day to offer to the student of con- 
 temporary European thought? For a long time French 
 literary products in many fields have engrossed the attention 
 of Spain's thinkers and readers, but there is one field in which 
 for a good many years native work of the highest and most 
 engaging quality has been put forth, to the entertainment 
 and delight not only of the reading pubhc of the Peninsula, 
 but of the readers of all the modern nations. It is needless 
 to say that I speak of the field of fiction, while the only two 
 authors whom it will be possible to mention by name are
 
 SPANISH LITERATURE 249 
 
 Juan Valera, late minister of the Spanish government to the 
 United States, and Perez Galdos, one of the most eminent 
 writers of fiction in the world to-day. 
 
 It is surely not by mere chance that the finest work of each 
 of these Uterary masters is occupied with problems that are 
 fundamentally spiritual and religious, but this is certainly due 
 to the fact that the heart of the Spaniard to-day is profoundly 
 religious, as it has ever been in the past; while both Valera 
 and Galdos are too closely in touch with the pulsation of 
 the people's heart to fail to respond to every stirring of the 
 popular emotion. I am fain to speak of Valera's "Pepita 
 Jimenez " as if it were the work of yesterday, because time 
 flies so fast that the readers of that most notable production 
 must still count the enjoyment of it as one of their recent 
 pleasures. This is the book of which Coventry Patmore 
 wrote as an example of "that complete synthesis of gravity 
 of matter and gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown 
 of art, and which, out of Spanish Literature, is to be found 
 only in Shakspere, and even in him in a far less obvious degree." 
 Of his "El Comendador Mendoza," it must suffice to say that 
 it bears the mark of being a sublimated autobiography. Of 
 Galdos likewise I shall mention only two preeminent works 
 out of the great wealth of his productivity — his "Dona 
 Perfecta," and, though it is a play and not a novel, his "Elec- 
 tra," the keynote of both of which is, that Uberty — political 
 liberty, religious liberty — is the world's best, supremest gift. 
 
 On the subject of contemporary Spanish Literature, I shall 
 venture to quote a few words from no less distinguished a 
 representative of it than the Countess Pardo Bazan, in which 
 she says: — 
 
 " The novel, alternating between the old naturalism and the neo- 
 romantic spiritualism, has been losing vogue. Our most famous 
 novelist, Perez Galdos, after having sought a greater glory in writing 
 for the stage, has left off publishing and has gone ardently into poli-
 
 250 SPANISH LITERATURE 
 
 tics. His name is one of the four or five which are mentioned in the 
 hypothetical case that a Spanish Republic should ever want a 
 President. . . . 
 
 " From Dramatic Literature, Echegaray, honored with the Nobel 
 prize, has never definitely retired. He had filled our stage like 
 another Lope de Vega, for more than a quarter of a century, yet 
 to-day his plays are not presented. . . . Last year there were pre- 
 sented in Spain more than a thousand theatrical pieces, flowers of a 
 single day. The public, always the same, demands novelty. That 
 being so, it cannot expect to have masterpieces." 
 
 In conclusion, it may be said that the predominating fact 
 in the development of literary self-expression in Spain has 
 been that, while Spanish Literature, like the English Litera- 
 ture, takes its root in French and Italian soil, it is supremely 
 true that Spain has in all periods held firmly to her national 
 individuality, to her devotion to high and noble ideals, to 
 love of country, love of honor, love of truth, and love of the 
 faith and religion for which in all ages her sons have unflinch- 
 ingly fought and died.
 
 XIII 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 By Ashley H. Thorndike, Professor of English 
 
 We are not here to praise English Literature or to recount 
 its glories. Its greatness, its long unbroken history, its splen- 
 did names, are for you commonplaces; to you it means books 
 that have been treasured and cherished, that have been the 
 ever-renewing springs of your mirth and solace and invigora- 
 tion. For you it is a friendship and an intimacy. But even 
 for those who care little for Literature and who knock rarely at 
 her doors, her influence is none the less intimate and abiding. 
 Like our laws, our institutions, and our faiths, our Literature 
 is a part of the heritage of English-speaking peoples. It has 
 paralleled and reflected their development and partaken of 
 their peculiarities. It represents the centuries behind us; 
 it has had its part, and it still has, in all that we mean by na- 
 tional or racial progress; it is a social bond that unites the 
 millions of to-day with the millions of yesterday or to-morrow; 
 it still contributes and ministers to our beliefs and hopes; 
 it reflects itself directly or indirectly in the daily thought and 
 feeling of every one of us. We approach English Literature, 
 therefore, not as an imposing collection of beautiful works of 
 art, not as a museum of the achievements of genius, not as a 
 Hall of Fame, nor even as an assembly of familiar and noble 
 friends; but rather as the record and expression of English 
 minds, as a living thing in whose growth and dominion we, 
 as our forefathers, have a share. We ask what has been 
 and what is its meaning for those of English birth or speech ? 
 
 251
 
 252 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 What is the endowment which it confers on the race of to- 
 morrow? 
 
 These questions, at first thought, do not seem to indicate 
 the way to a clear demarcation of a national literature. For 
 Literature is older than the nations, or the races. It began 
 with the dawn of culture, and it has continued its sway in 
 many climes and tongues through the long advance of civi- 
 lization. Its great masterpieces in the Hebrew, Greek, and 
 Latin languages have been the pillars of fire and cloud that 
 have guided the peoples of Western Europe out of their bond- 
 age into a freedom where they have created literatures of 
 their own. In modern times, through the ever-increasing 
 intercommunication among these nations, Literature has be- 
 come in no small measure the result of constant borrowing 
 and exchanging. No great work in one language is without 
 its influence on other nations; no national literature at any- 
 time stands by itself without large support from outside. The 
 greatest writers are adopted by peoples not their own, and 
 become essential parts of foreign traditions. The literary 
 impulse now struggling in some future poet of the Sierras shall 
 learn from ^Eschylus and Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Moliere, 
 and Goethe before it ventures flight. In spite of her isolation 
 fi'om the Continent, England has shared, and usually followed, 
 in all the movements of European culture, and her Literature 
 has always been heavily indebted to those of other nations. 
 These borrowings have been of all possible kinds, ranging 
 from the adoption of a suggested idea to detailed copying of 
 treatment and expression. Often such borrowing and lend- 
 ing back and forth have become complicated beyond the possi- 
 bility of umaveling. The relation of English Literature to 
 other national literatures is, in fact, fully as much one of com- 
 plex and multiple resemblances as one of prevailing and essen- 
 tial differences. 
 
 Even if we could wave aside the resemblances and consider 
 only the differences, our subject would yet retain a large
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 253 
 
 share of its difficulties; for the Literature of any generation 
 is varied, complex, and contradictory. Its distinction from 
 any other national literature of that time has been the result- 
 ant of innumerable causes, and is displayed in an enormous 
 variety of effects. There can be no brief and satisfactory 
 characterization of a literature so varied and extensive as 
 that of the English people. To get anything like unity of 
 effect we must needs go far back to a time when national life 
 was simpler and authors fewer than now, to a time, in fact, 
 of which very few records have been preserved and of which 
 our knowledge is consequeiitly scanty. "Beowulf" and a few 
 fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry present glimpses of the life 
 of a pagan Germanic people, a primitive heroic age, far more 
 fully and nobly described in the Old Norse Eddas. Later 
 the Literature of the Angles and the Saxons becomes domi- 
 nated by that of European Christendom, and then for a while 
 after the Norman Conquest there is a submergence of vernacu- 
 lar Literature. When it reasserts itself, there is a new quick- 
 ening from Celtic romance, but for many generations the 
 spread of ideas and of literary forms characteristic of the 
 Middle Ages is carried on in England mainly under French 
 auspices. Not until the fourteenth century did English 
 Literature attain national and individual greatness, notably 
 in two men, Langland and Chaucer. The first, or whoever 
 was the author of "Piers Plowman," was almost untouched bj'' 
 direct foreign influence; he was a democrat, a dreamer sing- 
 ing of social unrest and aspiration, hating things as they were, 
 praying for better government, better opportunity for the 
 individual worker, and a fairer system of society. Typically 
 English, he spoke for the English people of his age. The 
 second, Chaucer, was a man of the world, an artist and a 
 scholar, who took all he could get from French, Italian, or 
 Latin. He was observant, tolerant, and ironical, a humorist, 
 and, in the broad sense of the word, a humanist, who studied 
 men even more closely and lovingly than his worthy authors,
 
 254 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and for the same reason, because he cared above all to retell 
 what he read or saw in a beautiful and enduring fashion. He 
 did not picture what Langland saw, he was the opposite of 
 Langland in almost every respect, yet surely his poetry is 
 characteristically English. Whose is more so, Chaucer's or 
 Langland 's ? 
 
 After this fashion we might come down from generation to 
 generation, through the eras of the Transition, the Renais- 
 sance, of Neo-Classicism, and of Romanticism; we might 
 examine changes in language, in government, in literary rela- 
 tions leading to the successive dominance of Latin, Itahan, 
 French, and German ideas and forms; and in spite of our 
 extended analysis we should find it difficult to decide in each 
 generation what movements, or even what authors, are most 
 characteristically English. Let us take them in couples, 
 pairing two writers who are important and representative, but 
 diametrically opposed in many traits, and then ask which is 
 the more characteristically English: Shakspere or Bacon? 
 Milton or Dryden? Pope or Defoe? Johnson or Cowper? 
 Scott or Shelley? Or who represents most typically English 
 Literature in the nineteenth century: Longfellow or Whit- 
 man? Cooper or Hawthorne? Browning or Tennyson? Car- 
 lyle or Newman? Emerson or Disraeli? Dickens's novels or 
 Matthew Arnold's poems? Walter Pater or Mark Twain? 
 
 It is needless to go on multiplying the complexities of our 
 subject. Enough has been said to indicate a few of the many 
 complications which our discussion will seek to avoid, and to 
 afford a glimpse of some extensive and interesting fields of 
 study into which we shall not venture. Even if the relations 
 of English to other literatures, and the different aspects of 
 successive periods, and the various manifestations of any 
 moment of our literary history, all be neglected, we may still 
 seek for suggestions toward a summary of the characteristics 
 which Literature has developed and the meaning which 
 it has acquired from its particular national environment.
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 255 
 
 Let us return to our general inquiry and consider how the 
 vital literary principle, which is ever transforming experience 
 into song and story and sermon, has been preserved and 
 nourished among the English people, and what for them has 
 been the significance of this leaven of imagination and sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 An analogy readily presents itself between the growth of 
 Literature and the evolution of English political government. 
 In their development of political institutions the English 
 have been distinguished among nations by an impatience of 
 authority, in whatever form of centralization it appeared, 
 and by an insistence on the freedom of the individual person. 
 While they have encouraged liberty to broaden slowly down 
 from precedent to precedent, they have been distrustful of 
 any violent break from the past or any sudden conversion 
 under the persuasion of theory. They have preferred com- 
 promise to formula, the practical and the expedient to the 
 theoretical and systematic. Hostile to system or codifica- 
 tion, or centralization, clinging to government in small units, 
 to provincial and parochial control, they have nevertheless 
 built up a great system of political institutions, the wonder- 
 fully efficient machinery of an empire. Here has been at work 
 the same national character which has expressed itself in 
 Literature. As in politics, there has been no central author- 
 ity, but a steady growth from national precedent and tradition, 
 and a distrust of theory or system. In Literature as in politics 
 there has been no control by a class, or caste, or profession, 
 no control by one city, not even by London. Literature has 
 been provincial, parochial, making its home in Edinburgh, 
 or Boston, or Ayrshire. It has not been monopolized by the 
 clergy, or the courtiers, or the lettered. Its doors have ever 
 opened wider and wider, and tradesmen and peasants have 
 won its greatest honors. Englishmen have insisted on all 
 possible freedom for the individual in Literature as elsewhere, 
 and out of the diversities and differences of this untrammeled
 
 256 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 individualism, English Literature has attained its unity and 
 its organic growth. Like the political constitution, so the 
 English Literature has developed, not in response to any 
 theory of what Literature is or ought to be, and not in re- 
 sponse to any authority or criticism, but by closely adapting 
 itself to the varying local life and thought of the people. If 
 there has been any one guiding ideal, it is the same which has 
 directed the creation of English political institutions, a faith 
 in the rights of the individual. 
 
 Literature in modern times as contrasted with antiquity 
 has undergone an enormous expansion. Its subjects and 
 forms are more nmnerous, it reflects a more complex life, it 
 appeals to a vaster and more variegated public. In this 
 expansion the English people since the sixteenth century 
 have played a leading part. Their great books have not been 
 the outcome of a national attainment either of high artistic 
 standards and taste, or of a thorough intelligence and culture. 
 In neither of these respects has the nation ever for a moment 
 equaled the achievement of the Athenian civilization, and its 
 Literature has borne the marks of its deficiencies. Its great 
 books have been the results of efforts to extend the scope of 
 Literature and to influence a wider pubhc. They have often 
 been approved by the vulgar as quickly as by the cultured. 
 Take the books that have most influenced foreign litera- 
 tures, that have exercised a great sway over the world: the 
 Elizabethan drama, including Shakspere, the eighteenth- 
 century novels, Scott's romances, Byron's poems. These 
 were all daring departures from old forms, in an effort to 
 make use of new experience, and they all aimed at the popular 
 approval which they won. And many other authors, who 
 might be cited as less representative of popular success, have 
 been, like Browning and Wordsworth, equally intent on 
 enlarging the boundaries of Literature and on leading the 
 multitude into their new-found lands. We may return to 
 our analogy. In Literature, as in politics, the English people
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 257 
 
 have been foremost among modern nations in expansion and 
 democratization. They have built up both an individuahstic 
 democracy and a vast empire. 
 
 These achievements in Literature have not been unaccom- 
 panied by defects and deficiencies. Our energy and indi- 
 viduahty have been noted by foreign critics, but they have 
 charged us with many faults, to which they have sometimes 
 applied a single phrase — lack of form. 
 
 In the first place, Form is often judged by classical stan- 
 dards. Formlessness becomes another word for a difference 
 from the masterpieces of Greece and Rome, or rather from 
 certain masterpieces. The great masters of simplicity, 
 dignity, and sanity, — Homer, Sophocles, and Horace, — these 
 are assumed to be the guides to perfection. They are the 
 ultima Thule ; you cannot go beyond them. And you cannot 
 depart away from them; straight toward their beacon lies 
 the path of literary greatness; on either side are the breakers 
 of formlessness. While English writers have turned again 
 and again to the classics for models and inspiration, they have 
 not kept within this straight and narrow pathway. Without 
 now questioning whether this is for better or worse, or how 
 far other matters than form are involved, we must, I think, 
 admit that there is no connotation of the word classical which 
 will render it applicable to English Literature. Our indi- 
 vidualistic expansion has, in fact, carried us farther than any 
 other literature of modern Europe in divergence from classical 
 guides and instruction. If lack of form means a departure from 
 classical tutelage, it is a characteristic of English Literature. 
 
 In the second place, lack of form sometimes means lack of 
 obedience to authority, or tradition, or social agreement. 
 English Literature has never had an Academy, rarely even a 
 school, hardly an estabhshed technic, never a ruling criticism. 
 It has not obeyed the authority of the classics; it has not 
 obeyed anybody. Critics have cried, as some still do, for 
 academies, rules, dogmatism, authority; but Literature has
 
 258 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 refused to be led by the nose. The leviathan has declined the 
 hook. English Literature has in consequence lacked urbanity, 
 regularity, moderation, the virtues that come from a general 
 agreement or a yielding to authority. French prose, with 
 its clarity and decorum, is an example of what social agree- 
 ment can accomplish in literary form. English prose has too 
 often exhibited the sins fathered by anarchy and dissent. 
 Our great writers, those who survive and affect our lives, 
 have violated almost every precept of literary law and order, 
 and displayed eccentricity, bad taste, and even unintelli- 
 gibility. No wonder our criticism has been mainly concerned 
 in telling how much better they do things in France. Yet 
 in spite of this independence of dictation, English Literature 
 has often been imitative enough ; it has clung to its precedents 
 and traditions; it has been characteristically slow to change; 
 but it has never reUnquished its right to liberty. So soon as 
 there has been any sign of a consensus of opinion as to what 
 Literature is or should be, English Literature has then be- 
 come something else. An unwiUingness to accept any stan- 
 dards has been one salient characteristic of its growth. 
 
 In the third place. Form or Art may be viewed as something 
 opposed to fact, to actuality, to life. Evidently there is 
 need in Literature for both fact and fancy, actuality and art, 
 truth and beauty; but there is a tendency to insist on Art as 
 the essential. This tendency has usually resulted in limiting 
 in some way the interpretation of life, in restricting the choice 
 and treatment of subjects, in placing some refinement or 
 abstraction of life as the goal of Literature. We have ob- 
 served that English Literature has been hostile to all rules 
 and restrictions. Further, to put the case boldly, it has been 
 skeptical as to the possibility of making its imitation of life 
 an Art. It has seen the incongruity, the precipitousness, 
 the confusion, the eternal changeableness of life, and it has 
 not readily believed that an imitation of these should observe 
 any law or order.
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 259 
 
 We have had great artists, but they have rarely given a 
 single-hearted devotion to their goddess. They have also 
 worshipped some cause, some truth, or some fact. They have 
 frankly tired of Art, as they knew her, and, like Dryden, 
 voted to please themselves. Or, like Wordsworth, they have 
 created an Art of their own, and then disregarded it. We 
 have not produced artists as Sophocles and Horace, or as 
 Racine and Flaubert were artists. Enghsh Literature has 
 been suspicious of any guide imposed upon its explanation of 
 experience ; and it has come to no acceptance of any abstrac- 
 tion, refinement, or generalization of life, call it what you 
 will: Beauty, or Nature, or Form, or Art, or Realism. It 
 has been devoted to an extension of Art, but not to its refine- 
 ment; to its popularization, but not to its perfection. 
 
 So much for what English Literature has lacked in art, 
 or in certain kinds of art. But it must be remembered that 
 Literature is the only one of the fine arts in which the English 
 people have greatly excelled. It is the one kind of artistic 
 effort which has greatly attracted them and in which they 
 have originated and maintained a national tradition. As I 
 have hinted, the deficiencies and failures that we have 
 been noticing are the negative sides of positive accomplish- 
 ments. 
 
 If English Literature has not been classical in form any 
 more than in content, if it has not been distinguished by the 
 virtues of simplicity, dignity, and sanity; it has neverthe- 
 less had its own trinity of graces, — variety, novelty, and 
 abundance. Beauty for it has been something rich and 
 strange, varied and startling. It has not loved moderation, 
 but aspiration; not harmony, but picturesqueness; not 
 sanity or even unity, but it has ransacked every clime and 
 every creed for some form and expression for the two irrec- 
 oncilable opposites, which it is the function of Literature 
 to unite — the world of experience and the world of vision. 
 If English Literature again has disdained authority, and has
 
 260 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 lacked urbanity, and self-criticism, and deference to a social 
 consensus, it has welcomed experiment and innovation and 
 has triumphed through its individual variations. Take, for 
 example, the matter of poetic style. Only for a few barren 
 years in the eighteenth century has there been any general 
 agreement as to the requisites of poetical diction; and that 
 agreement rested on the absurdity that everything which 
 Shakspere had done was wrong. Well, the power and glory 
 of Shakspere's style lie in no inconsiderable measure in his 
 unrestrained use of figures of speech. And how over-inge- 
 nious, far-fetched, mixed, and absurd they sometimes are! 
 And yet how amazingly abundant and beautiful ! How they 
 create associations and resemblances, how they bind the 
 world together in our minds, how they sally forth and cap- 
 ture new figures, how they translate the things of every day 
 into faery land or the affair of a moment into the sweep of 
 destiny! Theirs is a beauty which bows to no authority or 
 decorum, it is the beauty of adventure and discovery, of 
 motion and change, of the fast mail and the aeroplane. Again, 
 if English Literature has not suffered itself to be abstracted 
 from life and fact and moral values, it has, in its effort for an 
 enlargement of its subject-matter, sought also for an accom- 
 panying variety and experimentation in expression. It has 
 sought for forms that would reveal the fullness of hfe, for an 
 art that would have power to affect men's conduct. And in 
 nearly every kind and form of Literature there has been both 
 high and varied achievement. In lyric poetry, for example, 
 we have given new splendor to foreign forms hke the ode, the 
 elegy, and the sonnet, we have made the most of suggestions 
 from our ballads and folk-songs, and we have created a new 
 realm of melody and beauty in the poems of Shelley and 
 Keats. Our Literature has indeed been extraordinarily fertile 
 in its creation of new art-forms. I have mentioned the Shak- 
 sperean drama, the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the 
 historical romances of Scott, and these are only the striking
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 261 
 
 successes of an art that has always been at its best in innova- 
 tion and invention. 
 
 If the Enghsh people have not greatly excelled in music, 
 painting, or sculpture, it is perhaps partly because these 
 arts have seemed to them too abstracted from life, too un- 
 practical. At all events, they have tended to regard Litera- 
 ture as a practical art. They have not been much concerned 
 with it as a profession, a technic, or an abstraction from life; 
 but they have always been intensely interested in its sub- 
 stance, in its revelation and criticism of life and conduct, for 
 that is what the substance of Literature has meant to them 
 in the long run. Moral purpose {i.e. what seemed to the ^ 
 authors moral) has influenced nearly all of our writing, and 
 the bearing of a book upon conduct has been a large part of 
 its attraction for most readers. The Moral, indeed, has 
 been too much with us. It has colored our metaphors and 
 phrases, subdued our fancy, intruded where it did not belong, 
 as into the " Faery Queen" and " Christabel," and too often 
 led to didacticism and sermonizing. And its excess is the 
 token of an essential trait. English Literature has never ^^' 
 been able to escape moral values or to imagine a moral world 
 separated from actuality. It has never been able to fancy 
 itself in some superior sphere whence it could look down upon 
 this mundane tangle with disinterested languor. Milton, 
 the greatest of our artists, in the sense in which I have been 
 using the word, chose for his subject " The Fall of Man," and 
 all the theology attached thereto, because this seemed to him 
 the most vital and moral subject conceivable. It was Puri- 
 tanism which he sought to translate into sublime music. Two 
 centuries later another English artist chose for his theme one 
 which Milton rejected, because he saw an opportunity to 
 sentimentalize and moralize the stories of King Arthur into 
 a practical ethical commentary on the life of his own day. 
 Keats is the only one of our great poets who saw the world 
 unclouded by questions of conduct; and if he had lived a few
 
 262 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 years longer he would have been a moralist. The very criti- 
 cism of one age on another has usually been ethical. Dr. 
 Johnson found Shakspere insufficiently moral; and Coleridge 
 found Dr. Johnson and his age sadly lacking in pure morahty; 
 and Coleridge has since come in for his full share of moral 
 judgments. Classicism and Romanticism for us have meant 
 moral principles and interpretations; our Battle of the 
 Books is ever a struggle over conduct, a conflict of sweetness 
 and light against the powers of darkness. And if Ethics 
 has maintained a jealous guardianship over Art, she has also 
 been a helping handmaid. It was when the Bible had come 
 to be regarded as a sovereign guide in practical conduct that 
 we made it our own as Literature. It remains the greatest 
 monument of our prose and our most amazing display of sheer 
 literary genius. 
 
 The English critic who has thought most closely over the 
 questions which we are discussing, though he was prone to 
 hold up French example to his countrymen and to insist on 
 the unapproachable excellence of the classical models, was yet 
 too thorough-going an Englishman to admit any interest in 
 Literature higher than the interest in conduct. Matthew 
 Arnold found the essential of Literature to be a moral criti- 
 cism of life. And that probably comes as near as any other 
 definition to expressing the meaning of English Literature to 
 Englishmen. 
 
 This moral criticism of life has been more than an ethics, 
 it has been a philosophy and a religion. The English people 
 have not been system-makers any more than they have been 
 sculptors or musicians. They have not devoted themselves 
 to philosophy or to the fine arts with full-hearted allegiance. 
 They have preferred a halfway ground, the bridge which 
 Literature provides from the real to the abstract, from pure 
 reason to experience. The powers which they have reserved 
 from the fine arts and metaphysics seem to have sought 
 refuge in Literature. There the individual has been left to
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 263 
 
 work out his own salvation. And though his search for an 
 explanation and reconciliation of life may have reached no 
 goal, whether in theory or religion, the history of his solitary 
 struggle has often made itself into poetry. Our Literature 
 has ever been seeking truth in her hiding-places and calling 
 upon men to worship at strange shrines. It has found in the 
 escapades of "Tom Jones" a system of ethics; in the land- 
 scape about Tintern Abbey the revelation of a deity 
 
 " Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns " 
 
 and from the wild stories of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, it has 
 made its symbols of eternal moral conflict and victory. It has 
 been the lever which the individual has pressed against the im- 
 movable world in undaunted confidence that the world can 
 be moved. It has refused to accept this life as fixed, static, 
 adjudicated. It has viewed life as a struggle, a journey, a 
 progress. It has ever been proclaiming new gospels and 
 propaganda; constructing bridges across philosophical 
 chasms, preparing new guides and new faiths. Futile enough 
 these may seem in the retrospect, broken bridges, crumbling 
 towers, and vanished faiths; but our way has led over these 
 bridges, and has been lighted by these beacons, and sum- 
 moned by these visions. The EngUsh race would be poorer 
 indeed had not its Literature so constantly sought to advance 
 from the confusion of fact to the assurance of faith. 
 
 Our insistence on conduct first and art second, our negli- 
 gence in regard to standards and definitions, our unwilling- 
 ness to accept direction or to come to a common agreement, 
 our eagerness to crowd our vessels with precious freight 
 before we have assured ourselves of their structural stability 
 — all these national characteristics have unquestionably re- 
 sulted in prodigious waste. Not merely the waste that 
 must always come from mediocre and barren effort, but the 
 waste of intellectual and imaginative greatness struggling 
 without safe guidance; the waste that arises from refusal to
 
 264 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 submit to discipline, to learn the result of past experiment and 
 success, to control both ideas and form by reference to a 
 common basis of social agreement, and to preface imaginative 
 expression with intellectual culture. Much of our most 
 splendid verse has lost its appeal because the poets dedicated 
 themselves to ethical or theological propaganda, soon to be 
 discarded as outworn or absurd. We need recall only Spen- 
 ser's ethics, Milton's theology, Pope's deism, and Shelley's 
 Godwinism, With the expansion of interests due to modern 
 life, our Literature has wandered uncontrolled in many paths 
 that lead nowhere, least of all to grandeur and permanence 
 of achievement. 
 
 All this waste and expense of spirit is most manifest in the 
 nineteenth century. Tennyson, devoting poetry to feeble 
 compromises between old religion and a new society; Arnold, 
 deserting the muse of his " Scholar Gypsy " to write " Saint 
 Paul and Protestantism " ; Browning persisting in eccentricity; 
 Carlyle and Ruskin disdaining all discipline; Dickens prosti- 
 tuting his marvelous power of invention to the worst tastes 
 of his public ; George Eliot spoiling novels in order to make 
 ethical treatises; George Meredith, distracting his superb 
 genius in about all of these ways and some others ; — surely, 
 no other national literature in this period has brought to 
 its service so much of intellectual and imaginative genius; 
 and yet how comparatively little survives that is surely a 
 thing of beauty for the ages. How much we seem to have 
 needed a standard of perfection and an agreement as to the 
 goals of literary endeavor. 
 
 But, as has been already hinted, this waste has its compen- 
 sations, or even its justification. The very conditions of 
 individualism and popularization which have been respon- 
 sible for this confusion and uncertainty of effort have been 
 the attractions that have summoned genius to Literature. 
 Let us balance the account of waste and profit in an individual 
 example, Lord Byron.
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 265 
 
 For two generations past, criticism has been indicating 
 the faults of his poetry: its carelessness and even sloven- 
 liness in execution, its lack of profound thought, its departures 
 from our accepted standards of morality. Clearly he cuts 
 but a poor figure beside a painstaking artist like Horace 
 or an artist and thinker like Goethe. Criticism has been 
 inclined to pronounce him a bad man and a bad poet. But 
 all Europe has read him, and surely English-speaking people 
 will long continue to read him. Why? Because, in spite of 
 some sentimentality and insincerity, his poems give a tre- 
 mendous revelation of a man and his adversaries. For 
 Byron was fighting alone against everybody, not only Bob 
 Southey, and the bhnd, mad, old King, and Castlereagh and 
 the Holy Alliance; but also against the shams, hypocrisies, 
 artificialities, and tyrannies of European society, and against 
 the religion, faith, and even the idealisms and philosophies 
 of his day. He said no final word about anything, and very 
 few wholly true words, but he wrote eloquent, powerful, and 
 effective poetry, crowded with life and struggle and his per- 
 sonal vitality. Genius was in many ways wasting its efforts, 
 yet creating a fresh, memorable, and irresistibly interesting 
 criticism of fife, and in that great satire "Don Juan" a new 
 and amazing form of poetry. And Byron's case is typical 
 rather than unique. ^English Literature has attracted great 
 men who, having forced themselves into conflict with their 
 environments, have found victory only when their individual 
 struggles have led to imaginative expression — an expression 
 that must have its trials and experiments, and succeed not 
 by adherence to old models but only through the discovery 
 of new. Is this not in some measure true of Marlowe, and 
 Wordsworth, and Fielding, and Swift, and even of Milton? 
 
 Let us take another example, this time of a period and a 
 class of popular Literature, the Elizabethan drama. There, 
 in defiance of rules, models, and critics. Literature found its
 
 266 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 shrines in a few crude playhouses that entertained a brutal 
 and almost illiterate populace. Thither came young poets 
 eager to create beautiful and sonorous phrases, but eager 
 also to please the crowd and to record something of the ex- 
 citement and action with which they knew, from both story 
 and experience, that life was filled. A great number of 
 plays resulted, very few of which are free from vulgarity, 
 inconsistencies, bad taste, and sensationalism; hardly one of 
 which is free from manifest and distressful faults that de- 
 tract from the consummation of a consistent and unified pur- 
 pose. Yet the conditions which made inevitable this extrava- 
 gant expense of talent aroused the ambition of the supreme 
 genius. Even without Shakspere the product of those condi- 
 tions is still splendid and appealing after these centuries. For 
 its faults and its excellences are similar to his. Even his 
 greatest plays are by no means as symmetrical or harmo- 
 nious or dignified as those of Racine or Sophocles. And, 
 on the other hand, the phrases that have so often been used 
 to sum up the effect of Shakspere upon the civiUzed world, 
 and that have become almost dedicated to his memory, 
 these phrases, had he never lived, would have found service 
 in expressing our debt to those who prepared his way. For 
 they too have renewed their power and charm through the 
 years by means of their wealth of life, their revelation of 
 man's motives, their idealization of his mirth and grief and 
 passionate conflict; by their incidental wisdom, and their 
 bursts of superbly beautiful and suggestive poetry. " Out of 
 the struggle and waste of their free individual efforts to please 
 the public, there came a new Literature, a new kind of drama 
 which wears the scars received in its endeavor to excite and 
 horrify and amuse, but which in its great master has been for 
 the Enghsh race a literature and a philosophy and almost a 
 religion. 
 
 These examples suggest how completely the wasteful- 
 ness of English Literature has been justified by its leaders
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 267 
 
 and its masterpieces. Still further, they bear witness that 
 its encouragement of unrestrained, manifold and waste- 
 ful individual effort, and its uncritical and popular eager- 
 ness for new subjects and new forms, have triumphed in the 
 wealth of experience that Literature has thereby brought 
 under its transforming power. *It has mirrored life from 
 many ethical angles, refracted through many creeds and phi- 
 losophies, and through many commanding personalities; but 
 its great victory is the fullness of life which it has imitated, 
 the vast and ever-widening range of experience which it has 
 opened to our imagination and reflection. 
 
 Here surely is God's plenty, an abundance so varied that 
 it baffles description and specification. We might dwell 
 upon the observation, appreciation, and worship which our 
 Literature has given to external nature. The world of 
 mountain, forest, and cloud has been the source of our imagery, 
 the key to our emotions, our very standard of beauty. But 
 to dwell on the treatment of nature is to be reminded of that 
 other world of cities and crowds, of Chaucer's pilgrims, Ben 
 Jonson's gulls, Kipling's soldiers, and Mark Twain's river 
 folk. The past century, which has meditated with Words- 
 worth at Tintern Abbey, has also feasted with Burns among 
 the Jolly Beggars. "Our Literature has indeed been loath to 
 depart far from actuaUty. it has frequented the busy haunts 
 of men; it has delighted in the incongruities and absurdities 
 of their daily living; it has mingled its beggars and clowns 
 with its kings and seers; it has faced the miseries and trivi- 
 alities of existence. But if we are tempted to dwell on its 
 realism, we are reminded of the romance which it has found in 
 London streets and in the Heart of Midlothian, as well as 
 in distant lands and past ages, and of the mysticism with 
 which it has glorified hut and palace, sunset and the mind of 
 man. It is useless to analyze. " The Essays of Elia," " Don 
 Juan," " The Heart of Midlothian," and " Epipsychidion " were 
 written within a few years of one another. Thackeray wrote
 
 268 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 both " Vanity Fair," and " Henry Esmond." A new gospel of 
 nature, a keen analysis of human motives, a comedy of follies, 
 and an idealistic philosophy — all in richest measure — are 
 to be found in the novels and poems of George Meredith. 
 Falstaff, Ariel, Rosalind, and Lear inhabit one room in the 
 imagination of each of us. X)ther Hteratures may perhaps 
 have attained a finer art, or a greater surety and precision in 
 their criticism of hfe than ours, but none has equaled it in 
 the abundance, variety, and comprehensiveness of the Hfe 
 which it attempts to interpret. 
 
 There is, moreover, another achievement of English Litera- 
 ture which may justify its methods. '*'As it has divided 
 and scattered its efforts, as it has been unorganized, undi- 
 rected, popular, journalistic, democratic, individual, it has 
 had all the freer opportunity to know the shifting and com- 
 plex trends of national life, and to awaken that life to the 
 more inomediate and imperious calls of reason, imagination, 
 or spirit. *No other national Literature, through a long 
 period, in times both of intellectual advance and hesitation, 
 of both emotional stir and quiescence, has so intimately con- 
 cerned itself with national morals, and so constantly influ- 
 enced the main currents of national activity. And this 
 function of social service has been increasing in importance. 
 In the Victorian era, which we have foimd so neglectful of 
 literary standards. Literature has been of greater social and 
 ethical stimulus than ever before. This era inherited the 
 Uterary traditions of the preceding epoch of Wordsworth and 
 Keats, but it also confronted great changes in ways of think- 
 ing, and the great change of the industrial revolution that 
 created the new existence of factories, railways, huge indus- 
 tries, and crowded cities in which we still live. From this 
 new existence our Literature could not hold aloof. It throbs 
 with a new sympathy for those who toil unceasingly in poverty, 
 and a new bewilderment upon the realization that the world 
 which is changing so rapidly is still so full of misery and hope-
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 269 
 
 lessness. Without the industrial revolution, Carlyle, Ruskin, 
 Dickens, Newman, George Eliot, William Morris, Matthew- 
 Arnold, might have written greater Literature, or they might 
 not have written at all. But, as the world went, the main 
 impulse and the main characteristic of Victorian Literature 
 became this great sense of pity for things as they are and of 
 an imperious duty to make them better. 
 
 If in the future our Literature is even more unwilhng than 
 in the past to confine itself to the interpretation of a hmited 
 and accepted portion of experience into an enduring form, 
 shall we not find a consolation and recompense in the promise 
 that the continued multiplication and enlargement of its 
 purposes will result in a more immediate, more lively, and 
 more effective social service? Even in these United States, 
 in our own day, when we are bemoaning the lack of dignity 
 in our Art, is not this tradition of service becoming a most 
 vital, a most fertile, a most promising fact? Is it not felt 
 in our books, our plays, our magazines, our newspapers? 
 May it not again prove the summons that will call genius to 
 Literature? 
 
 Here, at all events, there is already instituted a new devel- 
 opment of English Literature. Looking backward, it is 
 natural to make American Literature a part of English Litera- 
 ture, as I have not hesitated to do in this lecture; but, look- 
 ing forward, it is clear that the national division must con- 
 tinue, for wherever there is a real national life its expression 
 must differ from that of its neighbors. The great stream of 
 English Literature, though it continue to represent the same 
 language, race, and traditions, must henceforth run in separate 
 channels. It is no longer the Literature of one nation, but 
 the Literature of the English nations and peoples. In 
 America, however, we have not forgotten our ancestry. We 
 brought Shakspere and the English Bible to Virginia and 
 Plymouth, and English Literature has continued the bulwark 
 of our education. It is no small matter that we teach its
 
 270 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 masterpieces in all our schools. Thereby we have made it 
 the doorway of our institutions. Through it every aUen 
 child enters into the inheritance of our manners, our hopes, 
 and our ideals. We are gathering other traditions, making 
 new experiments, and beginning traditions of our own; but 
 we shall not prove recreant to our great heritage. Our Liter- 
 ature, like that of the mother land, will remain free from any 
 domination or limitation of criticism or caste. It will arrive 
 at a united purpose, a national promise and ideal, but only 
 through an entire freedom of individual initiative and experi- 
 ment. It is already moral and social in its aims, intent to 
 reflect the fullness of life, devoted to the democratization of 
 art, and sustained by one trait which the older nations seem 
 to be losing, an indomitable optimism. We have kindled 
 our torch at the altars of English Literature, and we shall bear 
 it far and wide as our experience broadens. In its light we 
 shall examine men and their surroundings, and we shall de- 
 clare, " Here is the world as we see it." And, in that spirit of 
 reform, which we believe is the fountain of eternal youth, 
 we shall add, "And here are ways to make the world better." 
 I have now examined some of the manifestations of the 
 literary principle among the English people. In Athens 
 that principle propagated among a genuine aristocracy dis- 
 tinguished by a highly developed culture, and it reflected a 
 restricted tradition and a simplified and rationalized life. 
 Since that time it has never found an environment so finely 
 adapted to its perfect development. It has traveled far, 
 and often has lodged in unfriendly places, but it has not 
 lost its vitality. This spirit of Literature, which is created 
 of sympathy and imagination, which is forever working to 
 reflect, interpret, and transform experience, which must for- 
 ever create and propagate so long as man's mind is not a clod, 
 has now for thirteen centuries been thriving and multiplying 
 among English people. Nowhere else, even among modem 
 nations, has it been diffused more widely among the people;
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 271 
 
 nor has it elsewhere loaded itself with more burdensome 
 duties. It has resulted in a Literature, neglectful of a basis 
 of criticism, culture, or social agreement; a Literature, which, 
 through the freedom it offered to individual expression, has 
 attracted genius and constantly gathered to itself new subjects 
 and new forms, and widened the range of ideas and emotions 
 with which it deals. The main outlet for the nation's artistic 
 aspirations, it has also laden itself with the duties of phi- 
 losophy, religion, and practical ethics; but if it has lost thereby 
 as a fine art, it has gained as an efficient servant of society and 
 as a leavener of the national life. Art with us has been 
 harnessed in service. Apollo has been in toil for Admetus. 
 Heavy have been his burdens, strange his yoke-fellows, varied 
 and ever multiplying have been his tasks. But if the god has 
 been hidden, life has been illuminated. 
 
 " God, of whom music 
 And song and blood are pure, 
 The day was never darkened 
 That had Thee here obscure ! " 
 
 In a day like ours, when we are wont to turn to the bacteri- 
 ologist for guidance and philosophy, the claims of Literature 
 to preserve the nation's health and to direct her future, may 
 seem less convincing than they did to Spenser, and Milton, 
 and Wordsworth, and Browning, and Emerson. Or, if we 
 survey other of the great achievements of the English people, 
 their creation of free political institutions, their system of 
 law, their building of this great democracy, their accomplish- 
 ments in trade, invention, and science, we shall not be in- 
 clined to claim for Literature too great a part in the advance 
 of our civilization. But let us render to Phoebus Apollo his 
 due. In all this advance of the English people, the bright god 
 has been a present helper. He has been the companion of 
 her sons, and their labors have quickened to his music. In 
 every generation Literature has presented much of the best
 
 272 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 that has been known or thought, and it has united, as has 
 no other endeavor, the imagination and the intellectual 
 genius of this vast people. It has guarded the past, and 
 handed down her glories and lessons to the present, ^t has 
 been the voice of prophets descrying the future and caUing 
 men to her allurements. It has helped to make the idealisms 
 of its visionaries the practices of their children. Who shall 
 measure the boundaries or predict the conquests of its mag- 
 nificent empire over the minds and hearts of mankind ?
 
 XIV 
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 By Adolphe Cohn, Professor of the Romance 
 Languages and Literatures 
 
 The claim to distinction of a national literature may 
 rest upon the highest degree of excellence in a special line or 
 upon excellence of a high degree in a number of branches; 
 and again it may lie in the presence in all sorts of produc- 
 tions of a quality which seems to be the special possession 
 of that literature. 
 
 In regard to French Literature it may hardly be disputed 
 that its special characteristics are, first, the variety of fields 
 in which it has produced works of lasting value rather than 
 the commanding eminence of a few monuments of literary 
 genius. A French counterpart of the "Divina Commedia," 
 or of " Faust," it would be idle to look for. But survey as you 
 will the whole domain of Literature and it will be hard to 
 discover in it any spot not marked by the production of 
 some French work which has remained a portion of mankind's 
 literary heritage. Poetry in all its forms, even the epic, 
 witness the wonderful epic production of the Middle Ages; 
 drama, romance, history, memoirs, letters, ethics, philosophy, 
 science, — in short, whatever man may have to say to his 
 fellow-man has been at some time expressed by some French- 
 man in a form upon which it has seemed difl&cult if not im- 
 possible to improve. 
 
 Then, if, instead of surveying the outward appearance of 
 the literary domain, we choose to look below the surface and 
 T 273
 
 274 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 to discover what is the chief and most generally diffused 
 quality present in the works of French writers, it is not diflS- 
 cult to find that the chief merits by which they are distin- 
 guished is the presence in them of a quality which may be 
 called essentially national, viz. clearness. More than a cen- 
 tury has elapsed since Rivarol wrote "that which is not 
 clear is not French;" and few sayings have had the good 
 fortune of being repeated oftener than this pronouncement 
 of the most celebrated of the panegyrists of the French 
 language. 
 
 But one who wishes to apprehend the real spirit of French 
 Literature must not be satisfied with that altogether too easily 
 made discovery of the quality of clearness as the most 
 generally possessed by the works which it contains. He must 
 go deeper and discover the cause of the phenomenon. Nor will 
 this be a very difficult task. The clearness and lucidity of the 
 French language is a natural consequence of the logical char- 
 acter of the French mind. Man invented language because 
 he felt the need of communicating with his fellow-man. 
 If he had lived alone, language would never have been created. 
 If the desired result is to be reached, what we say has to be 
 understood, and must therefore be, above all, clearly intelligible. 
 Thence the first duty of the speaker is to express himself 
 with clearness. A writer is a speaker; he does not write 
 for himself, but for the benefit or enjoyment of others; he 
 has something to say which he wishes them to understand. 
 Literature is a conversation. Thus Descartes, in his "Dis- 
 cours de la Methode " : " I know that the reading of good books 
 is like a conversation with the best people of bygone ages." 
 And here the most modern and subjective of the great poets 
 of France, Alfred de Musset, is found in full agreement with 
 the seventeenth-century philosopher. When trying to give 
 us his reasons for loving poetry above all things else, he tells 
 us that he loved it because " it is intelligible to the world, 
 though spoken by the poet alone."
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 275 
 
 This conception of language as a device, having for its 
 object to make the intercourse between the various members 
 of the human race easier, conditioned the French language 
 not only in the formation of its grammatical and syntactical 
 constructions, but even in the formation of its pronunciation. 
 Language was not only to be understood, but also uttered 
 with as little difficulty as possible. This does not mean 
 that French is a language a correct pronunciation of which 
 can be easily acquired by foreigners, whose ear and organs 
 of speech have been fashioned by some other scheme of 
 pronunciation, but that it does not require any strenuous 
 physical effort. An accumulation of consonants without the 
 interposition of any vowel does require some such effort; 
 therefore such accumulations were banished from the language 
 of France. A curious result followed, which acted upon the 
 very essence of French poetry, viz. the creation of nasal 
 syllables. Originally nasal syllables were created only 
 when the nasal consonant, n or m, was followed by another 
 consonant, the object in view being to reduce the number of 
 consonants separating one vowel from another. The utter- 
 ance of words was thereby made easier, but the idiom was 
 deprived of one of the most musical elements of language. 
 Take such words as the English slumber, the Italian cantar; 
 such a line as this suggestive line of Heine's in German : In 
 Abendsonnenschein ; these examples will suffice to show what 
 a price the French paid for the acquisition of an easily uttered 
 and admirably lucid language. 
 
 The latent preoccupations which thus acted upon the 
 modeling of the idiom itself, already explain one of the most 
 striking facts that appear in a general survey of French 
 Literature, the absence in it of the great preponderance of 
 poetry over prose which may be noted in almost all the 
 other literatures of Europe. But the effect of them was most 
 marked in French poetry itself. With its musical element 
 reduced to a minimum, and made for a group of hmnan beings
 
 276 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 bent upon understanding fully every word which was told 
 them, it could not have for its object to lead through musical 
 combinations of syllables to that part of the poet's thoughts 
 or feelings which he preferred to leave untold, and to suggest 
 instead of expressing it. This explains the failure of those 
 poets of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who, like 
 Emile Verhaeren and other men of undoubted talent, tried 
 to make French poetry a musically suggestive poetry to con- 
 quer the ear of the general public. In France poetry has to be 
 as clear as prose itself, and unable to be both musical and clear, 
 these men sacrificed clearness to music and paid the penalty. 
 
 In French Literature the line that divides poetry from prose 
 is less distinctly marked than it is elsewhere. While the 
 poet is not absolved from the necessity of uttering his thoughts 
 and feelings in absolutely clear language, neither is the prose 
 writer excused from pleasing the ear as well as satisfying 
 the mind. Language having been created for social inter- 
 course, any one that uses it in harsh and repelling tones acts 
 against its very purpose. Boileau's advice, "Shun the odi- 
 ous combination of unpleasant sounds," is surely meant for the 
 writer of prose as well as for the poet. 
 
 This conversational character of Literature appears in the 
 very form of a number of the masterpieces of French Litera- 
 ture, from Montaigne's "Essays" down; and even going 
 farther back than Montaigne, as that in which the poet of 
 the medieval "Chanson de Geste" always familiarily ad- 
 dressed his audience. Pascal is conversational to as high a 
 degree as Montaigne. He is so, of course, in the "Pro- 
 vincial Letters," but no less in his " Pens^es" ; no mere 
 communing with himself, but an ardent expostulation with 
 an imaginary guest always present by his side, and whose 
 soul seems in imminent peril of damnation. 
 
 In a language built upon such lines poetry will not look for 
 the exceptional, or rather the extraordinary in man, but, on 
 the contrary, will try to bring forward the traits that bind
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 277 
 
 all men together. Lamartine in his " Bonaparte," speaking 
 of Napoleon, exclaims, " Rien d'humain ne battait sous son 
 epaisse armure," and Hugo, who tried to bring the great war- 
 rior as near as possible to the great herd of mankind, wrote 
 in his "Napoleon II" " Mais les cceurs de lions sont lesvrais 
 coeurs de peres: II aimait son fils, ce vainqueur!" It was not 
 Lamartine, but Hugo, who was here to be accepted by the 
 people as the great Napoleonic poet. Least of all will 
 be loved the poet who writes merely for himself. The 
 genuine admiration and the strenuous exertions of all the 
 great French critics have not been able to make Alfred de 
 Vigny a poet dear to most of the readers of French verse. 
 They will, in spite of his inferior art, turn to Beranger, and 
 with his old sergeant repeat, for instance, a line summing 
 up in a few words the tragic condition of France, when 
 the return of the Bourbons had exiled the tricolor of the 
 Revolution and reinstated the white flag of the old 
 monarchy: " C'est un drapeau que je ne connais pas!" 
 And while the regiment passes by, with drimas beating, the 
 old warrior remains motionless on his beat, lulling his grand- 
 children to sleep with tales of departed and forebodings of 
 returning glory. Even in poetry, then, which usually con- 
 tains the most subjective part of Literature, the French 
 seem to enjoy, and therefore to produce, only what is common 
 to all mankind. The saying of Montaigne, that "each man 
 has in him an exemplar of the human conditions," might 
 serve as a motto for the whole of their literary production. 
 Among all literary forms there is one in which man is pre- 
 sented more completely than in any other, viz. the drama. 
 Elsewhere man has to be suggested by the writer and im- 
 agined by the reader. On the stage he is seen, almost touched. 
 He moves and speaks. That a Literature which has for its 
 object only this communication between man and man by 
 which the speaker makes himself, his dispositions, his desires, 
 his feelings, his needs, better understood by others, should
 
 278 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 excel in this typical form of production is only what was 
 to be expected. The most striking phenomenon in French 
 Literature is the uninterrupted flow of its dramatic current 
 from Corneille's "Cid" down to the present day. Compare 
 this with the other great Literatures of the world. What 
 is there in English Literature after Shakspere, or in German 
 before Lessing, What of commanding greatness in Spanish 
 after the Golden Age of Lope and Calderon? In France 
 note the fact first, that the appearance of the "Cid" is not 
 an unexpected event. Corneille's drama does not, as was 
 believed for a long time when the real history of the French 
 drama was but very imperfectly known, come out suddenly 
 from the utter darkness of ignorance. It is the result of the 
 strivings of one generation and another after dramatic per- 
 fection. While the medieval mystery and miracle play 
 slowly, very slowly, sinks into its grave, the modern forms, 
 tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy, not less slowly come into 
 shape, developing their more or less complicated structure 
 from the mere embryo of Jodelle in the middle of the 
 sixteenth to the perfected model of the following century. 
 And from that time to the present day not one half-century 
 has elapsed which has not enriched French dramatic Literature 
 with some works of lasting value. The half-century which 
 followed the production of the"Cid" (1636-1686) witnessed 
 the production not only of the other masterpieces due to 
 Corneille's genius, but also the whole of Moliere's production 
 and nearly the whole of Racine's. In the half-century fol- 
 lowing (1686-1736), appeared the last two plays of Racine, 
 oneof them, " Athalie," deservingto be considered the starting- 
 point of the modern freer and spectacular drama, Le Sage's and 
 Regnard's comedies, and the two most striking of Voltaire's 
 tragedies, "Brutus" and "Zaire." Between 1736 and 1786 
 we have, in addition to the rest of Voltaire's dramatic works, 
 the comedies of Marivaux and Sedaine, and the two dazzling 
 comedies of Beaumarchais, "The Barber of Seville," and
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 279 
 
 "Figaro's Wedding." It is towards the close of the next fifty 
 years' period that the Romantic revolt tried to break the 
 supremacy of the Classical School. Hugo's "Hernani" was 
 produced in 1830, and had been preceded by the dramatic 
 debuts of Alexandre Dumas, the elder; Casimir Delavigne, 
 whose " Louis XI " used to be one of the favorite parts of that 
 sterling English tragedian, Sir Henry Irving, belongs to 
 the same generation. And then comes the age of Scribe and 
 Sardou, of Emile Augier and Alexandre Dumas, the younger. 
 The present uncompleted half-century does not seem more 
 likely than the preceding ones to be considered barren of 
 great dramatic works by the ages to come. It will suffice here 
 to single out the production of Rostand's "Cyrano de Ber- 
 gerac " in the last days of the year 1897. Without going into 
 any detailed study of the French drama, for which time 
 would now be lacking, we may here call attention to two or 
 three points which will make it still clearer that the drama 
 is the most original, the most rational part of French Litera- 
 ture. It is now universally acknowledged that Moliere is 
 the greatest dramatic genius ever produced by France. In 
 fact, he and Shakspere stand out as the two dramatic giants 
 of modern nations. But in judging Moliere and assigning 
 him his rank in the galaxy of the world's dramatic poets, 
 it should not be forgotten that Moliere died before Time had 
 allowed him to deliver in full his message to mankind. From 
 his return to Paris, after his '' Wander jahre" through the 
 provinces of France, to his death in February, 1673, hardly 
 fifteen years elapsed. His average productivity during that 
 period was two plays a year; how many of them, ''The 
 Miser," "Tartufe," "Don Juan," "The Misanthrope," "The 
 Pedantic Women," masterpieces, the profound insight of 
 which into the recesses of human nature time only serves 
 more clearly to demonstrate; composed by him only in the 
 intervals left free by his arduous labors as actor, theatrical 
 manager, and court entertainer, they are a prodigious example
 
 280 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 of human industry. At the close of the period his genius 
 does not betray the shghtest sign of enfeeblement, his 
 last two plays, "The Pedantic Women" and the "Malade 
 Imaginaire," being among his best. And then he dies, hardly 
 fifty-one years old, carrying to his grave how many other 
 unwritten masterpieces! 
 
 Now let us look at the Romantic drama. It blazed for a while 
 and then went out. Wliat remains of it to-day is simply 
 Hugo's dramatic production. It begins with " Hernani " 
 (1830); it closes with the " Burgraves " (1843). The 
 more we study Hugo's dramas the more clearly we see that 
 Hugo was not intended by nature for a dramatist. There 
 would be nothing easier than to show how absurd, from a 
 purely dramatic point of view, such works as " Hernani," 
 "Marion Delorme," and the "King's Diversion" are; and the 
 climax is reached in the lurid, but none the less majestic, 
 " Burgraves." But everywhere the lyric splendor of Hugo's 
 verse blinds us to the childishness of his dramatic construction. 
 Nowhere more than in his dramas has Hugo demonstrated 
 that he was essentially a lyric, perhaps also an epic, poet, 
 but not a dramatist. Why then did he throw so much of 
 his strength and vitality into dramatic form as to hold us 
 spellbound, in spite of faults which would have brought 
 ridicule upon any other writer? Because he had to. As the 
 head of the Romantic School he had, under penalty of having 
 the new school unanimously proclaimed inferior to the old, 
 which had produced the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, 
 to demonstrate that the rebels, whom he led in their on- 
 slaughts against worn-out literary dogmas, were as able as 
 their forerunners to win the laurels of the stage. So strongly 
 embedded in the French mind was the conviction that the 
 drama is the highest and most complete form of poetry! 
 
 And later, after Shakspere's supremacy, so long disputed 
 in France, had finally come to be acknowledged, it would have 
 been for the French language a sign of inferiority had it been
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 281 
 
 found impossible to prepare for the French stage adequate 
 renderings of the great English masterpieces. This naturali- 
 zation of Shakspere upon the French stage at last took place, 
 not through the efforts of any one man, but by the labors of 
 a legion of dramatists and poets, anxious to vie with each 
 other in enriching the most dramatic Literature with the 
 most powerful of all dramatic works. Paul Meurice, 
 Jules Lacroix, Edmond Harancourt, Paul Delair, Auguste 
 Dorchain, Louis Legrand, and others thus cooperated 
 in a work which was intended to add to the dramatic 
 Literature of their country what it needed in order to be- 
 come the most complete, as it already was the most varied, 
 of all dramatic Literatures. 
 
 But, striking as it is, this extraordinary vitality of the drama 
 is not the most important phenomenon in the history of French 
 Literature. It is merely an effect, more visible perhaps than 
 any other, of a cause which pervades the whole intellectual 
 life of the nation, and which has been alluded to above already, 
 viz. the conviction that there is no essential difference be- 
 tween a speaker's and a writer's words; that, just as no one 
 except a madman will speak only to himself, no one will 
 write except with the object of communicating with readers. 
 But to communicate what? This brings us to the question 
 which has in some form or other to be examined in any literary 
 inquiry: What is Literature? Does it consist of some 
 specially literary forms, created purposely by the imaginative 
 faculty of the human mind? Whatever theoretical answer 
 may be given to the question, the French answer is clear 
 enough . The literary or non-literary character of an utterance 
 does not depend on its subject, but on its excellence. As soon 
 as a thought has been couched in such language that those 
 who hear or read it, and who consider it true, admit that they 
 could not improve upon it, and that the best they can do 
 when wishing to give it expression is to reproduce the words 
 just addressed to them, this utterance becomes Literature.
 
 282 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 Quite naturally the most engrossing thoughts will beget the 
 most striking expression. This is what was meant by Boileau 
 in his famous lines 
 
 " Ce que Ton congoit bien s'enonce clairemcnt, 
 Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement. " 
 
 This fact receives marvelous confirmation from even a most 
 rapid survey of Voltaire's literary career. When, early in 
 his life, Frangois Marie Arouet put in his first bid as a candi- 
 date for literary fame, nothing was farther from his mind 
 than the kind of activity which, in the last century, led John 
 Morley to salute him as the author of "one of the cardinal 
 liberations of the race." Corneille and Racine were held to 
 be the greatest literary names of the century just closed. 
 To rival, possibly to surpass them by a strict application of 
 the rules laid down by their contemporary, Boileau, was then 
 his sole ambition. And soon the success of his first tragedy, 
 "CEdipe," and still more the universal applause that greeted 
 the appearance of his epic poem, "La Henriade," gave fair 
 promise of the realization of this dream. But he had not 
 yet completed his thirty-second year when his enforced trip 
 to England placed this pupil of the Jesuits and this subject 
 of the absolute King of France, face to face with a state of 
 things in which political and civil liberty, freedom of speech 
 and religious freedom, in no way interfered with the sway 
 of law and order, and rather fostered than hindered the growth 
 of national power. That he should let his countrymen know 
 what he had seen, and the thoughts to which contact with 
 a freer atmosphere had given birth in his mind, was an in- 
 evitable consequence for this impetuous man, for whom by 
 nature it was as impossible to keep for himself a particle of 
 discovered truth as for the sun to hide one of his beneficent 
 rays. The publication of the " Letters upon the English 
 Nation," the first of his works devoted to the dissemination
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 283 
 
 of what came to be called Voltairean ideas, was followed by- 
 numberless other works upon politics, history, philosophy, 
 science, social and legislative reforms, until his various ut- 
 terances upon so many subjects constituted a whole arsenal 
 at the service of all those who yearned for more light, more 
 air, more truth, and more freedom. But how astonished the 
 author of all these would have been had he been told that 
 in those marvelously clear utterances lay the very founda- 
 tions of his undying literary glory, and that the "Essay on 
 Manners" or the " Treatise on Toleration " would long out- 
 live such a tragedy as " Alzire " or even his great epic poem! 
 And this simply because his message to mankind, though far 
 from being absent from the works framed by him in obedience 
 to the rules laid down by Boileau, does not ring there with the 
 penetrating clearness which is recognized as soon as Voltaire 
 addresses his contemporaries in his own name and in their 
 interest, and not a theatrical or literary public, under the 
 guise of imaginary characters, and under the trammels of 
 an outworn esthetic legislation. 
 
 Strange to say, were we to couple any other name with 
 Voltaire's, it would be that of Bossuet, the greatest divine 
 given to France by the Catholic Church. In the saying that 
 Voltaire was the Bossuet of the eighteenth and Bossuet the 
 Voltaire of the seventeenth century, there is more truth than 
 paradox. Like Voltaire, Bossuet delivered to his age the 
 message which it needed and was ready to understand, and 
 he delivered it with such convincing force as to remain to 
 this day the truest exponent of the spirit of seventeenth- 
 century France, and to be the one mere preacher of sermons 
 whose works have become a part of mankind's literary 
 treasure. 
 
 To express in each age with the greatest felicity and with 
 unmistakable clearness the main preoccupations of the time, 
 — such has been the mission of French Literature, and this 
 mission has been so well discharged that he who has carefully
 
 284 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 read the works of each period might almost dispense with any 
 further study of its history. 
 
 All the turmoil and confusion, the clashes of unbridled in- 
 dividualism, the thirst after knowledge and the lust of the 
 unchained beast that are typical of the sixteenth century, 
 appear in Rabelais' gigantic literary puzzle; and side by side 
 with it, in Ronsard, du Bellay, and their school, we find all 
 the elegance and refinement of those Italian courts which 
 taught France and all Europe how to hide, and perhaps ulti- 
 mately to lessen, all the vulgarities of life under the purple 
 and gold, the silk and velvet of the richest artistic mantle. 
 And who can read even a few pages of Montaigne's im- 
 mortal '' Essays " without hearing, through the apparent 
 skepticism of this most minute describer of human moods, an 
 echo of the fierce religious wars which were then covering the 
 whole of France, and such a large portion of Europe, with 
 the smoke of burning villages and the remains of human 
 martyrs. 
 
 In modern French Literature this identification of the 
 history of each period with the activity of its literary inter- 
 preters becomes visible through the presence, in each of the 
 last three centuries, of a writer of commanding greatness 
 whose span of life covers almost the whole of the century, so 
 that the seventeenth century might be known as the century 
 of Corneille (1606-1684), the eighteenth as the century of 
 Voltaire (1694-1778), and the nineteenth as the century of 
 Victor Hugo (1802-1885). 
 
 Rarely indeed has Literature so completely revealed a 
 nation's condition as was done in France during the first 
 of these three centuries. The very multiplicity of great 
 writers, three of them dramatists, points to a period of great 
 splendor. The political absolutism of the king might be 
 deduced from the fact that, from the works of so many writers 
 of powerful intellect, political discussions are, we might say 
 without exaggeration, totally absent. But not a single line
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 285 
 
 betrays any desire for a different state of things. The 
 absolute sway of the sovereign is so fully accepted, nay, 
 desired, by the nation, that, deprived of political power as it 
 is, it feels as free as if provided with agencies for the mani- 
 festation and enforcement of its will. Listen only to one of 
 its favorite poets, — listen to Racine. In his tragedy of 
 " Britannicus " he introduces to us a character whom we may 
 consider a type of the upright public servant, Burrhus, now 
 minister, formerly private tutor to Nero. And when Burrhus 
 explains to the Emperor's mother, Agrippina, the principles 
 by which he was guided while directing her son's education, 
 he states that his ambition was, that in the work of a trium- 
 phant reign, 
 
 " Rome soit toujours libra et Cesar tout-puissant." 
 
 Thus in one line of the poet we have made clear to us the 
 mental attitude of a society that saw no contradiction be- 
 tween the omnipotence of the monarch and the freedom of 
 the people. Political problems were, for such people, non- 
 existent; and La Bruyere, at the end of the century, in his 
 "Characters," ridicules the busy bodies who give themselves 
 airs of infringing upon the province of the prince, and dis- 
 cussing matters which lie far beyond their sphere. 
 
 And yet seldom have problems relating to man's conduct 
 been discussed with greater frequency, profundity, and dis- 
 crimination, — nay, fervor and passion, than by these writers 
 of a stately age, when self-satisfied France believed for a while 
 that she had reached the goal of perfect and permanent social 
 and political arrangements. The whole nature of man, in all 
 its manifestations, passes under the scrutinizing eye of Pascal 
 and Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, Corneille 
 and Racine. Even La Fontaine, in his "Comedi a cent actes 
 divers," as he calls his "Fables," reveals to us a good deal of 
 what we every day hide, not from our neighbor only, but from 
 our own vision; and the whole seems to be summed up by 
 Moliere, in his sometimes somber and tragic comedy, which
 
 286 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 reaches its climax when in his "Misanthrope" he reproduces 
 before our eyes, with unsparing fidelity, the everlasting con- 
 flict between Society and Sincerity. 
 
 But in the succeeding age other thoughts engrossed the 
 mind of the public. Outwardly indeed, Literature bore the 
 same face. Poets still, and Voltaire at their head, wrote 
 tragedies like Racine, odes, satires, epistles hke Boileau, 
 even epic poems that were held to equal, nay, to outdo, the 
 "iEneid" and the "Iliad," but after the disasters and sufferings 
 of the latter part of Louis XIV's reign, after the scandals 
 and speculations of the Duke of Orleans' regency, the robust 
 optimism of a Bossuet would have been entirely out of place, 
 and it was but natural that the best minds of the age should 
 no longer devote their strongest efforts to the discussion of 
 problems entirely unconnected with what we are wont to call 
 public affairs. Yet the time had not come when politics 
 properly so called were to be in France anybody's business 
 but the King's. And therefore politics and Literature are 
 as completely apart from each other in the eighteenth as in 
 the seventeenth century. What has collapsed is the theory 
 which represented France under Louis XIV as the picture 
 of the ideal condition for the whole of mankind. The voyage 
 of man toward his ultimate goal is now known to be far from 
 ended. It behooves him to inquire wherever he can for the 
 best direction to follow. Revelation he has tried, and it 
 seems to have failed. Science is young and has not yet been 
 tried. Therefore he will turn to Science, or. using the language 
 of the time, to Reason. Montesquieu, first of the great minds 
 of the century, in his "Persian Letters," as a preliminary task, 
 but for the fulfilment of which everything else was bound to 
 failure, calls the attention of his contemporaries to their 
 foolish custom of considering absurd aV that does not agree 
 with their own uses and practices. Then Voltaire's " English 
 Letters" endeavor to demonstrate to them the wisdom of 
 many things held by him to be done better out of France
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 287 
 
 than in it. Once started, the movement of scientific inquiry- 
 goes on without interruption. The great writings, the Hterary 
 masterpieces of the age, are no longer tragedies, comedies, 
 fables, sermons, works upon morals, but " The Spirit of Laws," 
 — an attempt scientifically to present to mankind a view of all 
 its legislative labors; the "Essay on Manners," aiming to 
 be a philosophic presentation of universal history; Buffon's 
 "Natural History," which brings Science properly so called 
 within the domain of Literature; even Diderot and d'Alem- 
 bert's bulky " Encyclopedia," born of the idea that it is man's 
 right to have within his reach all that it is possible for him to 
 know, that thus alone, by giving him a clear point whence to 
 start, will he be able to perform the duty just discovered as 
 imposed upon mankind and summed up in one word, — Prog- 
 ress. Even the stage is enlisted in this search after new and 
 better things, and Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro," per- 
 formed, in spite of Louis XVI's not unreasonable misgivings, 
 but five years before the beginning of the Revolution, sounds 
 the knell of the old order of things. 
 
 The political revolution which broke out at the end of the 
 eighteenth century was followed by a literary revolution. 
 Politics then became a subject of general interest, and at once 
 invaded Literature. The " Genius of Christianity " which was 
 brought out by Chateaubriand in the earliest years of the 
 nineteenth century, and which preceded by a few weeks only 
 the signing of the concordat by General Bonaparte, then First 
 Consul of the French Republic, was a work of political no 
 less than literary significance. During the whole of the cen- 
 tury politics and Literature appear almost inextricably mixed. 
 Hardly one great literary name that has not its place in the 
 political history of the period. And this is true of the women, 
 of Madame de Stael and George Sand, not less than of the 
 men; of the poets, not less than of the historians and philos- 
 ophers. Chateaubriand gloried in having given Louis XVIII 
 more than an army by the publication of his pamphlet on
 
 288 FRENCH LITERATURE 
 
 "Buonaparte and the Bourbons." Lamartine sits as a 
 member in the legislative halls of the reign of Louis Philippe, 
 and as President in the Provisional Government of the Second 
 Republic. The works of Victor Hugo, begun with a collec- 
 tion of royalist and catholic Odes, and crowned by "Les 
 Chatiments," an impassioned arraignment of the Second 
 Empire of Napoleon III, as well as an eloquent defense of 
 republican and democratic ideas, might serve as a running 
 commentary upon the whole series of political developments 
 in France and Europe, from the time of his entrance into 
 literary life aknost to the day of his death in May, 1885. 
 Guizot, the historian, is Prime Minister from 1840 to 1848; 
 Thiers, President of the Third Republic; Cousin, Villemain, 
 Tocqueville, Duruy, are cabinet Ministers. Even those who 
 occupy no political positions, like Michelet and Quinet, 
 never write a line that is wholly free from political preoccupa- 
 tions. Others, who are primarily politicians, see what can be 
 achieved for their cause by literary eminence, and Louis 
 Blanc absorbs himself in the preparation of a masterly in- 
 troduction to his one-sided history of the French Revolution. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, Renan, are certainly not political names; 
 yet Sainte-Beuve wrote political leaders for the republican 
 newspaper, Le National, and later accepted a seat in the 
 Imperial Senate of Napoleon III; and Renan at least twice 
 tried to have himself elected a representative of the people. 
 Were it not that he felt out of sorts with the trend of con- 
 temporary politics, Taine would never have written his 
 " Origin of Contemporary France." 
 
 Literature is enriched, too, by the appearance of two kinds 
 of productions hitherto unknown in France, — parliamentary 
 speeches and newspaper articles, both owing their birth to 
 the newly created political life of the French people. In 
 short, take out of the literary production of the nineteenth 
 century in France everything that owes its meaning, partly 
 or totally, to the political developments of the time, and what
 
 FRENCH LITERATURE 289 
 
 will be left will seem a very poor show for such a tremendously 
 active period of history. 
 
 Something would be left, though, and well worth reading. 
 j Politics predominate because they are the newly introduced 
 /element in the life and preoccupation of the nation. But 
 Literature now aims to present a complete picture of society; 
 witness Balzac's stupendous production, which he gathers 
 under this extraordinarily ambitious title '' The Human 
 Comedy"; witness also the bewildering variety of subjects 
 treated by the great master of literary criticism, Sainte- 
 Beuve. For criticism now speaks in its own name and does 
 not feel compelled, as it did in Boileau's time, to hide under 
 the cloak of prosaic verse. 
 
 Thus in these three centuries of continuous literary great-" 
 ness. Literature in France goes on constantly broadening; 
 from the purely speculative study of man's moral nature 
 in the seventeenth century, through the search after the 
 conditions necessary to social progress in the eighteenth, 
 it reaches in the nineteenth the height from which it can 
 survey the whole domain of human activity, rejoicing in all 
 its glories, lashing all its vices, weeping over all its miseries, 
 and bidding Science discover a cure for all the evils but for 
 the fight against which life would not be worth living.
 
 XV 
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 Calvin Thomas, Professor of the Germanic 
 Languages and Literatures 
 
 In pursuance of the plan of these lectures it falls to me to 
 set forth, as well as I can in a short hour, the distinctive char- 
 acter and value of the German contribution to the world's 
 literature. The task is at once grateful and difficult. It is 
 grateful because there are parts of German Literature which 
 I have found very profitable for study, and one likes to talk 
 of that which one loves. To-night, however, I cannot merely 
 conduct you to my own favorite nooks and vistas in the forest, 
 but I must try to give some account of the forest as a whole. 
 And there comes in the difficulty. For German Literature 
 is a very different thing at different epochs, and even within 
 the epochs there is much diversity for which it is hard to find 
 a unifying formula. But, for better or worse, the order of 
 the day is broad generalization about a vast and complicated 
 subject that has a long history. In such case the motto 
 must be: Cautious, very cautious, but not too cautious. 
 Let us do the best we can, endeavoring to look at the subject 
 in a large way, but without ever forgetting the inherent 
 deceitfulness of the general phrase. 
 
 Some years ago an eminent French critic, M. Brunetiere, 
 being in pursuit of very general truth, as we are now, com- 
 mitted himself to the proposition that German Literature 
 is philosophic. The literature of France, he said, is social; 
 that of England individualistic; that of Italy artistic; that 
 
 291
 
 292 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 of Spain chevalresque, and that of Germany philosophic. 
 Now that sounds rather seductive. It is so convenient to 
 have all those great literatures thus neatly labeled with an 
 adjective so easy to remember. But is German Literature, 
 taken as a whole, really philosophic? Where is the "philoso- 
 phy" in the "Nibelung Lay," in the songs of Walther von der 
 Vogelweide, in the poems of the Dietrich-saga? Is "phil- 
 osophic" the word that lights up the distinctive character 
 of the old folksongs, of Luther's Bible, of Hans Sachs, of 
 " Simplicissimus," of the poems of Giinther, the odes of Klop- 
 stock, of the " Sufferings of Young Werther"? Is it the right 
 word for Wieland's " Oberon," for the classic drama of Lessing, 
 Goethe, and Schiller, for the work of the famous nineteenth- 
 century lyrists, for the plays of Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, 
 and Hauptmann? The question answers itself. And yet, 
 those which I have named are not out-of-the-way things; 
 they are some of the important, the characteristic things, of 
 German Literature from age to age. 
 
 There is, indeed, a body of far-famed German philosophy 
 — the work of resolute and lonely thinkers who wrote for 
 their own kind — which to some extent has influenced " Lit- 
 . erature" in our conventional sense of the word. But this 
 influence is of comparatively recent origin, and is apt to be 
 exaggerated; on the whole it is rather insignificant. Taken 
 by itself, however, the work of Kant and Fichte and Hegel 
 is an outgrowth of the specialization of modern thought. 
 Like the writings of the great theologians, historians, natu- 
 ralists, it flows apart from the general Literary current. It is 
 not what we mean by German Literature, any more than 
 Berkeley and Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer are what we 
 mean by English Literature. 
 
 Of course there is a sense in which works of real Literature, 
 for example, "Faust," "Wilhelm Meister," "Nathan the 
 Wise," may be called philosophic; the sense, namely, that they 
 embody criticism of life. But in that sense all vital Literature
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 293 
 
 is philosophic. The difference between "Faust," say, and a 
 play of Corneille, is not expressed by calling the one phil- 
 osophic and the other social. Both are philosophic, both 
 social. Each mirrors a creative mind that was a child of its 
 epoch and was interested in certain spiritual values. Each 
 reacts in its own way on the soul of the reader or the spectator, 
 and this soul which is affected includes the social feelings. 
 If Goethe is harder to understand than Corneille, it is not 
 because of his abstruseness, but because there is more of him. 
 He deals with a far wider range of human experience. What 
 is needed for the enjoyment of " Faust" is not a course of read- 
 ing in philosophy, but knowledge of life in its concrete variety, 
 its rush, and its pressure. And the same is substantially 
 true of every German literary production that has proved to 
 have any real vitality in it, apart from the exigencies of the 
 scholar-class, who must of course have their Stoff for the 
 laboratory. To say that German Literature is philosophic, 
 and stop there, is too much like saying that the population 
 of Boston is red-headed. To be sure, even that dictum has 
 its use in that it sets you thinking; thinking, namely, how 
 many Bostonians you have known who are not red-headed. 
 Of the larger factors that go to make a nation's literature 
 what it is, the two most important are language and ethnic 
 character. It would seem, therefore, that any attempt to 
 describe the essential qualities of German Literature should 
 begin with an account of the German language and the Ger- 
 man people. The genius of a nation's language, said Herder, 
 is the genius of its Literature. But, unfortunately for the 
 present purpose, the genius of a language is something that 
 cannot be effectively described in a few words. One would 
 be compelled to attack the problem by means of detailed 
 philological analysis and comparison, such as would be out of 
 place on this occasion. So far as poetry is concerned, the 
 genius of German is not very different from that of English. 
 Both languages are sprung from a common stock, and both
 
 294 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 retain much of the ancient inheritance. Both have borrowed 
 largely from the Latin and the French. Both have a stress 
 accent, differing from the pitch-accent of the Greeks and 
 Romans, and usually falling, in native words, on the root 
 syllable. The chief difference is that English has lost more 
 than German of the old unaccented endings. For practical 
 purposes this loss may be set down as gain, but for the pur- 
 poses of poetry its effect has been to restrict the choice of 
 feminine rhymes, and thus to lessen the range of those rhythmic 
 and melodic effects which depend on them. The English 
 poet has, I think, a more powerful instrument, but the Ger- 
 man a more delicate and flexible. Nothing is impossible to 
 the good craftsman in German verse. Not without reason 
 do the Germans boast that their translations of the world's 
 great poetry are on the whole better than those of any other 
 people. It has been well said that every good French trans- 
 lation is at the same time an explanation. The good Geraian 
 translation — remember that I am now speaking of poetry — 
 is an echo. Let me give just a single illustration, one that 
 was used long ago by Bayard Taylor, to show how the Ger- 
 man language can adapt itself to an English verse-melody. 
 It is a well-known stanza of Tennyson, with a translation by 
 Strodtmann, who, by the way, has no fame as a poet. 
 
 "The splendour falls on castle walls 
 And snowy summits old in story ; 
 The long light shakes across the lakes, 
 And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 
 Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 
 Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying." 
 
 "Es fallt der Strahl auf Burg und Tal 
 Und schneeige Gipfel reich an Sagen ; 
 Viel Lichter wehn auf blauen Seen, 
 Bergab die Wasserstiirze jagen. 
 Bias, Hiifthorn, bias, im Widerhall erschallend, 
 Bias, Horn, antwortet Echos, hallend, hallend, hallend."
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 295 
 
 I quote these lines merely for the purpose stated, namely, 
 to illustrate the metrical flexibility of the German language. 
 Unquestionably much of Tennyson's vividness and lyric 
 intensity is lost in the German version. We miss the "long" 
 light that " shakes," and get something less good in its place. 
 In Bergab die Wasserstiirze jagen, the " glory " of the original 
 is gone. In hallend, hallend, hallend, the echoes do not "die " 
 as they should. All this, however, is merely saying that 
 poetry, in its more intimate nature, is hardly translatable. 
 
 When we come to prose, the genius of German is less like 
 that of English. Modern German has developed an elaborate 
 periodic structure, with rigid rules of word-order in subor- 
 dinate clauses and a tendency to make the sentence very 
 complex. I seem to observe in recent writers a conscious 
 reaction against that sort of thing, but it does not yet amount 
 to a revolution. Thus it has come about that, while German 
 verse is more flexible than English, German prose is less 
 flexible, less expeditious, more intricate. To the uninitiated 
 those Gothic cathedrals of syntax become mere jungles in 
 which it is easy to get lost. And in the hands of a careless 
 writer they really are jungles. It is said that a Frenchman 
 cannot write his mother-tongue in an altogether slovenly 
 manner if he tries. But a German can do it without trying. 
 I would not seem to imply, however, that Germans are less 
 sensitive than other folk to the rhythm of good prose. In the 
 best masters, in Goethe and Schiller, in Heine and Keller, 
 the rhythm is always there; but it is apt to be complicated, 
 and it requires for its appreciation an ear that is sensitive to 
 the German cadence of words and phrases. I am persuaded 
 that the recent vogue of Nietzsche is no more due to his doc- 
 trine than to the marvelous rhjrthm of his style. At his best 
 he is a great prose poet. The madness of the intellect was 
 paired in him with a superb gift for the orchestration of 
 words. 
 
 As for the ethnic character that is reflected in German Liter-
 
 296 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 ature, I hardly venture to speak of that at all. What can 
 one say that is broadly true of the whole German people, 
 from Karl the Great to Bismarck, and from the Alps to the 
 Northern Seas, and yet is not true of any other people? What, 
 indeed, except that they speak the German language? A 
 few centuries ago the German stock appears identical with 
 the English, Go a little farther back, and it fuses more or 
 less with the Roman, the Slavic, the Celtic, and the other 
 stocks that philologists call "Aryan." This whole subject of 
 the relation of linguistic to ethnic kinship is in a rather hazy 
 condition, a free field for speculation by three classes of 
 investigators: those who study language, those who study 
 skulls, facial angles, hair, and complexion, and those who 
 study tools and ornaments. Where much is so uncertain a 
 mere literary scholar should express himself with caution. I 
 merely say, therefore, that it seems to me that the differences 
 we observe in the great nationalities of modem Europe are 
 due more to environment and tradition than to anything in 
 their blood or physical conformation. In the lapse of ages 
 they have all come under the influence of the same great 
 ideas, and civilization tends to uniformity. Amid varying 
 forms of 'life, all over the world, we see an astonishing simili- 
 tude in the virtues of good men, and also in the ways of the 
 transgressor, in the follies of vanity and idleness, in the ruin- 
 ous effects of poverty, ignorance, and vice. I have hved 
 much in Germany, I have had a multitude of German friends. 
 But I do not undertake to tell you what the " average" German 
 is like. He is no less elusive and phantasmal than the " aver- 
 age " Englishman, Frenchman, or American. Few subjects are 
 more tempting to the ready generalizer than that of national 
 character; but the summary statements always rest on 
 limited observation, and are more or less colored by the prej- 
 udice, the mental habit, and the personal experience of the 
 commentator. They are never objectively true when they 
 deal with the invisible things of the spirit. You can write
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 297* 
 
 the history of a great people, you can describe their forms of 
 life; but when you attempt to depict their ethical character 
 you inevitably depict your own. 
 
 " Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, 
 In dem die Volker sich bespiegeln." 
 
 You can average a column of figures, but you can not average 
 moral qualities. You can make a composite photograph of 
 faces, but not of souls. 
 
 If now, in spite of what I have been saying, I still hazard 
 one or two observations on the German character, you will 
 understand that I do not claim for them any great importance 
 or any absolute validity. They are the impressions of an 
 individual, of a bookish man, of a lover. You can make your 
 allowances. 
 
 The German at his best — Literature is a record of the best 
 for the best — seems to me to be temperamentally a loyalist, 
 intellectually a radical. In all the older books, the virtue 
 that we hear most about is Treue, which we are obliged to 
 translate by such borrowed words as fidelity and devotion. 
 His ethical idealism is less strenuous than the Puritan's, not 
 because he wishes to live lawlessly, but because he is more 
 interested in the ultimate whys and wherefores. His pro- 
 clivity has manifested itself historically in the form of an 
 earnest devotion to, coupled with a patient and laborious 
 scrutiny of, those great idealisms which, one after another, 
 have ruled the life of Europe : Feudalism, the Cathohc Church, 
 Holy Scripture, classical learning, progress by enlighten- 
 ment. Romanticism, science, the socialistic state. In all these 
 matters, if the German has seldom been the pioneer, he has 
 been the most patient and industrious of subsequent explorers 
 and road-builders. If he has but rarely given the very best 
 artistic expression to the form and pressure of an epoch, he 
 has excelled in working out its intellectual basis and conse- 
 quences. His temperament is not phlegmatic; certainly not
 
 298 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 in Middle and South Germany; he is not, as is so often asserted, 
 deficient in the sense of form. But his intellectual process 
 is slow, circumspect, reverent of first principles. 
 
 The German's patriotism is rooted, like other men's, in 
 ancient tribal instinct, but on the whole he has rationalized 
 and humanized it rather more than other peoples. Having 
 suffered more than others from war on his own soil, he is less 
 subject to the illusion of military glory. La gloire loses half 
 its electricity as der Ruhm. " My country right or wrong" is 
 hardly a German motto; partly, perhaps, because "my coim- 
 try" has been on both sides of so many important questions. 
 Like other nations, the Germans idealize their great fighters; 
 this is human nature, and seems likely to remain so for a 
 long time to come. But it is interesting to note what kind of 
 fighters the nations idealize. I would not attach too much 
 importance to legends of long ago, but it seems worth recalling 
 at the present time that the chief German hero of an earher 
 day, the man who, more than any other, captivated the 
 German imagination and held it for centuries, was slow to 
 wrath, reluctant to fight, a lover of justice and fair play, a 
 man gifted with a high sense of responsibility. Taunts that 
 affected only his personal dignity and prowess Dietrich would 
 bear with composure. But when the wanton aggression be- 
 came too insolent, or when a beloved liegeman fell, to whom 
 he was in honor and in duty bound, then at last the mighty 
 Amelung would draw his sword, the flames would begin to 
 stream from his nostrils, and, — well, it was then prudent 
 to keep away from him. 
 
 There are two periods, more especially, at which the German 
 genius has brought forth works that deserve to be considered 
 in a bird's-eye view of the world's literary values. Let us 
 call them, without trying to be very precise in the matter of 
 dates, the Age of the "Nibelung Lay" and the Age of Goethe. 
 Of these the second is unmensely the more important for the 
 modem man. If I speak mainly of that, and hardly at all
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 299 
 
 of what follows the Age of Goethe, it is not from any feeling 
 that there would be little to say; it is because, in the general 
 perspective, the classic era has the better claim to our precious 
 time. There is, indeed, much in the more recent past that I 
 should like to discuss, for one reason or another; but not 
 very much that is at the same time distinctively German 
 and highly significant for the world at large. At least, it 
 seems so to me. With the lapse of time it becomes more and 
 more difficult to disengage and evaluate the national element 
 in the great modern hteratures. The underlying substance 
 is much the same everywhere. There is now a very free and 
 rapid interchange of the ideas and emotions which constitute 
 the raw material of Literature. The new thoughts grooving 
 out of the progress of science and invention ; the conflict of the 
 classes and the masses; the friction of church and science, or 
 of religion and the secular spirit; the social problems that 
 grow out of the modern industrial system; the position of 
 women, marriage and divorce, the sexual instinct, with its 
 ecstasies and its vagaries — these are a few of the matters 
 about which men and women are writing all over the world. 
 And the morning paper brings the literary news from every- 
 where. A book or a play which deeply stirs one capital is 
 quickly known at all the others. Writers get hints from 
 every direction and are cosmopolitan in spite of themselves. 
 We read them just because they deal effectively with these 
 universal passions and problems. For that which is avowedly 
 provincial, or narrowly national, we really care very little, 
 save as we find in it a more or less amusing foil to the life we 
 actually lead. Under such conditions who can tell any longer 
 what is national? The difference of savor which we feel in 
 passing from an English to a French or German book is more 
 a matter of language and of personality than of any national 
 idiosyncrasy which is capable of exact definition. 
 
 Let us now take a long flight through the backward abysm 
 of time, glance for a moment at the poetry of the Middle
 
 300 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 Ages, and then make our way back quickly to the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 Down to the middle of the twelfth century the Literature 
 of Germany is mainly a Literature of appropriation: appro- 
 priation of the Christian rehgion, with its Bible stories, its 
 legendary lore, and its spirit of other-worldliness; of that 
 fabulous ancient history which we find everywhere in medi- 
 eval writings; of tales of fighting and adventure which had 
 already been molded into poetic form in France. But the 
 old indigenous German poetry had never died out. After 
 the incoming of Christianity it was kept alive by illiterate 
 gleemen whose work did not get written down, because the 
 churchmen, who alone could write, looked on it with disfavor. 
 In the latter part of the twelfth century, however, the art of 
 writing began to be more generally practised by the knights, 
 and then came a notable flowering of lyric and narrative poetry. 
 
 Let us pass by all that part of it which has any resemblance 
 to the work of the ProvenQal and French poets. In so doing, 
 to be sure, we shall be passing by the most winsome lyrist of 
 medieval Europe, a poet equally eminent for the perfection of 
 his artistry and the rugged virility of his thought, and we shall 
 also be passing by the profoundest interpreter of Arthurian 
 and Grail romance. But the songs of Walther von der Vogel- 
 weide, while essentially original, as much so as the work of 
 Chaucer, belong after all to a type that had first been devel- 
 oped in France. So also the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach 
 and the other German romancers, while it contains much that 
 is truly their own, follows the line of an imported fashion. 
 This is not the case, however, with that ancient conglomerate 
 tale of the fair maid of Burgundy, which a nameless Austrian 
 poet, about the year 1200, put into the form which we know 
 as the "Lay of the Nibelungs." 
 
 There is no time here for any comparison of the " Nibelung 
 Lay" with the other famous folk-epics, such as the Homeric 
 poems, the "Mahabharata," the "Shanama" or the "Chan-
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 301 
 
 son de Roland." Nor would the comparison boot much, if 
 there were time for it, on account of the utter unlikeness of 
 the things compared. Which is the most soul-stirring sight, 
 the Jungfrau from Miirren, the Bay of Naples, the Grand 
 Canyon of the Colorado, or the view from Acro-Corinth? 
 As a patriotic American I could cheerfully vote for the Grand 
 Canyon, but the truth is, I prefer Acro-Corinth. To speak 
 less cryptically, I think the " Iliad " peerless among the folk- 
 epics. It yields a steadier and a more varied pleasure than 
 any of the others. If Homer sometimes nods, the others 
 take long naps, during which they are rather dull companions 
 for the modern man, unless he be some kind of a speciaUst. 
 This is certainly true of the ''Nibelung Lay." On the other 
 hand, in the capital quality of power, the quahty which in 
 sculpture we associate with the name of Michael Angelo, 
 there are parts of the ' ' Lay " which have hardly been surpassed 
 anywhere. And however the poem as a whole may affect the 
 esthetic sensibilities of the present day, it is a precious record 
 of the old German spirit and of medieval German life. Unique, 
 strong, boldly linmed, and permeated with a dark fatahsm, 
 it takes the imagination captive, and its pictures of fierce 
 passion and ruthless conduct haunt the memory with the 
 vividness of reality. 
 
 Following the " Nibelung Lay" there is a considerable body 
 of indigenous German minstrelsy which has its interest for 
 the scholar, but cannot be allowed to detain us on the present 
 occasion. And then came a long stretch of time during 
 which the Germans made no very important contributions to 
 Literature. Poetic genius of a high order failed to appear, 
 and what got written in the German language was, for the 
 most part, ignored by the rest of Europe. There are, indeed, 
 a few books, notably Brant's "Ship of Fools" and the chap- 
 book of Doctor Faust, which played a role on the interna- 
 tional stage; but neither of these can justly be called a Uterary 
 masterpiece. And then there is the majestic figure of Luther;
 
 302 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 but Luther belongs to the history of reUgion, rather than to 
 the history of what we call Literature. The Italian Renais- 
 sance, which wrought such marvels elsewhere, found Germany 
 politically disintegrated, without an intellectual center, largely 
 obUvious of its own past, and with no generally accepted 
 literary language. It was necessary to begin anew, so to 
 speak, and the new beginning was retarded by the fierce 
 and all-absorbing contentions of the Protestant revolt. Of 
 course, the continuity of history was not entirely broken; 
 such a thing as that would be inconceivable. There is a 
 body of Literature — I am thinking more especially of Hans 
 Sachs — which continues old tradition and at the same time 
 is not unaffected by the ideas of the Renaissance. But it is 
 a homespun literature, without great thoughts, without 
 imaginative sweep, without artistic distinction or exaltation 
 of feeling. The Niirnberg shoemaker is a winsome poet in 
 his way, and very interesting as a mirror of German life in 
 the sixteenth century; but the reader of Sophocles, Shak- 
 spere, and Mohere will not miss very much in ignoring him. 
 
 When at last, in the seventeenth century, the German soil 
 was prepared for a race of scholar-poets who knew what had 
 been going on elsewhere, were proud of their mother-tongue, 
 and eager to give their country a place among the literary 
 great powers, their ambition spent itself on reproduction. 
 They exerted themselves to prove that they could do, in regu- 
 lar and dignified German verse, what the French, the Italians, 
 and the Dutch had already done. But the Renaissance was 
 by this time an old story; it had done its work, and Europe 
 was ready for something new, something which Germany 
 was not yet prepared to give. And yet, let us not think 
 too meanly of that pseudo-classic period as one of unrelieved 
 artificiality and imitation. There are some real poets there, 
 with minor messages and melodious voices; and there is 
 one prose-writer, Grimmelshausen, who is worth reading. 
 But there are no really commanding literary personalities.
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 303 
 
 And now, how shall I describe the spirit of the new epoch 
 which finally gave to Germany not only a place, but for a 
 while the leading place, in the literary world? 
 
 The Itahan Renaissance had conquered for Western Europe, 
 not indeed for the plain people, but for the choicer spirits 
 everywhere, the right to live. The instincts and passions 
 of human nature, the love of beauty and of self-assertion, no 
 longer seemed dangerous lures of the devil, beguiling the soul 
 to eternal suffering. But the literary expression of this 
 abounding life had everywhere fallen under the blight of an 
 all too rigid formalism. There was a disposition to hark 
 back; to lay too much stress on the rules of the ancients, 
 and not enough on the eternal right of the human soul to 
 self-expression. The Reformation had freed men, pretty gen- 
 erally, from the intellectual tyranny of the medieval Church, 
 but had itself given rise, in many quarters, to a narrow and 
 pugnacious bibliolatry. The misunderstood and ignorantly 
 worshiped word of Scripture was killing the vital spirit of 
 religion. The philosophers had won a large measure of intel- 
 lectual Hberty; the active brain was no longer confronted by 
 the awful peril of the burning fagot or the Spanish boot ; but 
 they were a little too much inclined to overlook all that part 
 of human nature which underlies and antedates the reason- 
 ing faculty. 
 
 What use was to be made of all the liberties and knowl- 
 edges that had been won? Was the homo sapiens to be, 
 after all, but a free and joyous animal, with a respect for an- 
 tiquity and a taste for art? Was his religious nature to be 
 evermore shut up to a choice between the worship of a hier- 
 archy and the worship of a book? Was there a necessary 
 conflict between his intellect and his emotions, between his 
 social obligation and his individual welfare? 
 
 We see that there was need of a new synthesis of all that had 
 been gained, a synthesis that should take account of the 
 whole of human nature and turn the thoughts of men from
 
 304 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 the Past to the Future. I am one of those who hold that the 
 eighteenth century, much as it has been derided by a certain 
 class of writers, is on the whole the most important century 
 in human history. The cleavage that was then effected 
 between the votaries of authority and the votaries of progress 
 — between the men who look inward and backward, and the 
 men who look outward and forward — is the most momen- 
 tous of historical events. 
 
 Now it is Germany's distinction that, just at the fullness of 
 time, her soil brought forth a group of great writers whose 
 work gives the first large and luminous answer to the questions 
 I have formulated. Foremost among them stands the man 
 of whom Emerson said that " the old Eternal Genius that built 
 the world had confided itself more to him than to any other." 
 Any of the group would have made any epoch memorable; 
 that this epoch has become supremely memorable is due to 
 the radiant genius of Goethe. 
 
 In Literature, if not in the domain of physical magnitude, 
 the whole may be greater than the sum of the parts. One 
 who takes up the various writings of Goethe and compares 
 them, one after the other, with the very best that has ever 
 been done in their several kinds, will find nowhere, perhaps, 
 an absolute maximum of achievement. Let " Faust " be 
 excepted, for " Faust " is incommensurable; there is nothing 
 else like it anywhere. But take " Gotz von BerHchingen ": 
 surely it is a splendid manifesto of youthful genius, vigorous, 
 captivating, " rammed with life." So too, " Iphigenia " and 
 "Tasso" are exquisite dramas of the soul. But in respect of 
 dramatic power and universality of appeal these plays must 
 hide their diminished heads in the presence of Shakspere. 
 Again, '' Werther " is a better sentimental novel than any one 
 else wrote in the sentimental age, but it is a study in mental 
 morbidity. ' ' Wilhelm Meister ' ' is surcharged with wise obser- 
 vation, but lacking in artistic finaUty. 
 
 And so one might traverse the remainder of Goethe's work,
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 305 
 
 his lighter plays and tales, his narrative poems, his scientific 
 writings, his critical papers, his biographies, including *'Dich- 
 tung und Wahrheit," and find everywhere profound thought 
 and literary distinction, but nowhere, perhaps, that which bears 
 the indisputable mark of a supreme excellence. What, then, 
 is the secret of his power over those who know? Of the 
 perermial fascination that invests his life and work? It is 
 to be sought in the totality of his career; in the marvelously 
 instructive evolution of his many-sided nature from youth to 
 age; in the way he '' beat his music out " under the impact of 
 experience from year to year; in his loyalty to the Genius of 
 Life, and his splendid endeavor to envisage the world ever 
 more broadly and more sanely. 
 
 Taken thus in his entirety, Goethe stands for a larger and 
 deeper synthesis of life than the world had previously known. 
 Little by little he gathered up into the crucible of his mind 
 all the great values which the^ast had contributed to the 
 upbuilding and enrichment of the human soul, and fused them 
 into a new spiritual treasure. His childhood was nourished 
 on the Bible, and his youth was deeply stirred by the mystic 
 appeal of the Christian faith. Then came, in the prime of 
 his manhood, the glory that was Greece, with all that Hellenism 
 implies for the modern man; the Italian Renaissance, with 
 its passion for ideal and sensuous beauty; science, with its 
 endless vistas of heights to be won by laborious investigation ; 
 the idea of evolution, dimly glimpsed, it is true, and lacking 
 the definite proofs that Darwin was to furnish, but clear 
 enough to reveal to him its tremendous import, and to become 
 henceforth the pivot of all his thinking. Add to all this the 
 strenuous discipline of long public service during one of the 
 most pregnant epochs in human history. What other writer 
 of books ever hved so much as did Goethe? 
 
 It might seem, perhaps, as if all those multifarious distrac- 
 tions must have thwarted the vocation of the poet. And so it 
 was, no doubt, to some extent. There are periods in which
 
 306 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 the reader of Goethe's diary and letters may get an almost 
 painful impression of magnificent strength frittered away on 
 futihties. But while we indulge in that melancholy reflection, 
 let us at any rate not forget the countervailing gain. The 
 immense prestige of Goethe as a critic of Ufe rests on his 
 broad and intimate knowledge of the subject. To call him, 
 as Herman Grimm did, the greatest poet of all times and of 
 all nations, seems to me, as it seemed to Matthew Arnold, 
 a patriotic hyperbole. But to call him the wisest of poets is 
 sober truth. That which has endeared him to scientific 
 men — for he is preeminently their poet — is not the work 
 he did in half a dozen lines of investigation, but the general 
 sanity of his mind. The poetic frenzy tends usually to pas- 
 sionate overstatement, involving some sacrifice of truth. 
 England has lately lost a wonderful master of verbal witcher- 
 ies, and we love to quote him for the scintillant beauty of his 
 phrase. But what strange opinions Swinburne sometimes 
 expressed! Not thus with the great German. If you find 
 it in Goethe, it is so. 
 
 Do I seem to be saying that the greatness of Goethe was 
 that of a sage rather than a poet? I would not be under- 
 stood exactly in that way. To be sure, it does not grieve 
 me, as an individual Goethefreund, to hear him classed with 
 the sages; for I hold that " wise man" is on the whole a more 
 august title than "poet." Not the impassioned dreamer; 
 not the prophet, the orator, the artist, the warrior, the states- 
 man, or the empire-builder, but the wise man, is thus far the 
 noblest product of evolution on this planet. Still, I know 
 that many would take issue with me on that point. Consid- 
 ering the fallibility of man's wisdom at its best, they would 
 assign the highest place in the hierarchy of spirits to the 
 "poet," who voices his vital experience in rhythmic words of 
 supreme fitness and imperishable power. I believe I under- 
 stand that point of view. Let us not forget, however, that 
 Poetry, in a large historical survey of the subject, is a thing of
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 307 
 
 Protean aspect, which has always resisted exact definition. 
 Our English usage makes much of the metrical factor, the 
 " poet" being first of all a maker of verse. On the other hand, 
 the German dichten hardly connotes meter at all, but lays 
 chief stress on the element of imaginative creation. 
 
 Now if the poet, in the essence of his being, is an imagina- 
 tive creator, and if what he creates has great importance for 
 the understanding and the conduct of life, then he becomes a 
 "sage"; differing, however, from other sages, from the mere 
 savant, man of science, or philosopher, by precisely that 
 element of imaginative warmth, without which the wisdom of 
 the wise rarely goes home to the deep places of human nature. 
 In such case his wisdom, instead of being a reproach to his 
 poetry, is the perfect flowering of it. 
 
 Such, in effect, was Goethe's conception of the poet's call- 
 ing, as we find it in those famous lines of the Prelude to 
 "Faust": — 
 
 "Wodurch bewegt er alle Herzen? 
 Wodurch besiegt er jedes Element ? 
 1st es der Einklang nicht, der aus dem Busen dringt, 
 Und in sein Herz die Welt zuriicke schlingt ? " 
 
 The passage goes on to say that the poet is he who gathers up 
 into his soul the facts of life, in their tiresome monotony and 
 their jangling discord, and gives them back in the form of a 
 S3anphony, — 
 
 "Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlagt." 
 
 Put in somewhat different words, this means that the poet's 
 function is to reconcile us to the Power that made and makes 
 the world; to keep us on a friendly footing with the Genius 
 of Life, by permitting us to see through the phenomenal veil 
 of discord and ugliness to the essential harmony, the ever- 
 lasting goodness.
 
 308 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 I would by no means assert that Goethe was always true 
 to this ideal, or that everything he wrote was inspired by it. 
 Like other men, he was the child of his epoch and of his cir- 
 cumstances. He had his limitations, and he made his mistakes. 
 Were this not so, we should hardly care for him as we do; 
 for, as he himself said, it is a man's mistakes that make him 
 lovable. No more than other men was he always up to his 
 own highest level. He had his private battle to wage with 
 the goblins of pessimism, with the misere of trivial existence. 
 Much that he wrote, in the course of his long life, was tenta- 
 tive, uninspired, of transitory interest. But take him all in 
 all, his writings do illustrate and accord with the doctrine 
 that I have tried, in my imperfect way, to describe. It forms 
 the heart of "Faust"; "Wilhelm Meister" is saturated with 
 it; it sings in many a lyric. It informs that "calm, free, and 
 onward" spirit which lends such an imperishable interest to 
 the afternoon and evening of his life. 
 
 I have left little time for the other great writers of the classic 
 era; for Lessing, the superb critic, for Herder, the inspired 
 pathfinder, or for Schiller, the beloved idealist. None of 
 these men measures up to the stature of Goethe as a world- 
 author, but each did a work of such far-reaching importance 
 in modern life that one may well shrink from the attempt to 
 describe it in a few words. Only a hint or two can be given. 
 So far as I know, Lessing was the first great critic to write of 
 religion in a spirit at once fearless, reverent, scholarly, and 
 broadly human, that is, free from all ecclesiastic bias. In 
 " Nathan the Wise" his critical gift rose to the height of creative 
 genius. It is the most pregnant and irresistible of all modern 
 dramas having a specifically religious import. Fresh and 
 real to-day as when it was first published, that eloquent plea 
 for tolerance, practical goodness, and human brotherhood, is a 
 very precious world-classic. 
 
 And what a world of fruitful ideas first took shape in the 
 teeming mind of Herder! He was the real father of the
 
 GERMAN LITERATURE 309 
 
 " historical method." It was he, and not a nineteenth-century 
 Frenchman, who first clearly enmiciated the doctrine of the 
 ''race, the epoch, and the surroundings." He was a pioneer 
 in the due appreciation of primitive culture and of the poetry 
 of unlettered men. The whole Romantic School is prefigured 
 in his writings. He opened new vistas in the understanding 
 of the Hebrew Bible, and he first developed the great thought 
 that the goal of the historic process is the training of man for 
 humanity. There is a spot in the Black Forest where the 
 rain which falls at a certain point goes into the Danube and 
 the Black Sea; but if it falls a few feet away, it goes into 
 the Rhine and the German Ocean. Standing at this apex, 
 the traveler may well have the sensation of being at the source 
 of great things. Some such feeling I used to have at Weimar, 
 as I wandered among the places where Herder lived and 
 wrought, or paused in my walk to look at his statue, with its 
 noble inscription, " Light, Love, Life." 
 
 But with all his opulence of ideas. Herder was an indifferent 
 artist, whether in verse or prose; wherefore it is well for us, if 
 not so well for his own fame, that what he had to say was in 
 the main better said by his two illustrious friends. It is 
 the prime distinction of Schiller to have made himself beloved 
 in a peculiar degree as a poetic idealist. Freedom, Truth, 
 Beauty, are invested in his glowing and sonorous fines with 
 a high and alluring significance. The temper of our time and 
 country is rather cool toward such abstractions. We look 
 on them somewhat as we look on the white and filmy clouds 
 that float high in the June sky, as bright and beautiful, but 
 unsubstantial and not well suited for human nature's daily 
 food. We go in for specific practical betterment, and we are 
 a little suspicious of vague dreams and the rapt dreamer. 
 Nevertheless we perceive, in our moments of insight, that 
 these more or less ethereal ideals, and our willingness to work 
 for them, are what gives dignity to life and lifts us above the 
 brutes that perish. Without our dreams, our faiths, our
 
 310 GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 ideal objects of devotion and aspiration, we are but featherless 
 bipeds who have somehow learned to talk and to make tools. 
 The improvement of our tools, our food, our clothes, and hous- 
 ing, may be worth attending to, — it is worth attending to, — 
 but chiefly as a means of releasing our energies for that 
 spiritual betterment, the hope of which is the best part of our 
 human heritage and the noblest incentive of the modern man. 
 Now this was clearly seen and deeply felt by Schiller, who 
 expressed it not only in philosophic writings which are caviare 
 to the general, but also in poems and plays which have become 
 household lore for the German people. By the high serious- 
 ness of his life and his unwavering fealty to the unseen things 
 which are eternal, he accredited his message for all who know 
 him. This is why we love him. This is why his name has 
 become a name to conjure with in every part of the world 
 where Germans are gathered together.
 
 XVI 
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 By J. A. JoFFE, Lecturer in Russian 
 
 In the Pantheon of Literature the writers of Russia have 
 been accorded, within the last thirty years, a niche by the 
 side of the supreme heaven-dwellers of that temple. The 
 phenomenon is all the more remarkable when one remembers 
 that it is practically within this brief period, about a genera- 
 tion and a half, roughly speaking, that the outside nations 
 have made the acquaintance of Russian Literature. 
 
 The hold it laid upon the non-Russian reading pubHc was 
 instantaneous, firm, and persistent. Foreign observers of 
 literary phenomena were amazed at its sudden sweep and 
 force. One of its greatest admirers (Ferdinand Brunetiere) 
 records that for a time matters threatened to reach a point 
 when the well-known yellow-covered volume in the hands 
 of a Frenchman could be almost safely assumed to be the 
 work of one of the chief Russian novelists, — such was the 
 vogue of the conquering barbarians. 
 
 Are these Russians "barbarians or are they saints"? — those 
 were exactly the words used by French critics in attempting 
 to fathom the causes of the sudden tide of interest in Russian 
 Literature in France. The critics were seized with the im- 
 pression that Russian authors did not merely write novels, but 
 celebrated mass as it were, with the "why and wherefore" 
 ever present in all they wrote. There was a strange fascina- 
 tion in the "new gospel" these writers were preaching. In 
 their works new horizons and a new world were being opened 
 to the astonished gaze of their Western European readers. 
 
 311
 
 312 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Was this unprecedented success the result of a mere whim 
 of literary taste among the jaded and volatile Frenchmen? 
 Its persistence and its rapid conquest of the reading public 
 throughout the world preclude a negative answer to our 
 question. 
 
 It was the new world, both of men and of emotions, into 
 which the foreign reader was introduced, and it was the new 
 spiritual attitude of the Russian writers that supplied the 
 real cause of the conquering march of Russian Literature. 
 
 What are the peculiar traits that exercised such a potent 
 influence on the foreigner? A more or less satisfactory an- 
 swer can be given only when a thorough examination is made 
 of the country and the people that produced this Literature. 
 Have they not grown trite, these dicta that "Literature is the 
 mirror of the spiritual hfe of a nation," that "the literary his- 
 tory of a nation is the history of the nation's psychology," etc.? 
 
 Geographically, Russia (European, I mean chiefly) is one 
 vast plain with hardly an elevation within its confines. It 
 has a negligible length of seacoast (particularly navigable 
 for a considerable part of the year) and several sluggish, if 
 majestic, rivers. Thus, while presenting practically no natural 
 barrier to foreign incursions, Russia, on the other hand, has 
 enjoyed the advantage of easy communication among the 
 various tribal and racial elements that composed it. For 
 centuries, it is true, such relations were far from amicable, yet 
 the fact stands that intercourse was free and easily achieved. 
 Again, the absence of mountain barriers on the North placed 
 no obstacle in the way of the icy winds from the Arctic Sea, 
 and though the southernmost regions of Russia, such as the 
 Crimea and Caucasus, may be a land of olives and oranges, 
 there is unbroken winter with permanent snow-roads and 
 sleighs and sleighbells for several months even in the South, 
 following upon the scorching heat of summer. And this 
 contrast in temperature has tended but to make the Russian 
 physique more rugged and inured to hardships.
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 313 
 
 Ethnologically, the ancient Slavs were longheads, while 
 the various Finnish and Mongolian races were chief!}'' of the 
 broadhead type. At present the Russians present both types, 
 with the intermediate mesocephalic form, and they are darker 
 of eye and hair than might be gathered from descriptions in 
 classical and medieval authors. 
 
 The history of Russia is usually dated from 862, when, 
 tired of continuous squabbles and wars, the natives of Nov- 
 gorod in the North called a Norse tribe, the Russ, "to come 
 and rule, for our land is great and abundant, but order it has 
 none." In time the bold Viking princes sailed down the 
 Dnieper (where the capital, Kieff, was situated), and even 
 stood at the gates of Constantinople, which they left after 
 collecting rich tribute. From Byzantium the Russian prince 
 Vladimir introduced Christianity (985), after refusing the 
 overtures of Mohammedan missionaries because of their 
 opposition to the use of spirituous liquors, as "the joy of the 
 Russians is [in] drinking." Under the Byzantine priesthood, 
 monasteries were founded, schools established, a primitive 
 Literature (liturgical, patristic, and annaUstic) chiefl}^ of 
 translations, but at times original as well, sprang up; the 
 common law was codified, and intercourse and even inter- 
 marriage with the ruling houses of Western Europe grew up 
 during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Slavic system 
 of dividing up principalities among all the sons and bestowing 
 the chief authority on the oldest in the house, i.e. seniority 
 of the brothers over the sons of the deceased, split up Russia 
 into innumerable petty domains which were in constant war- 
 fare with one another. Conspiracies and parricidal exploits 
 went on for centuries. The Tartar Invasion (1224-1237) 
 found Russia in no condition to resist it, and for two hundred 
 and fifty years the invaders trampled the Russians under 
 foot, encouraging internecine war among the princes, selling 
 for a price the thrones and lives of rulers to their less scrupulous 
 and wealthier rivals. They humiliated the rulers by enforced
 
 314 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 visits to pay homage to the Tartar Khans and enslaved, 
 tortured, and massacred, the populace. Intermarriage be- 
 tween Russians and Tartars, both forcible and voluntary, 
 became quite common. Asiatic customs, pohcies, methods 
 of government, and criminal justice blotted out whatever 
 Western culture had been acquired by Russia and reduced 
 the Russians almost to the invaders' own level of barbarism. 
 Yet in those dark times a line of shrewd princes at Moscow 
 brought that obscure town to the forefront and made it Rus- 
 sia's rallying-point. From Moscow the final expedition against 
 the Tartars was made in 1480, and their Khanates on the 
 Volga were added to Russia some seventy years later. In 
 1547 John IV, the Terrible, was crowned Tsar of Russia, 
 after more than two centuries of "gathering together of 
 Russia" on the part of the Muscovite princes, in the course 
 of which teachers, artisans, artists, and architects from 
 Western Europe were brought in. In 1597 the peasants were 
 fastened to the soil, serfdom was established, and in 1654 
 Little (Southern) Russia joined the realm of the Muscovite 
 Tsars. 
 
 By the end of the seventeenth century Moscow had a large 
 colony of foreigners skilled in all manner of trades, quartered 
 in the so-called German ( = foreign) Village, a suburb of the 
 capital. Here Peter the Great was initiated into European 
 military methods and the art of navigation and conceived 
 the idea of pursuing his studies in Holland incognito. On 
 his return he made up his mind "to cut a window to Europe " 
 by founding St. Petersburg (1703) and making it his capital. 
 Peter I ruled Russia Uterally with a "big stick" and forced 
 Western European dress, customs, schools, books, as well as 
 a reformed alphabet, upon his unwilling subjects. His final 
 triumph over that royal knight-errant, Charles XII of Sweden, 
 made Russia a European power to be reckoned with, and 
 Peter assumed the title of Emperor of all the Russias. 
 During the reigns of his female successors, German influences
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 315 
 
 were all powerful in all departments of life, but the wars with 
 Frederick the Great brought on a reaction, and with Catherine 
 II (1762-1796) a long line of Russian court-favorites begins. 
 From that time Gallomania becomes rampant. The restless 
 "Semiramis of the North" established numerous commissions 
 for effecting radical reforms both governmental and social. 
 She coquetted with the Uberal ideas of the Encyclopedists, 
 and carried on a voluminous correspondence with Voltaire and 
 Diderot. No sooner had the liberal seeds begun to sprout 
 than the Empress became reactionary in the extreme, eradicat- 
 ing "plots "and " revolution " with a hand that knew no mercy. 
 But during the few liberal years of her reign Russian life pul- 
 sated with great intensity. 
 
 The Empress herself wrote more than a score of comedies, 
 dramatic sketches, and operatic librettos, all fully national in 
 subject and genuinely popular in language and treatment, 
 quite a contrast to the artificial pseudo-classicism prevalent 
 for nearly half a century. Under Alexander I (1801-1825) 
 Russia experienced a process of liberal reforms during the 
 first half of the reign, and rabid reaction in the latter half. 
 During their march upon Paris and their sojourn there, in 
 the course of the Napoleonic Wars, the Russians had absorbed 
 too many liberal ideas to suit the victorious Emperor, and 
 the Holy Alliance was the result. Thenceforth Russia be- 
 came part and parcel of Europe in her politics and in her 
 Literature. Nicholas I (1825-1855) still further curtailed the 
 hberties of his subjects, but police tyranny and the censorship 
 reached their highest point after the days of 1848. The last 
 seven years of his reign were the "Darkest Age" of Russian 
 Literature. The liberal beginnings of Alexander II (1855- 
 1881) brought "the Sixties," the culminating point in Russian 
 Literature, followed by the great movement of "going to the 
 people" in the Seventies. Reaction of a severity almost 
 equaling the period of 1848-1855 set in with Alexander III 
 (1881-1894). The rule of Nicholas II, characterized by Hague
 
 316 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Peace Conferences before the World and "Red Sundays" at 
 home, is of to-day and need not be dwelt upon. 
 
 Such has been Russia's history, the foundation on which its 
 Literature was reared. The instrument in question, the 
 Russian language, has had enough admirers to save one the 
 delicate task of rhapsody, though a tolerable acquaintance 
 with several modem tongues and familiarity with the lan- 
 guages of Greece and Rome would seem to warrant having an 
 opinion on the subject. 
 
 LomonosofT, "Russia's First University" in Pushkin's fe- 
 licitous phrase, one of the world's few all-embracing geniuses 
 of the type of Aristotle and Leibniz, with the gift of poetry 
 in the bargain, says, in the Dedication of his Russian Grammar 
 (1755) : — 
 
 " Charles V, Emperor of Rome, was wont to say that it b proper 
 to address oneself in Spanish to God, in French to friends, in German 
 to the enemy, and in Italian to the female sex. Had he been 
 skilled in (the knowledge of) Russian, he would doubtless have 
 added that in the last named it behooves one to speak to all the 
 above. For therein he would have found the magnificence of 
 Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the ten- 
 derness of Italian, and, besides, the opulence of Greek and Latin 
 and their forceful gift for concise imagery. The powerful eloquence 
 of Cicero, the magnificent stateliness of Virgil, the pleasing poesy of 
 Ovid, do not lose their worth in Russian. The finest philosophical 
 concepts and reasoning, the multiform properties and changes of 
 nature occurring in this visible edifice of the universe and in the in- 
 tercourse among men as well, have, in our tongue, locutions befitting 
 and expressing the matter." 
 
 Over a hundred years later, Turgenieff, a master of the 
 principal modem languages, thus voiced his admiration for 
 Russian : — 
 
 " In days of doubt, in days of distressing meditations on the fate 
 of my country, in thee alone I trust, O Russian language, great, 
 mighty, truthful, free" . . .
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 317 
 
 "But it is impossible to believe that such a language was not 
 given to a great people." 
 
 An opinion fully indorsed by a Frenchman, De Vogiie, 
 who says, "The Russian Language is undoubtedly the richest 
 of all the European tongues." 
 
 Of the three distinct varieties (into which Russian, roughly 
 speaking, is subdivided), the "Little Russian" in the South 
 of Russia, "White Russian" in the Western provinces border- 
 ing on Germany and around the Baltic coast, and "Great 
 Russian " spoken in the rest of Russia by nearly seventy million 
 souls, — this last is the literary language, the speech of 
 Moscow being its purest form. On the other hand, St. Peters- 
 burg, from a literary point of view, is even more than the 
 Paris of Russia, for every writer of note, no matter where 
 born, has gravitated to the capital; and this has given an 
 additional impulse towards a single literary language. 
 
 With these physical, historical, and political conditions, 
 Russia presents certain special psychological characteristics 
 which, in part at least, are the result of such conditions. 
 
 This huge expanse of earth's surface, often without a single 
 tree for hundreds of miles, with only a carpet of grass in 
 summer and a thick mantle of snow in winter, makes the 
 Russian self-centered and contemplative, with a strong ten- 
 dency towards the mystical, the vague, and the fantastic. 
 
 The early mingling of Slavic, Norse, and Finnish elements, 
 centuries of Byzantine influence with its sapping of secular life 
 to foster monastic ideals, two hundred and fifty years of Mon- 
 golian domination and intermarriage, followed by a faint taste 
 of Italian Renaissance in the artistic labors of the Fioraventis, 
 thereupon a forcible inoculation of Western manners and 
 civilization by Peter I, finally to be succeeded by unbroken 
 intercourse with Western Europe, — this process has brought 
 it about that to-day Russia is, for the tourist, culturally (as 
 she is geographically) the middle ground between Western 
 Europe and Asia, and justifies to a certain degree Havelock
 
 318 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Ellis's characterization of Russia as the barbarian country in 
 Europe, just as lately he has labeled Spain the surviving 
 savage country in Europe. 
 
 The commingling of such contrasting elements has made 
 "the Russian in reality a well-tempered alloy of the two great 
 racial stocks, the European longheads and Asiatic broadheads," 
 and has given him the pecuUar traits that have stood him in 
 good stead in gaining his position among the nations. 
 
 The Russian's emotional expansiveness, the recklessness 
 with which he expresses his feelings, as shown in the habit 
 of kissing and embracing among men (on meeting after a long 
 separation), in his tropical enthusiasm and tears at the 
 theater, in the whole-heartedness with which he goes in for 
 the work he chooses — that is what most strikes a foreigner. 
 
 And with this are combined a simplicity and frankness that 
 seem brutal to a staid Anglo-Saxon or a courtly Latin. The 
 ''broad Russian nature," a "soul wide-open" (like a door 
 ajar), are the current phrases among the Russians themselves. 
 To confer the highest encomium upon a man in his private or 
 public relations is to say that he is "a man with a soul," a 
 "soulful man," a "soul of a man." 
 
 Such simple-heartedness and sincerity make a Russian 
 fearfully zealous in his ideals. He accepts ideas no matter 
 by whom propounded, and immediately makes them a part 
 of himself. As Brandes says : — 
 
 "The cultivated Russian understands and always has under- 
 stood the living, the new, the newest in foreign countries, and does 
 not wait till it becomes cheap because it is old or has gained currency 
 by the approbation of the stranger's countrymen. The Russian 
 catches the new thought on the wing. Their culture makes a 
 modern race, with the keenest scent for everything modern." 
 
 Having once made an idea or ideal his own, a Russian will 
 unfalteringly carry it to its bitter end. He will not yield even 
 in the face of its reductio ad absurdum.
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 319 
 
 It is this devotion to ideals that has caused tens of thousands 
 of the flower of Russian youth to leave their kindred and homes 
 and "go to the people," hve and work among and for the 
 peasants, share their simple fare, their joys and their sorrows, 
 and give their lives in the prisons, in Siberia and on the gallows, 
 with a stoicism and martyr's exaltation, that have aroused the 
 wonder of the civilized world. But it is also this same de- 
 votion to ideals that makes the tender-hearted Russian un- 
 hesitatingly shoot down men by the hundreds, when these 
 men happen to be among those who misrule Russia. To 
 the unthinking it may seem a cruelty incompatible with that 
 almost feminine tenderness. But who would deny the tender 
 love of Brutus for Csesar and the logic of his arguments for 
 kilhng Caesar ? 
 
 Altruism and a burning zeal combine into a well-defined 
 sense of responsibihty which becomes almost oppressive. 
 It makes the Russian youth mature early and age too soon. 
 
 On the one hand an ardent love for one's fellow-beings, on the 
 other the iron hand of an autocratic government; the out- 
 bursts of hopeful youth countered by the fury of merciless 
 repression, — there is the environment which explains the 
 apparently causeless oscillation between hopefulness and 
 pessimism, unbridled merriment and fathomless grief, which 
 lies in the make-up of every Russian. That master of Russian 
 character, Pushkin, sang more than seventy years ago: — 
 
 " Something kindred, dear is sounded. 
 In my coachman's songs unending : 
 Now 'tis merriment unbounded, 
 Then again 'tis grief heart-rending," 
 
 and elsewhere : 
 
 " How sadly sings the Russian Maiden, 
 Like our Muse, a songstress sorrow-laden. 
 . . . All our race, 
 From coachman to the foremost poet,
 
 320 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 We all sing dolefully. A dismal whine 
 A Russian's song is, ever know it ; 
 
 Begins : "Your health !" a funeral dirge in fine. 
 Though Muse and Maid sing mournfully, 
 I like their plaintive melody." 
 
 Clearly, as has been said, "the Russians are radicals in 
 ever}i,hing, in faith and infidelity, in love and hate, in sub- 
 mission and rebellion." 
 
 In analyzing " De Rerum Natura " Professor Mackail states 
 that with Lucretius "the joy and glory of his art come second 
 to his passionate love of truth, and the deep moral purport 
 of what he believes to be the one true message for mankind. 
 . . . His mission ... is that light of truth which is "clearer 
 than the beams of the sun or the shining shafts of day." 
 
 "A Roman aristocrat, living among a highly cultivated society, 
 Lucretius had been yet endowed by nature with the primitive in- 
 stincts of the savage. He sees the ordinary processes of everyday 
 life — weaving, carpentry, metal-working, even such specialized 
 forms of manual art as the polishing of the surface of marble — with 
 the fresh eye of one who sees them all for the first time. Nothing 
 is to him indistinct through familiarity. In virtue of this absolute 
 clearness of vision it costs him no effort to throw himself back into 
 prehistoric conditions and the wild life of the earliest men." 
 
 Almost two thousand years after Lucretius, history has 
 repeated itself in the case of the Russian writers. They have 
 brought to their task the same passionate love of truth and 
 the savage's clearness of vision in approaching the phenomena 
 of human life they chose to deal with; qualities just as pre- 
 cious in their way as the ancient Greek's Forschungsgeist — 
 the cra\ang for investigation (if this free rendering may be 
 pardoned), and his unfailing sense of artistic proportion. 
 
 This is what made Russian authors realists Kar Uoxnv, 
 what gave Russia a naturalist school in Literature decades 
 before anybody in Western Europe had ever thought of realism 
 or naturalism. "Whether it was due to his superior quali-
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 321 
 
 fication for the special end in view, or precisely because his 
 mind was untutored and unsophisticated and therefore un- 
 spoiled, makes no difference for the point in hand. The fact 
 remains that a Russian writer could no more help seeing life 
 and action exactly as they were, and then depicting them as 
 he saw them, than a Greek could help expressing himself in 
 art with a wonderful sense of proportion. 
 
 Add to these traits the Russian's innate emotionality and 
 you have the basis of the all-pervading humanity of Russian 
 Literature as a whole, its teaching mission, or "pity" as it 
 has often been called, which must not be confounded with 
 didacticism. A comparison of the works of the modern 
 Russian writers with the realistic productions of their French 
 rivals will make the matter quite clear. The Frenchmen, 
 in developing their negative characters, and following up the 
 succession of their psychological states with the minutest 
 details, give one the impression of delivering a prosecuting- 
 attorney's speech in court; they have no sympathy with their 
 characters of non-heroic stamp, they bring up all those wonder- 
 fully wrought out protocol minutiae only the more effectively 
 to draw a crushing verdict from their readers. 
 
 To the Russian authors, on the other hand, the famous Une 
 of Terence — 
 
 Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto — 
 
 " I am a man : I deem nothing human foreign to me " — 
 
 is the principle par excellence ; it is their chief and moving spirit. 
 People with weak -v^ills, with high-strung nerves, affected by 
 the many other maladies of the day, are not looked down upon, 
 but evoke the heart-felt pity of the author, who sees in them 
 but incomplete portions of human beings as designed by their 
 Creator, members of society crippled by the vagaries of the 
 private, social, and political life of our times. It is this 
 quality that made Gogol consider that the greatest merit of 
 his work consisted in the fact that "he surveyed all this hugely
 
 322 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 rushing life, through laughter seen by the world and tears 
 invisible and unknown to it.'" It is this quality again that 
 moved a foreign critic to say that Tolstoy "possesses the skill 
 of an English chemist with the soul of a Hindu Buddhist." 
 
 To what extraordinary lengths this gift of sjTnpathy with 
 the characters depicted, of placing themselves so to speak in 
 their heroes' skin, can go with the Russian writers, may be 
 gathered from the following anecdote, sufficiently attested to 
 be quoted here. 
 
 "One dreary winter day Tolstoy and Turgenieff, in their aimless 
 rambles, came upon a broken-down old horse waiting for its driver, 
 in the piercing cold. Tolstoy walked over to the horse and ten- 
 derly patting the shivering animal, depicted its pedigree, past his- 
 tory, and its feelings at the moment, in a few masterly strokes, with 
 such power, boundless love and compassion, that Turgenieff half- 
 joldngly burst out : ' Lyoff Nikolayevich ! you surely must have 
 had several generations of horses among your ancestors, for other- 
 wise you could not feel so deeply for this horse.' " 
 
 This was the secret mainspring that enabled Tolstoy (in 
 common with the other great Russian writers) to depict with 
 equal facility, sureness of touch and unerring power, all kinds 
 of characters: children, adults, and old folk; men and women 
 in all walks of life, from rulers of nations, through ministers, 
 statesmen, courtiers, great noblemen and clergymen, down 
 to the smallest prison official who can be bought with a pound 
 of sugar; the martyrs of the Russian revolution and its dun- 
 geon-keepers, executioners, and hardened jailbirds; the most 
 ideal representatives of Russian womanhood and the women 
 of the gutter. 
 
 But this altruism in dealing with others makes them just 
 as cruel in dealing with themselves (in their remorseless self- 
 analysis and self-criticism) as they are tender in dealing with 
 others, for in depicting in both cases with equal fideUty to 
 actual life, they are drawn by their extreme idealism to
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 323 
 
 explain away the faults of others while scourging themselves 
 for the same. 
 
 A gang of convicts, with many a murderer and hardened 
 criminal among them, on the foot-wearying tramp to Siberia 
 evoke nothing but the most effusive outbursts of sympathy 
 (often taking the material shape of donations in money, 
 clothes, and provisions) on the part of the villagers by the road. 
 Yet those same peasants, after conmiitting a crime, will in 
 most cases, under the stress of awakened conscience, rush to 
 the market-place to make a clean breast of it before the whole 
 community, pleading with the fellow- villagers to shower abuse 
 and blows on them as sinners unworthy of their God's image. 
 
 But no matter how strongly marked these humane ten- 
 dencies might be, they would probably remain isolated cases, 
 if there had been no conscious striving after definite ideals, 
 had they not been enthroned as principles that should be the 
 beacon fights of the advanced writers among the Russians. 
 
 True, Dyerzhavin's (1743-1816) whole claim to immortality 
 was based on being the bard of Catherine IPs achieve- 
 ments: — 
 
 "I shall extol, I shall proclaim thee, 
 Through thee immortal be myself," 
 
 but he also takes credit for 
 
 "With a smile telling the truth to Tsars." 
 As for Pushkin, who as a lad wrote — 
 
 "The old Dyerzhavin us has noticed, 
 And on the brink of grave has blessed," 
 
 he has entirely different claims. He, whom partisans of 
 "Art for Art's sake," "pure Art," etc., proclaimed their ideal 
 and idol, — he will have his imperishable monument for this 
 reason: — 
 
 "And of my people I long for this shall be beloved 
 That kindly feelings with my lyre I used to wake ; 
 That by the vivid charm of verses I was useful 
 And mercv to the fallen I invoked."
 
 324 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 It is on the invoking of "mercy to the fallen," the "waking 
 of kindly feelings," the actual "usefulness" of his poetry, that 
 Pushkin bases his claims to immortaUty. 
 
 In another poem, "The Echo," he distinctly lays it down 
 as the poet's duty to vibrate in consonance with the multi- 
 tudinous events of life, even though himself receiving no 
 response from any one: — 
 
 THE ECHO 
 
 "There roars a beast in forest's gloom, 
 Or horn blares, or thunders boom, 
 Or maiden sings beyond the holm ; — 
 < To every tone 
 
 Thy answer in air's vacant dome. 
 Thou dost intone. 
 
 "Thou hearkenst to the thunders gruff, 
 The voice of storm and waves far-off, 
 And shout of rustic shepherds rough ; — 
 
 Comes answer back. 
 But thou gett'st none. As badly off 
 
 A bard's, alack !" 
 
 And this is the keynote of Russian Literature and literary 
 criticism. Every Russian author of note has distinctly stated 
 that his literary work is but a means for a certain well-defined 
 purpose, a straight aiming at a sturdy reality, not a blind 
 groping after vague and diffuse ideals. 
 
 The faltering verse of Russia's first would-be poet, Kantemir 
 (1708-1744), becomes a social satire against the senseless 
 opposition to the reforms of Peter the Great. The odes of 
 Lomonosoff (1711-1765) attain a genuine poetic ring when 
 dealing with the value of knowledge for benighted Russia. 
 The comedies of Fonvizin (1745-1792), the first artistic crea- 
 tions (along with their lesser contemporary achievements by 
 Catherine II) on truly Russian lines, scourge the excesses of
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 325 
 
 worshiping foreign manners and customs, and plead for the 
 national simphcity of olden days. 
 
 Griboyedoff (1795-1829), in his "Misfortune from Intelli- 
 gence," that heart-rending cry of a man that loved his coun- 
 try only too well, had for his direct object to combat the bane- 
 ful influence of the fad for aping everj-thing French. 
 
 Lermontoff (1814-1841) forges his deadliest darts, pours 
 out the fiercest venom of his "iron verse, suffused with bitter- 
 ness and anger," against the triviality and shallowness of 
 the society of his time. The Eternal Judge has given him 
 the omniscience of a prophet : — 
 
 "Of love and truth I then commenced 
 To herald undefiled teachings ; 
 Then all my fellow-men incensed. 
 
 At me stones hurled for my preachings." 
 
 At eighteen, Gogol (1809-1852) writes in his letters: "I 
 have consecrated my whole hfe to doing good," " all my powers 
 to nothing but the advantage of the fatherland," "almost 
 since the age of mental immaturity I burned with the un- 
 quenchable zeal of making my life indispensable for the wel- 
 fare of the State; I eagerly sought to contribute the slightest 
 benefit whatever." 
 
 Turgenieff (1818-1883), "the Westerner," whom Tame 
 considered " one of the most perfect artists the world has 
 produced since the classic period," on the very threshold of 
 his literary career takes his Hannibalian oath never to make 
 peace with his "enemy," to fight to a finish that enemy — 
 the institution of serfdom — and actually leaves Russia the 
 more effectively to strike his blows. His "Annals of a Sports- 
 man" (1847-1851), an infinitely superior artistic achievement 
 to "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " produced the effect aimed at by the 
 author. Alexander II, who avowed the strong impression 
 Turgenieff's sketches had made on him, emancipated the serfs 
 in 1861.
 
 326 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 Tolstoy (1828-1910), in the early fifties, when an author 
 was safe from the rigors of reprisals only in the realm of "pm-e 
 Art," proclaims in a personal outpouring, "I shall write, 
 but not as you do, for I know wherefore I shall write." 
 
 His "'Sebastopol" sketches conclude as follows: "Where 
 is the embodiment of evil which is to be avoided? Where, 
 in this story, is the embodiment of good which is to be imi- 
 tated? Who is its villain and who the hero? All are good 
 and all are bad. But the hero of my story whom I love with 
 all the powers of my soul, whom I have striven to reproduce 
 in all his beauty and who always has been, is, and will be 
 beautiful, is truth." 
 
 Or elsewhere, in the preface which Tolstoy wrote for the 
 Russian translation of Amiel's "Journal": "For we love and 
 need an author only in proportion as he reveals to us the 
 inner process of his soul, of course if this process is new and 
 has not been gone through before. Whatever he may write 
 — a play, scientific work, novel, philosophical treatise, 
 lyric poem, critique, satire — what is dear to us in the writer's 
 work is but this inner working of his soul and not the archi- 
 tectural edifice, into which most of the time (and I even think, 
 always) he lays his maimed thought and feeling." 
 
 As for the folk-novel movement of the period of "going 
 to the people," suffice it to quote a letter of Ryeshetnikoff 
 (1841-1871) to Nyekrasoff : "I conceived the idea of describ- 
 ing the life of the burlaks (bargemen on the Volga) in order that 
 I might, even in the slightest degree, help these poor toilers." 
 
 It may be pointed out here that this view had permeated 
 all branches of Russian art at the time. Thus the composer 
 Dargomyzhski wTote iii 1857: "I have no intention to degrade 
 music to the level of a pastime. I want the sound to express 
 the word directly. I want truth." He strove for the im- 
 pression of truth and realistic representation, while Musorgski, 
 the follower of this "great teacher of musical truth," laid this 
 down as the articles of his own reahstic faith: "artistic rep-
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 327 
 
 resentation of material beauty is childishness, the infantile 
 age of Art"; "Art is a medium of communion with mankind, 
 not its aim." 
 
 Thus whether in the jeremiads of Radishcheff against serf- 
 dom or in Fonvizin's and Griboyedoff's satires on the stupid 
 mania for imitating foreign manners, or Gogol's scourging of 
 oflBcial corruption from lowest to highest, or Turgenieff's 
 pleading for the serfs, or the whole folk-novel movement in 
 behalf of the starving emancipated peasants, or Tolstoy's glori- 
 fication of the common people (and in his actual teachings), 
 or Dostoyefski's plea for the humble, the downtrodden, and 
 the criminals, or Gorki's appeals for the outcast and the tramp, 
 Russian Literature has been faithful to its mission: to direct 
 the minds of its readers for the betterment of Russian society 
 as a whole by bettering the lot of those who most urgently 
 need it, to tell the unvarnished truth in describing Russian 
 life. 
 
 Owing to the extraordinary conditions of Russian political 
 and social life, with its argus-eyed censors and dreadful system 
 of espionage, Literature has by force of circumstances become 
 the only means, the exclusive arena for struggle against the 
 evils of Russian political, economic, and social Ufe. Even the 
 establishment of a free school is strongly objected to by the 
 government and imphes untold difficulties. Tolstoy's peda- 
 gogic labors in Yasnaya Polyana had been made the subject 
 of an especial investigation with a view to finding traces of 
 revolutionary activity. Through certain circumstances, how- 
 ever, Tolstoy went unmolested and was even commended 
 where thousands of others were visited with exile or imprison- 
 ment. 
 
 In this its special mission. Literature in the narrower sense of 
 belles-lettres was powerfully supported by all the advanced Rus- 
 sian literary critics who took their cue from the great authors 
 of Russia. Thus the interdependence between Literature 
 and life, and the function of Literature as a disseminator of
 
 328 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 the tenets of the advanced minds in Russia, soon became the 
 Russian hterary critics' profession of faith. A hterary pro- 
 duction was judged not from a purely literary point of view, 
 but according as it furthered or retarded social progress, as 
 it served to help the attainment of the social and ethical ideals 
 of society. A work would be condemned unhesitatingly if it 
 lost connection with Hfe by tearing itself away into the regions 
 of Art for Art's sake. 
 
 Here one might say that the Russian's well-known ideal- 
 ism apparently runs counter to his uncompromising realism 
 in Literature. But this contradiction is only surface deep; 
 the Russian sees everything with the eyes of a thoroughgoing 
 realist, but back of it all is a higher purpose, the reahsm 
 becomes handmaid of a high ideal: to advance social prog- 
 ress, to better the lot of the unfortunate. 
 
 Naturally, in the clash and turmoil of several generations 
 of opposing views, many a writer or critic has gone to the 
 absurd limits of his pet theories, the more so when we bear 
 in mind that the Russian nature tends to run to extremes. 
 
 Thus, on the one hand, Pisareff (1840-1868), a critic who 
 swayed the minds of Russian youth during the Sixties, pro- 
 claimed the ancillary office of Literature by pushing his utiU- 
 tarian theories to the point of declaring that all the works 
 of a second-rate poet are not worth a pair of boots, the labor 
 of a plodding cobbler. And years before Ibsen had disowned 
 verse for the purposes of drama, the great satirist Shchedrin, 
 himself guilty of riding Pegasus in his younger days, declared, 
 in a moment of exasperation, that those who wrote verse 
 seemed to him lunatics trying to walk along a string stretched 
 on the floor, and half sitting down at each step. 
 
 On the other hand, a whole group of poets, under the reac- 
 tionary pressure of Nicholas I's reign preached "Art for Art's 
 sake," and their most characteristic representative, Fet, who 
 hymned abstract beauty untiringly for over half a century, 
 was the most hard-handed among the many Russian hard-
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 329 
 
 handed masters in dealing with his peasants and in his fre- 
 quent polemic writings on this subject. The mere fact that 
 they preached pure Art, that they kept aloof from life's stern 
 realities, made such preachers advocates of the existing order 
 in the eyes of all those who felt the weight of governmental 
 oppression. Thus the view, that the realistic school of 
 writers stood for progress and light and the partisans of "pure 
 Art" were allies of the forces of darkness and reaction, was 
 only strengthened. 
 
 While these two currents of literary thought and ideals 
 have to a certain degree existed side by side, they really 
 carried on a ceaseless struggle for supremacy. But with each 
 successive swing of the pendulum the ethical school, with its 
 altruistic teachings of love for the "lesser brother," invari- 
 ably gathered more and more force at the expense of the 
 school of pure art. The victories of the former ever represent 
 the culminating points in the history of Russian letters; the 
 latter as unfailingly mark the gloomiest periods in the reigns 
 of a succession of gloomy autocrats. There is a throbbing 
 joy of life, a hopefulness and vigor throughout the length and 
 breadth of Russian Literature, when the ethical cause is 
 predominant; there is marked melancholy, pessimism almost 
 bordering on despair, when "pure Art" sends forth its full 
 bloom. 
 
 But with all this Russian Literature has mirrored every 
 shade of the literary movements of Western Europe. For 
 have we not seen that the Russian possesses to an extraor- 
 dinary degree, the capacity for grasping new ideas imme- 
 diately upon coming into contact with them, and also the 
 power of adapting and adopting, appropriating them at 
 once? 
 
 And thus it is that the Russians were pseudo-classicists in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, were Encyclopedists 
 (as, for example, in Catherine II) with Voltaire and Diderot, 
 wept tears of sentimentalism with Karamzin (1766-1826)
 
 330 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 over the novels of Richardson and Sterne, grew violent ro- 
 manticists when Byron was the undisputed overlord over the 
 minds of Pushldn and the youthful Lermontoff, became plus 
 royalistes que le roi over Hegelian dialectics, with the 
 famous "all that which exists is reasonable," in the Thirties 
 and early Forties, then Darwinists and positi\4sts and Spen- 
 cerians and Schopenhauerians and sjonbolists and Nietz- 
 scheans and even, at last, decadents with a faint touch of 
 pornography to boot, all in turn (at times somewhat behind- 
 hand) as these movements succeeded one another in the 
 thought of Western Europe. But all these numerous in- 
 tellectual shades of opinion were almost inamediately re- 
 created and incorporated into the peculiarly national psy- 
 chology of the Russian, with its sober realism of manner and 
 high idealism of thought. The history of Russian Literature 
 is thus at the same time the history of Russian thought. 
 
 Thus the saying current in Russia, that "the Frenchman 
 will hit upon an invention, the Enghshman will manufacture 
 it, the German will import it into Russia for sale, and the 
 Russian will come and steal it," has been shown to be true 
 in other fields than industry. But the process has been much 
 more than mere appropriation. It has been a laborious and 
 painstaking process of transmutation and fusion. It has 
 been a gathering of threads of somber color and bright color, 
 garish and subdued, and weaving them into one majestic 
 tapestry of a wonderful design and charming the sense of 
 vision with the beauty of its composition and the harmo- 
 nious blending of all the tints and shades of the rainbow. 
 
 It has been a fructifying process par ecxellence, not of cram- 
 ming only or even of assimilation, whereby Russia has re- 
 turned a hundred fold for what it has borrowed. 
 
 Some of the most prominent writers of France, England, 
 Germany, Italy, Spain, and America, of the last quarter of a 
 century, have been more or less the product of the school of 
 writing as exemphfied in the works of Turgenieff, Dostoyefski,
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 331 
 
 and Tolstoy, and Bourget, Maupassant, James, Howells, 
 Hauptmann, and D'Aimunzio, to name but a few of a host, 
 have clearly shown or expressly acknowledged their in- 
 debtedness to the Russian literary masters. 
 
 It is idle and perniciously misleading therefore to assert 
 that Russian Literature has nothing original in it (as has been 
 done in a curiously biased "History of Russian Literature," 
 by K. Waliszewski, 1900), for ''does it detract a whit from 
 the quality of the magnificent ruby, when we are told that 
 the element of which it is formed is a colored variety of 
 corundum or alumina," actually the most abundant of the 
 earths ? 
 
 As for the future of Russian Literature, it of course is in 
 the lap of the gods along with the future of Russia. 
 
 In order to avoid the perils of prophecy and to let a non- 
 Russian, who is more competent in that sphere, pronounce 
 upon the question of Russia's future, I shall conclude with 
 these words of Havelock Ellis : — 
 
 "Russia at the present time is a vast laboratory for the experi- 
 mental manufacture of the greatest European and Asiatic nation, 
 fated to mold, as much probably as any nation, the future of 
 the world. Such a process is always going on everywhere at 
 some stage of acuteness, but in the rest of Europe the formative 
 stage in the growth of peoples has long gone by, and while it lasted 
 there were few or none able and competent to observe it. Irr Russia 
 we see the process in its most acute form. This enormous birth- 
 rate, this death-rate so enormous as sometimes to equal the births, 
 this creation of human beings on so vast a scale and the testing and 
 proving of them in the most trying of climates — in this great 
 experimental operation Nature is, on the whole, still left to attain 
 her own results in her own way. In such an acute and destructive 
 process of natural selection, not only are the weakest lost, but a 
 certain number of human failures are necessarily left. Thus there 
 are neurotic and degenerate elements in all classes of society, though, 
 as the comparative harmlessness of Russian criminality and the
 
 332 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 
 
 absence of the physical signs of degeneracy clearly indicate, the 
 process of selection on the whole works truly. The Russian pessi- 
 mist and the hostile foreigner see nothing but decadence. The 
 thoughtful observer knows that such decadence is but the inevitable 
 by-product in the formative process of a great nation." 
 
 "Beyond any other European people the Russians possess a 
 degree of receptivity, a radical humanity of feeling, a fund of high 
 idealism, and a sense of the relationship of ideals to practical life, 
 which cannot fail to carry them very far. These things, far more 
 than either an outrageous militarism or the capacity for frantic in- 
 dustrial production, in the end make up civilization."
 
 XVII 
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 By W. p. Trent, Professor of English Literature 
 
 The title of this lecture is "The Cosmopolitan Outlook," 
 undoubtedly a very high-sounding phrase, but, like most 
 such phrases, exceedingly vague. I suppose it gives me a 
 license to talk briefly about the general status of Literature, 
 present and future, and to endeavor to discover what part 
 Cosmopolitanism plays and may be expected to play in de- 
 termining that status. Such a license plainly carries with it 
 one advantage. It is not safe to contradict a man, however 
 much one may dislike his utterances, when it is obvious that 
 he is discussing a subject about which neither he nor any 
 one else knows anything definite. On the other hand, I have 
 a shrewd conviction that this apparent immunity from suc- 
 cessful contradiction differs Uttle from an opportunity to 
 display my rashness as a generalizer, and that I am about to 
 essay what has come to be in America a presidential rather 
 than a professorial function. It is our presidents who fill 
 our sails of thought with the winds of generahzation. When 
 Ulysses carried the bags of -^olus, it was his crew that let 
 loose, while he slept, the angry and adverse blasts. But in 
 our superior modern wisdom we have changed all that. It 
 is our leaders themselves that let loose our gusty winds. It 
 is our presidents, actual and potential, who tell us things 
 about finance that are in very truth beyond the dreams of 
 avarice, and the wits of political economists. It is our 
 presidents who, in their philanthropical zeal, are ready to 
 
 333
 
 334 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 regulate the size of our families and the length of our book- 
 shelves. Into their perilous barks shall a mere professor at- 
 tempt to climb ? Ah, yes ! for the public is platform-mad 
 just as it is airship-mad. It is the duty of all of us, that 
 have even the feeblest gift of tongue, to sacrifice ourselves 
 to thee, O sovereign Demos, lest, to paraphrase Homer, we 
 all perish in thy anger at being deprived of wind : — 
 
 <I>S fir] TravTCS oXwvrat oSvaaafxevoLO reolo 
 
 The Cosmopolitan Outlook! That seems to imply that, 
 even if we are not all cosmopolitans now, we have a chance of 
 becoming cosmopolitans one of these days, and that Litera- 
 ture will be affected by the change. Such an inference 
 appears to be reasonable, but it would scarcely be safe to use 
 it as the basis of any sort of discussion without previously 
 answering many questions that naturally present themselves. 
 
 We Americans are a very composite people, but, in so far as 
 a fusion of race characteristics has taken place among us, 
 have we not tended to evolve into a people strongly marked 
 by national characteristics of which we are exceedingly 
 proud ? We are great travelers — hence the talk one often 
 hears of the American invasion of Europe — and we are very 
 hospitable to strangers; but that these two facts involve the 
 conclusion that in our ideals and our modes of thinking as a 
 people we are true citizens of the world seems to me very 
 doubtful. So far as my own studies and travels have led me 
 to think about the matter, I have been left wondering 
 whether one does not find among the educated Europeans 
 of one's acquaintance more of that liberality and poise of 
 thought, and more of that humanitarian idealism, which are 
 or ought to be the fruits of a truly cosmopolitan spirit, than 
 one finds among Americans. » Facile adaptiveness, and easy- 
 going tolerance, and superficial acquaintance with what the 
 world is saying and doing, are probably found in larger 
 measure among Americans than among any other people,
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 335 
 
 but they are not signs of real Cosmopolitanism as I under- 
 stand the term. 1 will go farther and say that our Literature 
 and our thought, while on the whole sound and adapted to 
 our special needs, strike me as tending to become more 
 national rather than more cosmopoHtan. I sometimes even 
 wonder whether we are not in a fair way of becoming one of 
 the most parochical of peoples. Not long since, for example, 
 one of our leading newspapers published among its obituaries 
 those of a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 
 a dock engineer, a provision outfitter, and a great historian. 
 The shortest notice, as might have been expected, was that 
 of the scholar, the only one of the four men who had an inter- 
 national reputation. The newspaper knew its business, and 
 presumably it knew that its readers would not even care to 
 be given the name of a single one of the historian's books. 
 Perhaps this is entirely as it should be, and certainly I am 
 expressing only the opinion of one moderately well-informed 
 individual. But, as these must be my generalizations and 
 no one else's, I may as well give them honestly and fearlessly. 
 We Americans as a people have in ourselves the elements that 
 go to make a true Cosmopolitanism, and we have them per- 
 haps to a greater extent than any other people. We have in 
 our broad system of public instruction, in our peace societies, 
 our scientific associations, our philanthropical and other fed- 
 erated bodies, instrumentalities admirably fitted for fusing 
 these elements and increasing their working power; but in 
 some respects we seem to be less truly cosmopolitan than we 
 were half a century ago. *A profound belief in the rights of 
 man as man, is, I think, an essential element of true Cosmo- 
 politanism. Did not that belief help to keep alive the cour- 
 age of Abraham Lincoln, and of hundreds of thousands of 
 soldiers, and of millions of men, women, and children at 
 home, during the dark days of the Civil War? Where is 
 that profound belief now? Look into your hearts and an- 
 swer, and remember that this question is put to a Northern
 
 336 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 audience by a Southern-bom man. And answer another 
 question, please. Is a profound belief in the rights of man 
 as man likely to dominate a generation proud of a newly 
 acquired imperial sway, reared on the precepts of the gospel 
 of strenuosity, and naively exhilarated by its comparatively 
 easily acquired wealth and power? Would there be any reason 
 to be surprised if some one were to remark that he considered 
 Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to have been far 
 truer cosmopolitans than any American statesman of this 
 modern epoch, which has seen the United States definitively 
 enrolled among the so-called great powers of the world? And 
 do not fancy for a moment that I am talking about politics, 
 not Literature. SThe spirit that determines a people's politi- 
 cal ideals cannot be separated, much as a certain tj^De of 
 critics would hke to perform the feat, from the spirit that 
 determines its hterary and artistic ideals. 'Mere interna- 
 tional exchange of books, mere contemporaneous evolution, 
 in the several nations, of similar schools of art and thought, 
 mere exploitation throughout the world of more or less iden- 
 tical literary forms applied to varying material, may be signs 
 of the approach of a truly CosmopoHtan Literature; but 
 they afford no proof that we possess such a Literature now 
 or that we shall soon possess it. A truly Cosmopohtan 
 Literature, in my judgment, will come into existence only in 
 that nation or those nations wherein a majority, or a domi- 
 nant minority, of true citizens of the world, that is, of pro- 
 fessed servants of humanity, hve and move and have their 
 being. 
 
 I wondered a moment ago whether one does not find among 
 cultivated Europeans more of that hberahty and poise of 
 thought, and more of that humanitarian ideaUsm which 
 ought to be the fruits of a truly cosmopolitan spirit, than one 
 finds among Americans of the present generation. The 
 comparison here implied is rendered less offensive by the 
 reflection that the peoples of Europe have been welded into a
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 337 
 
 sort of unity by social and political forces generated, for the 
 most part, in the remote past and operative through many 
 centuries, while the people of America have been welded 
 into such unity as they display by the operation of compara- 
 tively new forces, in conjunction with many of the older 
 forces operative in Europe. The pressure that makes for 
 equaUty, the pressure which we may broadly denominate as 
 democratic, has worked more slowly in Europe than it has 
 here, and the spirit of caste has been more powerful. Hence, 
 as it seems to me, there has been more occasion in Europe 
 than in America for the soul of man to brood upon the im- 
 perfections of society and to find refuge in liberal and ideal- 
 istic thought. It is the old story that adversity is a better 
 nurse of virtue than prosperity. I do not wish to push the 
 point too far, but it certainly seems to me to be a significant 
 fact, even after all due allowances are made for the effects 
 of individual genius, to find what many persons regard as 
 the greatest cosmopolitan force in Literature to-day, pro- 
 ceeding from one of the most backward and oppressed of all 
 the great peoples of the world. The most potent voice of my 
 generation, if I know what the words I am using mean, is that 
 of a true cosmopolitan who is also a Russian, Count Tolstoy. 
 I know that he is sneered at as a visionary, and that one 
 eminent American is said to have pronounced him to be a 
 moral pervert. I know that he preaches love instead of force, 
 and that thereby he lays himself open to the charge of being 
 a weakling. I know that his views with regard to Art and 
 Science, to modern governmental methods and policies, and 
 to that much lauded virtue, patriotism, are, to say the least, 
 not acceptable to the average citizen anywhere, and are 
 anathema to many well-to-do persons plethoric in pocket 
 and neck. But I know also that he is the only living man in 
 private life, and one of the very few since Voltaire, whom 
 an organized and powerful government has with good reason , 
 shown itself to be afraid to punish for his unacceptable
 
 338 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 writings; I know also that few even of his most inveterate 
 opponents are bold or foolish enough to express a doubt of his 
 courageous sincerity and essential nobility; and — what is the 
 main thing to me — I know that no other contemporary 
 voice speaks so directly to my heart and to the hearts of 
 thousands of other men throughout the world. And I know 
 too that the message of Tolstoy, whatever its impractical 
 elements, represents what I understand as true Cosmopoli- 
 tanism; that is to say, citizenship in that ideal republic of 
 men and women of which the good and wise in all ages have 
 dreamed, and for the coming of which they have labored. 
 In so far as that message in its spirit is influential to-day, in 
 so far, in my opinion, Literature and life have a cosmopoUtan 
 outlook of high significance. I trust that prosperity and the 
 intellectual cramping and flattening, which so often result 
 from what I have called the democratic pressure, will never 
 seriously impede the promulgation of that message in this 
 country and in the world at large, and that in a broad sense 
 it may fairly be taken as an index of the spirit of that Litera- 
 ture of the future in which our sons and our grandsons will 
 find solace and inspiration. 
 
 What matter if coming generations accept as entirely 
 valid not a single article of his ideahstic creed! The main 
 consideration should be for us, as it will be, I think, for them, 
 the man's essentially idealistic attitude toward his fellows. 
 He is a great cosmopolitan because he is a great altruistic 
 idealist; because, with ardor undiminished and faith unper- 
 turbed, he stands there an aged prophet amid the Russian 
 snows : — 
 
 " Still nourishing the unconquerable hope, 
 Still clutching the inviolable shade." 
 
 The hope I have just expressed is not jeopardized by a 
 curious condition of affairs to which we must now turn our 
 thoughts. We are considering the Cosmopolitan Outlook
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 339 
 
 at a time when, as perhaps never before, the minor nationali- 
 ties are zealously fostering their political and racial aspira- 
 tions through their Literatures. We are all familiar with 
 the efforts a group of men are making to establish a modern 
 Irish Literature, to which if one of my colleagues applies his 
 favorite epithet British, he will do it at the peril of his life. 
 The evolution of Norwegian Literature has been one of the 
 most striking facts in the literary history of the past half cen- 
 tury. With the winning of her national unity, which was 
 attained in a considerable measure through the patriotic 
 labors of her men of letters, Italy has taken the place due 
 her by inheritance in the ranks of the nations illustrious 
 through their literary and scientific productivity. In Bo- 
 hemia Czech aspirations are cherished by a group of writers, 
 and in Belgium concerted efforts are making to estab- 
 lish Flemish as a literary language. Among the colonies of 
 the British Empire and the republics of South America 
 similar tendencies are at work. As I write these words, I 
 see an announcement of "A Treasury of South African Poetry 
 and Verse." It is not called "A Golden Treasury," although 
 it comes from a region of gold mines, but the editor, though 
 modest, has all the boldness one expects of a pioneer. He is 
 evidently rash enough to try to distinguish poetry from 
 verse, or else to mingle them without discrimination. 
 
 And within the large nations themselves a somewhat analo- 
 gous tendency may be discovered. Within the past half 
 century we have been almost swamped with books, especially 
 novels and histories, devoted to the exploitation of regions, 
 sections, provinces, towns, and small localities. This local 
 Literature is partly no doubt the result of a search for some 
 new thing, partly the result of the imitation of the work of 
 the leaders of the realistic and naturalistic schools of fiction, 
 partly the result of an intensification of interest in all that 
 pertains to the nation and the race to which the writer be- 
 longs. However this may be, it is at least clear that any one
 
 340 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 casually examining the reviews and advertisements in such 
 a journal as the Athenceum for the past twenty-five years 
 might be tempted to declare that, while he found many evi- 
 dences of what may be called international influences in 
 Literature, he found little evidence of anything worthy of 
 being called cosmopolitan, but on the other hand much to 
 tempt him to believe that the vast majority of writers think 
 far less of the world and humanity than they do of the na- 
 tion, section, and race to which they belong. 
 
 I am not sure that I should care to quarrel with any such 
 putative reader of the dignified journal I have just named; 
 but I am sure that, as I have already said, the cause of true 
 Cosmopolitanism in Literature is not really jeopardized by 
 the conditions that have been described. True Cosmopolitan- 
 ism, that is, citizenship in an ideal republic whose bounds are 
 coextensive with those of the entire human race, may well 
 coexist with whatever tends to make that race stronger and 
 better, and the local or national Literature that is worthy of 
 the name surely tends to make men better men by making 
 them better citizens of the lands and localities in which their 
 lives have been cast. If you will let me make a personal 
 application of what I am saying, I shall perhaps be better 
 able to bring out my point. I read the other day in manu- 
 script a little idyllic story of Southern life that in its charm 
 reminded me of "Cranford." When I put that story down, 
 I felt that I was a better Southerner for having read it, but 
 that I was also a better adopted Northerner and a better 
 American. But, on the same line of reasoning, was I not a 
 better man, that is a better cosmopolitan, a better qualified 
 citizen for that ideal republic to which we should all yield 
 our highest allegiance? Surely I was, and surely no man 
 in his senses will protest against patriotism rightly under- 
 stood, or against national and local tendencies in Literature 
 and Art. These are essential to our mental and spiritual 
 health as men and women, and it is of healthy minds and
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 341 
 
 souls that the ideal republic must be constituted. What we 
 have a right to protest against is near-sightedness and nar- 
 row-mindedness in these matters. Chauvinistic patriotism, 
 spread-eagleism, as we Americans call it, vulgar satisfaction 
 with ourselves and with fellow-vulgarians, childish strenu- 
 osity and other forms of noisy emptiness, these defects of 
 character, when they are embodied in books that are mis- 
 taken for Literature, undoubtedly retard the progress of the 
 cosmopolitan spirit, not by making us more patriotic Ameri- 
 cans, Englishmen, or Germans, as the case may be, but by 
 making us more intolerable and useless as men and women. 
 Much the same thing is true with regard to those inter- 
 national literary relations which many persons, I suspect, 
 tend to confuse with Cosmopolitanism in Literature. In so far 
 as improved facilities of intercourse tend to spread rapidly a 
 knowledge and appreciation of what other peoples are doing 
 in the realms of art and thought, and in so far as the influ- 
 ence of foreign ideas makes for the lessening of intellectual 
 narrowness, without at the same time modifying deleteri- 
 ously the distinctive merits of the respective national 
 Literatures, it can scarcely be doubted that we may view 
 with gratification rather than with apprehension the present 
 status of Literature throughout the world. Even France, 
 the most intellectually self-centered of countries, has come 
 to display more and more interest in the Literatures of other 
 nations with no probable detriment to herself, and, in the 
 realm of scholarship at least, with no Uttle advantage to the 
 other countries. Witness, for example, the elaborate mono- 
 graphs upon British and American writers which we owe to 
 the industry and acumen of a group of French scholars. As 
 to the influence of French Literature upon our own, espe- 
 cially in the matter of form, there can be little question that 
 we owe much to the country of Balzac and Augier, while 
 France itself owes something to the country of Cooper and 
 Poe. But I must frankly confess that, while these interna-
 
 342 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 tional literary relations are important, especially to students 
 of literary history, and while they seem to-day to be in a 
 satisfactory condition, I cannot perceive that the present age 
 deserves in any especial degree to be called cosmopolitan, or 
 that a mere rapid and free interchange of ideas and books is 
 ipso facto a thing to be devoutly prayed for. It all depends, 
 I think, upon the nature of the ideas and the books. For 
 example, I notice that the works of several modern British 
 noveUsts are speedily translated into French and appear to 
 interest a small number of Frenclmien; but this seems to me 
 to be a phenomenon of very minor importance, since it would 
 be exceedingly rash to prophesy that any, or at least many, of 
 the books translated will be read twenty-five years hence 
 either in France or in England itself. On the other hand, 
 the vogue of Byron in France and in the rest of Europe 
 nearly a hundred years ago, ought to be looked upon, what- 
 ever our personal animus toward Byron, as a phenomenon of 
 great and of cosmopohtan importance. The reason of this 
 distinction is obvious. The modern writers are men of tal- 
 ents, doubtless, but in most cases they are apparently desti- 
 tute of large seminal thoughts and of ideas capable of arous- 
 ing the emotions of whole peoples, or large sections of a 
 people. This was not the case with Byron, although it is 
 plain that his great vogue was due, not merely to his indi- 
 vidual genius, but to the fact that the French Revolution 
 had prepared the European pubhc to appreciate his liberal 
 and fiery utterances. Whatever the cause of his vogue, 
 however, there is no question that his was far more than an 
 international influence. It was a cosmopolitan influence of 
 great significance, because it made for poUtical and individual 
 liberty. With all his faults Byron lived and died a splendid 
 fighter in the war for humanity. By his side fought with 
 equal valor that more ethereal combatant, Shelley. And 
 with them stood — I will not say fought, for it is hard to 
 think of him save as a benign and beneficent spirit — the man
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 343 
 
 who was probably — peace to the shade of Thomas Carlyle — 
 the noblest British writer of his age, Sir Walter Scott. If we 
 could believe that the year 1910 would usher in twenty such 
 years of really cosmopolitan Literature as were ushered in by 
 1810, we ought to be more than satisfied with the present 
 Cosmopolitan Outlook. 
 
 But how idle is all such talk! How little do we know 
 about the present, and how less than little we know about 
 the future. Take your stand with me for a moment at the 
 year 1710. Who, reading the two-paged Daily Courant of 
 that year, or the tri-weekly Post-Boy, or the weekly Review, 
 would ever have thought that two centuries later the news- 
 paper press of London, and New York, and other great 
 cities would constitute one of the wonders of the world? 
 Who would have foretold the rise of the popular magazine 
 or the practical triumph of prose over verse as a medium 
 of expression for almost every form of Literature? Who 
 would have thought that the day would ever come when men 
 would seriously contend whether Alexander Pope, the brill- 
 iant young author of the newly published "Pastorals" 
 was entitled to be called a poet? Who, reading the ''Mem- 
 oirs of the Life and Adventures of Signor Rozelli," perhaps 
 the best story of the year 1709 and a translation at that, 
 would have thought that within a decade ''Robinson Cru- 
 soe" would be beginning its career of popularity, and that 
 about two decades later the modern novel would be born? 
 The year 1710 came after a singularly barren decade that 
 followed the death of Dryden, and, if a pessimist had declared 
 at any time during those ten years that the glory of British 
 poetry was forever eclipsed, it would have been difficult to 
 prove that he was playing the part of a superfluous raven. 
 Such a pessimist would not have been likely to clinch his 
 argument by exclaiming that we should never see another 
 poet equal to Milton, but, if he had done so, he would have 
 uttered a prophecy which, in the judgment of many, would
 
 344 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 have held true for at least two centuries. Yes, this talk 
 about what the future holds for us is often very idle, but it is 
 none the less interesting. We are creatures designed, as 
 the poet tells us, to look before and after. I prefer at times 
 to look back rather than forward, to point out that we are 
 not quite so wonderful as we think ourselves; to suggest, 
 for example, that a great general like Marlborough, and a 
 versatile, dashing statesman Uke BoUngbroke, must, despite 
 their earthly antagonism, take more pleasure in conversing 
 with each other in Hades than in watching as ghostly spec- 
 tators the doings of whatever successors they may have in 
 the England of this year of grace. But I have been set up 
 here to be a kind of watchman and prophet, not to be a 
 laudator temporis acti, and, to change the figure suddenly, I 
 must continue to roll my stone up the hill of futurity only 
 to have it roll down again as the stones of prophecy are for- 
 ever doing. 
 
 I spoke a moment ago of the practical triumph of prose 
 over verse as a medium of expression for almost every form of 
 Literature. Does that mean that the Literature of the future, 
 the Literature that, as we hope, is to make for true Cosmo- 
 politanism, is to perform its task of converting us into citi- 
 zens of the ideal republic without the aid of new poetry an- 
 swering to new spiritual and mental needs? Heaven forbid 
 that I should answer "Yes." I could not give so pessimistic 
 an answer in view of the hosts of young poets who are lift- 
 ing their voices on high, a formidable band among whom I 
 count enough friends and former pupils to insure my dis- 
 cretion. We have been told of late that all writers who are 
 unfortunate enough to date from the wrong side of a certain 
 3^ear, let us say 1860, are hopelessly antiquated. If that be 
 so, then our younger poets need no longer complain that 
 they are overshadowed, and they need pay no attention to 
 the fact that the great democratic public reads, in the main, 
 newspapers and fiction, adds to these forms of prose some
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 345 
 
 history and biography and volumes of travel and criticism, 
 and, as a rule, leaves poetry severely alone. Those of us, 
 however, who are scanning the literary horizon cannot so 
 easily shut our eyes to what the large public is doing. We 
 cannot but observe, not only that prose is increasingly 
 written and increasingly read, but that in narrative, dra- 
 matic, and idyllic work, that is in a very large portion of 
 imaginative Literature, it has almost supplanted verse. 
 Even for lyrical purposes prose has shown its adaptability, 
 and it is possible that in the form of confessions, diaries, 
 and jottings it may afford a means of subjective utterance 
 to future writers who probably, if they lived now, and cer- 
 tainly if they had Hved in the past, would turn or would have 
 turned to poetry. It seems almost idle to deny that, with 
 rare exceptions, the modern poet addresses a very limited and 
 a very sophisticated audience. These poets and their read- 
 ers may constitute a small literary aristocracy, and by their 
 talk and writing they may secure a certain amount of promi- 
 nence, but how widespread an influence they exert, and 
 what the future of any form of aristocracy is to be in a world 
 of ever increasing democratic pressure, is more than I or any 
 other man can say. Certain it is that, while some of us 
 disparage the eighteenth century, that age of prose and 
 reason seems justified of its prose grandchild, the twentieth 
 century. The glib critics who have been borrowing that 
 catch phrase "the Renascence of Wonder" had better won- 
 der a little at the dominance and the growing power of that 
 instrument of expression which the despised centurj"- prac- 
 tically fashioned. Most of us even read the great poems of 
 other nations in prose translations, that is, when we read 
 them at all. 
 
 It seems to .me beyond dispute that the literary outlook, 
 whatever promise it contains of the spread of cosmopolitan 
 ideas, contains abimdant promise of the spread of the power 
 of prose. If the eighteenth century had not devoted itself
 
 346 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 to the task of creating a serviceable modem prose, the nine- 
 teenth century would have been obhged to essay it, for it is 
 obvious that it was long ago determined in the courts of 
 heaven that the laureate of a Triumphant Democracy should 
 write in unmeasured language. I am far from intending to 
 extol this order of things; I am merely doing my duty in 
 calling attention to it. For old-fashioned beings of whom it 
 may truly be said that the love of poetry is their breath of 
 life, and I trust I am one of them, there is, however, no lack 
 of consolation. Never before were the great poets so ac- 
 cessible; never before were the forces of education so turned 
 to the task of subduing the susceptible mind of youth to the 
 influence of the supreme poetic masterpieces. A reasonable 
 amount of pessimism is, I confess, congenial to me, but it 
 would seem positively foohsh to be altogether pessimistic 
 with regard to the future of poetry in the Ught of these plain 
 facts of our democratic culture. I do not believe that the 
 spread of cheap books, the foimding of hbraries, the insistence 
 upon the study of Literature in our schools and colleges, can 
 result in anything but an absolute increase in the number of 
 men and women who, to quote Matthew Arnold's inspiring 
 prophecy, will find in poetry "an ever surer and surer stay." 
 There is no room for denying or grudging the relative pre- 
 ponderance of prose, or for not admitting that in many 
 respects it fulfils excellently functions which were of old ful- 
 filled by poetry. But there is equally no occasion for being 
 blind to the fact that the transcendent glory of poetry is 
 unextinguishable. The great poetical classics are, thus far, 
 the world's chief storehouses of noble thought and feeHng. 
 The supreme poets are of all mortals our most satisfying and 
 unfailing sources of pleasure and dehght. What matter if 
 the day of the epic and the poetic drama appear to be, not 
 precisely over, but far past the meridian? Are not Homer, 
 Sophocles, Vergil, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, and Goethe 
 in a very true sense more completely alive than ever, answer-
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 347 
 
 ing as they do to the spiritual and mental needs of an ever 
 larger pubhc? and who shall say that another master-poet 
 may not at any moment make his appearance, and adapt to 
 the purposes of his genius the old forms of poetry or else in- 
 vent new forms? And whatever the future of the epic and 
 the poetic drama, and the idyll and the more or less didactic 
 poem, who is rash enough to limit the future scope and in- 
 fluence of that large and varied form of more or less personal 
 utterance in verse which we vaguely denominate lyrical 
 poetry? If, as seems not unlikely, the drawing together of 
 the nations and the increasing pressure of democracy tend 
 to render more and more uniform and unspectacular the 
 external lives of men, may it not well be that the life of the 
 mind and soul will become to a greater and greater degree 
 the province of the writer's chief activities, and the scene 
 of the reader's greatest dehghts? The success already 
 achieved by novehsts of a psychological type and by diarists 
 and autobiographers, together with the extraordinary prog- 
 ress made of recent years in metrical technic, especially as 
 that is applied to forms of lyric, would seem to warrant the 
 expectation that, even should the objective types of Liter- 
 ature, and particularly of poetry, undergo a permanent 
 decline, the subjective types may well experience a corre- 
 sponding development. It cannot be too often repeated that 
 the birth of new forms of Literature does not imply the death 
 of old forms, so far as concerns the life-giving power of the 
 latter. Scott's novels are still read and will continue to be 
 read even in this "up-to-date" country of ours, in which Mr. 
 Henry James, Jr., first hailed the light of day with a saluta- 
 tion so intricately phrased and so dissimilar to "that large 
 utterance of the early gods" that it has been puzzling Hy- 
 perion ever since. 
 
 What I have just been saying about the possible prepon- 
 derance of subjective over objective Literature may seem at 
 first thought to be contradicted by certain aspects of the life
 
 348 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 and Literature of to-day. The life of action has been led and 
 preached by many notable men, its exhilaration has been 
 celebrated in prose and verse, and it has been illustrated 
 recently by achievements too fresh in your minds to demand 
 specification. Never before were men more widely awake 
 to the outward facts of the Uves of other men, and never 
 before was their curiosity with regard to objective details so 
 catered to as by latter-day journaUsm. Compare what the 
 average citizen of the spacious times of Queen EUzabeth 
 knew of what was going on in the world with what the aver- 
 age subject of the literally more spacious empire of King 
 George knows. Listen to the outcries that are raised against 
 the continuous flow of population to the cities and the dechne, 
 not merely of rural, but of private, life. Think of the part 
 played in our civiUzation by the objective sciences, and by 
 the colossal, more or less materiahstic, forms of industry. 
 What chance is there in our roaring modem chaos for the 
 cultivation of those choice gifts of the spirit which are so 
 essential to the creation of great subjective Literature, re- 
 pose, and observation, and reflection? Some satirically 
 minded persons actually doubt our power to think a real 
 thought, just as with reason they complain that nowadays 
 no one writes a charming or an interesting letter. They 
 believe that, following the example of the Southern conven- 
 tion which shortly before the Civil War resolved, according 
 to the story, that there should be a Southern Literature 
 and that WilUam Gilmore Simms, Esq., should be requested 
 to write it, the entire country will soon resolve that there 
 be an American thought and that President or Ex-President 
 So and So be requested to think it. 
 
 To certain types of mind the picture I have just drawn 
 will seem a caricature; to other types it may seem sur- 
 charged with a depressing realism. I will not defend it or 
 explain it, except to say that I am far from beheving that we 
 axe warranted in viewing the status of modem life with dis-
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 349 
 
 gust or the future with trepidation. I doubt whether any 
 one can prove that we are a whit more materialistic than 
 our fathers were ; in fact, the supposition that we are scarcely 
 harmonizes with what we know about the course of human 
 history and the evolution of the human mind and body. To 
 sensitive spirits the jar of our modem civihzation is as dis- 
 agreeable as the vibration of the machinery in one of our 
 mammoth and swift steamships. But the steamship carries 
 us safely, and our civilization will probably carry us safely, 
 too. We are awake to our present discomforts; we forget 
 the evils that have been left behind. Never before was 
 human vulgarity so flaunted in our faces, but that is mainly 
 because our senses have been, as it were, extended by the tele- 
 phone, the telegraph, the printing-press, and similar in- 
 strumentalities, and because the masses have been rapidly 
 losing their apathy, and have been compelling recognition 
 of the fact that they are human beings, not chattels. The 
 evolution is, on the whole, natural and, as always, it has not 
 been uniform. We have gained in wealth and comfort; we 
 have probably lost in some of the aristocratic graces and 
 amenities of hfe. For example, we no sooner win a triumph 
 of any kind than we forthwith proceed to vulgarize it. Our 
 heroes get into squabbles and go on the lecture platform. 
 Our publishers and magazines force the genius of a promis- 
 ing writer, and often kill it. But we have the heroes and the 
 men of genius, and I see no special reason to doubt either 
 that we shall learn to foster them better or that they will 
 learn to preserve themselves. And meanwhile the masses 
 of the people have not only been growing in wealth and 
 leisure, but, what is more important, they have been be- 
 coming more and more conscious of the great and beautiful 
 in conduct and in art. In other words, we are probably 
 warranted in sajdng of our generation, as of every other gen- 
 eration perhaps for several centuries past, that it is gaining 
 more than it is losing.
 
 350 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 But I have not yet fully explained why I think that, despite 
 the objectivity of modem Hfe, the future of Literature may 
 lie largely in the realms of the subjective. I think this be- 
 cause it seems to me that the growing pressure of democracy, 
 which is all the stronger because of the colossal and materi- 
 alistic character of much of our civilization, and the smooth- 
 ing down or obhteration of national and racial idiosyncrasies, 
 which seems destined to result from the drawing together 
 of the peoples, must sooner or later force the strongly in- 
 dividual mind and soul back, as it were, upon themselves and 
 stimulate their subjective utterance. If the society of the 
 future is to be more or less sociaUstic in type, and if the earth 
 is destined to become one great peaceable workshop of hu- 
 manity, the forces of individuaUsm will either diminish in 
 power or seek new outlets. Certain types of leaders may be- 
 come even more influential and spectacular in action than 
 ever before — I hope they will not be the demagogues of the 
 future — certain kinds of artists may exploit their genius in 
 large and essentially objective achievements; but the major- 
 ity of writers, especially the poets and the critics, may not 
 improbably find that the lines of least resistance to their tal- 
 ents or genius lie in the fields of subjective rather than of 
 objective Literature, and the majority of men and women, 
 deprived more and more of their opportunities for outward 
 distinction, by reason of what may be called their mere atom- 
 istic status in the social mass, and rendered more subtle 
 and acute in their mental and aesthetic faculties through 
 education and the cumulative influences of heredity, may not 
 only find their chief solace and inspiration in reading, but 
 may seek it in the works of writers who like themselves are 
 the slaves as well as the exponents of a self-centered sub- 
 jectivity. 
 
 This generaHzation is, I opine, suflficiently hazardous to 
 satisfy latter-day requirements, but it should be observed 
 that it might be supported, did time permit, by certain ar-
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 351 
 
 guments drawn from the history of Literature. It is sup- 
 ported, also, by the normal tendency of human nature to 
 avoid contests with the immortals. Once or twice a Diomede 
 may engage in combat with a god, and here and there the 
 triumphs of the objective masters of the past may be chal- 
 lenged; but the tendency will almost surely be to leave those 
 divine masters standing on their isolated elevations, and to 
 press forward into new paths for new victories, whether easier 
 than the old or not, it would be ungracious to inquire. But 
 what, in the midst of all this generalization, has become of 
 the subject I am supposed to be in the main discussing, the 
 subject of Cosmopolitanism? Has it vanished out of sight? 
 Not completely, I trust, or at any rate not so far that it 
 cannot be hauled down by the string of desultory specula- 
 tion, much as small boys haul down their kites. I shall try 
 to get it down in the following way. The writers of the fu- 
 ture, if they exploit the personal types of Literature, will 
 surely make for the spread of the spirit of true CosmopoUtan- 
 ism, by developing in themselves and their readers an ever 
 increasing respect for man, the center of the new Literature 
 and of the new society. The more man is dwarfed in his 
 outward position in the social order, the more, if he is to pre- 
 serve his dignity, nay his civilization, he must uphold his 
 essential nobility as a child of God. The huger and the more 
 crushing our democracy, the more sacred grow the rights of 
 man as man, — a fact of which sociological students and work- 
 ers are fully conscious, and of which the general pubhc is 
 vaguely conscious. But a recognition of the rights of man 
 as man is, as we saw, an essential element of true Cosmopoli- 
 tanism. It is also an essential element of all subjective 
 Literature that is worthy of the name. Hence we seem 
 warranted in concluding that, if the Literature of the future 
 becomes increasingly personal and subjective, it will also be- 
 come increasingly effective in the spread of true Cosmopoli- 
 tanism; that is, in the spread of the spirit that makes for
 
 352 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 citizenship in the ideal repiibUc. And in thus serving the 
 cause of CosmopoUtanism, the Literature of the future will 
 also serve itself, I believe, in one very important way. We 
 are accustomed to think of the commanding character of 
 the great works of objective Literature and to invest their 
 creators with an atmosphere of grandeur. The great works 
 of subjective art somehow seem smaller to us. Set the son- 
 nets of Shakspere, for example, over against three or four 
 of his greatest plays and see whether you do not imderstand 
 what I am trying to say. Anything, then, that will make for 
 the largeness and dignity of subjective Literature is to be 
 welcomed if that Literature is to be dominant in the future. 
 Such an element of largeness and of true grandeur is to be 
 found in the services the Literature of the future may render 
 to the sacred cause of human brotherhood. And in per- 
 forming those services the writer, be he poet or proseman, 
 need by no means eschew all the forms of objective art. He 
 may take the older forms and infuse them with the spirit 
 of subjectivity and personality. He may serve the cause of 
 Cosmopolitanism as Mr. Thomas Hardy has done in his 
 amorphous but great poetic drama, ''The Djmasts." He 
 may inspire a detestation of war and an acquiescence in the 
 reign of that democracy which will, we trust, afford no scope 
 for the sinister energies of another Napoleon. Yes, the out- 
 look for Cosmopolitanism is also the outlook for large and 
 noble work on the part of every writer filled with love for his 
 fellow-men. I refuse to believe that the future is with the 
 shallow writers who glory in war and who hear in the whir 
 of machinery the only voice of God. 
 
 But in this mixed hfe of ours every incitement must be 
 accompanied by a warning. We may rightfully cherish 
 splendid hopes for the future of Literature and of life upon 
 this planet of ours, but we must remember that the forces of 
 civilization move slowly and that the law of loss and gain 
 will not soon be abrogated. For many an age to come new
 
 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 353 
 
 parties, new social movements, new schools of art and thought, 
 will have their birth, maturity, and death, and still the ideal 
 republic will seem to lie on the horizon, or only just beyond 
 it. New achievements of the spirit of man will fill the world 
 with enthusiasm, but thoughtful men will still be puzzled to 
 determine whether on the whole to laugh or cry at the game 
 of life they see playing before their eyes. When the South 
 Pole is discovered, the first objects the wise discoverer will 
 look for will be two spectral forms crouching upon the desid- 
 erated and liitherto inaccessible spot, the shades of Democ- 
 ritus and of Herachtus, of the philosopher who was forever 
 laughing at the folUes of mankind and of the philosopher 
 who was forever weeping at them. 
 
 The mention of Democritus and Heraclitus, and of the 
 folly of mankind, suggests naturally the propriety of my 
 bringing this lecture to a conclusion, lest you should take it 
 upon yourselves to play the philosophers and leave me hold- 
 ing the floor of folly. I shall merely say, therefore, that 
 while as a lecturer I deem it my duty to see as much good 
 as I can in the present and future of Literature, as a man I 
 am naturally disposed to sympathize with Heraclitus. The 
 particular folly that draws my tears is the undue neglect of the 
 ancient classics in our education and the consequently in- 
 creasing lack of their beneficent influence upon our Litera- 
 ture. I miss their simple power and their pure charm, and 
 I fear lest, as the years go by, not only will these essential 
 qualities of the very highest Literature be less perceptible, 
 but that there will be fewer readers trained to demand them. 
 I trust that this is an entirely unjustifiable manifestation of 
 my pessimistic bias. I trust that the vital energy of some 
 of our writers, the subtle and studied art of others, the spir- 
 itual aspirations of others who draw some, at least, of their 
 inspiration from the great ages of faith, the high unselfish 
 ideahsm of others who draw their inspiration from the needs 
 of the present and the promise of the future, will all work in 
 
 2a
 
 354 THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK 
 
 harmony to give us a Literature which in power and beauty- 
 will be worthy to vie with that of Greece itself. But I should 
 be dishonest if I confounded my hopes with my beliefs. 
 When, O you disdainful, strenuous moderns, and you mystic 
 and sentimental neo-medievalists, and you eager-eyed, altru- 
 istic cosmopohtans of the future, when will you ever give us 
 anything comparable with that superb Iliad, with its rolling 
 rhythm, its stirring action, its heroic characters, its impres- 
 sive scenes, its large, simple truth to nature, and its charm of 
 the far-off past ?
 
 XVIII 
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 By J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative 
 Literature 
 
 "What droll creatures these college professors are whenever 
 they talk about art," wrote Flaubert in one of his letters, and 
 voiced the world's opinion of academic criticism. For the 
 world shares the view of the Italian poet that "monks and 
 professors cannot write the lives of poets," and looks only to 
 those rich in literary experience for its opinions on Literature. 
 But the poets themselves have had no special grudge agains 
 academic criticism that they have not felt equally for every 
 other kind. For the most part, they have objected to all 
 criticism, since what each mainly seeks in his own case is not 
 criticism, but uncritical praise. "Kill the dog, he is a re- 
 viewer," cried the young Goethe; and in our own age William 
 Morris expressed his contempt for those who earn a livelihood 
 by writing their opinions of the works of others. Fortunately 
 for criticism, it does not live by the grace of poets, to whom 
 it can be of small service at its best, but by the grace of others 
 who have neither the poet's genius nor the critic's insight. I 
 hope to persuade you this evening that the poets have been 
 mistaken in their very conception of the critic's craft, which 
 lives by a power that poets and critics share together. The 
 secret of this power has come to men slowly and the knowl- 
 edge they have gained by it has transformed their idea of 
 Criticism. What this secret is, and into what new paths 
 Criticism is being led by it, is the subject of my lecture 
 to-night. 
 
 355
 
 356 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 At the end of the last century, France once more occupied 
 the center of that stage whose auditors are the inheritors of 
 European civiHzation. Once more all the world listened 
 while she talked and played, and some of the most briUiant 
 of her talk was now on the question of the authority of Criti- 
 cism. It is not my purpose to tell you (what you know already) 
 with what sober and vigorous learning the official critics of 
 the Revue des deux Mondes espoused the cause of old gods 
 with the new weapons of science, and with what charm and 
 tact, with what grace and suppleness of thought, Jules Le- 
 maitre and Anatole France, to mention no others, defended 
 the free play of the appreciative mind. Some of the sparks 
 that were beaten out on the anvil of controversy have become 
 fixed stars, the classical utterances of Criticism, as when 
 Anatole France described the critic not as a judge imposing 
 sentence, but as a sensitive soul detailing his "adventures 
 among masterpieces." 
 
 To have sensations in the presence of a work of art and to 
 express them, that is the function of Criticism for the impres- 
 sionistic critic. His attitude he would express somewhat in 
 this fashion: "Here is a beautiful poem, let us say 'Prome- 
 theus Unbound.' To read it is for me to experience a thrill of 
 pleasure. My delight in it is itself a judgment, and what 
 better judgment is it possible for me to give? All that I can 
 do is to tell how it affects me, what sensations it gives me. 
 Other men will derive other sensations from it, and express 
 them differently; they too have the same right as I. Each 
 of us, if we are sensitive to impressions and express ourselves 
 well, will produce a new work of art to replace the work which 
 gave us our sensations. That is the art of criticism, and 
 beyond that criticism cannot go." We shall not begrudge 
 this exquisite soul the pleasure of his sensations or his cult of 
 them, nor would he be disconcerted if we were to point out 
 that the interest has been shifted from the work of art to his 
 own impressions. Let us suppose that you say to him:
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 357 
 
 "We are not interested in you, but in 'Prometheus Unbound.' 
 To describe the state of your health is not to help us to un- 
 derstand or to enjoy the poem. Your criticism constantly 
 tends to get away from the work of art, and to center atten- 
 tion on yourself and your feelings." But his answer would 
 not be difficult to find : "What you say is true enough. My 
 criticism tends to get farther and farther from the work of 
 art and to cast a light upon myself; but all criticism tends 
 to get away from the work of art and to substitute something 
 in its place. The impressionist substitutes himself, but what 
 other form of criticism gets closer to 'Prometheus Unbound'? 
 Historical criticism takes us away from it in a search of the 
 environment, the age, the race, the poetic school of the artist ; 
 it tells us to read the history of the French Revolution, 
 Godwin's 'PoHtical Justice,' the 'Prometheus Bound' of 
 iEschylus, and Calderon's 'Magico Prodigioso.' Psycho- 
 logical criticism takes me away from the poem, and sets me 
 to work on the biography of the poet ; I wish to enjoy 
 'Prometheus Unbound,' and instead I am asked to become 
 acquainted with Shelley the man. Dogmatic criticism does 
 not get any closer to the work of art by testing it according 
 to rules and standards ; it sends me to the Greek dramatists, 
 to Shakspere, to Aristotle's 'Poetics,' possibly to Darwin's 
 'Origin of Species,' in order that I may see how far Shelley 
 has failed to give dramatic reality to his poem, or has failed 
 to observe the rules of his genre; but that means the study of 
 other works, and not of 'Prometheus Unbound.' ^Esthetics 
 takes me still farther afield into speculations on art and 
 beauty. And so it is with every form of criticism. Do not 
 deceive yourself. All criticism tends to shift the interest 
 from the work of art to something else. The other critics 
 give us history, politics, biography, erudition, metaphysics. 
 As for me, I re-dream the poet's dream, and if I seem to write 
 lightly, it is because I have awakened, and smile to think I 
 have mistaken a dream for reality. I at least strive to replace
 
 358 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 one work of art by another, and art can only find its alter ego 
 in art." 
 
 It would be idle to detail the arguments with which the 
 advocates of the opposing forms of Criticism answered these 
 questionings. Literary erudition and evolutionary science 
 were the chief weapons used to fight this modern heresy, but 
 the one is an unwieldy and the other a useless weapon in the 
 field of aesthetic thought. On some sides, at least, the posi- 
 tion of the impressionists was impregnable; but two points 
 of attack were open to their opponents. They could combat 
 the notion that taste is a substitute for learning, or learning 
 a substitute for taste, since both are vital for Criticism ; 
 and they could maintain that the relativity of taste does not 
 in any sense affect its authority. But these arguments are 
 not my present concern ; what I wish to point out is that the 
 objective and dogmatic forms of Criticism were fighting no 
 new battle against impressionistic Criticism in that decade 
 of controversy. It was a battle as old as the earliest reflection 
 on the subject of poetry, if not as old as the sensitiveness of 
 poets. Modern literature begins with the same doubts, with 
 the same quarrel. In the sixteenth century the Italians were 
 formulating that classical code which imposed itself on 
 Europe for two centuries, and which, even in our generation, 
 Brunetiere has merely disguised under the trappings of 
 natural science. They evolved the dramatic unities, and all 
 those rules which the poet Pope imagined to be "Nature 
 still but Nature methodized." But at the very moment 
 when their spokesman Scaliger was saying that "Aristotle 
 is our emperor, the perpetual dictator of all the fine arts," 
 another Italian, Pietro Aretino, was insisting that there is 
 no rule except the whim of genius and no standard of judgment 
 beyond individual taste. 
 
 The Italians passed on the torch to the French of the seven- 
 teenth century, and from that day to this the struggle be- 
 tween the two schools has never ceased to agitate the progress
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 359 
 
 of Criticism in France. Boileau against Saint-Evremond, 
 Classicists against Romanticists, dogmatists against impres- 
 sionists, — the antinomy is deep in the French nature, indeed 
 in the nature of Criticism itself. Listen to this: "It is not 
 for the purpose of deciding on the merit of this noble poet 
 [Vergil], nor of harming his reputation, that I have spoken so 
 freely concerning him. The world will continue to think 
 what it does of his beautiful verses; and as for me, I judge 
 nothing, I only say what I think, and what effect each of these 
 things produces on my heart and mind." Surely these words 
 are from the lips of Lemaitre himself! "I judge nothing; 
 I only say what I feel." But no, these are the utterances 
 of the Chevalier de Mere, a wit of the age of Louis XIV, and 
 he is writing to the secretary of that stronghold of authority, 
 the French Academy. For some men, even in the age of 
 Boileau, criticism was nothing but an "adventure among 
 masterpieces." 
 
 No, it is no new battle; it is the perpetual conflict of Criti- 
 cism. In every age impressionism (or enjoyment) and dog- 
 matism (or judgment) have grappled with one another. They 
 are the two sexes of Criticism; and to say that they flourish 
 in every age is to say that every age has its masculine as well 
 as its feminine criticism, — the masculine criticism that 
 may or may not force its own standards on Literature, but 
 that never at all events is dominated by the object of its 
 studies; and the feminine criticism that responds to the lure 
 of art with a kind of passive ecstasy. In the age of Boileau 
 it was the masculine type which gave the tone to Criticism; 
 in our own, outside of the universities, it has certainly been 
 the feminine. But they continue to exist side by side, ever 
 falling short of their highest powers, unless mystically mated, 
 — judgment erecting its edicts into arbitrary standards and 
 conventions, enjoyment lost in the mazes of its sensuous in- 
 decision. 
 
 Yet if we examine these opposing forms of Criticism in
 
 360 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 our own age, we shall find, I think, that they are not wholly 
 without a common ground to meet on ; that, in fact, they are 
 united in at least one prepossession which they do not share 
 with the varying forms of Criticism in any of the earlier 
 periods of its history. The Greeks conceived of Literature, 
 not as an inevitable expression of creative power, but as a 
 reasoned ''imitation" or re-shaping of the materials of life; 
 for Aristotle, poetry is the result of man's imitative instinct, 
 and differs from history and science in that it deals with the 
 probable or possible rather than with the real. The Romans 
 conceived of Literature as a noble art, intended (though under 
 the guise of pleasure) to inspire men with high ideals of life. 
 The classicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
 accepted this view in the main; for them. Literature was a 
 kind of exercise, — a craft acquired by study of the classics, 
 and guided in the interpretation of nature by the traditions 
 of Greek and Roman art. For these men Literature was as 
 much a product of reason as science or history. The eight- 
 eenth century complicated the course of Criticism by the 
 introduction of vague and novel criteria, such as "unagina- 
 tion," " sentiment," and "taste." But with the Romantic 
 Movement there developed the new idea which coordinates 
 all Criticism in the nineteenth century. Very early in the 
 century, Mme. de Stael and others formulated the idea that 
 Literature is an "expression of society." Victor Cousin 
 founded the school of art for art's sake, enunciating "the 
 fundamental rule, that expression is the supreme law of art." 
 Later, Sainte-Beuve developed and illustrated his theory 
 that Literature is an expression of personality. Still later, 
 under the influence of natural science, Taine took a hint from 
 Hegel and elaborated the idea that Literature is an expression 
 of race, age, and environment. The extreme impressionists 
 prefer to think of art as the exquisite expression of delicate and 
 fluctuating sensations or impressions of life. But for all these 
 critics and theorists, Literature is an expression of something,
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 361 
 
 of experience or emotion, of the external or internal, of the 
 man himself or something outside the man; yet it is always 
 conceived of as an art of expression. The objective, the dog- 
 matic, the impressionistic critics of our day may set for them- 
 selves very different tasks, but the idea of expression is im- 
 plicit in all they write. They have, as it were, this bond of 
 blood : they are not merely man and woman, but brother and 
 sister; and their father, or grandfather, was Sainte-Beuve. 
 The bitter but acute analysis of his talent which Nietzsche 
 has given us in the "Twilight of the Idols" brings out very 
 clearly this dual side of his seminal power, the feminine sensi- 
 tiveness and the masculine detachment. For Nietzsche, he 
 is "nothing of a man; he wanders about, dehcate, curious, 
 tired, pumping people, a female after all, with a woman's 
 revengefulness and a woman's sensuousness, a critic without 
 a standard, without firmness, and without backbone." Here 
 it is the impressionist in Sainte-Beuve that arouses the Ger- 
 man's wrath. But in the same breath we find Nietzsche 
 blaming him for ''holding up objectivity as a mask"; and it 
 is on this objective side that Sainte-Beuve becomes the source 
 of all those historical and psychological forms of critical 
 study which have influenced the academic thought of our 
 day, leading insensibly, but inevitably, from empirical inves- 
 tigation to empirical law. The pedigree of the two schools 
 thereafter is not difficult to trace : on the one side, from Sainte- 
 Beuve through I'art pour Fart to impressionism, and on the 
 other, from Sainte-Beuve through Taine to Brunetiere and his 
 egregious kin. 
 
 French criticism has been leaning heavily on the idea of 
 expression for a century or more, but no attempt has been 
 made in France to understand its aesthetic content, except 
 for a few vague echoes of German thought. For- the first 
 to give philosophic precision to the theory of expression, and 
 to found a method of Criticism based upon it, were the Ger- 
 mans of the age that stretches from Herder to Hegel. All
 
 362 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 the forces of philosophical thought were focused on this cen- 
 tral concept, while the critics enriched themselves from out 
 this golden store. I suppose you all remember the famous 
 passage in which Carlyle describes the achievement of Ger- 
 man criticism in that age. "Criticism," says Carlyle, "has 
 assumed a new form in Germany. It proceeds on other prin- 
 ciples and proposes to itself a higher aim. The main question 
 is not now a question concerning the qualities of diction, the 
 coherence of metaphors, the fitness of sentiments, the general 
 logical truth in a work of art, as it was some half century 
 ago among most critics, neither is it a question mainly of a 
 psychological sort to be answered by discovering and deline- 
 ating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry, as is 
 usual with the best of our own critics at present; but it is, 
 not indeed exclusively, but inclusively, of its two other ques- 
 tions, properly and ultimately a question of the essence and 
 peculiar life of the poetry itself. . . . The problem is not 
 now to determine by what mechanism Addison composed 
 sentences and struck out similitudes, but by what far finer 
 and more mysterious mechanism Shakspere organized his 
 dramas and gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his 
 Hamlet. Wherein lies that life; how have they attained that 
 shape and individuahty? Whence comes that empyrean 
 fire which irradiates their whole being and appears at least 
 in starry gleams? Are these dramas of his not veri-similar 
 only, but true; nay, truer than reahty itself, since the essence 
 of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them under more ex- 
 pressive similes? What is this unity of pleasures; and can 
 our deeper inspection discern it to be indivisible and existing 
 by necessity because each work springs as it were from the 
 general elements of thought and grows up therefrom into 
 form and expansion by its own growth? Not only who was 
 the poet and how did he compose, but what and how was the 
 poem, and why was it a poem and not rhymed eloquence, 
 creation and not figured passion? These are the questions
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 363 
 
 for the critic. Criticism stands like an interpreter between 
 the inspired and the uninspired; between the prophet and 
 those who hear the melody of his words, and catch some 
 glimpse of their material meaning but understand not their 
 deeper import." 
 
 I am afraid that no German critic wholly realized this 
 ideal ; but it was at least the achievement of the Germans that 
 they enunciated the doctrine, even if they did not always 
 adequately illustrate it in practice. It was they who first 
 realized that art has performed its function when it has 
 expressed itself; it was they who first conceived of Criticism 
 as the study of expression. "There is a destructive and a 
 creative or constructive criticism," said Goethe; the first 
 measures and tests Literature according to mechanical stand- 
 ards, the second answers the fundamental questions: "What 
 has the writer proposed to himself to do? and how far has he 
 succeeded in carrying out his own plan?" Carlyle, in his 
 essay on Goethe, almost uses Goethe's own words, when he 
 says that the critic's first and foremost duty is to make plain 
 to himself "what the poet's aim really and truly was, how the 
 task he had to do stood before his eye, and how far, with such 
 materials as were afforded him, he has fulfilled it." This 
 has been the central problem, the guiding star, of all modern 
 criticism. From Coleridge to Pater, from Sainte-Beuve to 
 Lemaitre, this is what critics have been striving for, even 
 when they have not succeeded; yes, even when they have 
 been deceiving themselves into thinking that they were striv- 
 ing for something else. This was not the ideal of Aristotle 
 when he tells us that the critic may censure a work of art as 
 "irrational, impossible, morally hurtful, self-contradictory, 
 or contrary to technical correctness." This was not Boileau's 
 standard when he blamed Tasso for the introduction of Chris- 
 tian rather than pagan mythology into epic poetry; nor Addi- 
 son's, when he tested "Paradise Lost" according to the rules 
 of Le Bossu ; nor Dr. Johnson's, when he laments the absence
 
 364 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 of poetic justice in "King Lear," or pronounces dogmatically 
 that the poet should not "number the streaks of the tulip." 
 What has the poet tried to do, and how has he fulfilled his 
 intention? What is he striving to express and how has he 
 expressed it? What impression does his work make on me, 
 and how can I best express this impression? These are the 
 questions that nineteenth-century critics have been taught 
 to ask when face to face with the work of a poet. 
 
 The theory of expression, the concept of Literature as an 
 art of expression, is the common ground on which critics have 
 met for a century or more. Yet how many absurdities, how 
 many complicated systems, how many confusions have been 
 superimposed on this fundamental idea; and how slowly 
 has its full significance become the possession of critics! 
 To accept the naked principle is to play havoc with these 
 confusions and complications; and no one has seen this more 
 clearly, or driven home its inevitable consequences with more 
 intelligence and vigor, than an Italian thinker and critic of 
 our own day, Benedetto Croce, who has received of late a 
 kind of official introduction to the EngUsh-speaking world in 
 the striking compliment paid to him by Mr. Balfour in his 
 recent Romanes Lecture. But I for one needed no introduc- 
 tion to his work; under his banner I enrolled myself long ago, 
 and here re-enroll myself in what I now say. He has led 
 aesthetic thought inevitably from the concept that art is 
 expression to the conclusion that all expression is art. Time 
 does not permit, nor reason ask, that we should follow this 
 argument through all its pros and cons. If this theory of 
 expression be once and for all accepted, as indeed it has been 
 partly though confusedly accepted by all modern critics, 
 the ground of Criticism is cleared of its dead lumber and its 
 weeds. I propose now merely to point out this dead lumber 
 and these weeds. In other words, we shall see to what con- 
 clusions the critical thought and practice of a century have 
 been inevitably converging, and what elements of the old
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 365 
 
 Criticism and the old literary history are disappearing from 
 the new. 
 
 In the first place, we have done with all the old Rules. 
 The very conception of "rules" harks back to an age of magic, 
 and reminds the modern of those mysterious words which the 
 heroes of the fairy-tales are without reason forbidden to utter; 
 the rules are a survival of the savage taboo. We find few 
 arbitrary rules in Aristotle, who limited himself to 
 empirical inductions from the experience of Literature; 
 but they appear in the later Greek rhetoricians; and 
 in the Romans, empirical induction has been hardened 
 into dogma. Horace lays down the law to the pro- 
 spective playwright in this manner: "You must never have 
 more than three actors on the stage at any one time; you 
 must never let your drama exceed five acts." It is unneces- 
 sary to trace the history of these rules, or to indicate how they 
 increased in number, how they were arranged into a system 
 by the classicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 and how they burdened the creative art of that period. They 
 were never without their enemies. We have seen how Aretino 
 was pitted against Scaliger, Saint-Evremond against Boileau ; 
 and in every age the poets have astounded the critics by trans- 
 gressing rules without the sacrifice of beauty; but it was not 
 until the end of the eighteenth century that the Romanticists 
 banished them from the province of Criticism. The pedantry 
 of our own day has borrowed "conventions" from history and 
 "technique" from science as substitutes for the outworn for- 
 mulae of the past; but these are merely new names for the 
 old mechanical rules; and they too will go, when criticism 
 clearly recognizes in every work of art an organism governed 
 by its own law. 
 
 We have done with the genres, or literary kinds. Their 
 history is inseparably bound up with that of the classical rules. 
 Certain works of literature have a general resemblance and are 
 loosely classed together (for the sake of convenience) as lyric,
 
 366 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 comedy, tragedy, epic, pastoral, and the like; the classicists 
 made of each of these divisions a fixed norm governed by invio- 
 lable laws. The separation of the genres was a consequence of 
 this law of classicism: comedy should not be mingled with 
 tragedy, nor epic with lyric. But no sooner was the law enun- 
 ciated than it was broken by an artist impatient or ignorant 
 of its restraints, and the critics have been obliged to explain 
 away these violations of their laws, or gradually to change the 
 laws themselves. But if art is organic expression, and every 
 work of art is to be interrogated with the question, "What has 
 it expressed, and how completely?" there is no place for the 
 question whether it has conformed to some convenient classifi- 
 cation of critics or to some law derived from this classification. 
 The lyric, the pastoral, the epic, are abstractions without concrete 
 reality in the world of art. Poets do not write epics, pastorals, 
 lyrics; they express themselves, and this expression is their 
 only form. There are not, therefore, only three, or ten, or a 
 hundred literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are 
 individual poets. But it is in the field of literary history that 
 this error is most obvious. Shakspere wrote "King Lear," 
 "Venus and Adonis," and a sequence of sonnets. What 
 becomes of Shakspere, the creative artist, when these three 
 works are separated from one another by the historian of 
 poetry; when they lose their connection with his single creative 
 soul, and are classified with other works with which they have 
 only a loose and vague relation? To slice up the history of 
 English Literature into compartments marked comedy, 
 tragedy, lyric, and the like, is to be guilty of a complete mis- 
 understanding of the meaning of Criticism; and literary 
 history becomes a logical absurdity when its data are not or- 
 ganically related but cut up into sections, and placed in such 
 compartments as these. 
 
 We have done with the comic, the tragic, the sublime, and 
 an army of vague abstractions of their kind. These have 
 grown out of the generalizations of the Alexandrian critics,
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 367 
 
 acquiring a new lease of life in the eighteenth century. Gray 
 and his friend West corresponded with each other on the 
 subject of the sublime; later, Schiller distinguished between 
 the naif and the sentimental. Jean Paul was one of many who 
 defined humor, and Hegel among those who defined the tragic. 
 If these terms represent the content of art, they may be 
 relegated to the same category as joy, hate, sorrow, enthusiasm; 
 and we should speak of the comic in the same general way in 
 which we might speak of the expression of joy in a poem. If, 
 on the other hand, these terms represent abstract classifica- 
 tions of poetry, their use in criticism sins against the very 
 nature of art. Every poet re-expresses the universe in his own 
 way, and every poem is a new and independent expression. 
 The tragic does not exist for Criticism, but only ^schylus, 
 Shakspere, Racine. There is no objection to the use of the 
 word tragic as a convenient label for somewhat similar poems, 
 but to find laws for the tragic and to test creative artists by 
 such laws as these is simply to give a more abstract form to the 
 outworn classical conception of dramatic rules. 
 
 We have done with the theory of style, with metaphor, 
 simile, and all the paraphernalia of Graeco-Roman rhetoric. 
 These owe their existence to the assumption that style is 
 separated from expression, that it is something which may be 
 added or subtracted at will from the work of art. But we 
 know that art is expression, that it is complete in itself, that to 
 alter it is to create another expression and therefore to create 
 another work of art. If the poet, for example, says of spring- 
 time that '"Tis now the blood runs gold," he has not em- 
 ployed a substitute for something else, such as "the blood 
 tingles in our veins"; he has expressed his thought in its com- 
 pleteness, and there is no equivalent for his expression ex- 
 cept itself. 
 
 "Each perfect in its place; and each content 
 With that perfection which its being meant."
 
 368 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 Such expressions are still called metaphors in the text-books; 
 but metaphor, simile, and all the old terms of classical rhetoric 
 are signs of the zodiac, magical incantations, astrological 
 formulae, interesting only to antiquarian curiosity. To 
 Montaigne they suggested "the prattle of chambermaids"; 
 to me they suggest rather the drone and singsong of many 
 school-mistresses. We still hear talk of the "grand style," 
 and essays on style continue to be written, like the old "arts 
 of poetry" of two centuries ago; but the theory of styles has 
 no longer a real place in modem thought; we have learned that 
 it is no less impossible to study style as separate from the work 
 of art than to study the comic as separate from the work of 
 the comic artist. 
 
 We have done with all moral judgment of Literature. Horace 
 said that pleasure and profit are the end of art, and for many 
 centuries the critics quarreled over the terms "pleasure" 
 and "profit." Some said that poetry was meant to instruct; 
 some, merely to please; some, to do both. Romantic criticism 
 first enunciated the principle that art has no aim except ex- 
 pression; that its aim is complete when expression is complete; 
 that "beauty is its own excuse for being." If the achieve- 
 ment of the poet be to express any material he may select, 
 and to express it with a completeness that we recognize as 
 perfection, obviously morals can play no part in the judgment 
 which criticism may form of his work. No critic of authority 
 now tests Literature by the standards of ethics. 
 
 We have done with "dramatic" criticism. The theory 
 that the drama is not a creative art, but a by-product of the 
 physical exigencies of the theater, is as old as the sixteenth 
 century. An Italian scholar of that age was the first to 
 maintain that plays are intended to be acted on a stage, under 
 certain restricted physical conditions, and before a large and 
 heterogeneous crowd; dramatic performance has developed 
 out of these conditions, and the test of its excellence is the 
 pleasure it gives to the mixed audience that supports it. This
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 369 
 
 idea was taken hold of by some of the German romanticists, 
 for the pmpose of justifying the Shaksperean drama in its 
 apparent divergence from the classical "rules." Shakspere 
 cannot be judged by the rules of the Greek theater (so ran 
 their argument), for the drama is an inevitable product of the- 
 atrical conditions; these conditions in Elizabethan England 
 were not the same as those of Periclean Athens; and it is 
 therefore absurd to judge Shakspere's practice by that of 
 Sophocles. Here at least the idea helped to bring Shakspere 
 home to many new hearts by ridding the age of mistaken 
 prejudices, and served a useful purpose, as a specious argu- 
 ment may persuade men to contribute to a noble work, or a 
 mad fanatic may rid the world of a tyrant. But with this 
 achievement its usefulness but not its life was ended. It has 
 been developed into a system, and become a dogma of dra- 
 matic critics; it is our contemporary equivalent for the "rules" 
 of seventeenth-century pedantry. As a matter of fact, the 
 dramatic artist is to be judged by no other standard than that 
 applied to any other creative artist: what has he tried to 
 express, and how has he expressed it? It is true that the 
 theater is not only an art but a business, and the so-called 
 "success" of a play is of vital interest to the theater in so far 
 as it is a commercial undertaking. The test of "success" is an 
 economic test, and concerns not art or the criticism of art, but 
 political economy. Valuable contributions to economic and 
 social history have been made by students who have investi- 
 gated the changing conditions of the theater and the vicissi- 
 tudes of taste on the part of theatrical audiences; but these 
 have the same relation to criticism, and to the drama as an 
 art, that a history of the publisher's trade and its influence 
 on the personal fortunes of poets would bear to the history of 
 poetry. 
 
 We have done with technique as separate from art. It has 
 been pointed out that style cannot be disassociated from art; 
 and the false air of science which the term "technique" seems 
 
 2b
 
 370 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 to possess should not blind us to the fact that it too involves 
 the same error, "Technique is really personality; that is the 
 reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot 
 learn it and why the aesthetic critic can understand it," 
 says Oscar Wilde, in a dialogue on "The Critic as Artist, "which, 
 amid much perversity and paradox, is illumined by many 
 flashes of strange insight. The technique of poetry cannot 
 be separated from its inner nature. Versification cannot be 
 studied by itself, except loosely and for convenience; it re- 
 mains always an inherent quality of the single poem. Milton's 
 line — 
 
 "These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof " 
 
 is called an iambic pentameter; but it is not true that artisti- 
 cally it has something in conunon with every other line pos- 
 sessing the same succession of syllables and accents; in this 
 sense it is not an iambic pentameter; it is only one thing; it is 
 the line : — 
 
 " These my sky-robes spun out of Iris' woof." 
 
 We have done with the history and criticism of poetic 
 themes. It is possible to speak loosely of the handling of 
 such a theme as Prometheus by ^Eschylus and by Shelley, of 
 the story of Francesca da Rimini, by Dante, Stephen Phillips, 
 and D'Annunzio; but strictly speaking, they are not employ- 
 ing the same theme at all. Each artist is expressing a certain 
 material and labeling it with an historic name. For Shelley 
 Prometheus is only a label; he is expressing his artistic con- 
 ception of life, not the history of a Greek Titan; it is the vital 
 flame he has breathed into his work that makes it what it is, 
 and with this vital flame (and not with labels) the critic 
 should concern himself in the works of poets. 
 
 We have done with the race, the time, the environment of 
 a poet's work as an element in criticism. To study these 
 phases of a work of art is to treat it as an historic or social
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 371 
 
 document, and the result is a contribution to the history of 
 culture or civilization, without interest for the history of 
 art. "Granted the times, the environment, the race, the 
 passions of the poet, what has he done with his materials, how 
 has he converted poetry out of reality?" To answer this 
 question of the Italian De Sanctis as it refers to each single 
 work of art is to perform what is truly the critic's vital func- 
 tion; this is to interpret "expression" in its rightful sense, 
 and to liberate aesthetic Criticism from the vassalage to 
 Kulturgeschichte imposed on it by the school of Taine. 
 
 We have done with the "evolution" of Literature. The 
 concept of progress was first applied to Literature in the 
 seventeenth century, but at the very outset Pascal pointed 
 out that a distinction must here be made between science 
 and art; that science advances by accumulation of knowl- 
 edge, while the changes of art cannot be reduced to any 
 theory of progress. As a matter of fact, the theory involves 
 the ranking of poets according to some arbitrary conception 
 of their value; and the ranking of writers in order of merit 
 has become obsolete, except in the "hundred best books" 
 of the last decade and the "five-foot shelves" of to-day. 
 The later nineteenth century gave a new air of verisimilitude 
 to this old theory by borrowing the term "evolution" from 
 science; but this too involves a fundamental misconception 
 of the free and original movement of art. A similar miscon- 
 ception is involved in the study of the "origins" of art; for 
 art has no origin separate from man's life. 
 
 "In climes beyond the solar road, 
 Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam, 
 The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom " ; 
 
 but though she wore savage raiment, she was no less the 
 Muse. Art is simple at times, complex at others, but it is 
 always art. The simple art of early times may be studied
 
 372 ;literary criticism 
 
 with profit; but the researches of anthropology have no 
 vital significance for criticism, unless the anthropologist 
 studies the simplest forms of art in the same spirit as its highest; 
 that is, unless the anthropologist is an aesthetic critic. 
 
 Finally, we have done with the old rupture between genius 
 and taste. When Criticism first propounded as its real con- 
 cern the oft-repeated question: "What has the poet tried to 
 express and how has he expressed it?" Criticism prescribed 
 for itself the only possible method. How can the critic an- 
 swer this question without becoming (if only for a moment of 
 supreme power) at one with the creator? That is to say, 
 taste must reproduce the work of art within itself in order to 
 understand and judge it; and at that moment aesthetic judg- 
 ment becomes nothing more nor less than creative art itself. 
 The identity of genius and taste is the final achievement of 
 modern thought on the subject of art, and it means that 
 fundamentally the creative and the critical instincts are one 
 and the same. From Goethe to Carlyle, from Carlyle to 
 Arnold, from Arnold to Wilde, there has been much talk of 
 the "creative function" of Criticism. For each of these men 
 the phrase held a different content; for Arnold it meant 
 merely that Criticism creates the intellectual atmosphere of 
 the age, — a social function of high importance, perhaps, yet 
 wholly independent of aesthetic significance. But the ulti- 
 mate truth toward which these men were tending was more 
 radical than that, and plays havoc with all the old platitudes 
 about the sterility of taste. Criticism at last can free itself 
 of its age-long self-contempt, now that it may realize that 
 aesthetic judgment and artistic creation are instinct with 
 the same vital life. Without this identity. Criticism would 
 really be impossible. "Genius is to aesthetics what the ego 
 is to philosophy, the only supreme and absolute reality," said 
 Schelling; and without subduing the mind to this transcen- 
 dental system, it remains true that what must always be 
 inexplicable to mere reflection is just what gives power to
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 373 
 
 poetry; that intellectual curiosity may amuse itself by asking 
 its little questions of the silent sons of light, but they vouch- 
 safe no answer to art's pale shadow, thought; the gods are 
 kind if they give up their secret in another work of art, the 
 art of Criticism, that serves as some sort of mirror to the art 
 of Literature, only because in their flashes of insight taste and 
 genius are one.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abbasides, Development of poetry 
 under the, 33. 
 
 "Abbey of Theleme," Quotation 
 from, 168. 
 
 " Absolom and Aehitophel," Dryden's 
 genius noble in, 193. 
 
 Abu Said, Quatrain from, 64. 
 
 "Accademia della Crusca," criticized, 
 227. 
 
 Acts of the Martyrs, 36. 
 
 Adab, the polite literature of the 
 Arabs, 39. 
 
 Addai, Romance of, 36. 
 
 Addison, on the ballad of "Percy 
 and Douglas," 181-182; Latin 
 charm in, 194; papers on "Para- 
 dise Lost," 197-198 ; compared 
 with Pope, 198. 
 
 Addison and Steele, Sir Roger de 
 Coverley of, 15. 
 
 -lEneid, The Roman people the real 
 hero of the, 118-119; appeals to 
 the universal heart of man, 129 ; 
 ballad of "Percy and Douglas" 
 compared with the, by Addison, 
 181-182. 
 
 iEschylus, The tragedies of, 5 ; only 
 seven preserved, 95 ; transformed 
 the drama, 109. 
 
 ^sop. Source of the Fables of, 51 ; 
 Gallicized in La Fontaine, 190. 
 
 Age of Chivalry, The, 136. 
 
 "Age of Pericles," Engraving en- 
 titled, 91. 
 
 Agni, the god of fire, 44. 
 
 Ahura Mazdah, the theme of Zoroas- 
 ter's psalms, 58-59. 
 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, Effects of Treaty 
 of, upon Italy, 222, 224. 
 
 Al-Ahtal, Christian poet, 33. 
 
 al-Hamadani, The rhymed prose in 
 the Makamahs of, 35. 
 
 al-Hariri, The rhymed prose in the 
 Makamahs of, 35. 
 
 al-Harizi, the Hebrew Makamahs of, 
 35. 
 
 Al-Hirah, Persian influences at petty 
 court at, 33. 
 
 al-Khansa, female poet, 33. 
 
 al-Ma'mum, Court poets of, 33. 
 
 al-Mutanabbi developed the Kasidah, 
 33-34. 
 
 al-Tabari, the annalist, 39. 
 
 Alexander the Great, in Hebrew, 
 Arabic, and Syriac folk-tales, 27 ; 
 brought back many elements of 
 culture, 40 ; prevailing conditions 
 to time of, 95 ; empire of, short- 
 lived, 115. 
 
 Alexander II, influenced by Tur- 
 genieff to emancipate the serfs, 
 325. 
 
 Alexandrianism, dessicated Hellen- 
 ism, 12, 13; at Rome, 119. 
 
 Alexandrine, Use of the, by the 
 Pleiade, 183. 
 
 Alfieri, Vittorio, Patriotic idealism 
 in, 200 ; the passionate tragedies of, 
 231. 
 
 Alfred, Court of, 137. 
 
 Algarotti, Francesco, Venetian critic, 
 226. 
 
 Allegory, Persistence of, in Medieval 
 Literature, 140-141. 
 
 Allen, C. F. R., translator of the 
 Shi-king, 77. 
 
 Alliteration and assonance lost in 
 translation, 35. 
 
 Alphabet, We owe the, to the 
 Semites, 21-22. 
 
 American Literature, Romanticism 
 in, 206 ; separation of, from Eng- 
 lish, 269-270. 
 
 Angles and Saxons, The literature of 
 the, 253. 
 
 Animal fables of the Sanskrit, 51. 
 
 Annamites, The, study Chinese 
 Literature, 67. 
 
 375
 
 376 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Antar, The romances of, 39. 
 
 Antara, Epic of the black hero, 28. 
 
 Antiphon, earliest Attic orator, 112. 
 
 Antonius, a teacher of Cicero, 124. 
 
 Apocryphal writings originally in 
 Hebrew, 36. 
 
 Appius Claudius Caecus made first 
 speech published in Roman annals, 
 124. 
 
 Appreciation of authors, A reasoned, 
 16. 
 
 Approaches to Literature (B. Mat- 
 thews), 1-20. 
 
 "Arabian Nights, The," not a pic- 
 ture of Arab life, 39-40. 
 
 Arabic, The, drove out other tongues, 
 31. 
 
 Arabic belles-lettres under influence of 
 writers of Western Europe, 24. 
 
 Arabic historiography. Birth of, 38. 
 
 Arabic poetry. Influence of, on 
 Hebrew poetry, 29-30 ; collec- 
 tions of, 34. 
 
 Arabic prose first put to writing in 
 the Koran, 38. 
 
 Arabs, Passion of, for poetic diction, 
 22,31-32; compelled submission 
 of other races, 23, 30-31 ; devel- 
 oped a rich Literature, 31 ; poetry 
 of the, 32-34 ; rhymed prose, 34-35. 
 
 Aramaic language and Literature, 36. 
 . Arcadian Academy, Purpose of the, 
 200 ; influence of, on Italian 
 Literature, 222-223. 
 
 Archaeology, Chinese works on, 86 ; 
 effect of progress in, 97. 
 
 Archilochus a master of satire and 
 versification, 108, 109. 
 
 "Ardashir, Romance of King," 59- 
 60. 
 
 Ariosto, founder of classic tradition in 
 Italian poetry, 171; the "Orlando 
 Furioso " of, continued by Lope 
 de Vega, 247. 
 
 Aristocracy, Earliest stage of Greek 
 life an, 105. 
 
 Aristophanes, The lyrical-burlesque 
 of, 14; genius of, 102 ; satirist, 109 ; 
 comedies of, 125 ; model for Racine, 
 187. 
 
 Aristotle, Joy in a lasting friendship 
 with, 10 ; imbibed wisdom at feet 
 
 of the Rabbis, 24 ; translated into 
 Syriac, 37 ; the " Organon " of, 37 ; 
 valuable fragment of, 96 ; on the 
 critic, 363 ; few arbitrary rules in, 
 365. 
 
 Arjuna, the Achilles of the Maha- 
 bharata, 49. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, The "Sohrab and 
 Rustum" of, 60-61 ; a natural 
 evolution from the discipline of 
 the eighteenth century, 202 ; defi- 
 nition of classic, 206 ; on the 
 essential of Literature, 262 ; de- 
 sertion of the mu.se by, 264. 
 
 "Ars Poetica" of Horace, Boileau's 
 imitation of, the creed of the classi- 
 cal age, 189. 
 
 Art and Science colleagues, 1. 
 
 Art, Code of rules for every, 13 ; 
 Chinese works on, 86 ; sensuous 
 charm of Italian, 169 ; transforma- 
 tion of criticism and history of, 
 214; what English Literature has 
 lacked in, 258-259 ; is organic ex- 
 pression, 366 ; simple, may be 
 studied with profit, 371-372. 
 
 Art for Art's sake, the battle-cry of 
 French Romanticists, 13-14 ; Ro- 
 manticism gone to seed, 218 ; 
 Pushkin idol of the partizans of, 
 323. 
 
 "Art of Love," Ovid's, construed as 
 an allegory of love divine, 157. 
 
 Arts, Free trade in the raw materials 
 of the, 1 1 ; a new birth for the, 12. 
 
 Ascham, Roger, on the "Morte d' 
 Arthur," 141 ; on Renaissance 
 Italy, 169. 
 
 Assonance and rhyme, Delight of the 
 Arab in, 35 ; use of, formulated by 
 the Pleiade, 183. 
 
 Atharva collection, the fourth of the 
 Vedas, 45. 
 
 Athenian tragedy, Evolution of, 14. 
 
 Athenians, The, produced the drama, 
 102-103. 
 
 Athens, 4 ; total population of, 107 ; 
 influence of political conditions in, 
 on oratory, 110-112. 
 
 Attar, Farid ad Din, Persian mystic 
 poet, 61-62; extract from "Bird- 
 Parliament" of, 62.
 
 INDEX 
 
 377 
 
 Attic drama, Persistence of literary 
 dialect illustrated in the, 102-103. 
 
 Attic eclipsed Ionic prose, 101 ; 
 ascendancy of, 112-114. 
 
 Auerbach reveals the rustics of the 
 Black Forest, 5. 
 
 Augier indebted to Balzac, 16. 
 
 Auguration among the Chinese, 74- 
 75. 
 
 Augustus, Efforts of, for reconstruc- 
 tion of Italy, 129. 
 
 "Autos sacramentales " of Calderon, 
 248. 
 
 Avesta, The Yashts of the, 59. 
 
 Avicenna, see Ibn Sina. 
 
 Babrius, Source of the Fables of, 51. 
 
 Babylonian Literature, Oldest speci- 
 men of, 23. 
 
 Babylonian religion sublimated its 
 mythological elements, 25. 
 
 Babylonians, Beginnings of the cul- 
 ture of the, 21 ; imposed their 
 script and religion upon those they 
 conquered, 23 ; many ideas of 
 Greek philosophy came from the, 
 40. 
 
 Bacchylides, Ms. of, 95, 96 ; em- 
 ployed Doric dialect, 100 ; wrote 
 odes, 109. 
 
 Bacon, Havelock Ellis on Shakspere 
 and, 7; on Vergil, 117. 
 
 Balbilla composed poems in imita- 
 tion of Sappho, 100. 
 
 Balbus, from Cadiz, gained a public 
 triumph at Rome, 234. 
 
 Ballad Literature, Tragedy in, 144 ; 
 rhythm in, 145 ; in Spain, 239- 
 240. 
 
 Balzac, The sorry heroes of, a pat- 
 tern, 14 ; Dumas fils and Augier 
 indebted to, 16; "The Human 
 Comedy" of, 289. 
 
 "Bamboo Book" annals. The, 83-84. 
 
 Banu Hilal, The romances of the, 39. 
 
 Baretti, Guiseppe, found inspiration 
 in England, 200 ; literary critic, 
 227. 
 
 Barrie, J. M., Humor of, akin to 
 Chaucer's, 146. 
 
 Basques, The, 234 ; defeated Roland, 
 239. 
 
 Bazan, Countess Pardo, on contem- 
 porary Spanish Literature, 249— 
 250. 
 
 Beast fable. The, of India, 51. 
 
 Beatrice, Love of Dante for, 140. 
 
 Beaumarchais, The Figaro of, 12, 287. 
 
 Beers, H. A., on romanticism, 136, 
 204. 
 
 Belles-lettres, The Treasury of, of 
 Chinese Literature, 71, 88-89. 
 
 Benoit de Ste. More, French roman- 
 cer, 136. 
 
 Beowiilf, Germanic paganism in, 
 135, 253. 
 
 Beranger on the white flag of the 
 Bourbons, 277. 
 
 Berbers, The, submitted to religious 
 enthusiasm of the Arabs, 23. 
 
 Bernardo del Carpio, Spanish hero in 
 Ballad Literature, 239-240. 
 
 Bertola, Aurelio, poet, 230. 
 
 Bettinelli, Saverio, Itahan critic, 226. 
 
 Bhartrihari, Specimens of the lyrics 
 of, 55-56. 
 
 Bhavabhuti, a dramatist of India, 54. 
 
 Bible, Traditional narratives from 
 GUgamesh in the, 26-27 ; noble 
 language of the, 29, 30, 35; the 
 Book of the Jewish Church, 35 ; in- 
 fluence of, and of its translations, 
 40-41; debt of Milton to, 124; 
 source of modern Literature, 213 ; 
 the greatest monument of our 
 prose, 262. 
 
 "Bidpah or Pilpay," 52. 
 
 "Bird-Parliament" of Attar, Ex- 
 tract from FitzGerald's version of 
 the. 62. 
 
 Blake, William, on knowledge, 2 ; 
 a revolutionary writer, 177. 
 
 Blanc, Louis, as a writer, 288. 
 
 Boccaccio, The mother of, probably 
 a French woman, 7 ; began lec- 
 tures on Dante, 18 ; the source of 
 the "Knight's Tale," 137; on, 
 composition in the vulgar tongue, 
 161. 
 
 Bodner, translator of "Paradise 
 Lost," 201. 
 
 Boethius, Language of, 131-132; 
 classic thought in, 135 ; allegory 
 in, 141.
 
 378 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bohemia, Czech aspirations for Liter- 
 ature in, 339. 
 
 Boileau, satirist and critic, 172, 188- 
 189 ; the absolute model for criti- 
 cism, 189 ; on Tasso, 363. 
 
 Boissier, Gaston, The "End of 
 Paganism " of, and Walter Pater's 
 "Plato and Platonism," 8; dis- 
 covered struggle for life theory in 
 St. Augustine's "City of God," 19. 
 
 "Book of Changes," see "Canon of 
 Changes." 
 
 Bossuet, Influence of Demosthenes 
 and Cicero on, 14. 
 
 Bossuet and Voltaire, 283. 
 
 Boy, The, the stone, and the dog, a 
 quatrain, 56. 
 
 Brahman, The, and his bowl of rice, 
 52. 
 
 Brahmanas, works explanatory of the 
 Vedas, 47-48 ; earliest prose writ- 
 ings, 48. 
 
 Brandes on Romanticism, 204. 
 
 Briton, The, proud to call himself a 
 Roman, 115-116. 
 
 Broceliande, Enchanted forest of, 
 138. 
 
 Browning, Quotation from "Gram- 
 marian" of, 159; from "Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra," 209; the "Caliban" 
 of, 210; intense interest in man, 
 213; a Romanticist, 218; per- 
 sisting in eccentricity, 264. 
 
 Brunetifere, Ferdinand, followed Les- 
 sing, 18 ; most suggestive of 
 recent critics, 19 ; on French 
 Literature, 134 ; on Romanticism, 
 204 ; on the leading literatures, 
 291-292 ; on the French vogue for 
 Russian Literature, 311. 
 
 "Buch der Byspel der alten Weisen, 
 Das," 52. 
 
 Buchanan, George, Lines to France, 
 8. 
 
 Bucolic or pastoral poetry of Theoc- 
 ritus, 98. 
 
 Buddha, Accounts of the incarna- 
 tions of, in the Jatakas, 51. 
 
 Buddhism, Chinese works on, 87. 
 
 Buffon worked in richest garb, 3. 
 
 Buffon's "Natural History," 287. 
 
 Bunyan, Allegory in, 141. 
 
 Burlesques, flourish in classical age, 
 
 188 ; in Italy, 223. 
 Burns, a revolutionary writer, 177. 
 Byron, and the French Romanticists, 
 
 216 ; balance of waste and profit 
 
 in, 264-265 ; vogue of, in France, 
 
 342. 
 Byron's "Manfred," 210; "Don 
 
 Juan," 265. 
 Byzantium, Literature of, 94. 
 
 Caedmon characterized, 150. 
 
 Caesar's "Commentaries" a monu- 
 ment of the native capacity of the 
 Latin language, 123 ; style in, 126. 
 
 "Caff 6, 11" of Verri, periodical, 226. 
 
 Calderon, Spanish dramatist, 247— 
 248. 
 
 Calvin, the reaction against Renais- 
 sance license, 170, 174. 
 
 Calvus, member of a school already 
 Alexandrine, 119. 
 
 Campion, Plea of, for classical verse, 
 183. 
 
 "Canon of Changes" {I -king). The, 
 a work on the eight mystic dia- 
 grams, 73-75 ; the Fong-shui of the, 
 75 ; a rationalism based on the, 85. 
 
 " Canon of History" {Shu-king), The, 
 75-76. 
 
 "Canon of Odes" (Shi-king), The, 
 76-77. 
 
 " Canon of Rites" (Li-king), The, 77. 
 
 Canterbury Pilgrimage, The, illus- 
 trates the importance of the 
 Church, 147. 
 
 Canto, terzett, and hexameter, in 
 Hebrew poetry, 30. 
 
 Carasalla's extension of Roman citi- 
 zenship, 115. 
 
 Carducci, a Romanticist, 218. 
 
 Carlyle, on Shakspere, 173-174; dis- 
 daining discipline, 264 ; on the new 
 German criticism, 362-363. 
 
 Carthaginians, Incursions of, into 
 Spain, 234. 
 
 Catherine II, of Russia, 315 ; an 
 Encyclopedist, 329. 
 
 Catholicism, Action of Council of 
 Trent on, 170. 
 
 Cato, the elder, a teacher of Cicero, 
 124; the "Origins" of, 126.
 
 INDEX 
 
 379 
 
 "Catone," The, of Metastasio, 223. 
 
 Catullus, of a school already Alex- 
 andrine, 119; the poetry of, 119- 
 120. 
 
 Caxton, on chivalry, 142 ; on the 
 humanities, 162. 
 
 Celtic cycle. Tales of the, kxiown in 
 Spain, 240. 
 
 Celts, The, 234. 
 
 Centralization in Art and Literature, 
 171. 
 
 Cervantes, a master of prose fiction, 
 15 ; began as a playwright, 15 ; 
 life and writings of, 241-246 ; 
 career of, 242 ; a representative 
 citizen of the world, 247. 
 
 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, literary critic, 
 227-228. 
 
 Chang K'ien, the discoverer of India 
 for the Chinese, 69-70 ; the Colum- 
 bus of the Chinese, 82. 
 
 Chansons de geste known in Spain, 
 238, 240. 
 
 Chant, A, the first melody of India's 
 voice, 44. 
 
 Character, Education of, the great 
 lesson of Mencius, 80. 
 
 Characters, literary, Wanderings of 
 cosmopolitan, 10-12. 
 
 " Characters " of La Bruyfere, 285. 
 
 Charlemagne in the Spanish ballads, 
 239-240. 
 
 Chateaubriand's "Genius of Chris- 
 tianity," 214; political, 287; 
 "Buonaparte and the Bourbons," 
 287-288. 
 
 Chaucer, Thoreau on, 19 ; quoted, 
 137 ; influenced by lore-allegory, 
 140 ; lack of tragedy in, 144 ; 
 humor in, 146 ; Dryden on, 193. 
 
 Chaucer and Langland, 253-254. 
 
 Chenier, Andre, in France, 214, 216. 
 
 Chiari, Pietro, Romances of, 228. 
 
 "Child Waters," Quotation from, 
 143. 
 
 Chinese, No one knows where the, 
 came from, 68 ; Indian folk-lore 
 and the, 69. 
 
 Chinese biographies, 83. 
 
 "Chinese Classics," The, not influ- 
 enced from any quarter, 70 ; the 
 works of thinkers, 70 ; books in- 
 
 cluded in the, 73 ; glossaries and 
 dictionaries on, 80-81. 
 
 Chinese dictionaries, 81. 
 
 Chinese historians, One-sidedness of, 
 69. 
 
 Chinese imperial libraries. Cata- 
 logues of, 70-72. 
 
 Chinese Literature (Friedrich 
 Hirth) 67-90 : The classic Litera- 
 ture of the Far East, 67 ; Con- 
 fucianist, 67 ; absolutely autoch- 
 thonous, 68 ; developed with the 
 nation, 68 ; similarities with Indian 
 folk-lore in fourth century, 69 ; 
 the Chinese Classics, 70, 73 ; no 
 history of, 70 ; catalogues of, 70- 
 71; the "Four Treasuries," 71; 
 the " Five Canons " : The "Canon 
 of Changes," 73-75; the "Canon 
 of History," 75-76, 81-83; the 
 "Canon of Odes," 76-77; the 
 " Canon of Rites," 77 ; the "Spring 
 and Autumn," 77-78; the "Four 
 Books," 78-79 ; commentaries and 
 expositions, 80-81 ; the twenty- 
 four Histories, 82-83 ; the historic 
 annals, 83-84 ; gazetteers, 84 ; 
 Treasury of the Philosophers, 84- 
 85; the cyclopedias, 86-87; Bud- 
 dhism and Tauism, 87-88 ; Belles- 
 Lettres, 88; "Elegies of Ch'u," 
 88-89 ; poetry, drama, and novels, 
 89-90. 
 
 Chivalry, Influence of, on social ethics, 
 138-140; immoral, 139; virtues 
 of, 142 ; in Spain, 240-241. 
 
 Ch'on Chon-sun, The private collec- 
 tion of, 71. 
 
 Choral IjtIc poetry, Dorian, 101-102. 
 
 Chretien de Troyes, French ro- 
 mancer, 135, 136 ; quoted, 143- 
 144; claimed his own work, 151. 
 
 Christ, Romance of the, 36. 
 
 Christianity, Origin of, 21 ; gift of 
 the Jews, 23 ; gospel of, preached 
 in Greek, 94 ; the world a place of 
 horror to medieval, 163-164 ; the 
 doctrine of good cheer enlivened, 
 166 ; introduction of, into Spain, 
 235. 
 
 Chu Hi, defender of Confucianism, 
 S5.
 
 380 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ch'un-tsHu, "Spring and Autumn," 
 77-78, 81. 
 
 Church, The medieval, in twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries, 134 ; 
 passion for system in, 140 ; influ- 
 ence of on Literature, 147-150 ; 
 discouraged individuality, 151. 
 
 Church Fathers, The, on the ancient 
 gods, 95 ; the Latinity of, made 
 possible by Cicero, 124. 
 
 Cicero, restores the ruins of Rome, 4 ; 
 influence of, on Bossuet and Web- 
 ster, 14 ; had the most cultivated 
 mind of aU antiquity, 117; justi- 
 fied his interest in Philosophy, 121- 
 122 ; created a philosophical vo- 
 cabulary, 123 ; made possible the 
 Latinity of the Church Fathers, 
 124 ; influence of, in Roman educa- 
 tion, 124 ; a literary artist, 124 ; 
 founder of Latin prose style, 125; 
 as an orator, 125-126 ; Letters of, 
 126 ; compared with Sallust, 127. 
 
 Cid, the. Story of, 236-238; origin 
 and form of, 238-239. 
 
 Cinna, member of a school already 
 Alexandrine, 119. 
 
 Ciriac of Ancona, antiquary, 160. 
 
 Citizenship, Roman, Extension of, 
 115. 
 
 Civ-ilization, Western, Debt of, to 
 the nearer East, 21. 
 
 Classic, Definition of a, 179, 206-207. 
 
 Classic art the highest, 210. 
 
 Classic contrasted with Romantic, 
 203, 205-211. 
 
 Classic revival a part of the Romantic 
 movement, 214. 
 
 Classical Rule, The (John Erskine) 
 177-202: "Classical" defined, 
 177-180 ; conflict between national 
 folk literatures and the classical 
 ideal, 180-182 ; imitation of classics 
 through external form or through 
 spirit, 182-184 ; strongest in 
 France, 184-191 ; in England, 191- 
 199; in Italy, 200; in Germany, 
 200-201 ; influence of, 201-202. 
 
 Classicism, empty and formal, 13 ; 
 the accompUshment of, 191 ; the 
 course of, 211 ; and Romanticism, 
 262. 
 
 Classicist canon, The, formulated in 
 mid-sixteenth century, 171-172; 
 to follow nature a chief, 212- 
 213. 
 
 Classics, The, defined, 178-180; 
 influence of, on European Litera- 
 ture, 180 ; delight in the, 194 ; a 
 genuine revival for, 214 ; decline 
 of the ancient, 353. 
 
 Classics (king). The, 71. 
 
 Classics of to-day, the Romanticists 
 who have arrived, 207. 
 
 "Clay Cart, The," a drama by King 
 S'udraka, 54. 
 
 Clay tablets of Babylonia, The, 28. 
 
 ' ' Cloud Messenger, The, " of Kalidasa, 
 55. 
 
 CoHN, Adolphe, French Literature, 
 27.3-289. 
 
 Coleridge, and the supernatural, 215 ; 
 found Dr. Johnson lacked morality, 
 262. 
 
 Colonization, Greek, 107. 
 
 Columella, a Spaniard, 234. 
 
 Comedy, Greek, The intriguing 
 slave of, revived in other litera- 
 tures, 11-12. 
 
 Comedy, Moli^re and, 10 ; in popu- 
 lar Medieval Literature, 146-147. 
 
 Comedy of cloak-and-sword. The 
 Spanish, 11. 
 
 Comedy-of-masks, The Italian, 11. 
 
 "Comendador Mendoza, El," of 
 Valera, 249. 
 
 Common law, Roman, Influence of 
 Stoic doctrine on the, 115. 
 
 Comte on humanity, 7. 
 
 Concordance published by the Em- 
 peror K'ang-hi, 81. 
 
 Confessions of Rousseau, 140. 
 
 Confucian analects, The, 78 ; filial 
 piety the keynote of the, 78-79. 
 
 Confucianist Literature includes anti- 
 Confucianist, 67-68; the "Canon 
 of History " purely, 76. 
 
 Confucius, and his influence, 72-73 ; 
 book written to prove he never 
 lived, 76 ; no teachings of, in the 
 "Five Canons," but in the "Four 
 Books," 78; teachings of, 78-79; 
 a pedantic ceremonialist, 79. 
 
 Confucius and Lau-tzi, thinkers,
 
 INDEX 
 
 381 
 
 representatives of Chinese Litera- 
 ture, 70. 
 
 Cooper, James F., 218. 
 
 Corax, a teacher of oratory. 111. 
 
 Coreans, The, study Chinese Litera- 
 ture, 67. 
 
 Corinna, Language of, 101. 
 
 Corneille, Influence of, on Mme. de 
 La Fayette, 16 ; the tragedies of, 
 185-186; Dryden indebted to, 
 193 ; model for Italian drama, 
 200 ; admired by Gottsched, 201 ; 
 drama of the "Cid," 238, 278; 
 other masterpieces of, 278 ; seven- 
 teenth, the century of, 284. 
 
 Cosmopolitan Outlook, The (Wil- 
 liam P. Trent), 333-354; presi- 
 dential generalizers, 333-334 ; cos- 
 mopolitan spirit wanting in Ameri- 
 cans, 334-335 ; elements of, here, 
 335 ; belief in the rights of man, 
 335-336 ; Tolstoy a true cosmo- 
 politan, 337-338 ; the minor na- 
 tionalities, 339 ; and the greater, 
 tend to nationalism, 339-340 ; 
 the better citizen, the better cos- 
 mopolitan, 340-341 ; international 
 literary relations, 340-342 ; Byron 
 in France, 342 ; triumph of prose 
 over verse, 343-346 ; the glory of 
 poetry, 346-347 ; the subjective 
 and objective in Literature and 
 in life, 347-348, 350-351 ; civiliza- 
 tion expanding, 349 ; future Litera- 
 ture will be subjective and there- 
 fore cosmopolitan, 350-352 ; de- 
 cline of the classics, 353. 
 
 Council of Trent reasserted authority 
 of dogma, 170. 
 
 Court chronicles of China, 83. 
 
 Cousin, a cabinet minister, 288. 
 
 Cowley ode, Dryden's use of the, 
 196. 
 
 Crassus, a teacher of Cicero, 124. 
 
 Crea^ve power of Greeks, Changes 
 in, 94. 
 
 Crescimbeni, Giam Mario, literary 
 historian, 221. 
 
 Critic, First and foremost duty of 
 the, 363. 
 
 Criticism, Code of, not unchangeable, 
 17 ; must lag behind creation, 18 ; 
 
 earliest attempt at, 18 ; few novel- 
 ties in, 19 ; Boileau a model for, 
 189 ; literary, in Italy, 225-228. 
 
 Criticism, Literary (J. E. Spingarn), 
 355-373: The secret of, 355; Ana- 
 tole France on, 356 ; the impres- 
 sionistic critic, 356-358 ; no new 
 battle against, 358-359 ; impres- 
 sionism and dogmatism, feminine 
 and masculine criticism, 359-360 ; 
 Literature an expression of some- 
 thing, 360-361 ; the study of 
 expression, 363-364 ; all expres- 
 sion is art, 364 ; rules of, abolished, 
 365 ; genres done with, 365-366 ; 
 abstract classifications, 366-367 ; 
 theory of style, 367-368; moral 
 judgment, 368; "dramatic," done 
 with, 368-369; technique, 369- 
 370; poetic themes, 370-371; 
 evolution, 371. 
 
 Croce, Benedetto, on Medieval Liter- 
 ature, 151 ; thinker and critic, 
 373. 
 
 Crusades, The, united men, 134. 
 
 "Cupid's Whirligig" of Bhartrihari, 
 55. 
 
 "Curse of the angry priest. The," 
 drama by Kshemis'vara, 54. 
 
 Cyclopedia, The great Chinese, 86- 
 87. 
 
 Cynewulf, characterized, 150. 
 
 Dactylic verse, 105. 
 
 Damascus, Byzantine influences at 
 Court at, 33. 
 
 Dandin, "Adventures of the Ten 
 Princes," by, 56. 
 
 Daniel, the man of judgment, on 
 border-land of mythology, 27. 
 
 Dante, Joy in a lasting friendship 
 with, 10, Lowell's admiration for, 
 10; Boccaccio began lectures on, 
 18 ; in Semitic translation, 24 ; 
 minutely self-searching, 140 ; alle- 
 gory a reality to, 141 ; on jurisdic- 
 tion of Roman Empire, 156-157; 
 on the noble vernacular, 157, 161, 
 162 ; reproached Florentines for 
 deserting legitimate government, 
 158 ; on Vergil, 163 ; yields reason 
 to dogma, 174 ; criticized by
 
 382 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bettinelli, 226 ; study of, revived, 
 
 227. 
 Dargomyzhski on music, 326. 
 Dark Ages, Literature in the, 135 ; 
 
 romantic spirit of the, 136-138 ; 
 
 feudalism an advance over the, 141. 
 "Dawn Age," The, of Greek civiliza- 
 tion, 93. 
 De Quincey, Prose style of, 210. 
 "De Republica," see "On the State." 
 "Decameron," The, in the vulgar 
 
 tongue, 161. 
 "Defence and Ennoblement of the 
 
 French Language," Du Bellay's, 
 
 171. 
 Defoe, Daniel, on Don Quixote, 243. 
 Delavigne, Casimir, The "Louis 
 
 XI" of, 279. 
 Delphi, Games at, 109. 
 Democracy in Literature, Roman- 
 ticism the beginning of, 205, 211- 
 
 212. 
 Democritus and Heraclitus, 353. 
 Demosthenes, The orations of, 5 ; 
 
 influence of, on Cicero, 14 ; the 
 
 incomparable, 113; death of, 114. 
 Descartes, Influence of, on French 
 
 thought, 185 ; on Italian thought, 
 
 224. 
 Deschanel on "Le Romantisme des 
 
 classiques," 207. 
 Desert, The, the source of every great 
 
 effort, 27-28 ; the home of poetic 
 
 expression, 32. 
 Dhammapada, The, a book of moral 
 
 maxims, 51. 
 Diagrams, The Eight, of the "Canon 
 
 of Changes," 73-75 ; Won-wang 
 
 on, 74-75. 
 Dialect, The choral lyric, 101-102. 
 Dialect, Divergence of, among the 
 
 branches of Greek Literature, 99- 
 
 103. 
 Dialect, The Epic, 100. 
 Dickens, Charles, Influence of Ben 
 
 Jonson on, 16 ; Pinero and Jones in- 
 debted to, 16 ; prostituting his 
 
 power of invention, 264. 
 Diction in the Elizabethan and 
 
 classical periods, 192. 
 Dictionary of the French Academy, 
 
 184. 
 
 Diderot imitated Goldoni, 229. 
 
 "Didone abbandonata," The, of 
 Metastasio, 223. 
 
 "Difesa di Dante," The, of Gozzi, 
 227. 
 
 Dionysius, Worship of, 109. 
 
 " Directorium, " The, 52. 
 
 " Dissertazioni Vossiane," The, of 
 Zeno, 220. 
 
 Distich, The elegiac, suited to for- 
 cible expression, 107-108. 
 
 "Divine Comedy," The, of Dante, 
 an example of allegory, 141 ; prog- 
 ress of Roman eagle celebrated 
 in the, 157 ; repudiated by Betti- 
 nelli, 226. 
 
 "Doctrine of the Mean" (Chung- 
 yung), The, 79. 
 
 Don Juan, a wandering lyrical hero, 
 11. 
 
 Don Quixote, at home in the hills of 
 Spain, 1 1 ; purpose of, 243-244 ; 
 Howells and Fitzmaurice Kelly on, 
 244-246. 
 
 "Doiia Perfecta," The, of Galdos, 
 249. 
 
 "Donation of Constantine," The, a 
 forged warrant of legitimacy, 157. 
 
 Dorians, The, cultivated the choral 
 lyric, 100-102. 
 
 "Dragontea," poem by Lope de 
 Vega, 247. 
 
 Drake, Sir Francis, attacked in poem 
 by Lope de Vega, 247. 
 
 Drama, The, never developed among 
 the Semites, 25 ; mj'thological ele- 
 ment in, repellent to their mono- 
 theism, 25; in China, 89-90. 
 
 Drama, The Attic, 102-103, 109. 
 
 Drama, The comic, originated with 
 the Dorians, 102. 
 
 Drama, The Elizabethan, condemned 
 by Sidney, 181, 182; contrasted 
 with the Greek, 209-210 ; struggle 
 and waste in the, 266-267. 
 
 Drama, Greek, Types in the, con- 
 trasted with those of Racine, 187 ; 
 contrasted with the Elizabethan, 
 209-210. 
 
 Drama, Greek comic. Development 
 of, 14. 
 
 Drama, The Indian, 52-54; Kali-
 
 INDEX 
 
 383 
 
 dasa's"S'akuntala,"53 ; the " Clay- 
 Cart " of King S'udraka, 54. 
 
 Drama, The Italian, in the eigh- 
 teenth century, 223, 228, 229, 231. 
 
 Drama, neo-classic, Conventions of, 
 overthrown, 217. 
 
 Drama, The Spanish, 246-250. 
 
 Dramatist, Horace's rules for the, 365. 
 
 Dramatists, The Attic, and the Eliza- 
 bethan, 17. 
 
 Dryden, satirist, 190 ; important 
 figure in classical period, 192-193 ; 
 Latin charm in, 194, 199 ; as a 
 translator, 195 ; first of the eigh- 
 teenth century wits, 196 ; use of 
 the heroic couplet and the Cowley 
 ode by, 196. 
 
 Du Bellay, formulated classic canon, 
 171 ; on discarding idiomatic 
 literature for classic, 181, 182 ; 
 elegant art of, 284. 
 
 Dumas, began as a playwright, 15, 
 279; stealings of, 125. 
 
 Dumas fils indebted to Balzac, 16. 
 
 Dunbar, influenced by lore-allegory, 
 140. 
 
 Duruy, a cabinet minister, 288. 
 
 Dyerzhavin, 323. 
 
 Ebed Yesu, The Syriac Makamahs 
 of, 35. 
 
 Echegaray, Countess Pardo Bazan 
 on, 250. 
 
 "Echo, The," of Pushkin, Transla- 
 tion of, 324. 
 
 Eclipses of the sun mentioned in 
 Chinese records, 75. 
 
 "Edward," Quotation from, 144-145. 
 
 Edward III, Court of, 137. 
 
 Ego, Rights of the, 212. 
 
 Egypt, Psalms of the priests and 
 singers of, 28-29 ; beginnings of 
 Art, Architecture, and Literature 
 to be found in, 40. 
 
 Egypt, Mohammedan, The poets of, 
 34. 
 
 Egyptians submitted to religious 
 enthusiasm of the Arabs, 23. 
 
 Eighteenth century the period of 
 the Classical Rule, 177 ; pseudo- 
 classic, 211; the Settecento in 
 Italy, 219-231. 
 
 "Electra," The, of Galdos. 249. 
 
 Elegiac poetry, Composiition of, 104, 
 107. 
 
 Elegies of Ch'u, by K'ii Yiian, 88. 
 
 Eliot, George, spoiling novels, 264. 
 
 Elizabethan Drama, see Drama, the 
 Elizabethan. 
 
 Ellis, Havelock, on Shakspere and 
 Bacon, 7 ; on Hawthorne and 
 Renan, 7 ; on Russia and Spain, 
 318; on Russia's future, 331-332. 
 
 Eloquence lauded, 160 ; Gabriel Har- 
 vey on, 161. 
 
 "Eloquenza italiana," The, of Fon- 
 tanini. Note to, by Zeno, 220. 
 
 "Encyclopedia," The, of Diderot and 
 d'Alembert, 287. 
 
 Encyclopedists, French, Italian coun- 
 terparts to the, 224. 
 
 English, Platonic idea of, 162. 
 
 English Literature, Influence of King 
 James' version of Bible on, 41 ; 
 classical period in, 177, 182-183, 
 191-199 ; Romanticism in, 206, 
 216, 218. 
 
 English Literature (Ashley H. 
 Thorndike), 251-272: Our heri- 
 tage, 251 ; relation of, to other 
 national literatures, 252-253 ; 
 Langland and Chaucer, 253 ; no 
 central authority in, 255-256 ; 
 expansion and democratization of, 
 256-257; lack of form in, 257- 
 259 ; the only fine art in which 
 the English have excelled, 259 ; 
 its trinity of graces, 259 ; poetic 
 style, 260 ; moral purpose in, 261 ; 
 moral criticism of life the essential 
 of, 262 ; prodigious waste in, 263- 
 264 ; waste and profit in Byron 
 265 ; has attracted great men 
 266 ; the Elizabethan drama, 266 
 wastefulness justified, 267 ; nature 
 realism, and romance in, 267-268 
 influence of, on the national life 
 268 ; the Victorian Literature, 269 
 separation of American from, 269- 
 270 ; the spirit of, 270-272 ; called 
 individualistic by Bruneti^re, 291. 
 
 Ennius, a soldier before he was a 
 poet, 118. 
 
 Epic dialect, The, 92.
 
 384 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Epic poetry, No development of, 
 among the Semites, 26 ; composed 
 in hexameters, 104. 
 
 Epicurus, philosopher. The aim of, 
 120. 
 
 Erasmus protested against Human- 
 ism, 170. 
 
 Erskine, John, The Classical Rule, 
 177-202. 
 
 Ethiopic poetry religious, 31. 
 
 Euclid grounded on Babylonian 
 mathematics translated into East- 
 ern tongues, 24. 
 
 Euripides, Eighteen plays of, pre- 
 served, 95 ; transformed the drama, 
 109. 
 
 Exotism a characteristic of the 
 Romantic movement, 216. 
 
 Fables of Bidpai, The, translated 
 through the Syriac, 37. 
 
 Fabliaux of the French satirists. 
 Flavor of Middle Ages in, 5. 
 
 Fabliaux of the Middle Ages, Coarse- 
 ness of the, 146. 
 
 "Faerie Queene," Spenser's, a sermon 
 on world-renouncing, 175. 
 
 Faguet on the rules of Art, 8. 
 
 Falstaff abides at home in England, 
 11. 
 
 Fantoni, Giovanni, the poet, 230. 
 
 Farozdak, Satire of, 33. 
 
 Faust, a transplanted seedling, 11 ; 
 embodied supernaturalism, 215; 
 292-293; incommensurable, 304; 
 lines from the Prelude, 307. 
 
 "Ferumbras," medieval romance, 
 149. 
 
 Feudal period. The, exalted woman, 
 138 ; passion for form and conven- 
 tion in, 139-140; virtues of, 141- 
 142. 
 
 Feudal system in the twelfth cen- 
 tury, 134. 
 
 Fichto, Romanticism in, 209 ; the 
 work of, 292. 
 
 Fick, Theory of, on Homeric poems, 
 92. 
 
 Fiction, Modern Spanish, 248-250. 
 
 Fiction, The prose, of the Greeks and 
 Romans, 126. 
 
 Fiction, Sanskrit prose, 56-57. 
 
 Fielding, a master of prose fiction, 15 ; 
 began as a playwright, 15. 
 
 Fifteenth century compared with 
 eighteenth, 221. ^ 
 
 Figaro, The, of Beaumarchais, of 
 Mozart, and of Rossini, 12. 
 
 Filelfo, on immortality, 100. 
 
 Filial piety among the Chinese, 78 ; 
 the "Canon of," 80. 
 
 Firdausi, The "Shah Namah" or 
 "Book of Kings" of, 60-61. 
 
 FitzGerald, Edward, translator from 
 the Persien, 62, 63. 
 
 Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James, Transla- 
 tion of, from the "Cid," 237; on 
 Cervantes, 242 ; on Don Quixote, 
 245-247. 
 
 "Five Canons" (wu-king), The, 73- 
 78: The "Canon of Changes" 
 (I -king), 73-75; the "Canon of 
 History" (Shu-king), 75-76; the 
 "Canon of Odes" {Shi-king), 76- 
 77 ; the "Canon of Rites" (Li-ki), 
 77; the "Spring and Autumn" 
 annals (Ch'un-ts'iu), 77-78. 
 
 Flemish, Efforts to establish, as a 
 literary language in Belgium, 339. 
 
 Fletcher, Jefferson B., The Re- 
 naissance, 155-175. 
 
 Florentines, The, opposed to German 
 polity, 158, 172. 
 
 Fionas, the historian, a Spaniard, 
 234. 
 
 Folk-literature, Conflict between the, 
 and the Classical ideal, 181. 
 
 Fong-shui of the Canon of Changes, 
 75. 
 
 Fonvizin pleads for national sim- 
 plicity in his comedies, 324-325 ; 
 satires of, 327. 
 
 Foreign ideas in a Literature no proof 
 of their importation, 69. 
 
 Form divisions of Literature, 365- 
 366. 
 
 Form not a characteristic of English 
 Literature, 257-258. 
 
 Formalism, in Literature, 139 ; in 
 warfare and religion, 140. 
 
 Forteguerri, Niccolo, The "Ricciar- 
 detto" of, 223. 
 
 "Four Books" (ssi-shu). The, the 
 text-books of Confucianism, 78-
 
 INDEX 
 
 385 
 
 80: The Lun-j/M, " Conversations " 
 or "Diacotirses," 78-79; "The 
 Great Learning" {Ta-hid), 79; 
 "The Doctrine of the Mean" 
 (Chun-yung), 79; "The Philo- 
 sopher Mong" {Mong-tzi), 79-80. 
 
 "Four Treasuries," The, 71 ; com- 
 mentaries and expositions in, 80- 
 81; the second of, "Historians," 
 81-83. 
 
 France, Literary leadership of, in 
 feudal period, 134-135 ; Romantic 
 movement in, 216-218; interest in 
 other Literatures in, 341. 
 
 Francis of Assissi on Death, 166. 
 
 Frederick the Great, Sojourn of Vol- 
 taire with, 190. 
 
 French, A Frenchman cannot write, 
 slovenly, 295. 
 
 French Academy founded, 184. 
 
 French authors, natives of Paris, 
 List of, 7-8. 
 
 French classic Literature fulfils the 
 Roman mood of the Renaissance, 
 172, 173. 
 
 French language, Structure of the, 
 275-276. 
 
 French Literature (Adolphe Cohn), 
 273-289 : Characteristics of, 273 ; 
 clearness, 274 ; musical element 
 lacking in its poetry, 275-276 ; 
 line dividing poetry and prose in, 
 less marked, 276 ; uninterrupted 
 flow of the drama in, 277-278 ; the 
 Romantic revolt, 279 ; the Ro- 
 mantic drama, 280-281 ; depen- 
 dent on excellence of expression, 
 283 ; Voltaire and Bossuet, 282- 
 283; the mission of, 283-284; 
 identity of historical and literary 
 periods, 284-886 ; politics and 
 Literature distinct, 285-286 ; polit- 
 ical and literary revolution, 286- 
 287 ; speeches and leaders, 288- 
 289 ; defined by Bruneti^re as 
 social, 291 ; influence of, upon 
 American, 341. 
 
 French Literature, The classic, ful- 
 fils the Roman mood, negates the 
 Greek, 172 ; problems of Class- 
 icism in, 182-183 ; Classical rule 
 in, 184-191 ; contrasted with 
 2c 
 
 English Classicism, 193 ; Roman- 
 ticism in, 206 ; tends toward 
 Classicism, 211 ; influence of, on 
 Italy, 224. 
 
 French people, A sense of style the 
 heritage of the, 93. 
 
 French poetry. The very essence of, 
 275-276. 
 
 French Revolution, the beginning of 
 the Romantic movement, 177, 205 ; 
 in Literature, 212. 
 
 Friendship with a great author. 
 Unfading joy in a lasting, 9-10. 
 
 Froissart, Society described in, 136 ; 
 on battle of Poitiers, 140. 
 
 Fronto admired Sallust, 127. 
 
 Frugoni, Innocenzo, Italian poet, 
 221. 
 
 "Frusta letteraria," The, of Baretti, 
 227. 
 
 Fu-hi, legendary emperor, 73. 
 
 Gaius Gracchus, a teacher of Cicero, 
 
 124. 
 Galahad, saintliest of medieval 
 
 knights, 141. 
 Galdos, Perez, Spanish writer of 
 
 fiction, 249-250. 
 Galen grounded on Babylonian med- 
 icine translated into Eastern 
 
 tongues, 24. 
 Galiani and Lorenzi, The "Socrate 
 
 imaginario" of, 223. 
 Galilei, Galileo, Work of, continued 
 
 by his disciples, 219. 
 Gardiner, Percy, on the Greek spirit, 
 
 93. 
 Gathas, the "hymns" of Zoroaster, 
 
 58-59. 
 Gautier, Theophile, on Spain, 236. 
 Gellius, Offer of, to be mediator to 
 
 the philosophers, 121 ; admired 
 
 Sallust, 127. 
 Genius, 20. 
 
 Geography, The science of, 39. 
 "Georgics," The, of Vergil, 129. 
 German, The, a loyalist and a radical, 
 
 297-298 ; his patriotism, 298 ; the 
 
 chief German hero of an earlier 
 
 day, 298. 
 German barbarians called themselves 
 
 Romans, 156.
 
 386 
 
 INDEX 
 
 German emperors considered up- 
 starts by the Italians, 158. 
 
 German Literature (Calvin Thomas) 
 291-310: Different at different 
 epochs, 291 ; M. Bruneti^re on, 
 291-292; is it philosophic? 292- 
 293 ; criticism of life in all vital 
 literature, 292-293 ; language and 
 ethnic character factors in, 293 ; 
 genius of German poetry like that 
 of English, 293-294; periodic 
 structure of German prose, 295 ; 
 ethnic character indefinable, 295- 
 297; Age of the "Nibelung Lay" 
 and the Age of Goethe, 298-299; 
 the poetry of the Middle Ages, 
 300; the "Nibelung Lay" and the 
 "Iliad," 301 ; Luther and Hans 
 Sachs, 302 ; scholar-poets of the 
 seventeenth century, 302 ; the 
 new epoch, 303-304 ; Goethe, 304- 
 308; Lessing, 308; Herder, 308- 
 309; SchiUer, 309-310. 
 
 German Literature, Modern, takes 
 its rise with Luther's translation of 
 the Bible, 40-41 ; Romanticism in, 
 206 ; classical period of, 214 ; 
 greatest epoch in, 217. 
 
 "Germania," of Tacitus, 136. 
 
 Germany, Classicism in, 200-201 ; 
 Romantic movement in, 216. 
 
 Gessner, Spirit of, in Bertola, 230. 
 
 Gettysburg address. The, 3. 
 
 Giannone, Pietro, "Storia civile del 
 reame di Napoli," 220. 
 
 "Gil Bias," to be traced in the 
 "Marriage of Figaro," 16. 
 
 Gilgamesh, Babylonian story of, 26- 
 27 ; Michael Angelo's two-horned 
 Moses, 27. 
 
 "Giornale del letterati" of Zeno, 
 220-221. 
 
 "Giorno," The, of Parini, 230. 
 
 "Giovanni Giscala," The, of Varano, 
 231. 
 
 Gladstone, The "Juventus Mundi" 
 of, 93. 
 
 Gods, A host of, became a "God of 
 hosts," 26. 
 
 Gods of the Vedic host, 44. 
 
 Goethe, in Semitic translation, 24. 
 
 Goethe, Classical influence in, 201 ; 
 
 on Romanticism, 207 ; return of 
 sentiment in his early lyrics, 212; 
 rhythm in, 295 ; the Age of, 298- 
 299 ; radiant genius of, 304 ; 
 taken in his entirety, 305 ; wisest 
 of poets, 306-307 ; his contempt of 
 critics, 355 ; on criticism, 363. 
 
 Gogol on his own work, 321-322, 
 325, 327. 
 
 Goldoni, Carlo, dramatist, 228-229. 
 
 Goldsmith not a true classicist, 199. 
 
 Gorgias, the orator. 111 ; a Sophist, 
 112. 
 
 Gothic night. The thick, of Rabelais, 
 155-156. 
 
 Goths, The, submitted to religious 
 enthusiasm of the Arabs, 23 ; in 
 Spain, 235. 
 
 Gottfried von Strassburg, 135. 
 
 GoTTHEiL, Richard John Horatio, 
 Semitic Literatures, 21-41. 
 
 Gottsched admired the French clas- 
 sicists, 201. 
 
 "Gotz von Berlichingen " to be 
 traced in "Ivanhoe," 16. 
 
 Gourmet and gourmand, 16. 
 
 Gozzi, Carlo, Fairy tales of, 228. 
 
 Gozzi, Gaspare, imitated the Specta- 
 tor, 200 ; revived the study of 
 Dante, 227; " Osservatore " of, 
 227. 
 
 Grseco-Roman culture. Diffusion of, 
 117. 
 
 "Grammarian," Browning's, 159. 
 
 Grammarians, The Italian, were 
 patriots, 160 ; called Humanists, 
 162. 
 
 Gravina, Giavincenzo, patron of 
 Literature, 223 ; critic, 225. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, appointed Professor 
 of Modern Literature and Lan- 
 guages, 18 ; discovered the charm 
 of early English, 198. 
 
 Gray's "O lacrimarum fons" a per- 
 fect Latin poem, 198. 
 
 "Great Learning" {Ta-hio), The, 79. 
 
 Greece, Ancient, The stage the pulpit 
 in, 26 ; took captive her rude 
 conqueror R6me, 116. 
 
 Greek and Roman compared, 9. 
 
 Greek civilization. The dawn age of, 
 93.
 
 INDEX 
 
 387 
 
 Greek dramatic characters idealized, 
 187. 
 
 Greek language, Widespread use and 
 persistence of the, 94 ; adequate 
 for expression of abstract thought, 
 123. 
 
 Greek life. Literature the outgrowth 
 of, 97, 103-110. 
 
 Greek Literature (Edward Delavan 
 Perry) 91-114: Covers a thou- 
 sand years, 92 ; posterior limit of, 
 93-94 ; value of existing remnant 
 of, 97 ; characteristics : extreme 
 variety of, 98-103 ; dialect and 
 form in, 99-101 ; intimate connec- 
 tion with Greek life, 103-110; 
 congenital, 103 ; Greek oratory, 
 110-112; appropriateness of style 
 to subject-matter, 110-114; Attic 
 prose, 112-114; post-classical, 
 abundant, 114; came into its own, 
 117; masterpieces of, classics, 
 178, 211 ; source of modern litera- 
 ture, 213. 
 
 Greek Mss., Earliest, 95. 
 
 Greek Middle and New Comedy 
 perished, 96. 
 
 Greek schools of Syria and Mesopo- 
 tamia, Influence of the, on Syriac 
 Literature, 37. 
 
 Greek society, Earliest stage of, 
 105. 
 
 Greek spirit and the Hebraic, 12 ; 
 conceptions about the, 91 ; shown 
 in dramas and temples, 93. 
 
 Greeks, ancient. The liberty, har- 
 mony, and proportion of the, re- 
 covered, 12-13 ; cared little for 
 fiction, 15 ; prevalent ideas of, 91 ; 
 creative power of, 94 ; not a homo- 
 geneous race, 97 ; not assimilated 
 by the Romans, 115; perfected 
 types of literary expression, 116; 
 influence of, on Roman life and 
 Literature, 116-117. 
 
 Griboyedoff, "Misfortune from In- 
 telligence," a cry against Gallo- 
 mania, 325 ; satires of, 327. 
 
 Grimm, Herman, on Goethe, 306. 
 
 Grimmelshausen, worth reading, 302. 
 
 Gudaca, King, Inscription on a stele 
 of, 23. 
 
 Guerara, on books read in his time, 
 
 241. 
 Guizot, Prime Minister, 288. 
 
 Hafiz, prince of Persian lyric poets, 
 65. 
 
 "Hamlet," a tale of Denmark, 6. 
 
 Han dynasty. Catalogue of the Im- 
 perial collection of the earlier, 70. 
 
 Haoma, The Persian, is the soma- 
 plant, 44. 
 
 Haroun al Raschid, 10 ; court poets 
 of, 33. 
 
 Harrington, Sir John, on a Human- 
 ist, 162. 
 
 Harsha, King, a dramatist of India, 
 54. 
 
 Hartmann von Aue, 135. 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, on Eloquence, 161 ; 
 advocate of classical forms, 183. 
 
 Hawthorne, Havelock Ellis on the 
 "glamor" in pages of, 7, 218. 
 
 Hazlitt on Lope de Vega, 247. 
 
 Hebraic spirit. Movement and conse- 
 quences of the, 12. 
 
 Hebrew, not a church language only, 
 30. 
 
 Hebrew belles-lettres under influence 
 of writers of Western Europe, 24. 
 
 Hebrew constructions. The sim- 
 plicity of, lost in translations, 35. 
 
 Hebrew Literature not ended with 
 the canonization of the Bible, 35 ; 
 the extent of, 36. 
 
 Hebrew poetry. Characteristics of, 
 29-30 ; takes on a modern dress, 30. 
 
 Hebrews, The, and the desert, 27-28. 
 
 Hegel, Taine borrowed from, 19 ; 
 the work of, 292. 
 
 Heine, Rhythm in, 295. 
 
 "Heliand," a Saxon epic, 150. 
 
 Hell, The thought of, a comfort to 
 outraged impotence, 163. 
 
 Hellenism, The movement of, 12, 13 ; 
 tide of, reached its flood in Cicero 
 and Vergil, 117. 
 
 Henry, the Luxemburger, 158. 
 
 "Henry Esmond," Thackeray's, 
 Horatian allusions in, 195. 
 
 Herder, the inspired pathfinder, 308 ; 
 father of the historical method, 
 309.
 
 388 
 
 INDEX 
 
 "Hermosura de Angelica," The, of 
 Lope de Vega, 247. 
 
 Herodotus, Charm of, 101. 
 
 Herodotus, The, of China, Ssl-ma 
 Ts'ien, 82. 
 
 Heroic couplet, Dryden's use of the, 
 196. 
 
 Herrick, Robert, Diction of, 192. 
 
 Hesiod, Didactic poetry of, 98 ; de- 
 scribes life of the people, 106 ; use 
 of hexameter, 108. 
 
 Hexameter, Greek use of, 103, 104 ; 
 development of the, 105-106, 108 ; 
 in Sidney's " Arcadia," 183. 
 
 Hiatus, Use of the, formulated by the 
 Pleiade, 183. 
 
 Hindu phUosophy, The beginnings of, 
 48-49. 
 
 Hindus, Animal tales developed 
 among the, 51. 
 
 Hindustan, Northern, The sunrise 
 splendors of, inspired the Rishis, 46. 
 
 Hippocrates grounded on Babylonian 
 medicine translated into Eastern 
 tongues, 24. 
 
 HiRTH, Friedrich, Chinese Litera- 
 ture, 67-90. 
 
 Hispanic Society of America, Vital- 
 izing activities of the, 233. 
 
 "Histoire de la Chine " of Father de 
 Mailla, 84. 
 
 Historians (sht), The, 71, 81-83. 
 
 Historical composition in Latin 
 Literature, 126-127. 
 
 Histories of holy men, 36. 
 
 History, Evolution of, 14 ; not repre- 
 sented in Indian Literature, 57. 
 
 Hitopades'a, The, or "Book of Good 
 Counsel," and its translations, 51- 
 52. 
 
 Homer, Ronsard on the "naive 
 facility" of, 18-19; Thoreau on, 
 19 ; translated into Syriac, 37 ; 
 one of the great classic masters, 
 257. 
 
 Homeric language. Genetic history 
 and subsequent career of the, 92. 
 
 Homeric poems, the oldest Greek 
 literary monuments, 91, 116; lan- 
 guage of, 92 ; heroic, 98 ; put into 
 final shape by lonians, 101 ; dis- 
 play condition of society, 105-106. 
 
 Horace peoples the ruins of Rome, 4 ; 
 "lesi^cle d'Auguste en personne," 
 118; champions Latin poetry, 120 ; 
 an accomplished man of the world, 
 131 ; his poetry, 130-131 ; Du 
 Bellay on, 181 ; "Ars Poetica" of, 
 imitated by Boileau, 189 ; echoes 
 of, in Dryden, 194 ; one of the 
 great classic masters, 257. 
 
 "Horace" of Corneille, Dramatic 
 struggle in the, 185. 
 
 Hortensius rival of Cicero, 125. 
 
 Howells, Wm. Dean, Realism of, 13 ; 
 adverse critics of, 19 ; criticism of, 
 202 ; on Don Quixote, 244-245. 
 
 "Hudibras," a burlesque, 193. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, Violent romanticism 
 of, 13 ; began as a playwright, 15 ; 
 the "Triboulet" of, 210; and the 
 New Republic of Letters, 217 ; 
 "Hernani," 279; dramatic pro- 
 duction of, at head of the Roman- 
 tic School, 280 ; the nineteenth the 
 century of, 284 ; works of, a run- 
 ning commentary on political 
 developments in France and Eu- 
 rope, 288. 
 
 Humanism, Conflict of divinity and, 
 162-163 ; of Shakspere, 173-174. 
 
 Humanists, defined, 162 ; doctrine of, 
 at variance with medieval Chris- 
 tianity, 163; spread of ideas of, 
 164-170 ; inveighed against alien 
 rule, 172. 
 
 "Husbandman's Calendar" of He- 
 siod, 108. 
 
 Hymn of praise, A sacred, the most 
 ancient form of Indo-European 
 Literature, 44. 
 
 "Hymnes in Honour of Love and 
 Beautie," Spenser's, 174. 
 
 Hymns, suktas. The noblest of the, 
 addressed to Varuna, 45. 
 
 Iambic trimeter. The, 104 ; suited 
 to forcible expression, 107-108. 
 
 Iberians, The, 234. 
 
 Ibn Ishak, biographer of Mohammed, 
 39. 
 
 Ibn Khalddn, the first philosopher 
 of history, 39. 
 
 Ibn Sina, Quatrain from, 64.
 
 INDEX 
 
 389 
 
 Iceland drew from French romances, 
 135. 
 
 Ideals and stories of the past a source 
 of inspiration, 213. 
 
 Ideals, Greek, Loose talk of, 91; in- 
 fluences of, on Roman culture, 116. 
 
 I-king, the "Canon of Changes," 73- 
 75. 
 
 "Iliad" and "Odyssey" the noblest 
 and only survivals of the whole 
 body of epic poetry, 95-96 ; the 
 "Iliad" a highly artificial produc- 
 tion, 118 ; peerless among the folk- 
 epics, 301. 
 
 "Imitation of Christ" renunciation 
 of world, 164. 
 
 Impressionism and dogmatism in 
 criticism, 359. 
 
 India a terra incognita to the Chinese, 
 69-70. 
 
 India and Persia, History of, covers 
 three millenniums, 43. 
 
 India and Persia, The Literature of 
 (A. V. W. Jackson) 43-66: In- 
 spiration for appreciation of, 43 ; 
 the most ancient form a sacred 
 hymn, 43-44 ; the Rig Veda, 44 ; 
 hymns to Varuna, 45-46 ; to 
 Ushas, 46-47 ; the Brahmanas and 
 Sutras, 47 ; earliest specimens of 
 prose, 48 ; the Upanishads, the 
 oldest philosophical treatises, 48- 
 49 ; epic poems : The Mahabha- 
 rata and the Ramayana, 29-51 ; 
 a dialectic Literature in Pali : the 
 Dhammapada, 51 ; the Jatakas, 
 51 ; the animal fables, 51 ; the 
 Pancatantra and the Hitopades'a, 
 51-52; the drama: Kalidasa and 
 others, 52-54 ; lyric poetry, 54- 
 66 ; prose fiction, 56-57 ; other 
 branches of Literature, 57 ; Persia, 
 58-66 : Zarathushtra, 58 ; the 
 Gathas of Zoroaster, 58 ; the 
 Avestan Yashts, 59 ; Pahlavi Liter- 
 ature, 59-60 ; epic poetry of 
 Firdausi, 60-61 ; rhymed romance 
 of Nizami, 61 ; mysticism and the 
 mystic poets, 61-62 ; lyric poetry, 
 62-66; prose and drama, 65-66. 
 
 Indian folk-lore in Chinese Litera- 
 ture, 69-70. 
 
 Indians, The, submitted to religious 
 enthusiasm of the Arabs, 23. 
 
 Indra, the storm-god, 44. 
 
 lonians. The, formed the Epic dia- 
 lect, 100 ; and the first artistic 
 prose, 101. 
 
 Iran, First poetry of, a prophet's 
 song, 58. 
 
 Iranians, The, submitted to the reli- 
 gious enthusiasm of the Arabs, 
 23. 
 
 Irish Literature, Efforts to establish 
 an, 339. 
 
 Irish people, A sense of style the heri- 
 tage of the, 93. 
 
 Ir-ya, a dictionary of terms used in 
 the Chinese Classics, 80-81. 
 
 Isaac of Antioch, a Syriac poet of 
 merit, 31. 
 
 Islam, Source of, 21 ; the gift of the 
 Jews, 23 ; born to man's estate, 
 27 ; all the great movements of, 
 nourished in the desert, 28 ; in- 
 fluence of the founder of, 38. 
 
 Isocrates, orator, father of the essay, 
 113 ; Cicero indebted to, 125. 
 
 Italian collectors. Devotion of early, 
 180. 
 
 Italian language restricted by the 
 "Accademia," 227-228. 
 
 Italian Literature in the Eighteenth 
 Century (Carlo L. Speranza) 
 219-231 : General intellectual ac- 
 tivity in, 219-222; sway of 
 Academy of Arcadia, 222-223; 
 innovation under influence of 
 other nations, 224-225 ; potency of 
 crticism in, 225-228 ; reform of 
 the drama by Goldoni, 228-229; 
 Parini, innovator in poetry, 229- 
 230; tragedies of Alfieri, 231; 
 called artistic by Bruneti^re, 291. 
 
 Italians blood heirs of Romans, 158 ; 
 followed "Do as you please" 
 maxim, 168-169. 
 
 Italy, Condition of, after Actium. 
 129 ; theme of Vergil's " Georgics," 
 129 ; Classicism in, 200 ; result 
 of Romantic movement in, 217 ; 
 end of Spanish donimation in, 
 222. 
 
 Italy in Literature, 339.
 
 390 
 
 INDEX 
 
 "I vain" of Chretien de Troyes, Quo- 
 tation from, 143-144. 
 
 "Ivanhoe," "Gotz von Berlichingen " 
 to be traced in, 16. 
 
 Jackson, Abraham Valentine Wil- 
 liams, The Literature of India 
 and Persia, 43-66. 
 
 Jacob Burdeana, 36. 
 
 Jacob of Serug, a Syriac poet of 
 merit, 31. 
 
 Jacobite ecclesiastics. Writings of 
 the, 36 ; at Greek schools, 37. 
 
 James, Henry, Criticism of, 202. 
 
 Japanese, The, study Chinese Litera- 
 ture, 67. 
 
 Jarir, satire of, 33. 
 
 Jatakas, The, contain a mass of folk- 
 lore, 51. 
 
 Jayadeva, The lyrics of, parallel 
 "Venus and Adonis," 55. 
 
 Jesus, Teaching of, 163. 
 
 Jewish philosophy of the Middle 
 Ages an echo from Hellas, 24. 
 
 Jews, Passion of, for poetic diction, 
 
 22 ; built up no great world-power, 
 
 23 ; had their prophets and teach- 
 ers, 26 ; post-Biblical poetry of 
 the, 30 ; not assimilated by the 
 Romans, 115. 
 
 Job, The tragedy of, 25. 
 
 JoFFE, JuDAH A., Russian Literature, 
 307-332. 
 
 John IV, [Ivan] the Terrible, Tsar of 
 Russia, 314. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, a product of Classi- 
 cism, 13 ; on Dryden as translator, 
 195 ; sums up English Classicism, 
 199 ; found Shakspere immoral, 262 ; 
 on standard of criticism, 363-364. 
 
 Jones, Henry Arthur, indebted to 
 Dickens and Thackeray, 16. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, Influence of, on Dickens, 
 16 ; on beauty in small things, 
 110 ; on language of Spenser, 162 ; 
 on Death, 166; on his own time, 
 170; on Shakspere, 173. 
 
 Judaism, Origin of, 21. 
 
 Judgment, Last, Terrors of the, real 
 to the medieval man, 147. 
 
 Julian, Emperor, Romance of the, 
 307. 
 
 "Julius Csesar" a tale of ancient 
 
 Rome, 6. 
 Justinian, The Code of, 4. 
 Juvenal, We walk the streets of Rome 
 
 with, 119; his pitiless indictment 
 
 of his time, 132 ; echoes of in 
 
 Dryden, 194. 
 
 Kalidasa, the Hindu Shakspere, 53 ; 
 as a lyric poet, 55 ; a Sanskrit 
 Marlowe, 55. 
 
 "Kalilah and Dinmah," 52. 
 
 Kant, The work of, 292. 
 
 Kantemir, Social satire in verse of, 
 324. 
 
 Karakoz or Shadow-play, The Turk- 
 ish, 25. 
 
 Kama, the Hector of the Maha- 
 bharata, 49. 
 
 Kasidah, the Arabic, Influence of, 
 on Hebrew poetry, 30 ; the form of 
 the, 33 ; developed by al-Muta- 
 nabbi, 33-34; followed by the 
 Muwashshah and the Zajal, 34. 
 
 Katha-Sarit Sagara, or, "Ocean of 
 the Streams of Story," 57. 
 
 Kavya style in Sanskrit fiction. Con- 
 ceits of the, 57. 
 
 Keats, Classical aspects of, 214 ; 
 poems of, 260 ; not a moralist, 
 261-262. 
 
 Kempis, Thomas k, on the misery of 
 life, 164. 
 
 Ker, W. P., on the term "medieval," 
 136. 
 
 "Khusrau and Shirin," The, of 
 Nizami, 61. 
 
 Khutbahs, The rhymed prose of the, 
 35. 
 
 Klopstock gave evidence of Clas- 
 sicism, 201. 
 
 "Knight's Tale" and its source, 137. 
 
 Koran, Traditional narratives from 
 Gilgamesh in the, 26-27 ; the 
 rhymed prose of the, 34 ; Arabic 
 prose first put to writing in the, 
 38 ; a masterpiece of Literature, 40. 
 
 Kshemis'vara, a dramatist of India, 
 54. 
 
 K'ii Yiian, The poetry of, 88-89. 
 
 Kuan-tzi, philosopher-politician, 85. 
 
 K'ung Fu-tzi (Confucius), 72-73.
 
 INDEX 
 
 391 
 
 La BruySre, "Characters" of, 285. 
 
 La Fontaine, Fables of, traced back 
 to the Pancatantra, 51-52 ; a 
 gallicized ^sop, 190 ; human 
 nature in, 285. 
 
 La Rochefoucauld's "Maximes," 190. 
 
 Lailah, female poet, 33. 
 
 Lamartine, on Napoleon, 277 ; in 
 the legislature, 288. 
 
 Landor in England, 214. 
 
 Langland, a dreamer, 253. 
 
 Lanzi, Luigi, "Storia pittorica d' 
 Italia" of, 221. 
 
 Latin language. Flexibility of the, 
 115; Caesar's "Commentaries" a 
 monument of the native capacity 
 of the, 123 ; homogeneous growth 
 of the, 132 ; influence of, on the 
 EngHsh Classicists, 193-195; the 
 haunting power of, 194. 
 
 Latin Literature (Nelson G. Mc- 
 Crea), 115-132: Two claims of, 
 115; idea of civil and religious 
 unity of mankind, 115-116; ex- 
 pressive of the national genius, 
 116; assimilation and transmis- 
 sion of Greek culture by, 116-117 ; 
 essentially Roman and not Greek, 
 118 ; the Roman spirit in Lucretius 
 and Catullus, 119-120; Horace 
 defends poetry on utilitarian 
 grounds, 120-121 ; Cicero justi- 
 fies philosophy on same, 121-123 ; 
 artistic form in, created by Cicero, 
 123—126 ; historical composition, 
 Sallust, Tacitus and Livy, 126- 
 128 ; Vergil, Rome's greatest 
 poet, 129-130; Horace, 130-131; 
 continuously developing national 
 life in, 131 ; Plautus, Terence, 
 Juvenal, 132 ; homogeneous growth 
 of the language, 132 ; master- 
 pieces of, classics, 175, 211 ; source 
 of modern literature, 213. 
 
 Latin Muses, Power of the, over the 
 English mind, 195. 
 
 Latin writers models of style, 117; 
 place of, fixed, 118; spirit and 
 work of, Roman, 118 ; several born 
 in Spain, 234. 
 
 Latinistic revival. Sentiment that 
 inspired the, 158. 
 
 Latinity, all pervasive, 117; of the 
 Church Fathers made possible by 
 Cicero, 124. 
 
 Latro, Fortius, Latin author, native 
 of Spain, 234. 
 
 Lawrence William Withekle, The 
 Middle Ages, 133-153. 
 
 Le Sage, began as a playwright, 15; 
 influenced by Moli^re, 16. 
 
 Leconte de Lisle, a Romanticist, 218. 
 
 Legge, James, and the "Chinese 
 Classics," 73; translator of the 
 Shi-king, 77. 
 
 "Legitimist illusion" deceived Mid- 
 dle Ages, 156-157. 
 
 Leo X on enjoying the Papacy, 169. 
 
 Lermontoff arraigns the society of 
 his time, 325 ; under Byron's in- 
 fluence, 330. 
 
 Lesbian dialect employed by Sappho, 
 100. 
 
 Lessing, on seeking truth, 18 ; first 
 and foremost of modern critics, 18 ; 
 employed only unity of action in 
 drama, 201 ; the superb critic, 308. 
 
 "Lettere inglesi" of Bettinelli, 226. 
 
 "Lettere virgiliane" of Bettinelli, 
 226. 
 
 Library, The Imperial, at Peking, 
 71-72. 
 
 Life influenced by Literature, 14. 
 
 Literary history, Form divisions in, 
 questioned, 366. 
 
 Literature, Approaches to (Brander 
 Matthews), 1-20: Art and Sci- 
 ence, 1 ; oldest and broadest of 
 the liberal arts, 1-2 ; most sig- 
 nificant, 2 ; friendly and intimate 
 3 ; result of individual effort 
 yet racial also, 4 ; reveals the 
 characteristics of a people, 5-6 
 evidence of this essence of nation- 
 ality, 6-9 ; the secret of genius, 7 
 major writers of Latin Literature 
 Spaniards, 7 ; French authors 
 natives of Paris, 7-8 ; value of 
 good taste in, 8 ; Boissier and 
 Pater, 8 ; a true talisman of appre- 
 ciation, 9; ways of entering the 
 portals of, 9 ; friendship with a 
 great author, 9-10 ; interest in a 
 single masterpiece of, 10-11 ; great
 
 392 
 
 INDEX 
 
 modifying movements in, 12-14 ; 
 literary species, 14—16 ; a reasoned 
 appreciation, 16 ; criticism, 17-19 ; 
 reversion to ancient types, 19-20 ; 
 one and indivisible, 20. 
 
 Literature, Latitude of the term, 22 ; 
 no ultimate source in, 124 ; aristo- 
 cratic structure of, overthrown, 
 217; for all, an expression of 
 something, 260-261 ; the spirit of, 
 among the English people, 270- 
 272; is a conversation, 274, 276; 
 dependent on its excellence, 281 ; 
 a record of the best for the best, 
 297 ; homogeneity of the raw 
 material of modern, 299 ; Greek 
 and Roman conceptions of, 360. 
 
 Literature, Elizabethan, Classic 
 French influence against extrava- 
 gances of, 192 ; by translation 
 possessed other literatures, 195. 
 
 Literature, French, after 1100, 134. 
 
 Literature, Grseco-Roman, Valua- 
 tion of human life in, 163 ; new 
 Italian compared with, 169-170. 
 
 Literature, Italian Renaissance, 169- 
 170. 
 
 Livy, continues the Ciceronian tra- 
 dition, 127 ; wrote a prose epic, 
 128. 
 
 Lomonosoff, "Russia's first univer- 
 sity," on the language, 316; the 
 odefa of, 324. 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., 218. 
 
 Lope de Vega, wrote against classic 
 rules, 171 ; dramatist, 246-247. 
 
 Lorenzi and Galiani's "Socrate imagi- 
 nario," 223. 
 
 Lorenzo the Magnificent on Enjoy 
 thyself now, 169. 
 
 Love-allegory, Vogue of, in Middle 
 Ages, 139. 
 
 Lowell, Admiration of, for Dante, 10 ; 
 on Thomas Gray as a professor, 18. 
 
 Lucan, criticized by Petronius, 19 ; 
 a Spaniard, 234. 
 
 Lucian, latest classical author, 91, 94. 
 
 Lucretius, Gassendi's revival of, 10 ; 
 the Roman spirit of sovereignty in, 
 119 ; practical results primary 
 aim with, 120, 123 ; echoes of, in 
 Dryden, 194 ; Mackail on, 320. 
 
 Lun-yu, the "Conversations" of 
 
 Confucius, 78. 
 Luther, "On the Liberty of a Chris- 
 tian Man," tract, 170 ; belongs to 
 
 history of religion, 302. 
 Lyric poetry in English Literature, 
 
 260. 
 Lyric poetry of Greece, 96, 98, 101- 
 
 102 ; was sung to melodies, 104. 
 Lyric poetry of Horace, 131. 
 Lyric poetry of India, 54-56. 
 Lyric poetry of Persia, 62-66. 
 Lyric poetry of the Semites, 28- 
 
 30. 
 Lyrics, Specimen, from the Sanskrit, 
 
 55-56. 
 
 McCrea, Nelson Glenn, Latin 
 
 Literature, 115-132. 
 Machiavelli, worked in courtly gar- 
 ments, 3 ; desired a united Italy, 
 
 172-173. 
 Mackail, J. W., on the Greeks and 
 
 Romans, 128 ; on Lucretius, 320. 
 Macpherson, James, Ossianic poems 
 
 of, translated into Italian, 228. 
 Maffei, Scipione, archseologist, 221. 
 Maffei's "Merope" modeled on 
 
 classic tragedy, 200, 231. 
 Mahabharata, the Iliad of India, 49- 
 
 50. 
 Mahdists of the desert, 28. 
 Makamahs, The rhymed prose of 
 
 the, 35. 
 Man, Belief in the rights of, 335-336, 
 
 351-352. 
 Mankind, Conception of the political 
 
 unity of, 115. 
 Man's conduct. Discussion of, in 
 
 French Literature, 285. 
 Manu, The Code of, 57. 
 Marett, R. R., on Greek Literature, 
 
 103. 
 Marie de France, romancer, 135, 136 ; 
 
 tells her name, 151. 
 "Marriage of Figaro," "Gil Bias" to 
 
 be traced in the, 16. 
 Martial, a Spaniard, 7, 234 ; we walk 
 
 the streets of Rome with, 119 ; Du 
 
 Bellay on, 181 ; echoes of, in Dry- 
 den, 194. 
 Mascarille and Scapin of Molifere, 12.
 
 INDEX 
 
 393 
 
 "Masnavi," The, of Jalal ad Din 
 Rumi, 61-62. 
 
 Matthews, Brander, Approaches 
 to Literature, 1-20. 
 
 "Maximes, Les," of La Rochefou- 
 cauld, 190. 
 
 RIazzuchelli, Giovan Maria, biogra- 
 pher, 221. 
 
 Medicine, Chinese Literature on, 
 extensive, 86. 
 
 Medieval period, The, defined, 133- 
 135 ; fades gradually into the 
 Renaissance, 136. 
 
 Medieval romance, 136-138. 
 
 Medina Sidonia, Duke de, burlesqued 
 in " Don Quixote," says Defoe, 
 243. 
 
 Mediterranean, The, a propagator of 
 Semitism, 23. 
 
 Mediterranean area. Commingling 
 of East and West in the, 40. 
 
 Memnon, Poems of Balbilla engraved 
 on statue of, 100. 
 
 Menander, The prosaic comedy of, 
 14. 
 
 Mencius, the philosopher Mong, 79- 
 80. 
 
 Mere, Chevalier de, on Vergil, 359. 
 
 Meredith, George, derived the novel 
 from comedy, 15 ; distracting his 
 genius, 264 ; variety in, 268. 
 
 "Merope" of Maffei, 200, 231. 
 
 "Merope" of Voltaire, 191. 
 
 Mesopotamia, Literature and lan- 
 guage of, 30-31 ; debt of the West 
 to, 40. 
 
 Metastasio, Pietro, poet and drama- 
 tist, 223. 
 
 Michael Angelo, The two-horned 
 Moses of, 27. 
 
 Michelet writes of politics, 288. 
 
 Micius, Mo Ti, the philosopher of 
 mutual love, 86. 
 
 Middle Ages, The (William With- 
 ERLE Lawrence), 133-153: Period 
 defined, 133-136 ; Literature of the 
 aristocracy, 136-142 ; realism in 
 Literature of the people, 142-147 ; 
 influence of Church in, 147-150 ; 
 variety and richness of Literature of, 
 150-151; fascination in, 152-153. 
 — Gothic night of the, 155 ; 
 
 believed that antiquity had never 
 died, 156-157 ; classical ideals in, 
 180; a Romantic period, 211; 
 source of modern Literature, 213. 
 
 Middle English romances imitated 
 the French, 135. 
 
 Middle High German masters influ- 
 enced by France, 135. 
 
 Midrashim, The, 36. 
 
 Milton, Joy in a lasting friendship 
 with, 10 ; on Shakspere, 19 ; debt 
 of, to other literatures, 124 ; last 
 English writer of the Renaissance, 
 177 ; placed with the Elizabethans, 
 192 ; prose of, 194 ; Addison on, 
 197; read verses before academies, 
 200; Satan in, 210; wide influ- 
 ence of, 214 ; moral purpose in, 
 261 ; theology of, 294. 
 
 Minnesingers, Flavor of Middle Ages 
 in lyrics of German, 5. 
 
 Mirkwood, an enchanted forest, 137- 
 138. 
 
 "Mirra" of Alfieri, 231. 
 
 "Mirror of History," The, by Ssi- 
 ma Kuang, 84. 
 
 Mithra, Description of, in the tenth 
 Yasht, 59. 
 
 Mock-heroic poem created by Forte- 
 guerri, 219. 
 
 Modern Literature, Chief sources of, 
 213-214. 
 
 Modernism, Doctrine of, 165. 
 
 Mohammed, nourished in the desert, 
 28 ; afraid of the power of the poets, 
 32 ; wide influence exerted by, 38. 
 
 Mohammedan philosophy of the 
 Middle Ages an echo from Hellas, 
 24. 
 
 Mohammedanism, Historians of, 38- 
 39. 
 
 Mohammedans, The, had their 
 preachers and moralists, 26. 
 
 "Moise Sauve" of Saint-Amand, a 
 would-be Vergilian epic, 190. 
 
 Molifere, has limned society under 
 Louis XIV, 5-6 ; to what admira- 
 tion of, will lead, 10 ; the Masca- 
 rille and Scapin of, 12 ; influence 
 of, on Le Sage, 16 ; in Semitic 
 translation, 24 ; attempt to adapt, 
 for the Egyptian stage, 25; "Lea
 
 394 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Precieuses Ridicules " of, 188; con- 
 trasted with Goldoni, 229 ; literary 
 
 production of, 279-280 ; greatest 
 
 dramatic genius of France, 279 ; 
 
 "Misanthrope" of, 285-286. 
 Mong-tzi, Mencius, 79. 
 Montaigne, on the classic ideal, 209 ; 
 
 a social egotist, 212; conversa- 
 tional, 276 ; echo of religious wars 
 
 in "Essays" of, 284. 
 Montalvan on Lope de Vega, 246. 
 Montesquieu, "Persian Letters" of, 
 
 286; "Spirit of Laws" of, 287. 
 Moon, Figures seen in the, 68-69. 
 Moore, Sir Thomas, on virtue and 
 
 pleasure, 165. 
 Moors, Invasion of Spain by the, 
 
 235-236 ; expulsion of, from Spain, 
 
 241. 
 Moral purpose an essential trait in 
 
 English Literature, 261. 
 "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci, 146. 
 Morris, William, Contempt of critics 
 
 of, 355. 
 "Morte d'Arthur," Caxton's preface 
 
 to, quoted, 141-142 ; pathos in, 
 
 144. 
 Mos maiorum, 121-122. 
 Moses, the man of God, on border 
 
 line of mythology, 27. 
 Moses, Michael Angelo's two-horned, 
 
 "He of the Two-Horns" of Gil- 
 
 gamesh, 27. 
 Moths, The, and the Flame, Persian 
 
 poem, 62. 
 Mozart, The Figaro of, sprang from 
 
 Greek comedy, 12. 
 Muratori, Antonio, historian, 220 ; 
 
 critic, 225. 
 Murray, Gilbert, on the Homeric 
 
 language, 92. 
 Muscovite princes, The, conquered 
 
 the Tartars, 314. 
 Musorgski on Art, 326-327. 
 Musset, Alfred de. Tragic and comic 
 
 fused in plays of, 218; on poetry, 
 
 274. 
 Muwashshah, the strophic poem, 34. 
 Mystic movement in religion, 140. 
 Mysticism in Persian Literature, 61- 
 
 62. 
 Mythology, of ancient Greece rooted 
 
 in religion of Babylon, 24, 40 ; of 
 ancient Semites gradually sub- 
 limated, 25 ; traces of, in the 
 Bible, 25-26 ; a source of inspira- 
 tion for modern Literature, 213. 
 
 Naevius, a soldier before he was a 
 poet, 118. 
 
 Napoleon I, Lamartine and Hugo on, 
 277. 
 
 Napoleon III, Hugo's arraignment 
 of, 288. 
 
 Nature, Life according to, natural 
 and right, 165 ; Renaissance ideas 
 of, 167, 174; return to, a chief 
 characteristic of Romanticism, 
 212-213. 
 
 Nebo, The God, brought writing to 
 the Babylonians, 21. 
 
 Negation, Moods of, dominant in 
 Christian doctrine, 163. 
 
 Nestor, a real orator, 106. 
 
 Nestorian ecclesiastics. The, 36 ; at 
 Greek schools, 37. 
 
 Newspaper press, Rise of the, 343. 
 
 " Newtonianismo per le dame" of 
 Algarotti, 226. 
 
 "Nibelungenlied," contrasted with 
 the " Poetic Edda," 137 ; the Age 
 of the, 298; and the "Iliad," 301. 
 
 Nietzsche, a great prose poet, 295 ; 
 analysis of Sainte-Beuve, 361. 
 
 Night and Day, Legend of the origin 
 of, 48. 
 
 "Night Thoughts" of Young, trans- 
 lated into Italian, 230. 
 
 Nizami, The rhymed romance of, 
 61. 
 
 Norman Conquest marks beginning 
 of medieval period, 134-135. 
 
 Norwegian Literature, The evolu- 
 tion of, 339. 
 
 Novalis on Romanticism, 204. 
 
 Novel, the, Unprecedented success 
 of, 15 ; a stimulant to the drama, 
 16. 
 
 Oberammergau dialect. The, 99. 
 Ode, English, Form of the, 196. 
 Odysseus a real orator, 106. 
 "Odyssey, The," 10; The "Iliad" 
 and, the noblest, and only sur-
 
 INDEX 
 
 395 
 
 vivals, of the great body of epic 
 poetry, 95-96. 
 
 " Old Comedy" of Athens, 109. 
 
 Olympia, Games at, 109. 
 
 Omar ibn Abi Rabi'a, singer of love, 33. 
 
 "On the State," The, of Cicero con- 
 trasted with "The Republic" of 
 Plato, 122. 
 
 Open-mindedness may be acquired, 
 16-17. 
 
 Opera, Comic, in Italy, 223. 
 
 Opitz pleaded for the German lan- 
 guage in Literature, 200-201. 
 
 Oratory, Development of, 14 ; Greek, 
 110-112, 125; Latin, 124-126. 
 
 "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto, A con- 
 tinuation of the, by Lope de Vega, 
 247. 
 
 Ormazd, Zarathushtra's chant to, 58. 
 
 "Osservatore," The, of Gozzi, the 
 Spectator of Italy, 227. 
 
 Ossian a Romantic ancestor, 216. 
 
 Ossianic poems. The, translated 
 into Italian, 226. 
 
 "Othello," Criticism of, by Rymer, 
 196-197. 
 
 Ovid, Brilliancy of verse of, 132 ; 
 read by monks, 148; "Art of 
 Love," 157; Du Bellay on, 181. 
 
 Page, Curtis Hidden, The Roman- 
 tic Emancipation, 203-218. 
 
 Pahlavi Literature yields little, 59- 
 60. 
 
 Pali, A dialectic Literature in, 51. 
 
 Panaetius winning converts to Stoi- 
 cism, 121. 
 
 Panchatantra, The, translated by 
 Syriac-speaking monks, 37 ; and 
 its translations, 51-52. 
 
 Pan-Latinism, a dream of Latin re- 
 conquest, 158-159 ; Valla's empire 
 of the spirit well-nigh realized, 
 160-161. 
 
 Pannonian, The, proud to call him- 
 self a Roman, 115. 
 
 "Paradise Lost" of Milton, Addi- 
 son on the, 197. 
 
 Parallelismus membrorum of Egyptian 
 and Hebrew verse, 28. 
 
 Parini, Giuseppe, a humanitarian 
 poet, 200, 229-230. 
 
 Paris, French authors born in, 7-8. 
 Pascal, on the ego, 212 ; conversa- 
 tional in "Letters" and "Pensees," 
 
 276. 
 Pater, Walter, The "Plato and Pla- 
 
 tonism" of, 8; on the Romantic 
 
 Age, 137, 204, 207. 
 Pathos in Medieval Literature, 145. 
 Patmore, Coventry, on "Pepita 
 
 Jimenez," 249. 
 Pearl, Origin of the, poem by Saadi, 
 
 65. 
 Pentameter, 104, 105. 
 "Pepita Jimenez," The, of Valera, 
 
 249. 
 Percy, Bishop, ridiculed by Dr. 
 
 Johnson, 199. 
 "Percy and Douglas," Sidney and 
 
 Addison on, 181. 
 Pericles, Speeches of, 112. 
 Perrault, Charles, "Parall^le des 
 
 Anciens et Modernes," 190. 
 Perry, Edward Delavan, Greek 
 
 Literature, 91-114. 
 Persia, The Literature of, 57-66 ; 
 
 see also India and Persia. 
 Persian epic poetry, 60-61. 
 Persian Literature, Modern, 60-66. 
 Persian mystic poets, The, 61-62. 
 Persian mysticism. Influence of, at 
 
 Bagdad, 33. 
 Persian prose and drama, 65-66. 
 "Persians," The, by Timotheus, 95. 
 Peter the Great, 314. 
 Petrarch, captivated by Cicero's 
 
 power over language, 124 ; on 
 
 barbarian rule, 156 ; urged Latin 
 
 reconquest, 158-159. 
 Petronius, The realistic fiction of, 4 ; 
 
 possibly a Parisian, 7; a critic of 
 
 Lucan, 19. 
 Pharmacopoeia, The great Chinese, 
 
 85. 
 Phillips, Stephen, on Gladstone, 195. 
 "Philosopher Mong" (Mong-tzi), 
 
 The, 79-80. 
 Philosophers (tzi), The, 71 ; Treas- 
 ury of, 84-87. 
 Philosophy, treated poetically, 48-49 ; 
 
 Cicero on, 121-122 ; in the Middle 
 
 Ages, 149 ; in Italy in eighteenth 
 
 century, 220.
 
 396 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Philoxenus of Mabry, 36. 
 
 Phcsnicians and Aramaeans, Success 
 of alphabet invented by, 21 ; the 
 PhcEnieians in Spain, 234. 
 
 Pico della Mirandola on man's free 
 will, 168. 
 
 "Piers Plowman," The author of, 
 typically English, 253. 
 
 Pindar, Many Mss. of, 96 ; employed 
 Doric dialect, 100 ; compared with 
 Corinna, 101 ; a Boeotian, 102 ; 
 employed to write odes, 109. 
 
 Pinero indebted to Dickens and 
 Thackeray, 16. 
 
 Pippa's song quoted, 167. 
 
 Pisareff, Russian critic, on poetry, 
 328. 
 
 Pius II on Eloquence, 160. 
 
 "Les Plaideurs" of Racine bor- 
 rowed from Aristophanes, 187. 
 
 Plato, imbibed wisdom at feet of the 
 Rabbis, 24 ; translated into Syriac, 
 37 ; prose of, the prose of a poet- 
 philosopher, 49 ; some Dialogues 
 of, spurious, 96 ; Mss. few in time 
 of, 104; ability of, 113-114; "Re- 
 public" of contrasted with the 
 "On the State" of Cicero, 122-123. 
 
 Plautus, has preserved the aroma of 
 the tenements of Rome, 5 ; fun 
 and wit of, 132 ; a model for the 
 drama, 181. 
 
 "Pleasure, or the Highest Good," 
 Lorenzo Valla on, 165. 
 
 Pleiade, The, sought improvement 
 by classical imitation, 183 ; laws 
 of versification of, followed by 
 Racine, 786. 
 
 Pliny the elder, re-peoples Rome, 4. 
 
 Pliny the younger. Optimism of, 132. 
 
 Plotinus of Alexandria on man, 164. 
 
 Plutarch, Importance of, in Greek 
 Literature, 114. 
 
 Poe and the supernatural, 215, 218. 
 
 Poet, Horace on the, 120-121. "~'' 
 
 Poetic diction. Passion for, among 
 the Semites, 22 ; among the Arabs, 
 31-32. 
 
 "Poetic Edda," The, contrasted 
 with the "Nibelungenlied," 137. 
 
 Poetics, Academy to compose a sys- 
 tem of, 184. 
 
 Poetry, The decline of, 344-345 ; the 
 glory of, unextinguishable, 346-347. 
 
 Poetry, ballad. Rhythm in, 145. 
 
 Poetry, Early Germanic, 133 ; love- 
 interest in, 138 ; degenerated, 150. 
 
 Poetry, Greek, Forms of, 98 ; written 
 for an audience, 103-104. 
 
 Poetry of the Arabs, 32-33. 
 
 Poetry, Pastoral, in Italy, 2. 
 
 Poitiers, Battle of, 140. 
 
 Polybius, discerned the possible civil 
 unity of mankind, 115; on the 
 government of Rome, 123 ; on the 
 Roman mind, 130. 
 
 "Polyeucte," the, of Corneille, Dra- 
 matic struggle in, 185. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, a product of Classi- 
 cism, 13; "Essay on Man," 48; 
 satirist, 190 ; Latin epithets in, 
 194 ; as translator, 195 ; suggests 
 the Latin Satirists, 198-199; Pa- 
 rini borrowed from, 200 ; deism, 
 264 ; right of, to be called a poet 
 questioned, 343. 
 
 Posidonius on the Roman mind, 130. 
 
 Prayers, psalms, and litanies. The 
 poetic, of Babylonia, 28-29. 
 
 Preferences, Personal, born in ua, 17. 
 
 Preraphaelitism, Romanticism gone 
 to seed, 218. 
 
 Progress, a duty imposed on man- 
 kind, 287. 
 
 "Prometheus Unbound," The im- 
 pressionistic critic on, 356-358. 
 
 Prose, Greek, Forms of, 98 ; written 
 for an audience, 104 ; ascendency 
 of, over poetry, 112. 
 
 Prose, Latin, modelled by Cicero and 
 Sallust, 125, 127. 
 
 Prose, rhymed. Cultivation of, 34- 
 35 ; the charm of Semitic prose, 35. 
 
 Prose, Triumph of, over verse, 343, 
 344-346. 
 
 Prose fiction. Origin and develop- 
 ment of, 15-16. 
 
 Prose fiction, Sanskrit, 56-57. 
 
 Protagoras, a Sophist, 112. 
 
 Protestant reformers on Renaissance 
 society, 169. 
 
 Protestantism, Reaction against, 170. 
 
 Provence, Poetry of, 135. 
 
 Ptolemaeus grounded on Babylonian
 
 INDEX 
 
 397 
 
 astronomy translated into Eastern 
 
 tongues, 24. 
 Puici, "Morgante Maggiore" of, 146. 
 Pushkin claimed the usefulness of 
 
 his poetry, 323-324; "The Echo" 
 
 translated, 324 ; under Byron's 
 
 influence, 330. 
 
 Quadrio, Saverio, literary historian, 
 221. 
 
 Queen Anne, Classical Literature 
 under, 179. 
 
 "Quest of the Holy Grail" symbol- 
 ized Christian ideals, 141. 
 
 Quinet writes of politics, 288. 
 
 Quintilian, ardent admirer of Cicero, 
 124 ; on Sallust, 127 ; a Spaniard, 
 234. 
 
 Quirites of the new Rome, The gram- 
 marians the, 160. 
 
 "Rabbi Ben Ezra" of Browning, 
 Quotation from, 209. 
 
 Rabelais, Francois, Humor in, 146 ; 
 on Gothic night, 155, 156, 163 ; on 
 Nature, 165-166 ; message of, 167 ; 
 "Abbey of Theleme," 168; pre- 
 supposed the restraint of honor, 
 170 ; pictured the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, 184. 
 
 Racine, The Greek tragedies of, 
 stamped of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, 6 ; influence of, on Mme. de 
 La Fayette, 16 ; in Semitic transla- 
 tion, 24 ; most nearly realized the 
 Roman ideal of Italian Humanists, 
 172, 173 ; gave French tragedy its 
 classical form, 185-188 ; Dryden 
 indebted to, 193 ; model for Italian 
 drama, 200 ; admired by Gott- 
 sched, 201 ; " Andromaque," 6, 
 210; "Athalie," 278; on omnipo- 
 tence of the monarch and freedom 
 of the people, 285. 
 
 Radischeff, 327. 
 
 Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, 50. 
 
 Ramayana, The, epic poem, 50-51. 
 
 "Ram's home rules of direction," 
 Harvey's, 183. 
 
 "Rape of the Lock," Pope's, a char- 
 acteristic classical burlesque, 198- 
 199. 
 
 Readers, Goethe's three classes of, 
 16. 
 
 Realism, in popular Medieval Litera- 
 ture, 142-143. 
 
 "Recessional, The," 3. 
 
 Reform movement in China, Litera- 
 ture of the, 85. 
 
 Regnier, a Parisian, 7 ; on rules of 
 Pleiade, 183. 
 
 Reid, James S., on Roman constitu- 
 tional history, 131. 
 
 Religion, Medieval, 140 ; char- 
 acterized, 148-150 ; See also 
 Church. 
 
 Religious systems, The great, 21. 
 
 Renaissance, Early triumphs of the, 
 12-13 ; dried up in Classicism, 13 ; 
 scholars of, certain of their knowl- 
 edge, 17; the rebirth of Latin 
 stock, 135 ; medievalism fades 
 gradually into the, 136; end of the, 
 177 ; meaning of classic in, 178 ; 
 classical ideals in, 180^, 182, 211; 
 the Romantic movement another, 
 204-205; revelation of the fif- 
 teenth century to the, 221. 
 
 Renaissance, The (Jefferson B. 
 Fletcher), 155-175: Dawn of 
 the, 155-156 ; a medieval legiti- 
 mist illusion, 156-159 ; aspira- 
 tion to revive the Roman state, 
 157-159; "revival of learning" 
 not for mere sake of learning, 159- 
 161 ; refining of the vernacular, 
 161-162 ; spread of Humanism, 
 162-170 ; effect of, on Literature, 
 170-175; Roman and Greek 
 moods of the, 172-173. 
 
 Renan, on real Literature, 5 ; Have- 
 lock Ellis on the style of, 7 ; ran 
 twice for election as representa- 
 tive, 288. 
 
 " Rerum italicarum scriptores " of 
 Muratori, 220. 
 
 Revival, A deep spiritual, against 
 rationalism, 314-315. 
 
 "Reynard the Fox" an example of 
 medieval wit, 146-147. 
 
 Rhetoric, The Academy to compose 
 an authoritative, 184. 
 
 Rhyme, Use of, formulated by the 
 Pleiade, 183.
 
 398 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Rhythm, in ballad poetry, 145 ; in 
 the German prose masters, 295. 
 
 Richardson, a Romantic ancestor, 
 216. 
 
 Rienzi, Plea of Petrarch for, 159. 
 
 Rig Veda, The hymns of the, finished 
 poems, 44 ; wholesome tone of, 47. 
 
 Rishis, or Vedic bards, inspired by 
 the sunrise splendors, 46. 
 
 Rivarol on clearness in French Litera- 
 ture, 274. 
 
 Robert of Sicily upheld by Floren- 
 tines, 158. 
 
 Roland, celebrated in Italy, 135 ; 
 discusses Christian dogma, 148. 
 
 Roland, Song of, 138 ; in Spain, 238- 
 239. 
 
 Rolli, Paolo, Italian poet, 222. 
 
 Roman Empire, disrupted by Ger- 
 man barbarians, 56 ; Middle Ages 
 believed in unbroken continuance 
 of the, 157 ; Renaissance in Italy 
 sought restoration of, 159, 172 ; 
 wherever the language prevails ; 
 160, 172. 
 
 Roman constitutional history, Un- 
 broken evolution of, 131. 
 
 Roman Literature, see Latin Litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Roman oratory. Survey of, by Cicero 
 in the "Brutus," 124. 
 
 Romance, A new creation of the, in 
 England, 218. 
 
 "Romance of King Ardashir," 59- 
 60. 
 
 Romance of Saif dhu al-Yazan, 39. 
 
 "Romance of the Rose," Quotation 
 from the, 139. 
 
 Romancero, Period of the Spanish, 
 239-240 ; the chivalrous, 241 ; 
 Cervantes tried to undo the vogue 
 of the, 243. 
 
 Romans, and Greeks compared, 9; 
 conquest of Spain by, 234. 
 
 Romans, Medieval, a mongrel popu- 
 lace, 159, 172. 
 
 Romantic age. Literature in the, 136- 
 140. 
 
 Romantic Emancipation, The (Cur- 
 tis Hidden Page), 203-218: 
 Many definitions of Romanticism, 
 203-205 ; Romanticism as dis- 
 
 tinguished from Classicism, 205- 
 211; examples of contrast, 209- 
 210; revolt against the pseudo- 
 Classic, 211-213; the sources of 
 Modern Literature, 213-217; in- 
 terest in all the past, 214; the 
 "renascence of wonder," 214-215; 
 exotism, 216-219; results of, 217- 
 218; reaction against, 218. 
 
 Romantic movement, the, Beginning 
 of, 177 ; in England, 179 ; and 
 the classical ideal, 182 ; medieval- 
 ism a characteristic of, 213-216. 
 
 Romanticism, its rise and tendency, 
 13-14; defined, 136, 203-205; 
 influence of Classicism on, 191 ; 
 evolution from Classicism, 202 ; 
 the "Renascence of Wonder," 
 204 ; contrasted with Classicism, 
 205-211; in Fichte, 209. 
 
 Romanticists, Negative work of the, 
 13 ; delight in enthusiasm, 208 ; 
 grasp at the infinite, 209 ; ban- 
 ished rules from criticism, 365. 
 
 Romanticists or realists. We are, by 
 instinct, 17. 
 
 Rome, Civilized world under sway 
 of, 115; a spiritual idea, 116; 
 assimilated and transmitted Greek 
 culture, 116. 
 
 " Romeo and Juliet" a tale of Italy, 6. 
 
 Ronsard, on Homer, 18 ; on Death, 
 166 ; strove after classic models, 
 171 ; founder of Romanticists, 
 216; elegant art of, 284. 
 
 Rossini, The Figaro of, sprang from 
 Greek comedy, 12. 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, in "Con- 
 fessions," 140, 212; on Roman- 
 ticism, 204 ; poetry of, 208. 
 
 Rudagi, Lyrics from, 62-64. 
 
 Rumi, Jalal ad Din, Persian mystic 
 poet, 61-62. 
 
 Ruskin disdaining discipline, 264. 
 
 Russ, The, called to rule Novgorod, 
 313. 
 
 Russia, the barbarian country in 
 Europe, 318. 
 
 Russian, Characteristics of the, 318- 
 321 ; his altruism, 322-323. 
 
 Russian language. Riches of the, 316— 
 317.
 
 INDEX 
 
 399 
 
 Russian Literature ( Jttdah A. Joffe) , 
 311-332 : Sudden vogue for, in 
 France, 311-312; a new world 
 and a new attitude of the Russian 
 writers, 312 ; geographical Russia, 
 312; the Slavs ethnologically, 313 ; 
 Russian history, 313-316; Cath- 
 erine II, as author, 315; the 
 "Darkest Age" of, 315; Lomono- 
 soff on the Russian language, 316 ; 
 Turgenieff on, 316-317; three 
 varieties of the language, 317; 
 Russian authors realists, 320 ; all- 
 pervading humanity of, 321 ; Gogol 
 and Tolstoy, 321-322; truth the 
 keynote of, 323-327; the folk- 
 novel movement of "going to the 
 people," 326-327; truth per- 
 meated all branches of Russian 
 art, 326-327; faithful to its 
 mission, 327 ; the exclusive arena 
 of political struggle, 327 ; oppo- 
 sition to poetry, 328 ; the school 
 advocating "Art for Art's sake," 
 328-329 ; has mirrored all literary 
 movements of Western Europe, 
 329-330; the history of, the his- 
 tory of Russian thought, 330 ; in- 
 debtedness of many foreign writers 
 to Russian literary masters, 330- 
 331 ; Havelock Ellis on Russia's 
 future, 331-332. 
 
 Ruteboeuf a Parisian, 7. 
 
 Ruy Diaz de Bivar, see The Cid. 
 
 Ryeshetnikoff wrote of the bargemen 
 to "help these poor toilers," 326. 
 
 Rj'mer, Thomas, on "Othello," 196- 
 197. 
 
 Saadi, Lyric of, on the origin of the 
 
 pearl, 65. 
 Sachs, Hans, a winsome poet in his 
 
 way, 302. 
 "Saggio sulla filosofia della lingue" 
 
 of Cesarotti, 227. 
 Saint-Amand's "Moise Sauv6," 190. 
 Saint Augustine's "City of God," 
 
 Struggle-for-life theory found in, 
 
 19. 
 Saint Bernard, on dogma, 150. 
 Saint Ephrahn, a Syriac poet of 
 
 merit, 31. 
 
 Saint James of Compostella, Pil- 
 grims of, 240. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, as critic, 18 ; gives us 
 "biographic psychology," 19; on 
 Odysseus and ^neas, 130 ; on 
 the liveliest joy of an individual, 
 180 ; definition of a classic, 182, 
 206 ; a senator leader writer, 288 ; 
 great master of literary criticism, 
 289; Nietzsche on, 361. 
 
 "S'akuntala, The," of Kalidasa, 53. 
 
 Sallust, The style of. 126-127; 
 Tacitus learned of, 127. 
 
 Samson, the man of strength, on 
 border line of mythology, 27. 
 
 Sand, George, in politics as well as 
 in Literature, 287. 
 
 Sanskrit drama. The, 52-54 ; the 
 lyric in perfection in, 55. 
 
 Santayana on Plato, 113. 
 
 Sappho, employed Lesbian dialect, 
 100 ; varied melodies of, 108. 
 
 Satire, French, in the classical period, 
 188. 
 
 Savonarola protested against Hu- 
 manism, 170. 
 
 Scandinavia, Rise of verse in, 150. 
 
 Scarron, a Parisian, 7 ; satires of, 
 188 ; buriesque of Vergil, 190. 
 
 Schiller, Rhythm in, 295; the be- 
 loved ideahst, 308, 309-310. 
 
 Scholastic philosophy owed the me- 
 dium for its expression to Cicero, 
 124. 
 
 Scholasticism, Protest against, 140; 
 object of, 149-150. 
 
 Schopenhauer found solace in the 
 Upanishads, 49. 
 
 Science, Progress of, in Italy in 
 eighteenth century, 215. 
 
 Scipio Africanus, a leader, 116. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, noblest British 
 writer of his age, 343. 
 
 Scudery, Georges de, "Alaric" of, 
 190. 
 
 Scudery, Mile, de. Novels of, 208. 
 
 "Seasons, The," of Kalidasa, 55. 
 
 Seicento, Reaction against extrava- 
 gances of the, 218-219. 
 
 Semites, We owe two gifts to the, 21 ; 
 vogue of the alphabet of the, 21- 
 22 ; varied, historic, and psychic
 
 400 
 
 INDEX 
 
 development of the, 22-23 ; forces 
 exerted by and upon the, 23-25 ; 
 mythology of the, 25-26 ; heroic 
 epic of the, 26-27 ; sprung from 
 the desert, 27-28 ; the epic of 
 Antara, 28 ; chief glory of the, 40. 
 
 Semitic Literatures (R. J. H. Got- 
 theil), 21-41 : Divine origin of 
 writing, 21 ; characterization of, 
 difficult, 22 ; forces that have in- 
 fluenced, 23-25 ; have developed 
 no drama, 25-26 ; nor epic poetry, 
 26-28 ; lyric poetry at its fullest 
 expression in, 28-29 ; Hebrew 
 poetry, 29-31 ; Arabic poetry, 31- 
 34 ; rhymed prose, 34-35 ; Hebrew 
 Literature, 35-36 ; Syriac a 
 
 Church language, 36-37 ; Arabic 
 prose, 38-39 ; polite literature, 
 39 ; the Koran and the Bible, 40- 
 41. 
 
 Semitic prose-writing. The charm of, 
 35. 
 
 Seneca, a Spaniard, 7, 230; model 
 for drama, 181. 
 
 Senoussis of the desert, 28. 
 
 Serfdom established in Russia, 314. 
 
 Serial story. The earliest, 15. 
 
 Settecento, The, 215. 
 
 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 37. 
 
 Sex or gender assigned to every 
 object of nature, 73-74. 
 
 Shadow-play, The Turkish Kara- 
 koz or, in Syria and Egypt, 25. 
 
 "Shah Namah," The, of Firdausi, 
 60-61. 
 
 Shakspere, an Elizabethan English- 
 man, 6 ; Havelock Ellis on S. and 
 Bacon, 7 ; Milton on, 19 ; in 
 Semitic translation, 24 ; paralleled 
 in India, 54 ; on Death, 166-167 ; 
 reincarnates the Greek spirit, 173 ; 
 a complete Humanist, 174 ; Rymer 
 on, 196-197 ; discountenanced by 
 Gottsched, 201 ; grandfather to 
 French dramatists, 216; founder 
 of English theater, 247 ; power and 
 glory of style of, 260 ; a dramatic 
 giant, 279 ; naturalized on French 
 stage, 281. 
 
 Shchedrin on poetry, 328. 
 
 Shelley, Classical aspects of, 214 ; 
 
 poems of, 260 ; Godwinism of, 
 264. 
 
 Shi, "Historians," 71, 81-83. 
 
 Shi-huang-ti, the "burner of the 
 books," 80. 
 
 Shi-ki, The, translated by Ed. 
 Chavannes, 82. 
 
 Shi-king, the "Canon of Odes," 76- 
 77. 
 
 Shu-king, the "Canon of History," 
 75-76 ; only source of the most 
 ancient history, 75, 81. 
 
 Shui-king, or " Water Classic," 84. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, condemned the 
 English drama, 181 ; larger minded 
 than the strict classicist, 182 ; 
 artificial hexameters of his "Arca- 
 dia," 183; liked " Chevy Chase," 
 197. 
 
 Sidney's "Defense of Poesy" imi- 
 tated from the Italians, 19. 
 
 Simonides, Longest fragment of, 96 ; 
 wrote in Doric dialect, 100 ; an 
 Ionian, 102 ; employed to write 
 odes, 109. 
 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, earliest of 
 serial stories, 15. 
 
 Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana, 50. 
 
 Sky-scraper, The, a reversion to an 
 ancient type, 19. 
 
 Slavs, The ancient, were longheads, 
 313. 
 
 Socrates, on love, 163. 
 
 "Sohrab and Rustum," The, of 
 Matthew Arnold, 60-61. 
 
 Solomon, King of wisdom, on border 
 line of mythology, 27. 
 
 Soma-plant, Laudation of the, 144. 
 
 "Song of Solomon," 25. 
 
 Sophists, Style of the, 112. 
 
 Sophocles, Joy in a lasting friendship 
 with, 10 ; surviving tragedies of, 
 95 ; transformed the drama, 109 ; 
 one of the great classic masters, 257. 
 
 Sophron, "Mimes" of, 98, 113. 
 
 South African Poetry and Verse, A 
 Treasury of, 339. 
 
 Sovereign, Absolute sway of the, and 
 freedom of the people, 285. 
 
 Spain, Literature of, deserves con- 
 sideration, 233 ; the ' ' Poem of the 
 Cid," 236-239; epico-lyric period
 
 INDEX 
 
 401 
 
 of the romancers, 239-240 ; the 
 chivalrous romance in prose, 241 ; 
 Cervantes, 243-244 ; Lope de 
 Vega and the drama, 246-247 ; 
 Calderon, 247-248 ; modern fiction, 
 248-250 ; pronounced chevalresque 
 by Brunetifere, 292. 
 
 Spain, Modern Hebrew poetry in, 
 30 ; the poets of Mohammedan, 
 34 ; a storehouse of races and 
 traditions, 233-234 ; Latin speech 
 and civilization in, 234-235 ; 
 Moorish supremacy in, 235-236 ; 
 the surviving savage country in 
 Europe, 318. 
 
 Spaniard, The, proud to call himself 
 a Roman, 115—116. 
 
 Spanish domination in Italy, End 
 of, 222. 
 
 Spanish Literature (Henry Alfred 
 Todd), 233-250: Historic back- 
 ground, 233-236; endless incursions, 
 235 ; " Poem of the Cid," 234-238 ; 
 " Chanson de Roland " and ballad 
 poetry, 238-240 ; the Celtic cycle, 
 240 ; chivalrous prose romances, 
 241 ; Cervantes and Don Quixote, 
 241-246; drama of Lope de Vega 
 and Calderon, 246-248 ; modern 
 writers, 249-250. 
 
 Spanish period in Latin Literature, 
 234. 
 
 " Spectator," The, classical quota- 
 tions from, 194 ; manner of society 
 portrayed in, 198 ; imitated in 
 Italy, 200. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, Ben Jonson on 
 language of, 162 ; opinion of 
 different ages upon, 171 ; illus- 
 trates tendency toward new ascet- 
 icism, 174-175; ethics of, 264. 
 
 Speranza, Carlo L., Italian Litera- 
 ture in the Eighteenth Century, 
 219-231. 
 
 Spingarn, Joel Elias, Literary 
 Criticism, 355-373. 
 
 "Spring and Autumn" annals 
 (Ch'un-ts'iu), The, 77-78. 
 
 Ssi-ma Kuang, author of "The 
 Mirror of History," 84. 
 
 Ssi-ma Ts'ien, the Herodotus of 
 China, 82. 
 2d 
 
 Ss'i-shu, the "Four Books," 78. 
 
 Stael, Mme. de, on the Romantic 
 ideal, 209 ; on the Romantic 
 nations, 211 ; in politics as well as 
 Literature, 287. 
 
 Stage, The, the pulpit in ancient 
 Greece, 26. 
 
 Statuary, Greek, . painted, 96-97. 
 
 Steele, Addison and, 15 ; in the 
 "Spectator," 198. 
 
 Stendhal on Classic and Romantic 
 taste, 207. 
 
 Stoicism at Rome, 121. 
 
 " Storia pittorica d' Italia," 221. 
 
 Strauss, Victor von, translator of the 
 Shi-king, 77. 
 
 Strophe-form, Use of, formulated by 
 the Pleiade, 183. 
 
 Struggle-for-life theory found in St. 
 Augustine's "City of God," 19. 
 
 Study, The historical and compara- 
 tive method of, 117-118. 
 
 Style, Sense of, possessed by the 
 Greeks, 92 ; shown in Homeric 
 poems, 93-106 ; in Byzantine 
 Literature, 94; in oratory, 112. 
 
 S'udraka, King, The "Clay Cart" 
 of, 54. 
 
 Sufi and Sufism in Persian poetry, 
 61-62. 
 
 Sui dynasty. Catalogue of the Im- 
 perial collection of the, 71. 
 
 Suktas, ' well-spoken compositions,' 
 45. 
 
 Sumptuousness in medieval romance, 
 137-138. 
 
 Sunrise splendors, 43, 46. 
 
 Superior man. The, 78-79. 
 
 Supernatural, Interest in the, 215. 
 
 Sutras, "threads" of rules, 47- 
 48. 
 
 Swift lacks foremost traits of Classi- 
 cism, 198. 
 
 Symbolism, 218. 
 
 "Symposium," Plato's, 114. 
 
 Syria, Debt of the West to, 40. 
 
 Syriac language, preserved as a 
 Church tongue, 30 ; spoken by 
 remnants of Aramaean peoples, 31 ; 
 poetry religious, 31 ; purely a 
 Church language, 36 ; later Syriac 
 Literature of translation, 37 ; the
 
 402 
 
 INDEX 
 
 stepping-stone for Eastern im- 
 agery from Asia into Europe, 37. 
 Syrian, The, proud to call himself a 
 Roman, 115. 
 
 Tacitus, "Dialogue" on oratory, 
 124, 126 ; on style in Caesar and 
 Cicero, 126; work of, 128-129; 
 "Germania," 136. 
 
 Taine, on the tragedies of Racine, 6 ; 
 followed Lessing, 18 ; and Hegel, 
 19; "Origin of Contemporary 
 France," 288; on Turgenieff, 325. 
 
 Talmuds, Mixture of two dialects in 
 the, 36. 
 
 Tanagra figurines, The molders of 
 the, 5. 
 
 Tartar Invasion, The, of Russia, 313- 
 314. 
 
 Tartar nations. Ethnographical 
 sketches of, 83. 
 
 Taste, good, Value of, in Literature, 8. 
 
 Tauism, Chinese works on, 88. 
 
 Temple, Sir William, on Gothic 
 humors, 133. 
 
 Tennyson, a natural evolution from 
 discipline of eighteenth century, 
 202; a Romanticist, 218; feeble 
 compromises in, 261, 264; Ger- 
 man translation of "The splendor 
 faUs" of, 294-295. 
 
 Terence, a well of "Latin undefiled," 
 132. 
 
 Thackeray, Pinero and Jones in- 
 debted to, 16 ; Horatian allusions 
 in "Henry Esmond," 195. 
 
 Theater, Greek and French, con- 
 trasted, 187. 
 
 Thelemite idea in Italy, 168. 
 
 Themistocles, orator, 112. 
 
 Theocritus, The idyls of, 5 ; intro- 
 duced pastoral poetry, 98, 103. 
 
 Thespis, gave impulse to dramatic 
 art, 109. 
 
 Thessaly, Political power in, 106. 
 
 Thiers, President, 288. 
 
 Thirty Years' War, Conditions in 
 Germany at close of, 200. 
 
 Thomas, Calvin, German Litera- 
 ture, 291-310. 
 
 Thomson, Parini borrowed from, 
 200 ; a Romantic ancestor, 216. 
 
 Thoreau on Homer and Chaucer, 19. 
 
 Thorndike, Ashley, H., English 
 Literature, 251-272. 
 
 "Thousand Days," The Persian, the 
 basis of the "Arabian Nights," 39. 
 
 "Thousand Nights and a Night, 
 The," not considered as literature 
 by the Arabs, 39. 
 
 Thucydides, "History of Peloponne- 
 sian War," 112; a model for 
 Sallust, 126 ; prose style of, 210. 
 
 Ticknor, G., Anecdote on books of 
 chivalry, 241. 
 
 Timotheus, The "Persians" of, 95. 
 
 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, "Storia della 
 letteratura italiana," 221. 
 
 Tisias, teacher of oratory. 111. 
 
 Tocqueville, a cabinet minister, 288. 
 
 Todd, Henry Alfred, Spanish 
 Literature, 233-250. 
 
 Tolstoy, Altruism of, 322 ; love for 
 the truth, 326 ; pedagogical labors 
 of, in Yasnaya Polyana, 327 ; a 
 true cosmopolitan, 337-338. 
 
 "Tom Jones," Ethics in, 263. 
 
 Topical song, The, in Aristophanes 
 and on the modern stage, 118. 
 
 Tragedy, in Ballad Literature, 144- 
 145. 
 
 Tragedy, French, 185-187. 
 
 Tragedy, Greek, Evolution of, 14 ; 
 compared with ballad, 145. 
 
 Tragedy, Italian, 231. 
 
 Trajan, from Seville, first foreigner 
 on Roman throne, 234. 
 
 Trent, William Peterfield, The 
 Cosmopolitan Outlook, 333-354. 
 
 Trimeter, 104 ; iambic, suited to 
 forcible expression, 107-108. 
 
 Truth, Lessing valued seeking, above 
 possession of, 18. 
 
 Tso-chuan by Tso-k'iu Ming, chief 
 source of Chinese history, 78. 
 
 Turgenieff, Realism of, 13 ; on the 
 Russian language, 316; "Annals 
 of a Sportsman" superior to 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 325, 327. 
 
 T'u-shu-tsi-ch'ong, the Chinese cyclo- 
 pedia, in over five thousand vol- 
 umes, 87. 
 
 Twain, Mark, and the Mississippi 
 river-folk, 6.
 
 INDEX 
 
 403 
 
 Twelfth century, Importance of, 134. 
 
 "Twenty-four Histories," The, 81- 
 82. 
 
 Tyranny, a form of Greek govern- 
 ment, 106-107. 
 
 Ulfilas, The Visigoths converted by, 
 235. 
 
 Ulysses abides with his own people, 
 11. 
 
 Umayyids, Literature prized at the 
 Court of the, 33. 
 
 Unities, Classical, 185, 186, 196, 201. 
 
 Unity, Civil and religious, of man- 
 kind, 115-116. 
 
 Upanishads, The Sanskrit, the oldest 
 philosophical treatises in Indian 
 Literature, 48^9 ; Schopenhauer 
 and Emerson and the, 49. 
 
 Urbanite, L', etait nee, 130. 
 
 Ushas, goddess of the dawn. Hymns 
 to, 46-47. 
 
 Utopians define virtue, 165. 
 
 Valera, Juan, Spanish author of 
 fiction, 249. 
 
 Valla, Lorenzo, on Roman Empire, 
 159, 160, 162; "On pleasure, or 
 the highest good," 165 ; on pleas- 
 ures of the senses, 169, 170 ; 
 prophecy of, verified, 172 ; affir- 
 mation of Nature, 174. 
 
 Valmiki, author of the Ramayana, 50. 
 
 Varano, Alfonso, "Giovanni Giscala" 
 of, 231. 
 
 Varuna, King, The noblest early 
 hymns addressed to, 45. 
 
 Vedas, The divine powers of nature 
 personified in the sacred hymns of 
 the, 44. 
 
 Veitch, John, on Lucretius, 119. 
 
 Verga pictures the primitive peasants 
 of Sicily, 5. 
 
 Vergil, Bacon on, 117; influence of, 
 117, 129; Rome's greatest poet, 
 129; works of, 129-130; essen- 
 tially Roman, 130 ; Messianic 
 Ecologue of, 163 ; Addison on, 181 ; 
 burlesque of, by Scarron, 190 ; 
 echoes of, in Dryden, 194 ; studied 
 by Parini, 230 ; Chevalier de Mere 
 on, 359. 
 
 Verhaeren, Emile, sacrificed clear- 
 ness to music, 276. 
 
 Vernacular, Dante on the, 157 ; 
 Boccaccio and Dante on, 161, 162. 
 
 Verri, Pietro, "II Caff^," 225. 
 
 Verse, Grammatical, legal, and medi- 
 cal treatises in, 22. 
 
 Versification, as test of Classicism, 
 191. 
 
 Vico, Giambattista, "Scienza nu- 
 ova," 220; critic, 225. 
 
 Vigny, Alfred de, not a popular poet, 
 277. 
 
 Villemain, cabinet minister, 288. 
 
 Villon a Parisian, 7. 
 
 Vina, The, or lute, of the Hindu, 54. 
 
 Virgin Mary, "Art of Love" dedi- 
 cated to, 157. 
 
 Vis'akhadatta, a dramatist of India, 
 54. 
 
 Visigoths established in Spain, 235. 
 
 "Vita;," 52. 
 
 Vladimir introduced Christianity into 
 Russia, 313. 
 
 Voltaire, sums up the chief traits of 
 Classicism, 190-191 ; manner of 
 writing, 194; "Merope," 191, 
 200 ; dramas of, 208 ; influence of 
 in Italy, 226 ; imitated Goldoni, 
 229; "Brutus" and "Zaire," 
 278; literary career of, 282-283; 
 and Bossuet, 283 ; the eighteenth 
 the century of, 284; "English 
 Letters," 282-283, 286-287 ; 
 "Essay on Manners," 283, 287. 
 
 Von Ranke, L., on Tacitus, 128. 
 
 Wahebis of the desert, 28. 
 
 Waller, Edmund, the beginning of 
 Classicism in England, 191. 
 
 Walther von der Vogelweide, the 
 most winsome lyrist of medieval 
 Europe, 300. 
 
 Wang-mang, the usurper, Destruc- 
 tion of books by, 70. 
 
 Wang Wei, The poems of, §9. 
 
 Warfare, Medieval, 140. 
 
 Watts-Dunton on Romanticism, 204. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, Influence of Demos- 
 thenes and Cicero on, 14. 
 
 Weltanschauung, Our monotheistic, 
 due to the Semites, 21.
 
 404 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wcrthor, Sorrows of, caused many a 
 suicide, 14. 
 
 West, The debt owed by the, to the 
 East, 40. 
 
 Wilkins, Miss, preserves the spinsters 
 of New England, 5. 
 
 Wine, Rudagi's lyric on, 63. 
 
 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 135, 300. 
 
 Woman, Exaltation of, in the feudal 
 period, 138. 
 
 Won-wang, Commentary of, on the 
 "Eight Diagrams," 74-75. 
 
 Wordsworth, Theory of natural 
 diction of, 190 ; protested against 
 Pope's diction, 192, 194 ; an evolu- 
 tion from the discipline of eigh- 
 teenth century, 202 ; love of nature 
 in, 213 ; battle for the humble, 217. 
 
 Work of art. The supreme test of a, 
 118. 
 
 World-religions, Three great, came 
 
 from the Semites, 21. 
 Writing, invented in various places, 
 
 21-22. 
 
 Yama and his sister Yami, the first 
 beings on earth, Legend of, 48. 
 
 Yang Chu, the philosopher of pessi- 
 mism, 86. 
 
 Yashts, "praises," The Avestan, 59. 
 
 Young's "Night Thoughts" trans- 
 lated into Italian, 230. 
 
 Yudhishthira, The Agamemnon of 
 the Mahabharata, 49. 
 
 Zajal, The, a sort of ottave-rime, 34. 
 
 Zarathushtra, The anthem of divine 
 praise of, 58. 
 
 Zeno, Apostolo, scholar and bibliog- 
 rapher, 220-221 ; court poet, 223. 
 C. Alex. Nelson.
 
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