I ITFRATl 1 1— I I OX/ \l vJ HE WORL iii:ii:iui!hiHiiti;)m.';iii:' 'i|.'i' i' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES c f" BBBgl HERMIT READING From the painting by Solomon Koninck LITERATURE OE THE WORLD AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY WILLIAM L. RICHARDSON AND JESSE M. OWEN ASSISTANT PROl-ESSOR OF ENGLISH, LEWIS INSTITUTE, CHICAGO GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON ATLANTA • DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO COPYRIGHT, 1922, MY WILLIAM L. KICilAROSON AND JKSSE M. OWEN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 827.2 gbe gtfctngum ^ttgg GINN AND COMPANY ■ PRO- PRIETORS • BOSTON • U.S.A. PREFACE This volume attempts to give a general survey of literature. It is in a sense the outcome of work done continuously for over twenty years in classes in literature at Hull-House, at Lewis Insti- tute, and elsewhere in Chicago. It has not been our purpose to furnish an inclusive and detailed compendium of literature nor to enter any of the numerous by- paths of literar>'^ criticism. Our aim has been rather to present in straightforward language a brief study of the literature of each of the major nations. We give in general the accepted judgments. We indicate the main currents, devote some attention to all writers of real consequence, and offer relatively full studies of authors who are recognized as the great figures in literature. In short, the book contains what we deem to be the essential facts that every- one should know about the literature of the world. Our observa- tion has been that a person who may be well informed regarding the chief writers of England and America, for instance, has all too frequently only a vague impression of the literature of — let us say — Italy and Spain, or of Russia and Scandinavia. He may specialize in one direction, but show astonishing ignorance of the field of letters as a whole. We hope, therefore, that this general outline of literature in one volume — the first of its kind, so far as we know — may serve a useful purpose. Generally speaking, each chapter gives the historical back- ground, some information about matters of language and racial connection, and an indication of the outstanding characteristics of the people. Then follows a chronological survey of the literature. Extracts from the works studied are occasionally included where these will serve to elucidate the text, but it is obvious that this element must be comparatively slight in a volume of such propor- vi LITERATURE OF THE WORLD tions as this. At the close of each chapter is appended a reference list of easily obtainable works in history, literature, and criticism. Since the impulse of the book is to encourage the reader to investi- gate the literature itself, good editions and translations of the classics are cited. Topics for special study are suggested as well. For the shortcomings of this book the authors must, of course, accept full responsibility. It is pleasant, however, to record in this place our appreciation of the helpful advice and criticism of a number of friends, especially the following: Dean Roy C. Flick- inger and Professor William F. Bryan, of Northwestern University ; Reverend P. F. O'Brien, Professor of Latin in the St, Paul Semi- nary ; Miss Carolina Marcial Dorado, of Columbia University ; Dr. Edwin H. Lewis and Mile. Lea De Lagneau, of Lewis Institute, Chicago ; Mile. Bertha de C. Favard, of Hyde Park High School, Chicago ; Dr. Philip S. Allen, of The University of Chicago ; and Professor Frederick W. Roe, of the University of Wisconsin. In particular we are indebted to Brother Leo, Professor of Literature in St. Mary's College, Oakland, California, and to Mr. Walter Taylor Field for time most generously taken in reading the entire manuscript. For the permission to use copyrighted material we heartily thank the following publishers: United States Publishers Association (several extracts from the Warner Library, University Edition, Cunliffe and Thorndike, Editors, 191 7). Oxford University Press (quotation from "Count Arnaldos," in Miss FarneU's "Spanish Prose and Poetry"; extracts from the Gilbert Murray translations of Euripides' "Trojan Women" and "Bacchae"; and the H. W. Garrod translation from Catullus). Messrs. E. P. Button & Company (the sonnet "On Reading Dostoevsky," from Evelyn Underbill's "Immanence''). Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons (two quotations from Barrett Wendell's "Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante"; ex- tracts from Douglas Hyde's "Literary History of Ireland" and from Dowden's "History of French Literature"). The John Lane Company (Paul Verlaine's "Chanson d'Automne," trans- lation by Arthur Symons ; extract from "When I was Om:- and^Twenty," from Housman's "A Shropshire Lad"). PREFACE vii Messrs. D. Appleton and Company (extract from the Gary translation of Herodotus). Messrs. Little, Brown and Company (Emily Dickinson's "Autumn"). The Thomas Y. Crowell Company (extract from Tolstoy's "Anna Ka- renina," English translation). Messrs. Longmans, Green & Company (three epigrams from Mackail's "Greek Anthology"). Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company (sonnet from Sewall's "Poems of Carducci"). Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company (two quotations from Dickinson's "Greek View of Life"). The Houghton Mifflin Company (quotations from Williams's "^neid"; from the Charles Eliot Norton translation of Dante ; and from the Isabel Butler translation of "The Song of Roland"; and from the writings of Lowell. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, and Holmes). The David McKay Company (extracts from Walt Whitman). The Century Company (a passage from Gorky's "My Childhood"). The Macmillan Company (two stanzas from George W. Russell's "Her- mit"; Padraic Colum's "Cradle Song"; a portion of John Mase- field's "Wanderer's Song," in "Saltwater Ballads"; one stanza of Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"; D. G. Rossetti's "Beauty" and his translation of Villon's "Ballade of Dead Ladies"). The Four Seas Company (a stanza of "The Silence of Unlabored Fields," from Joseph Campbell's "The Mountainy Singer"). Messrs. Ginn and Company (extracts from Genung's "A Guidebook to the Bibhcal Literature"). W. L. R. J. M. 0. CONTENTS CHAPTER PACE I. Introduction i II. Literature of the Orient 5 III. The Bible as Literature 34 IV. Greek Literature 59 V. Latin Literature 106 VI. Italian Literature 136 VII. Spanish Literature 170 VIII. French Literature ' . . . 200 IX. German Literature 251 X. Russian Literature 291 XI. Scandinavian Literature 323 XII. English Literature 354 XIII. English Literature (Continued) 404 XIV. Irish Literature 447 XV. American Literature 471 A CLOSING WORD 513 INDEX S15 LITERATURE OF THL WORLD CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When the term "literature" is properly used it denotes writings or records that are of permanent value, that have human interest, and that have beauty of form. Books, like plants and animals, must struggle for existence. Those that survive after perhaps hundreds of years have stood a supreme test, and back of them is the authority of generations. Such books are not often prosy or uninteresting. They are broad in their appeal, they touch us in a personal and intimate way, and they interpret to us the richest products of our civilization. We read them for their own sake, and when we go to them they do not turn us empty away. Literature for Information and Understanding He who knows literature dwells in a large and beautiful world that has no limit in time or space. In actual life he may be unac- quainted with his nearest neighbor, but in the world of books every door is opened by a magic more wonderful than that of .Aladdin. With the much-enduring Ulysses he sails the seas, with Dante he explores the depths and mounts to highest heaven, with Don Quixote he rights wrongs, with Sigurd the Volsung he dares the wall of flame. Huxley teaches him nature ; Gibbon, history ; Ruskin, art. He listens to the sweet songs of Sappho and David and Frangois Villon and Shelley. If it is philosophy that he craves, there are Socrates, .Aristotle, and Carlyle. Everyday matters, such 2 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD as the face of the sky, the greenness of the grass, and the prattle of little children, take on a new meaning. Through a thousand avenues he has knowledge of the great passions that sway the heart of man — of hate and despair and jealousy, of love and truth and beauty, of the problems of life and destiny. A single volume, like Browning's "The Ring and the Book," may give him rich and varied study, associated perhaps with the landscape of Italy, the forms of English poetry, the singular ways of justice, the blackness of evil, or the exquisite beauty of a woman's soul. Literature frees us from provinciality. No nation seems foreign or unfriendly when it is once disclosed to us in its literature. It is not knowledge but ignorance that makes us prejudiced. We laugh with Sancho Panza or Sam Weller or Tom Sawyer alike. Lear and Prometheus, Jean Valjean and Anna Karenina — do they be- long to one nation or one time ? All racial barriers disappear when we hear the agonizing cry, ''O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " Through literature we become citizens of the world. Literature for Pleasure But books are needful not only to push back horizons, to impart information, and to increase understanding ; one of their chief of- fices is to give pleasure. There is no other such enthusiast as the book enthusiast: he is termed a bibliomaniac. He thinks of books as he would of friends and companions. His grandfather may not have been born before the gentle Elia finished his life, but Elia is an intimate friend who is closer than a brother. The Roman Horace and the Norwegian Bjornson are his friends ; so are George Borrow and Walt Whitman and Montaigne and Omar Khayyam and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the flesh Thomas Carlyle or Henrik Ibsen may have repulsed him, but in the spirit they reveal to him their profoundest secrets. Edmund Gosse speaks in one of his essays of the inaccessibility of the English poetess Christina Rossetti even in a London drawing-room, but her deepest self is disclosed to us in this exquisite stanza : INTRODUCTION 3 "My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is hke an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit ; My heart is hke a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea ; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me." As the years pass, the friends of the reader of literature form a great company : the nonne, the prioresse, is there, and Eugenie Grandet, and Andromache, and Beatrix Esmond ; there are Joseph the dreamer, and Olaf Trygvesson, and Hamlet the Dane, and my Uncle Toby, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Dr. Johnson and Bozzy — and a host of others. W^ordsw^orth was right, then, when he spoke of books as "a substantial world": "Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow." Literature for Inspiration In the picture gallery, so the story goes, a woman was looking at some views of Turner's. "I am sure / don't see such things in nature," she complained to the man at her side, who proved to be the artist himself. "Ah, yes, madam," he replied, "but don't you wish to heaven you could ?" Literature makes us see more and further. Inspiration is its finest gift. "Books of power" — that is the expressive phrase at- tached to the world's choicest masterpieces. Great literature is animated by a great purpose. It is universal in quality: its roots go down deep, its branches spread wide. Homer, Dante, Shake- speare, Milton, Goethe (to mention no others), form a glorious company, and association with them will leave its impress upon us. "It is not possible," said Longinus, the Greek critic, "that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality." 4 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD In the succeeding pages of this volume we are to explore the pleasant land of books, where countless pilgrims have gone before. Our guideposts are, after all, only guideposts. Those who enter the land will do well to linger on the way and to investigate for them- selves its beauty, not overlooking the many trails and paths and winding roads that lead from the great highway. Reference List Crawshaw. The Interpretation of Literature. The Macmillan Company. Hudson. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. Harrap and Com- pany, London. QuiLLER-CoucH. On the Art of Reading. The University Press, Cam- bridge, England. Burroughs. Literary Values. The Houghton Mifflin Company. Bates. Talks on the Study of Literature. The Houghton Mifflin Company. Harrison. The Choice of Books. The Macmillan Company. CHAPTER II LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT The East conveys to our minds an impression of great antiquity. It is a region of vanished civilizations, and it carries with it an air of mystery and unreaHty. There is a remoteness also in its litera- ture ; the reader of English finds that only a portion of the vast literary stores of the Orient is open to him and that even that por- tion generally reveals modes of life and thought that can scarcely be recovered in our day. However, a glimpse of these Eastern peo- ples and of their literature will be informing. It will also furnish a useful background for the literature of Europe.^ Egyptian Literature For hundreds of thousands of years, as it now seems clear, man has lived on this earth, slowly becoming master of himself and of his surroundings, perfecting his weapons and domestic implements, evolving in time a system of agriculture, and patiently domesticat- ing animals as companions and beasts of burden. By comparison the Egyptians and Babylonians, who have passed on to us the earliest written records, appear modern, their history being almost of our own day. At least five thousand years before Christ true and relatively advanced civilizations existed in the favored regions of the Nile and of Mesopotamia. The first king of united Egypt reigned approximately 3400 b.c. (by some authorities he is placed a thousand years earlier). After an interval of five hundred years iThe literature of the Orient (apart from Hebrew literature, which calls for a separate treatment) does not bulk as large in our Western consciousness as the literature of a single country of Europe. It would be manifestly a mistake, therefore, to devote more than this one chapter to the study. The bibliography (page 32) may assist the reader in pursuing his studies in this interesting field. 5 6 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD f the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was erected, and for another two thou- sand years the ancient Egyptians made their contributions to art, science, Hterature, and religion. These ancient Egyptians, a dark-haired and slender people of un- certain racial connections, spoke a language allied to the Semitic and for a long period lived a life somewhat separated from that of their neighbors, developing a civilization highly individual and complex. They were not warlike, nor were they as a whole keenly intellectual ; yet their contributions to life and thought were really e.xtraordinary. To establish this fact we need but to recall their pioneer achievements in art, science, and religion. Their moral ideas and their conceptions of life after death deeply influenced other peoples. Picture-writing, which we term hieroglyphics, was employed by the Egyptians very early, and also an abridged and more flowing form known as hieratic, A still further development, known as demotic, was the more popular type of writing employed later, largely for business purposes. After the second century of our era the Egyptian language came to be written in Greek letters, with the addition of eight signs taken over from demotic. The literature of Egypt is very considerable in extent and em- braces inscriptions, religious charms and extensive religious writ- ings, hymns and lyrics, historical and legal material, proverbs and moral maxims, and many simple tales. We find this literature pre- served on mummy cases and on the walls of tombs, passages, and chambers, but mostly on papyrus, — that is, strips of the papyrus reed skillfully put together, — wonderfully preserved in the dry climate of Egypt these many centuries. The so-called Pyramid Texts, first discovered in 1880 in galleries and chambers in the pyramids, are probably the oldest written records that have come down to us of man's long intellectual his- tory. Their hieroglyphic characters date from the twenty-seventh century b.c. and later. But they embody material belonging to a much earlier time, and taken as a whole they probably represent a period of a thousand years, closing about 2600 b.c. These texts, consisting of charms, hymns, myths, prayers, and ritualistic ma- ®. ^. IL 81 t !l Id. mMnmrn 'ptian story-tellers of antiquity. They date from the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom (roughly 3000 to 700 b. c), and are some- times realistic, sometimes imaginative with miraculous elements. We have a curious tale of a shipwrecked sailor, strongly suggestive of Sindbad ; the story of the doomed prince whose violent death was prophesied at his birth; the story of two brothers, written very simply and presenting a picture of agricultural life ; and a number of others. The early literature of Egypt shows clearly that the Egyptian writers had developed a strong moral sense. They felt keenly for those who were afflicted unjustly. They frequently used the story as a form of social gospel, an aid in the crusade for social justice. The similar use of moral tales and parables by WTiters of the Old and New Testaments will at once recur to the mind of the reader.^ Babylonian and Assyrian Literature The very ancient civilization in Mesopotamia, possibly ante- dating that of Egypt, has been partially made known to us through the work of oriental scholars and archaeologists. The mastership of that region was for a long period in the hands of the non-Semitic Sumerians, but these peoples were gradually absorbed by the Sem- ites. Sargon was the first of the Semitic leaders (about 2750 B.C.). The Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean empires that followed dom- inated Western Asia for many centuries, to be succeeded in turn by the Medo-Persian (Persian Empire founded 538 B.C.) and ul- timately by the Graeco-Roman civilization. iQver one hundred pages of Egyptian literature are given in the Warner Library, a very fine exhibit of a varied and representative character. The Breasted and Maspero volumes mentioned in the bibliography arc of great value. 10 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD A good deal is now known regarding the Sumerians and their culture. They dwelt in cities ; they drained the marshes ; they were skilled in the arts ; they wrote in a simplified hieroglyphic — the cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, style of writing ; they possessed a highly developed religion. Their civilization, their laws, their lit- erature, and their religion were taken over by the Semitic peoples who succeeded them. We do not know as yet the full extent to which Babylonians and Hebrews were indebted to the culture of these non-Semitic peoples of little-understood racial origin, who seem to have passed out of history at least two thousand years before Christ. The Babylonian-Assyrian literature has come down to us in clay tablets. During the long history of these warlike and progressive peoples clay was utilized for writing of every description. Some of the poetry that has been preserved goes back to a very remote period ; the earliest petty rulers were producing written records as early as 3800 b. c. ; a great variety of chronological tables, legal codes, historical inscriptions, and personal and business letters date from the comparatively well-known historic period. Here is a por- tion of a letter from a traveler in a far country written to the lady Kadasu, presumably of his family : "Why hath news of thee to me been delayed, and why have I not seen a single answer to all the letters I wrote thee ? For I wrote unto thee thus : ' From the day that I start, send unto me whatever taketh place in my house.' Why, then, have I heard no news of thee ? " The clay tablet em- ployed for such a letter would be one inch thick, two to three inches wide, and three to four inches long. It would be inclosed carefully in an envelope of clay for preservation and privacy, after having been powdered with dry clay to prevent sticking. In the great library of Assurbanipal (seventh century b.c.) at Nineveh have been discovered twenty-two thousand clay tablets, an orderly collection of the scientific, religious, and literary material of these Mesopotamian peoples. This ancient library included some of the oldest poetry that has come down to us from any source. Of the prose literature of the Babylonian-Assyrians perhaps the most interesting is the Code of Hammurapi (about 2100 b.c). It LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT II embraced, no doubt, many legal regulations that were ancient even at that distant time. The Mosaic legislation promulgated about a thousand years later presents many curious parallels. It is, however, the old poetry that proves of the greatest value in this body of literature. There are prayers, magic formulas, and PORTION OF OLD BABYLONIAN STORY OF THE FLOOD, FROM ASSURBANIPAL S LIBRARY AT NINEVEH mythological narratives. One poem describes the beginnings of crea- tion and gives accounts of male and female gods. Another poem, the hero of which is Marduk, the god of Babylon, tells of the crea- tion of man, followed by that of animals. Another centers in the heroic fight between iNIarduk and the rebellious Tiamat, and in the creation of the heavenly bodies. There are cycles of stories dealing with the eagle, and another cycle dealing with the winds. 12 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD Most famous of all is the so-called "Gilgamesh Epic," a series of twelve tablets discovered in 1872. Each tablet describes a separate episode. Gilgamesh, the hero, is represented as delivering his coun- try from the Elamites (this must have occurred before 2000 b.c). He then slays the divine bull which is sent against him by the god Anu, the father of the goddess Ishtar, whose love had been rejected by Gilgamesh. Ishtar visits the underworld to seek some further means of overthrowing the hero. She enters seven gates in suc- cession and is held a prisoner, but is subsequently released. In the latter part of the poem we learn the picturesque Babylonian version of the story of the flood as told to Gilgamesh by Hasisadra, the Babylonian Noah. The Babylonian legends of the flood and of the origin of the world make an interesting study in connection with the similar traditions of the Hebrews. There is a rhythmical quality in the Babylonian poems, but no regular meter. As in the Hebrew poetry of later times, parallelism is employed.^ Chinese and Japanese Literature In the Mongolian centers civilization developed very early. As- tonishing progress was made in invention, science, art, and litera- ture — and then was strangely checked. The conservatism of the Chinese is a marked characteristic, continuing to our day. Dur- ing most of its history China has seemed like a second human race, living apart from the rest of mankind. Its literature, though un- deniably important in itself since it has deeply impressed for a great period of time the life and thought of countless human beings, has had little influence upon other peoples. The same is true of the literature of Japan. Our purpose, therefore, is to devote only pass- ing attention to the writings of these two countries. As long ago as nineteen hundred years a catalogue of standard Chinese literature was made, including more than six hundred au- thors. In 1782 there was published a catalogue of the Imperial 1 Professor Toy's article in the Warner Library and the accompanying extracts from the Babylonian and Assyrian literature should be consulted by the reader. LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 13 Library in Peking, comprising seventy-five thousand volumes. Such facts will give a suggestion of the great extent of Chinese writings. These writings comprise poetry, history, biography, philosophy, sci- ence, fiction, the drama — and still the list is not complete. The central figure in the history of China is Confucius (sixth century B.C.). All Chinese literature is based on the Five Classics, works compiled in large part by Confucius, and the Four Books, in which are included his teachings. The former comprise "The Book of Changes," a very ancient work in sixty-four chapters, consisting largely of divination ; "The Book of History," which contains leg- endary history carried forward to the twelfth century B.C.; "The Book of Odes," three hundred primitive poems and ballads collected by Confucius; "The Book of Rites," that overwhelming body of ceremonials and rules of behavior that have governed the life of the Chinese through the ages ; and the "Spring and Autumn," which is a work of history concerned with the state of Lu, the birthplace of Confucius. In the Four Books the doctrines of Confucianism are set forth in the great teacher's own words. These textbooks com- prise (i) the analects, or conversations of Confucius, (2) a treatise on self-culture, (3) a work in thirty-three chapters setting forth the doctrine of the ''golden medium," and (4) seven books on Con- fucianism by his great disciple Mencius. Poetry has enjoyed the greatest popularity in China, and the names of Chinese poets are legion, stretching over a period of over two thousand years. The short lyric is the common form ; in China the epic has never flourished. An anthology made in 1707 covered some fifty thousand poems. Recently there have appeared several volumes of English renderings of Chinese poems.' Crace- ful nature studies, personal confessions, and brief moralizings are the common themes. A number of these poems seem to touch our own thought with startling closeness. Interest has also been taken of late years in Chinese short stories and plays. We may expect to find that an increasing amount of the literature of China will be made available in English as a logical result of the closer contact of the West with this ancient race. iThe collection undertaken by Mr. Witter Bynner is of special interest. 14 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD In Japan the influence of China became powerful during the period subsequent to the sixth and seventh centuries of our era. Before that time a body of old Japanese literature had been pro- duced, largely of a religious character ; but now China furnished the standard for the literary work and thought of the island empire. An important original product should, however, be mentioned — the native poetry of Japan. While this poetry has not, as a whole, been as important or as influential as the poetry of China, the so-called No plays of Japan have attracted much attention, especially of late, and several English translations have appeared. These dramas date mostly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They are writ- ten in prose and poetry, but the poetical element is the larger and more significant. They are short ; the actors vary usually from three to six in number ; the story is slight and is subordinated to the characteristic mystical element and to the moral teaching involved. The old spirit of Japan is enshrined in these plays. Modern Japan has been deeply influenced by Western civi- lization. Its literature exhibits the stages of the conflict between old and new ideas. No writers of the first importance seem to have ap- peared during the modern period, but the output of Japanese presses and the general intellectual acuteness of the people of the empire are certainly most impressive. The most numerous publications at the present time are works of fiction, works on general literature and art, and writings in the fields of the social sciences. Literature of India India, like Persia, is of interest to us as an early center of the Aryan or Indo-European civilization. The Aryans pushed their way into India about two thousand years before Christ. The study of their ancient records has proved a fascinating branch of oriental research. It involves the beginnings of the Aryan speech ; it dis- closes a wealth of literary material ; most of all, it affords a glimpse of the early Aryan peoples, their ideas and their manner of life. In the Vedic hymns they sing of the glory of their gods and of the greatness of their own "Aryan" (or "noble") race. They are seen LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 15 marching in communities with the father of the family as leader and priest, and later, in their early settled home on the banks of the Indus, divided into tribes. Their civilization is relatively high ; their chief wealth lies in their cattle ; they use the horse as a beast of burden and as an aid in their battles; they eat beef and use fermented liquors; they sow seed in the field and they build boats for use on the river; blacksmiths, barbers, and other artisans are familiar figures among them. In short, our picture of these remote forefathers of the Aryan folk is interesting and fairly complete. The literature of India may be divided into three periods : the Vedic, chiefly from 1500 to 1000 b.c, but persisting several cen- turies longer ; the period of sectarian literature, dating from the time of Buddha (sixth century b.c.) and later; and the Sanskrit, which overlapped the Vedic period and extended to a period some centuries after Christ. Indian literature had a comparatively un- broken development for three thousand years. In bulk it is enor- mous, exceeding that of Greece and Rome combined. It is also original in form and especially important in the fields of religion and philosophy. It embodies the ritual and the doctrine of a na- tional religion, Brahmanism, and of a world religion, Buddhism. Until a few centuries after Buddha's day the literature of India was not reduced to writing ; and even then it was not ordinarily read, but was memorized and thus passed on from generation to generation. The sheer effort of the mind involved in the task seems extraordi- nary to us. When writing was finally employed, the style was bor- rowed mostly from the northern Semitic or Phoenician type. Few manuscripts have been preserved antedating the fourteenth century of our era, for the reason that perishable material, mainly birch bark and palm leaves, was used for the writing. After the Mohammedan conquest (a.d. iooo) paper was employed. The ancient languages of India were Vedic and Sanskrit, the one related somewhat closely to the other. Popular dialects were in com- mon use very early, and from these have sprung the native vernac- ulars of our own day. The Buddhistic writings made use of the popular language of the people of Buddha's day, especially in Buddha's own province. This is known as Pali. i6 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD The Vedas. Turning now to the literature itself, we find that four very important collections of hymns, or Vedas, coming from the earliest creative period have been preserved to us. The chief of these is the Rig Veda, which consists of about one thousand hymns in fifteen different meters. The form is rhythmical, but the rhythm is usually confined to the last four syllables of each line. There are ten books in the Rig Veda; the authors were chiefly priests or families of priests. The hymns are addressed to heaven, to the dawn, to the sun, and even to the earth, but in most cases to the divinities, particularly to Fire (the fire of the altar, the fire of the lightning, the light of the sun), to Indra (the god of the storm and tempest), and to Soma (the personified god of the intoxicating drink used in sacrifices). For example, the god of fire is addressed: "No god indeed, no mortal is beyond the might of thee, the mighty one." And the storm gods: "I hear their whips, almost close by, when they crack them in their hands ; they gain splendor on their way. . . . With such strength as yours, you have caused men to tremble, you have caused the mountains to tremble."^ The sun and moon are praised. There are prayers for personal blessings, wedding and funeral hymns, a song of creation, and speculative and philosophical poems. The following extract from the Vedic hymn to dawn, as translated by Hopkins, is singularly beautiful : "Aloft the lights of Dawn, gleaming for beauty, have risen splendid as waves of waters. . . . Thou revealest thy bosom, adorning thyself, O Dawn, and gleamest bright in thy greatness. . . . Thy ways are fair, thy paths upon the mountains. Thou goest in calm across the waters, self-shining one. thou, whose paths are wide, thou lofty daughter of the sky, bring to us wealth and nourishment. Bring sustenance, Dawn, who dost bring us good as thou willst. ... At thy clear dawning the birds fly from their nests; and [from their homes come] men who seek for food." The late Vedic hymn to starlit night belongs in the same class : "Night comes, the shining goddess, who now looks out afar with many eyes and puts on all her beauties. ... At thy appearing we go to ^Translations by Max Miiller. LITER.\TURE OF THE ORIENT 17 rest as birds fly home to the tree. To rest come the throngs of men; to rest, the beasts; to rest, the birds; and even the greedy eagles rest. Keep off from us the she-wolf and the wolf. Keep off the thief. bil- lowy Night, and be our savior now. Night, as a conqueror brings a herd of cattle, so do I bring [as a sacrifice] this Hymn to thee." Other Vedic literature consists of the Brahmanas, ritualistic works designed to explain the Vedic hymns ; the Upanishads, phil- osophical material in prose and poetry based upon the Vedas ; and the Sutras, manuals elucidating the religious rites of Brahmanism. During the period which followed the Brahmanas two religious sects greatly influenced the literature of India : Buddhism and Jainism. The former was based upon the teachings of Buddha, was Eastern in its origin, and was entirely out of sympathy with Brahmanism ; the latter, the Western sect, was more agreeable to the older faith. The Pali literature, dating from this sectarian period, includes sermons and other didactic material and histories. From the Buddhistic writings we take this picture of the death of Buddha (Professor Rhys Davids's translation) : "When Buddha was alone with his disciples, then the Blessed One ad- dressed the brethren and said : 'It may be, brethren, that there may be doubt or misgiving in the mind of some brother as to the Buddha, the truth, the path or the way. Inquire, brethren, freely. Do not have to reproach yourselves afterwards with this thought: '"Our Teacher was face to face with us, and we could not bring ourselves to inquire of the Blessed One when we were face to face with him.'" And when he had thus spoken they sat silent. . . . And the venerable Ananda said, 'How wonderful a thing. Lord, and how mar^-ellous ! Verily, in this whole assembly there is not one brother who has doubt or misgiving as to Buddha, the truth, the path or the way.' Then Buddha said, 'It is out of the fullness of thy faith that thou hast spoken, Ananda. But I know it for certain.' . . . Then the Blessed One addressed the breth- ren, saying, 'Behold, brethren. I exhort you, saying. Transitory are all component things ; toil without ceasing.' And these were the last words of Buddha." The Sanskrit period. In contradistinction to the Vedic litera- ture the writings of the Sanskrit period proper are largely secular, not religious. They include epics and Puranas (literature of a doc- 1 8 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD trinal character written in epic verse), also curious and characteris- tic fables, a considerable number of dramas (generally comedies with numerous ludicrous situations) , and a body of lyric poetry cele- brating love and the beautiful nature world of India. We must confine our attention in this place to two of the great epics. The Mahabharata, an enormous epic of over two hundred thou- sand lines (eight times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined), signifies by its title the "Great War" and celebrates the conflict of two races or rival groups of people who sought in ancient times for possession of the valley of the Ganges. The war was fought, it is interesting to note, on the site of the modern Delhi. The verse is heroic, and the story is graphic. However, the main story is broken by long digressions consisting of tales and phil- osophical discourses. It is probable that the Mahabharata was commenced three or four centuries before Christ but was not com- pleted until after many generations had intervened. This great poem comes from western India. The Ramayana, on the other hand, comes from eastern India. It is concerned with the wanderings of a national hero named Rama and is much more brief and more romantic than the Mahabharata. The poet Valmiki is reputed to be its author. It was probably written a few centuries later than its predecessor. The Ramayana includes national legends and descriptions of religious systems, and involves much symbolism and mystery. In recent times India has earned an international reputation as a center of thought and literature. The ancient Indian classics have become familiar and their power is recognized ; the philosophical systems of India have been generally exploited ; and in India itself during the last few generations a veritable renaissance has taken place, especially in Bengal. In the field of literature no such inter- esting figure has arisen in India for many generations as Rabindra- nath Tagore. He was born in i860, of a gifted family of Bengal. From his early youth he has written a great deal — of natural ob- jects, of love, of philosophy, of the communion of the soul with the Infinite. His songs are sung in his own province and reproduced in other dialects of India. His various writings in prose, drama, and LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 19 verse, written in Bengali and translated by himself into English, have gained for him international prominence. In 1913 the Nobel prize for literature was presented to him. Very few writers of our own day have such deep culture, such rare gifts, and such powers of expression. The subtle charm of Tagore is found at its best in his ''song offerings" entitled "Gitanjali." The English edition bears an eloquent introduction by W. B. Yeats. These songs remind us of the Belgian Maeterlinck and of the choicest poets of Ireland ; all lovers of beauty must be deeply moved by them, for they belong to the high tide of the poetry of our generation.^ Persian Literature It is natural to consider Persian literature in connection with that of India, for both had their beginnings in the Iranian region before these two branches of the Aryan people separated. As Professor Jackson says," "The morning stars sang together when 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." There are three distinct periods in Persian literature. The first is termed the Old Iranian, and this centers in the sacred writings of the prophet and teacher named Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster (seventh century b.c. or earlier) ; the second, termed Middle or Pahlavi, ex- tends from the third to the ninth or tenth century of our era ; the third, or the New, dates properly from the time of the Mohammedan conquest (a.d. 641). Old Persian is closely allied to Sanskrit ; the same is true of Pahlavi and modern Persian, though changes have naturally taken place through the centuries. ^ Others of Rabindranath TaRore's wrilinRs will also be of interest, such as "The Gardener" (early lyric poems of love and life), "The Crescent Moon" (a series of child poems), and a philosophical work entitled "Si- dhana : the Realization of Life." The last-named book is a straightforward, interesting account of the great religious scriptures of India, with many quotations. 2See the interesting chapter in "Lectures in Literature." published by the Columbia University Press. 20 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD The old Persian records include a number of cuneiform inscrip- tions. Most interesting of these is a series consisting of five histori- cal tablets carved by order of Darius I on the side of the mountain at Behistun. The Avesta or Zend-Avesta is the most considerable literary monument of old Persia. It is the only portion preserved of a once very considerable literature. (The Roman Pliny tells us of two million verses composed by Zoroaster ! ) A series of hymns in verse is the most sacred portion of the Avesta. This bible of the Zoroastrian religion also contains many texts and prayers, legal and ritualistic matter, and the Old Iranian account of creation. Zoroaster tells of his communion with the god Ormazd and of heaven and the future, and like a true prophet he calls upon man- kind to repent. The Avesta has been made accessible to Europeans largely within the last century ; the history of its translation into European languages and of the critical work done in connection with it is of great interest. During the Pahlavi period very little of consequence in the his- tory of literature was produced. The writings included translations of the Avesta and commentaries on it, texts on religion, histories, and even romances. The New period, on the other hand, contains a large body of at- tractive material, and this is what we commonly think of as Persian literature. First, we note the poet Firdausi (born a. d. 935), whose chief work was the epic "Shah Namah," or "Book of Kings"; it occupied him thirty-five years. The first edition of this epic ap- peared in loio. It is designed to cover the history of Persia from the earliest mythical times, 3600 B.C., to the Mohammedan con- quest. It is a vast work of sixty thousand couplets and is concerned mainly with the wars between the Iranians and the Turanians. There are some episodes of special attractiveness, such as that of 'Sohrab and Rustum used by ]\Iatthew Arnold in his poem of that title. The New period contains other epic poems, historical and romantic, and dramas, novels, short stories, legends, and fables, to say nothing of examples of other branches of literature. But the lit- erature of this period is mainly in lyric verse. It has been said that "Persia is the land of lyric poetry, the home of the nightingale and LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 21 the rose." Persian poems do not cover a wide range of subjects and are somewhat artificial, but they show a great perfection in form and are euphonious to a degree. Love and wine are the themes commonly celebrated in Persian lyrics. There is a body of court poetry and of religious and didactic poetry as well. Omar Khayyam. The wonderfully lyric verse of Persian poets has attracted Western readers for several generations, and many English translations have been made, Omar Khayyam (twelfth century) and Hafiz (fourteenth century) have found more English readers than any other Persian poets. The superb renderings by Edward Fitzgerald of the ''Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam may be classed with the finest English translations of any foreign poetry. Omar was a poet-astronomer who lived in the city of Xishapur. Over twelve hundred quatrains (four-line stanzas) are credited to him. Omar Khayyam's subject matter consists of complaints against fate and the world's injustice, comments on the insincerity of the pious, love poems on separation and reunion, poems in praise of spring and flowers, satirical utterances deriding orthodox beliefs and praising wine and pleasure, and, finally, poems of devotion and contrition.' Fitzgerald's selections cover about one hundred quat- rains, fully half of which are faithful and beautiful paraphrases of the original, and the remainder more or less close transcriptions of the thought of the Persian poet. Some of the most striking of Fitz- gerald's versions are the following : VII "Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance tling : The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing." XVI "The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes — or it prospers ; and anon. Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face, Lighting a little hour or two — is gone." 1 Summarized from Winfield's analysis. 22 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD XXI "Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears : To-morrow ! — Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n thousand Years." XXVII "Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about : but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went. XXVIII "With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow ; And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd — 'I came like Water, and Hke Wind I go.'" XLVI "And fear not lest Existence closing your Account, and mine, should know the hke no more ; The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour. XLVII "When You and I behind the Veil are past, Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, Which of our Coming and Departure heeds As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast." LXIV "Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road, Whidi to discover we must travel too." LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 23 LXVI "I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell : And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answerd 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell.'" LXVIII "We are no other than a moving row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held In Midnight by the Master of the Show ; LXIX "But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days ; Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays." "Yon rising Moon that looks for us again — How oft hereafter will she wax and wane ; How oft hereafter rising look for us Through this same Garden — and for one in vain! CI "And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass, And in your joyous errand reach the spot Where I made One — turn down an empty Glass!" Hafiz, like Omar Khayyam, is remembered not alone for his work as a poet. He had a scientific mind. He lectured on theology and philosophy. Curious biographical data have been preserved — of his travels, his interview with Tinnir the Great, his infidelity to the orthodox Mohammedan faith, and other items. He died close to the end of the fourteenth century. 24 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD The poems of Hafiz are concerned sometimes with individuals, but they deal chiefly with wine, love, youth and beauty, the spring, and the rose and the nightingale. It is quite possible that a mystic or philosophic meaning may be hidden in even the most straight- forward and transparent of these poems. The delight that Hafiz showed in nature, the entire naturalness of his poems, his clear style and unique expression, have won for him a host of admirers. He excels especially in his odes entitled "ghazals," poems from five to sixteen couplets in length. The riming-scheme is elaborate ; the signature of the poet is commonly worked into the last verse ; and in the arrangement of the ghazals an alphabetical plan is followed, based on the initial word of the successive poems. The principal poetical work of Hafiz is the "Divan," a collection of about seven hundred separate poems, mostly ghazals. Richard Le Gallienne, Justin Huntley McCarthy, Walter Leaf, H. Bicknell, and Miss G. L. Bell, among others, have made translations of the poems in the "Divan." Miss Bell's translations may be especially commended. Apart from Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat" they are per- haps the finest English poetical renderings of any Persian poet. The following is a portion of Miss Bell's translation of the ode engraved on Hafiz's tombstone : "Pour down, Lord ! from the clouds of Thy guiding grace The rain of a mercy that quickeneth on my grave, Before, like dust that the wind bears from place to place, I arise and flee beyond the knowledge of man. When to my grave thou turnest thy blessed feet. Wine and the lute shalt thou bring in thy hand to me, Thy voice shall ring through the folds of my winding-sheet, And I will arise and dance to thy minstrelsy. Though I be old, clasp me one night to thy breast, And I, when the dawn shall come to awaken me, With the flash of youth on my cheek from thy bosom will rise. Rise up! let mine eyes delight in thy stately grace! Thou art the goal to which all men's endeavor has pressed, And thou the idol of Hafiz's worship ; thy face From the world and life shall bid him come forth and arise ! " LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 25 Arabic Literature The literature of Arabia is rich and varied, comprising poetry^ anecdote, the typical oriental tale or romance, history, philosophy, and religious treatise. Our pictures of the Orient are inevitably colored by the luxurious, fan- tastic, and racy tales of Arabia and the Moslem world. We hark back to the great days of Bagdad, Cairo, and Cor- dova ; visions of the crowded bazaars, the mosques, Arab sheiks, veiled women, and Haroun al-Rashid beset us. and we breathe an air of mys- tery and enchantment. The classic period of Arabic poetry was just beforeand dur- ing the time of Mohammed (seventh century). A fixed poetic form and content of a high order of merit became prevalent. The poets told of the Arab life — the stretches of desert, the oases, the camels and antelopes, the joys of the chase, the life of the tribe. The poems were passed from mouth to mouth and became the common possession of the Arabs. The succeeding period wit- nessed the development of city life and the characteristic Moslem culture in such centers as Bagdad and Cairo. Arab Spain pro- duced an enormous amount of poetry, as an anthology of twenty thousand verses collected in the tenth century bears witness. Hakim, the patron of literature, collected in Cordova a library said to contain four hundred thousand volumes. As the Arab poetic A PAGE (chapter FIRST) OF A MANU- SCRIPT COPY OF THE KORAN, THE BIBLE OF THE MOSLEMS 26 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD spirit died out other branches of literature flourished, more par- ticularly anecdote and tale and a vast body of religious interpreta- tion and commentary. Arabia was the home of the Koran, and the Koran dominated the whole Moslem world. We have such excel- lent translations as Sale's and Lane's, but whatever interest the Koran may have for us exists more in the field of religion than of literature. The Arabian Nights. To the Western reader the strange, allur- ing, exotic life of the East is embodied for all time in the Arabian Nights. This famous collection of tales first became known to Europe through the French translation by Galland in the early eigtheenth century. Since that time the characters of the Nights — Haroun al-Rashid, Scheherazade, the calenders, Ali Baba, Sindbad, Aladdin, and a host of others — have given delight to all the world. The date of the Nights is variously estimated, but may be placed with some certainty as late as the thirteenth or fourteenth cen- tury of our era. The many accurate pictures of the life of Cairo of that period seem to point to that city as the place of their final col- lection. But the tales themselves have their source in many coun- tries and reach back many centuries. It has been pointed out that West Africa, Egypt, and Syria are represented in the tales ; so is ancient India ; the afrits and genii and many other references carry us to Persia ; at least one of the stories seems to be indebted to the Odyssey of Homer, and another to the Hebrew book of Esther; while the pictures of Bagdad in the great epoch of Haroun al-Rashid remind us constantly of the Arabian ]\Ioslem capital in its heyday. Burton expresses it as his conviction that the framework is Persian, that the oldest tales go back to the eighth century, that the nucleus may be placed in the tenth century, and that the authorship of necessity is composite. The medieval Arab, as Burton also makes clear, is shown quite frankly at his best and worst. There is a certain nobility clinging to him. The boy is respectful to his parents, a good comrade, a thorough student, a gentleman in his manners. The man is cou- rageous, loyal to his sultan and his faith, hospitable to strangers, temperate, and self-reliant. He may be depended upon as a friend LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 27 and father and husband, and he is the soul of honor and chivalry. He is inherently reverent, resigned to the decrees of fate and of Allah, and he is instinctively kind to the poor and afflicted. He looks forward with confidence to the life beyond. On the other hand, the Arab of the Nights shows many traits that are far from admirable. He frequently displays the barbarian. "He is a model mixture of childishness and astuteness, of simplicity and cunning, concealing levity of mind under solemnity of aspect." He is indolent, overbearing, intolerant, superstitious. He is fanatical by nature and hates every creed but Islam. The tales are loosely strung together by a familiar device. There is a certain king of India, so the prologue tells, who, because of his wife's infidelity, determines to destroy all the women of his king- dom, marrying them one by one and destroying each on the morn- ing succeeding her marriage. The women are in consternation, but are saved by the wit of the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, who contrives to tell the king such fascinating tales that her expected execution is delayed for a thousand and one nights, until the king no longer cherishes any hate in his heart for womankind. Thus we have the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, compiled from various sources and very unequal in value, but presenting as a whole a wonderful kaleidoscopic picture of the life of the East. It is not a finished work of literature, but in such translations as Payne's or Burton's it approximates literature, for under their skillful hands the frequent slovenliness of the original disappears. Lane's translation, though more familiar, is less readable. The edit- ing of Burton's translation displays vast erudition ; indeed, all of his contributions to the study of the East are important. The Western reader will, however, do well to avoid a complete literal translation of the Arabian Xights, both because of its bulk (sixteen volumes in the Burton edition) and because of its frequent coarse- ness, tiresome details, and repetition of incidents. A comparison of a free and popular version, such as Jonathan Scott's, with the literal yet poetic translation of Burton's, is curi- ously interesting. 28 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD SINDBAD'S FIRST VOYAGE Scott's version "One day, whilst under sail, we were becalmed near a small is- land, but little elevated above the level of the water, and resembling a green meadow. The captain ordered his sails to be furled, and permitted such persons as were so inclined to land ; of this num- ber I was one. But while we were enjoying ourselves in eating and drinking, and recovering ourselves from the fatigue of the sea, the island on a sudden trembled, and shook us terribly. The trembUng of the island was perceived on board the ship, and we were called upon to re-embark speedily, or we should all be lost ; for what we took for an island proved to be the back of a sea monster." Burton's version "We came to an island as it were a garth of the gardens of Paradise. Here the captain cast anchor and making fast to the shore, put out the landing planks. So all on board landed and made furnaces and lighting fires therein, busied themselves in various ways, some cooking and some washing, whilst other some walked about the island for solace, and the crew fell to eating and drinking and playing and sporting. I was one of the walkers but, as we were thus engaged, behold the master who was standing on the gunwale cried out to us at the top of his voice, saying, 'Ho there! passen- gers, run for your lives and hasten back to the ship and leave your gear and save yourselves from de- struction, Allah preserve you ! For this island whereon ye stand is no true island, but a great fish stationary a-middlemost of the sea, whereon the sand hath settled and trees have sprung up of old time, so that it is become like unto an island; but, when ye hghted fires on it, it felt the heat and moved : and in a moment it will sink with you into the sea and ye will all be drowned, so leave your gear and seek your safety ere ye die.'" The material of the Thousand and One Nights presents a great variety but falls readily under a few heads. There are histories, LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 29 some of them very long, romantic in character or with romantic episodes, but founded to some extent on known facts. There are many historical anecdotes, largely concerned with a certain line of caliphs. There are fairy tales or romantic stories — and these seem to be the characteristic part of the whole — with supernatural elements ; and other tales j^ — 3^^ told for the sake of the phi- ^^^K^,.^^S ^W losophy or erudition which they display; and, finally, there are beast fables. The verses which are strung through the stories are taken from the classical Arabic poetry and from favorites of later times; they are of unequal merit, some with beautiful im- agery- and others quite com- monplace in sentiment. From the opening words, ''In the name of Allah, the compassionating, the com- passionate! Praise be to Allah, the beneficent king, the creator of the universe, lord of the three worlds," it will be seen that these tales display the reverence and religiosity of the orthodox Moslem ; and they throw an interesting light on the customs and beliefs of the Mohammedan world. Let us call to mind the material of a characteristic Arabian Nights tale ; Prince Camaralzaman is a promising youth, the son of the king of an island realm. When he reaches fifteen years of age his father plans to retire in his favor, and he urges the youth to marry. The prince con- ceives that "infinite mischief" is caused by women, and is alarmed at A STREET IN BAGDAD 30 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD the thought of the hazard a man is obliged to run in selecting a wife. The discussion continues for two years, when the prince, still obdurate, is immured in a tower by his father. A similar situation arises in China, where the emperor has a daughter as fair as the dawn, who rejects all her suitors one by one until her father in anger holds her captive in a single apartment of his palace. In a wall in the prince's tower a fairy, Maimoune, makes her home. She discovers the prince and finds him the handsomest of Allah's crea- tures. An evil genie, Danhasch, in the course of his wanderings, ob- serves Badur, the princess of China, and is ravished by her beauty. Maimoune and Danhasch meet by chance while they are flying in mid- air. Contending over the beauty of prince and princess, they resolve to compare them side by side, and the genie transports the princess as by a flash of lightning to the tower where the prince lies asleep. The prince awakes, falls desperately in love with Badur, exchanges rings with her, and falls asleep again. The princess is aroused. She in her turn is enamored of Camaralzaman and decides forthwith that if this is the suitor provided by her father she is finally of an agree- able mind. She sleeps and is returned by the genie to her palace in China. In the morning the prince demands the hand of his princess in mar- riage, but no princess can be found, and in his sorrow he wastes away on a bed of sickness. Badur tells of her experiences and is looked upon as mad. Her father proclaims that anyone who will cure her is to marry her and become heir to the throne, but anyone who fails is to die. The task is difficult, and one hundred and fifty in turn lose their lives. Badur has a nurse, whose son Marzavan is a sort of foster brother of hers. He returns from a journey, learns the court news, and is secretly introduced to Badur's apartment, where he agrees to travel far and wide to locate Prince Camaralzaman. Marzavan journeys for four months and then reaches a region where there is talk of the prince and of his unfortunate illness. Marzavan fol- lows the clue, presents himself, and gives out that he can effect a cure. This he does marvelously, and he and Camaralzaman escape from the island kingdom and make their way to China. Here Camaralzaman in- troduces himself as a skilled astrologer and offers to restore Badur. All wonder at his youth and beauty and attempt to dissuade him, but in vain. He sends a note disclosing his identity and inclosing the princess's ring, and Badur rushing out to greet him falls into her lover's arms. There is great rejoicing and a magnificent wedding. The feasting continues for several months. LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 31 Time fails to tell of Camaralzaman and Badur's further adventures, their separation on the way to the prince's father's home, the loss of Badur's talisman, Camaralzaman's danger in the city of the idolaters, his discovery of an underground treasure, the miraculous recovery of the talisman, the happy reunion, etc. It is a tale of pure romance, and about it hangs the glamor of the East. We have all dwelt in this enchanted land and have been en- thralled at some time or other by these wonderful tales. The very titles bring back vivid memories : ''Story of the Three Calenders," "Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor," ''History of Ganem, the Slave of Love," "Story of the Hunchback," "Story of Aladdin and the Won- derful Lamp," "Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," "Story of the Enchanted Horse." And we feel grateful to the sultan of the Indies who needed entertainment to cure him of his cruel designs, and to the lovely Scheherazade who told the tales. "A thousand and one nights had passed away in these innocent amusements, which contributed so much towards removing the sultan's unhappy prejudice against the fidelity of women. His temper was softened. He was convinced of the merit and great wisdom of the sul- taness Scheherazade. He remembered with what courage she had offered to be his wife, without fearing the death to which she knew she exposed herself, as so many sultanesses had suffered within her knowledge. "These considerations, and the many other good qualities he knew her to possess, induced him at last to forgive her. 'I see, lovely Sche- herazade,' said he, 'that you can never be at a loss for these little stories, which have so long diverted me. You have appeased my anger. I freely renounce the law I had imposed on myself. I restore your sex to my favourable opinion, and will have you to be regarded as the de- liverer of the many damsels I had resolved to sacrifice to my unjust resentment.' "The sultaness cast herself at his feet, and embraced them tenderly with all the marks of the most lively and perfect gratitude. "The grand vizier was the first who learned this agreeable intelli- gence from the sultan's own mouth. It was instantly carried to the city, towns, and provinces ; and gained the sultan, and the lovely Sche- herazade his consort, universal applause, and the blessings of ail the people of the extensive empire of the Indies."^ 1 Translation by Scott. 32 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD A Few General Reference Works Warner. Library of the World's Best Literature (45 vols.) . United States Publishers Association. LoLiEE. A History of Comparative Literature. G. P. Putnam's Sons. MouLTON. World Literature. The Macmillan Company. Carlyle. Lectures on the History of Literature. Charles Scribner's Sons. Lectures on Literature. Columbia University Press. There are several collections of classics, of which Everyman's Library is the most complete. Send to E. P. Button & Company for list. Reference List Breasted. Ancient Times. Ginn and Company. Breasted. History of Egypt. Charles Scribner's Sons. Warner Library. Articles on Egyptian literature and other similar articles. Max MiJLLER (Ed.). Sacred Books of the East (50 vols.). Oxford Uni- versity Press. Trubner. Oriental Series (about 50 vols.). Kegan Paul, London. LuzAC. Semitic Text and Translation Series (18 vols.). Luzac and Com- pany, London. HoRNE (Ed.). Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East (14 vols.). Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb. Literatures of the World. D. Appleton and Company. Volumes on Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Arabic literatures. Frazer. A Literary History of India. Charles Scribner's Sons. Browne. A Literary History of Persia (2 vols.). Charles Scribner's Sons. Nicholson. A Literary History of the Arabs. Charles Scribner's Sons. Breasted. Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. Charles Scribner's Sons. Maspero. Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Harper. Assyrian and Babylonian Letters. University of Chicago Press. Hopkins. The Great Epic of India. Charles Scribner's Sons. Dutt (Tr.). The Ramayana and the Mahabharata (Everyman's Library). E. P. Button & Company. Taylor. Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers of the Ancient World. The Macmillan Company. Tagore. Several volumes. The Macmillan Company. Several other works have been mentioned in the text of the chapter. Suggested Topics Egyptian literature and thought. A geographical study of Asia. The maxims of Confucius. The migrations of the Indo-Europeans. LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT 33 Religions of Asia — a comparative view. The epics of India. Rabindranath Tagore and his writings. The Shah Namah of Persia. Omar Khayyam and his philosophy of life. The typical life and thought of the East. Tales from the Arabian Nights. CHAPTER III THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE The Hebrew people have made by far the greatest contribution to the literature of the East. It is the East that has developed the religious systems of the world, and here too the Hebrew contribu- tion is preeminent — unmatched in purity of thought, in profound understanding of the problems of life, and in depth of spiritual in- sight. The poetic imagery and the sustained and pellucid narra- tive, to say nothing of the religious ideas, of the books of the Old and the New Testament make a universal appeal. It is not to be wondered at that a few centuries ago our ancestors were called ''the people of a Book," or that in our more complex days the Bible con- tinues to be the most widely distributed of books in our language, as in most languages. It has been used on occasion as a source of despotic dogma and as an authority on all matters of history and science, but more commonly as the determining rule of life for the guidance of men. Our own study of it, however, in this place will be based upon its value as a work of literature. Contents. The Old Testament, as given in our English Bible, consists of thirty-nine books, comprising prophetical, or prophetical- historical, legal, and poetic writings dating from approximately looo to 100 B.C. The New Testament contains twenty-seven books, all written probably in the first one hundred and fifty years of our era, and presents the life and sayings of Jesus and the history and literature of the early Christian Church. These sixty-six books form a library produced by many authors widely separated in time and circumstances of life — practically all, however, of one race and with an underlying purpose in their writings that gives the entire work a marvelous unity and coherence. Matters of history. The traditions of the Hebrew people carry them back to the patriarch Abraham, who, reputed to have come 34 THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 35 from Mesopotamia, settled in Palestine at a very early period. His descendants, nomads like himself, dwelt in that land for some generations until, driven by famine, they entered Eg>-pt and there remained for a few centuries, first as welcome visitors and then as slaves. Under the leadership of Moses, a striking national figure, they escaped from Egypt and, after many vicissitudes in the wilder- ness, reached the borders of their ancestral home, Palestine (the "Promised Land"). Here Moses died, leaving the leadership to Joshua, w'ho entered the land and began the slow process of winning it over from the more highly civilized peoples (nearly all Semites, like the Hebrews) who dwelt there. From this point forward we are on more certain historic ground. The close of a rude period of conquest and settlement came with the establishment of a monarchy. David, the second king, is on the whole a fine, heroic type of man, notable for his courage, his attrac- tive personality, his abounding vitality, and his instinct for leader- ship. The height of his reign was approximately 1000 B.C. He unified the kingdom, subjugated the enemies within his borders, ex- tended his territory from the edge of the desert at the south to the foothills of Mount Hermon at the north (one hundred and fifty miles), and was a prominent factor in creating a national spirit and advancing literature and religion. The despotism of his successor, however, led to the disruption of the kingdom. Israel at the north and Judah at the south presented thereafter a divided front to their greedy neighbors, and in the end (Israel 722 b.c. and Judah 586 b.c.) were taken into captivity by the Assyrians and Babylonians. The remnant that returned under the edict of Cyrus (538 b.c.) and thereafter were mainly people of Judah. By this time members of the Hebrew race had come to be known generally as Jews, and this is their designation to this day. Jerusalem, the capital city, remained the center of thought and faith during the closing centuries of the Old Testament period. For six hundred years the chief spokesmen of the Jews were the prophets, whose double function it was to give a message to their times and to look forward to better days and the coming of a de- liverer. Palestine was ruled successively by Babylonians, Persians, 36 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD and Greeks, and for some years before the birth of Christ was part of the Roman Empire. The hfe and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth have profoundly af- fected the thought of the world. His is the most impelling figure in all history. For thirty years he lived quietly in his Galilean home, sixty-five miles north of Jerusalem, following the trade of a car- penter, and then for two and a half years went about from place to place, proclaiming by precept and example a new program of righteousness, until his cruel execution as a common malefactor. About forty years later (a.d. 70) Titus destroyed Jerusalem. There- after the history of the Jews became merged more and more defi- nitely with that of other nations. Literature as related to history. Palestine is a little land, and the Hebrews were an isolated people, preserving the purity of their race and maintaining tenaciously their peculiar institutions. How- ever, influences came to them constantly from the great world be- yond and enriched their life and literature. To the southwest of Palestine was Egypt, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, always to be reckoned with politically and culturally. Nearer at hand was Philistia, where dwelt a non-Semitic and highly artistic and civi- lized people. To the north was Syria, with its capital Damascus, — a constant factor in Hebrew history and on occasion a menace to He- brew national existence. Most important of all was Assyria, the great aggressive nation to the east, the seat of a civilization ancient even in Hebrew times. The early Semitic traditions of the creation and of the Flood the Hebrews possessed in common with the Meso- potamian peoples, and Babylonian legislation became the basis of that of Moses. Caravans from Assyria to Egypt crossed Palestine from northeast to southwest, and other well-traveled trade routes brought a constant procession of people of other lands. Spices and treasures of the Far East were also carried across the desert from the south. In times of war, soldiers marched and countermarched on the soil of Palestine. The people of Israel became involved, in spite of themselves, in age-long quarrels. It is not surprising, there- fore, that they were deeply affected by the culture, ideas, and for- tunes of their neighbors. THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 37 The primitive age of Hebrew literature covers roughly the five hundred years before David. It was a period of oral traditions, during which ideas were being formulated regarding the origin of the universe and the beginnings of human history, and traditions were being collected of the Hebrew people, their experiences in Egypt, and their exploits in the conquest of the land. On the legal side a great body of precepts, laws, tribal usage, and Semitic legis- lation was taking shape. Poetry was represented by the epics of the creation and the Flood, taken over from other Semitic sources but purified of their baser elements in a wonderful way ; also by such fragments of popular song as the Song of the Well, "Spring up, O well, sing ye unto it,"^ and by war songs, such as the magnificent, even if brutally barbaric, Song of Deborah in Judges v, and the Song of Moses in Exodus xv (for example, verses 6-8) : "Thy right hand, Lord, is become glorious in power : Thy right hand, Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown those that rose up against thee : Thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, The floods stood upright as an heap, And the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea." Finally, there survive from this time popular fables and riddles in poetic form, such as the riddles of Samson (Judges xiv and xv) and Jotham's fable (Judges ix). The next period (1050-750 B.C.) has been termed "the creative age of poetic composition and prophetic narration." The main body of the historical-prophetic material from Genesis to 2 Kings be- longs to this period, including such hero and primitive stories as seem to be quoted from early writings now lost. Codes and other legal material in written form date from this time ; also poetic ex- tracts such as the popular proverbs given in i Samuel x and .xxiv, the blessing of Jacob, and the Balaam oracles. 1 Numbers .xxi, 17. 38 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD Then came the great age of literary production in Palestine and in the lands of exile (750-400 b.c), the period of the prophets — Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Second Isaiah, and others. The codes in Deuteronomy and Ezekiel, the memoirs of Nehemiah, and a body of priestly material belong to this period. On the poetic side we have Lamentations and many of the Psalms. THE LATER TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM AS ENLARGED AND BEAUTIFIED BY HEROD A reconstruction by Schick The closing three centuries of the Old Testament period were an age of retrospection and imitation. The last of the prophets belong to these centuries, the writers of the apocrj-phal (or non-canonical) books, the collectors of the prophetic and priestly narratives and of the psalter, and the writers of such books as Esther, Job, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. The Old Testament canon was fixed, and a Greek translation of the Old Testament was made. The order of appearance of the books of the New Testament need not especially concern us. It was not until the close of the second century that a definite collection of sacred books relating to the life and teachings of Jesus and to the history of the early THE BIBLE AS LITER.\TURE 39 Church formed an authoritative canon, the New Testament as we have it — writings of the early apostles or followers of Jesus, and of those who wrote under their direction or inlluence. First in impor- tance, though not first in appearance, are four biographies of Jesus, the Gospels. The remainder are letters or epistles to the churches or to individuals ; one book of history ; and finally the book of Revelation, closing the canon, mystical in its nature, with close re- lationship to several Old Testament writings. Collections and versions. The Jewish canon of the Old Testa- ment consisted of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings — five books of the Law (the Pentateuch), eight books of the Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Minor Prophets), and eleven Writings (all the remaining books). The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but parts of Daniel and Ezra are in Aramaic, or northern Semitic, dialect. In the second century B.C. seventy Jewish scholars made in Alexandria a Greek version, the Septuagint. The quotations from the Old Testa- ment found in the New are generally taken from this version, and the New Testament writings were all in the Greek language — Hellenistic Greek. The Old Testament section of the Latin version of the Bible. — the Vulgate, — completed by St. Jerome in a.d. 405, was taken from the Septuagint. We are, however, naturally more interested in the English ver- sions of the Bible. There have been ten chief versions, of which the most important are Wycliffe's, Tyndale's, the King James (or the Authorized), the Roman Catholic, the Revised, and the .Ameri- can Revised. The version bearing Wycliffe's name was completed (about 1388) a few years after his death ; Tyndale's version dates from 1526 and later. The New Testament in the Roman Catholic Bible was published at Reims in 1582, "translated faithfully into English out of the authentical Latin, according to the best corrected copies of the same, diligently conferred with the Greek and other editions in various languages," etc. The Old Testament was issued at Douai in 1609-1610. Thoroughgoing revisions of the Reims and Douai Testaments appeared in 1 749-1 750 and again in 1763- 40 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD 1764, and these are the versions used at the present day by English- speaking Roman Catholics.^ The Authorized Version was projected as early as 1604 and undertaken by about fifty divines, at King James's command. It was issued in 161 1. The beauty and dignity of its style and the felicity of its phrases must be recognized by every reader. No other version can be compared with it, and, notwithstanding its occasional mistakes, it has not been superseded to any extent by later versions. It served in large measure to fix our English speech, and it is one of the chief glories of the Golden Age that produced it. The title-page stated that the text was "newly translated out of the original tongues, with the former translations diligently compared and re- vised." Parallel readings of the following familiar passage (Matthew vii, 24-27) will be instructive: WYCLIFFE, 1389 "Therfore eche man that herith these my wordis, and doth hem, shal be maad liche to a wijse man, that hath bildid his hous vpon a stoon. And rayn came doua, and flodis camen, and wyndis blewen, and rusheden in to that hous; and it felle nat doun, for it was foundid on a stoon. And euery man that herith these my wordis, and doth hem nat, is liche to a man fool, that hath bildid his hous on grauel. And rayn came doun, and floodis camen, and wyndis blewen, and thei hurliden in to that hous; and it felle doun, and the fallyng doun therof was grete." TYNDALE, 1526 "Whosoever hearethe off me these saynges, and doethe the same, I wyll liken hyme vnto a wyse- man, which by lit his housse on a rocke : and aboun- dance off rayne descend- ed, and the fluddes cam, and the wynddes blewe, and bett vppon that same housse; and it was not overthrowen, because it was grounded on the rocke. And whosoever heareth of me thesesainges.and doth not the same, shalbe ly- kened vnto a folysh man, which bilt his housse apon the sonde. And abun- daunceof raynedescended, and the fluddes cam, and the wynddes blewe, and beet vppon that housse; and it was overthrowen, and great was the fall off it." KING JAMES, 1611 {Original spelling) "Therefore, whosoeuer heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I wil liken him vnto a wise man, which built his house vpon a rocke: and the raine descended, and the floods came, and the windes blew, and beat vpon that house: and it fell not, for it was founded vpon a rocke. And euery one that heareth these sayings of mine, and do- eth them not, shall bee likened vnto a foolish man, which built his house vpon the sand : And the raine descended, and the floods came, and the windes blew, and beat vpon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." ^By way of comparison with the Authorized Version the Twenty-third Psalm as given in the Douai Bible (revised) will be of interest: "The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing. He hath set me in a place of pasture. He hath brought me up. on the water of refreshment : he hath con- verted my soul. He hath led me on the paths of justice, for his own name's sake. THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 41 Of the Authorized Version, Father Faber has remarked : "It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotteru ... It is part of the national mind and the anchor of national seriousness. The power of all the griefs and trials of man is hidden beneath its words." Old-Testament Poetry Hebrew is a primitive language. There is no involved syntax, no elaboration in the structure of the sentence. A simple "and" is a frequent initial word. The vocabulary is restricted. In the poetry the effect is produced by the natural rhythms, which, as Professor Rhys points out, "can be transferred without any loss into equiva- lent idioms, and its 'parallelism' can be repeated with almost the same haunting felicity and with more than a trace of its native magic, in other tongues." Abundant examples show that the Hebrew mind was deeply im- pressed with the wonders and beauties of the created world. The Biblical writers looked upon nature as an expression of the power and love of God, and when nature thoughts find expression, the characteristic, indeed, the exclusive, note is religious. "He made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies." — 2 Samuel ,xxii "He [the righteous man] shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season ; his leaf also shall not wither ; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." — Psalms i "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." — Psalms xix 'Tie [the Lord] maketh me to lie down in green pastures : he leadeth me beside the still waters." — Psalms xxiii "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, God." — Psalms xlii For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. Thou hast prepared a table before me. against them that afflict me. Thou hast anointed my head with oil ; and thy chalice which inebriateth me. how goodly is it ! And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life. .\nd that 1 may dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days." \ , j4 BIBLE R'^l fS\jitly Daiijlated out of J^tS' "^"^ e fii er Trji flj fin 1 . m lu 5 t I ■VlX- Vr>. * c f J cr Tra fli w i i ^^t — ■^^ Ali Icsfpcca Com m-rJcm nt 1 >,cc Jv TITLE-PAGE OF FIRST EDITION OF KING JAIMES BIBLE THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 43 "Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it : thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water : thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it. "Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. "Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness. "They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side. "The pastures are clothed with flocks: the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout with joy, they also sing.''^ — Psalms Ixv "The sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for her- self, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, Lord of hosts, my King, and my God." — Psalms Ixxxiv "As for man, his days are as grass : as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. "For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone : and the place thereof shall know it no more." — Psalms ciii "Thou art clothed with honor and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment : who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain, "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters : who maketh the clouds his chariot : who walketh upon the wings of the wind : "Who maketh his angels spirits: his ministers a flaming fire: "Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever. "Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment : the waters stood above the mountains. "At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. . . . "He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills. "They give drink to every beast of the field : the wild asses quench their thirst. "By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches." — Psalms civ iCf. "The mountains and the hili.'^ shall bn-ak forth before you into sing- ing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." — Isaiah Iv 44 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters ; "These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. "For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which hfteth up the waves thereof. "They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths : their soul is melted because of trouble. "They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. "Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. "He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. "Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven." — Psalms cvii "He [God] is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hard- ened himself against him, and hath prospered? "Which removeth the mountains, and they know not: which over- turneth them in his anger. "Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble. "Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars. "Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea. "Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south. "Which doeth great things past finding out ; yea, and wonders without number. "Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not : he passeth on also, but I perceive him not." — Job ix Of such poetry as this — simple, searching, eloquent — who shall speak ? Note that, apart from the rhythm and the sublimity of the ideas, the effect is produced by a parallelism of structure, a balanc- ing of one line or phrase with another : (i) "Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, (2) and in their death they were not divided." (i) "They were swifter than eagles; (2) they were stronger than hons." THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 45 (i) "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; (2) the world, and they that dwell therein." (i) "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? (2) the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" Sometimes the phrases are in antithesis : (i) "Though your sins be as scarlet, (2) they shall be as white as snow; (i) "Though they be red like crimson, (2) they shall be as wool." Sometimes the first portion is incomplete and the second is both repetition and completion : (i) "Give unto the Lord, ye sons of the mighty, (2) give unto the Lord glory and strength." Sometimes the parallelism consists in the putting and answering of a question : (i) "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? (2) "He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart ; who hath not Ufted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." In a passage such as Psalm cxix the arrangement is artificial and less poetic : every verse contains a synonym of the word "law," and the entire poem is in the form of an acrostic of the Hebrew alphabet, each stanza containing eight couplets commencing with a single letter. Another poem equally conscious of form but far more beautiful in content is the book of Lamentations, a dirge acrostic the scheme of which is very elaborate and interesting (see Driver's ''Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament" and Moulton's "Modern Reader's Bible"). Lyric poems of great beauty crowd upon us as we turn the leaves of the Hebrew poetic books. They express many human emotions, with, -however, a notable absence of humor and other lightsome qualities. Sadness and longing: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea. we wept, when we remembered Zion. "We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. 46 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD "For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" — Psalms cxxxvii * «: -C — HEBREW MANUSCRIPT (DEUTERONOMY IX, 5 END) "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people ! how is she become as a widow ! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary ! " — Lamentations i Praise : • "Serve the Lord with gladness ; come before his presence with singing. "Know ye that the Lord he is God : it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves ; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." Psalms c THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 47 Awe and adoration : "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; "Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me ; even the night shall be light about me. "Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day : the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. — Psalms cxxxix Contrition : "Have mercy upon me, God, according to thy lovingkindness : according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my trans- gressions. "Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. "For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me." — Psalms li Trust : "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. "I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress : my God; in him will I trust." — Psalms xci Love: "For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord piticth them that fear him. "For he knoweth our frame; he remcmbercth that we are dust." Psalms ciii There is an excjuisite love poem in the Bible that has fortunately been preserved to us — The Song of Songs — which seems foreign to 48 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD the general purpose and unity of the Old Testament. It consists of a cycle of songs celebrating a marriage. Here, as in other cases, a comparison with similar oriental literature shows the essential nobility and purity of the Hebrew conceptions. " My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; "The flowers appear on the earth ; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land ; "The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the ten- der grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. . . . "My beloved is mine, and I am his : he feedeth among the hlies. "Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether." The Song of Solomon ii, 10-17 Many other passages in this poem have equal beauty. Out of the later, thoughtful, chastened, philosophic Old Testa- ment period comes the Book of Job. "A noble Book," says Carlyle ; "all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never- ending Problem, — man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in- this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines ; grand in its sin- cerity, in its simplicity ; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcile- ment." It is a great world poem, one of the most magnificent poems in all literature. In the sense that it presents a single theme, a great theme, and a complete theme, it is an epic. The contro- versies between Job and his three friends suggest the analogy of the Platonic dialogue. A parallel may also be drawn with .^schylus's tragedy "Prometheus Bound." Professor Genung points this out and traces the struggle of Job upward to truth and light by means of "five acts or stages with their points of objective." "Act I. To Job's blessing and curse, i-iii. (The stroke devised and executed ; the silent friends ; Job's access of bewilderment.) "Act II. To Job's ultimatum of doubt, iv-x. (Wisdom misfit and in- sipid ; the world-order a hardness and chaos ; Job's plea for mutuahty and mediation.) THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 49 "Act III. To Job's ultimatum of faith, xi-xix. (The friends' false attitude ; Job's life resolve of integrity ; conviction that his Redeemer — next of kin — liveth.) "Act IV. To Job's verdict on things as they are, xx-xxxi. (No out- ward terms of profit and loss ; yet wisdom still supreme ; Job's Hfe record ready for presentation.) "Act V. To the vindicating denouement, xxxii-xlii. (The self- constituted umpire fails ; the whirlwind words display wisdom and power of creation; Job emerges to vindication and mediation.) "^ From Job's opening words, spoken in the access of his grief, "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived, "Let that day be darkness ; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it," to his final submission to God, "[I have] uttered that I understood not ; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not," the book touches the heights and depths of life and the very inner- most of human problems. Our study of Old Testament poetry must close, but much has per- force been passed by — such as the fine Hebrew elegies or laments to be found in Lamentations, in Ezekiel xix, xxvii, and xxxii, and in Isaiah xiv ; striking passages from the philosophic poetry of Prov- erbs ; and the sadly beautiful pictures of Ecclesiastes, particularly the description of old age given in chapter xii. Old-Testament Narratives As we turn to the simple, noble, and searching prose narratives in the books of the Old Testament, our minds revert not only to the days when these stories first held us enthralled but to those far- distant days when by fireside or in market place or in Tent of Meeting or on hilltop in Palestine these tales were told and retold to those ancient peoples, listening thoughtfully and reverently to the traditional account of the beginning of days and of the check- iprom Gcnung's "Guidebook to the Biblical Literature." 50 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD ered experiences of the fathers of their race. Do they seem remote to us ? Are we not moved even as they ? "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Hfe ; and man became a Hving soul." "Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will shew thee : and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great : and thou shalt be a blessing." "And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father and said, My father : and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood : but where is the lamb for a burnt offering ? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering." "And he [Jacob] lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set : and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven : and behold the angels of God ascending and de- scending on it." "God called unto him [Moses] out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither : put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." "So Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch; and they had but newly set the watch : and they blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers that were in their hands. . . . And they cried, The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon." "And Ruth said [to Naomi], Intreat me not to leave thee, or to re- turn from following after thee : for whither thou goest, I will go : and where thou lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God : where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried : the Lord do so to me and more also if ought but death part thee and me." THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 51 "And David sat between the two gates : and the watchman went up to the roof over the gate unto the wall, and lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold a man running alone. . . . And he came apace, and drew near. . . . And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Ab- salom safe? And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is. And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept : and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " "And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said. Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy ser\'ant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. . . . Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces : and they said, The Lord, he is the God ; the Lord, he is the God." Splendid examples of sustained narrative are to be found in all the historical books of the Old Testament, throughout the books of Ruth and Esther, and in the earlier chapters of Daniel, They constitute real literature, and of a noble type. The Prophets An acquaintance with the Hebrew prophets — their hatred of op- pression, their love of holiness and justice, their enduring hope and faith — enriches us. How magnificent a thing to stand by the side of Amos the herdsman of Tekoa as he preached in the streets of Bethel : "For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof ; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes. . . . Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and de- clareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning dark- ness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, The Lord, The God of hosts, is his name." 52 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD How overpowering the message of love and forbearance and pa- tience that came out of the pathetic domestic experience of Hosea 1 How ennobling the pronouncement of Micah : "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thou- sands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" FROM THE FRIEZE OF PROPHETS BY S.^RGENT Most of all, how exalted the outlook of the great prophets of Israel ! The troubles that they suffered were as nothing in the light of the glories of the latter day. ''The work of righteousness," said Isaiah, "shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance forever. And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places." And again: "Break forth into joy, sing together, 3-e waste places of Jerusalem: for the Lord hath comforted his people, he hath re- deemed Jerusalem." Ezekiel, in the land of exile, prophesied: THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE S3 "For I will take you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. . . . And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers ; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God." And that other, greater prophet of the Exile cried : "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye com- fortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accom- plished, that her iniquity is pardoned : for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the FROM THE FRIEZE OF PROPHETS BY SARGENT wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every moun- tain shall be made low : and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain : And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together : for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." The haunting beauty of such passages can scarcely be surpassed. The later thought of the prophets centered in the person of a de- liverer. "The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him," said Isaiah, "the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and 54 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord ; and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord : and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears . . . and righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins." Our view of the Old Testament may fitly terminate with this picture, from the Second Isaiah, of the Suffering Servant who was to atone for the sins of the people : "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities : the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed. "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Isaiah liii The New Testament There is much in the books of the New Testament that carries on, or fulfills, the thought of the Old. The writers told of the life and experiences of one who, as they firmly believed, was the Messiah foretold by the prophets. They were inheritors of the past, and the constant survival of Old Testament ideas in the New gives the two portions of the Bible a unity that every reader must appreciate. When we consider literature as applied to the writings of the New Testament, the four Gospels stand forth preeminent. The Epistles, though they contain the striking passages on love and on immortality in i Corinthians, and other chapters scarcely less note- worthy (for example, Hebrews xii, James iii, i John iii), are not, speaking generally, to be compared with them. The imagery of the book of Revelation is sometimes very beautiful, as in the closing chapters : "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 55 men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and there shall be no more death, nei- ther sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain : for the former things are passed away." "And he shewed me a pure river of water of hfe, clear as cr>'stal. proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of hfe, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit ever>' month : and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." But let us turn our particular attention to the Gospels, as the finest examples of New Testament literature. Note the unmatched felicity of expression in such passages as the following, taken almost at random : "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them : and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them. Fear not : for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all peoples." "Behold the fowls of the air : for they sow not. neither do they reap, nor gather into barns ; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. . . . Consider the hhes of the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin : And yet I say unto you. That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." "Let not your heart be troubled : ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto my- self ; that where I am, there ye may be also." "Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovcst thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord ; thou knowest that I 56 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me ? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord ; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him. Lord, thou knowest all things ; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto CHRIST AND THE YOUNG RULER From the painting by Hofmann him, Feed my sheep. Verily, verily I say unto thee, when thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not." Every reader of the Gospels has noted the unerring instinct of Jesus in dealing with all classes, — rich and poor, wise and ignorant, young and old, — reaching their hearts, solving their problems. He speaks, therefore, a universal language which we can all understand. THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE 57 His use of the parable was unsurpassed, and when he tells of the sower, the prodigal son, or the good Samaritan, everything is in keeping, nothing is superfluous. "I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son : make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." The characteristic message of Jesus is one of love and sympathy. As he understood the heart of man, so he reached more certainly than any other man who ever lived the heart of the Infinite God. To the man of today one of the most interesting things about Jesus is that he was essentially and radically democratic. His soul blazed with indignation at the sight of oppression and wrong. He was the true successor of the Old Testament prophets and must have noted with deep inward satisfaction such passages as "He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor"; "With righteous- ness shall [God] judge the world, and the people with equity"; ''Woe unto them that . . . turn aside the needy from judgment, and take away the right from the poor of my people." To Jesus all men were equal in the sight of God. "I call you not servants," he said to his disciples, "for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth ; but I have called you friends." Xot only did the common people of Jesus' day hear him gladly but, in their turn, the early martyrs, the crofters of the Scottish Highlands, the Huguenots of France, the peasants of Germany, the Pilgrims of Xew England, took comfort and courage in his words. The striving people of all ages have received inspiration from the sayings of this greatest of democratic leaders.^ ^In the foregoing chapter no mention has been made of the extra-Biblical literature of the Hebrews. Of this there is a considerable amount, and some portions reach a high level. We have deemed it advisable, however, to con- fine our study to the Bible. 58 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD Reference List Read the Bible itself (Authorized Version preferably). Genung. Guidebook to the Biblical Literature. Ginn and Company. Driver. Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. Charles Scribner's Sons. Kent. Various books on Biblical study. Send to Charles Scribner's Sons for list. MouLTON. Literary Study of the Bible. The Macmillan Company. Gardiner. The Bible as Literature. Charles Scribner's Sons. MouLTON. Modern Reader's Bible. The Macmillan Company. Rhys (Ed.). Lyrical Poetry from the Bible (2 vols.). E. P. Button & Company. Suggested Topics The relation of Palestine to other lands in Bible times. Old Testament history. New Testament history. Old Testament poetry compared with English or American poetry. Narratives of the Old Testament. Great passages from Isaiah. Ruth: a Biblical idyl. The book of Job. Jesus' use of the parable. Ideas of Jesus on brotherhood and democracy. Quotations from the Bible in current speech and literature. CHAPTER IV GREEK LITERATURE It is but a commonplace to say that our debt to the Greeks is incalculable. Whether the Greek genius applied itself to architec- ture, sculpture, music, literature, government, logic, or speculative thought, the products excelled those of any other people of antiq- uity. We are separated from the Greeks by many centuries, but every intelligent person of today has a certain familiarity with Homer, Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — to mention no others of those who have contributed to the lus- ter of this richly gifted race. Our own culture is based largely on the Greek, or on the Greek through the Latin. In the field of literature we have but to name Milton, Dryden, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne to recall the copious use that our English poets have made of Greek conceptions and themes ; and, indeed, what writer or thinker of the modern world does not hark back, consciously or unconsciously, to the Greek? At many points the Greek literature seems extremely modern. This is not surprising, for the Greeks were a highly civilized race, and in the long history of humanity they lived — to use Professor Robinson's picturesque phrase — but "day before yesterday." We feel our age closely akin to theirs in artistic impulse, keen power of analysis, thirst for knowl- edge, splendid originality, vigorous imagination, and fondness for beauty. Early history. The earliest memorable event which is recorded in Greek literature was the capture (twelfth century b.c.) of Troy, a famous city on the northern coast of Asia Minor. A number of centuries before this (roughly, 2000 b.c.) a branch^ of the Indo- European race — known to us as the Greeks, to themselves as the Hellenes — had migrated from the region of the Black Sea, had settled in the Greek peninsula, and had by degrees taken over iThe vanguard were the .^chaeans; other groups followed later. 59 6o LITERATURE OF THE WORLD the relatively advanced JEgean civilization which they had found. Their predecessors were a white race of a higher stage of culture than their own, and the contact of the Greeks with them was im- portant. The subsequent mastery of the neighboring island of Crete gave the Greeks still further artistic impressions and impulses. One additional step is to be recorded : the capture of ^gean settle- ments in the islands of the .Egean Sea and on the coast of Asia Minor. By looo B.C. the Greek peoples had subdued the entire yEgean world. We feel strangely drawn to these earliest Europeans (using the word in the modern sense). They had definitely passed their nomad period, though still retaining many barbaric traits. They had looked upon the wonders of Mycenae and Cnossus and had made them their own. They had mastered the i^gean Sea with their ''swift ships." They had become acquainted with the civilization of Egypt to the south. They had bartered with those earliest of commercial travelers, the Phoenicians, and from them had secured the most valuable of their products, the alphabet. By the close of the period of migration this instrument of thought was recording the earliest Greek literature. Part of the Greek inheritance consisted of hero tales or sagas, folk stories, songs, legends — going back to the old pre-Dorian Achreans and to the ^gean peoples. The Greeks were a mixed race and spoke many dialects. They stood at the end of an age. INIount Olympus was still the home of their gods. They had a peculiar fondness for such heroic stories as the exploits of Perseus, the labors of Hercules, the feats of Theseus, the quarrels of the royal house of Thebes, the Argonautic expedition, the capture of Troy, the return of the heroes. And in their later and more sophisticated days they turned to such tales as to a great storehouse for literary material. The Homeric Epics The earliest Greek literature is epic in form. Epic poems were recited by bards and were transmitted from one generation to the next. Probably this type of poetry was very common by 900 b.c. The greatest of all epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, drew GREEK LITERATURE 6i upon the subject matter of earlier poems and in turn were suc- ceeded by a whole cycle of minor epics of varying value. The Greeks thought of the epic as poetry that was recited, not sung to music (as in the case of the lyric), and as narrative, not acted, poetry (as distinguished from dramatic). Aristotle's definition of the epic is more specific. He asserts that it must have a dignified theme, organic unity, and orderedprogress. Theevents must form a connected series and move to a common end. We think of the epicasbeing also frequently national in character, narrating events which a people may deem most worthy of remem- brance in its history. The Iliad and the Odys- sey existed in practically their present form by the end of the ninth century B.C. They seem to have been lost sight of for a consider- able period and then to have reappeared. Public recita- tions made Homeric poetry generally known. There is in one of the Platonic dialogues a striking picture of Ion, the rhap- sodist, who went from place to place and, in embroidered dress and wreath, addressed as many as twenty thousand persons at a time. He was carried out of himself "in the recitation of some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet, or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or the sorrows of Andromache, Hecuba or Priam." ^ At the tale of pity his eyes 1 Translation by Jowett. HOMER 62 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD were filled with tears, and when he spoke of horrors his hair stood on end and his heart throbbed. From Plato's "■ Protagoras" we learn of the large place occupied by the writings of Homer in the educa- tion of Greek youth during the great Attic period. The Greeks regarded him as their earliest historian and as an authority. Herod- otus and the later biographers accepted early traditions of an ac- tual Homer (who had lived about 850 B.C.), the author of both Iliad and Odyssey. Modern literary criticism has been much con- cerned for a century or more with the Homeric question. Fascinat- ing as the subject is, we cannot enter into it in this place. The identity of Homer cannot be determined. While it is not certain that one poet produced both Iliad and Odyssey, there has been in recent years a strong movement in the direction of accepting a single authorship.^ Scholarship and archaeology seem to prove the existence of the Homeric Troy and a general Greek expedition which resulted in its overthrow after a long siege. The background. Life in the Homeric Age (approximately 1000 B.C.) was in most respects exceedingly primitive. Travel by water was by means of boats, covered only at bow and stern and propelled by oars, or by a sail when the breeze was favorable. Easy stages were made by daylight from island to island until the main- land was reached. The Homeric geographical knowledge is limited by the ^Egean Sea and the surrounding lands. Beyond is a region of rumor and terror. To the north are nomads, to the south ''swart faces,'' "remotest of men." Odysseus' journeys are in the realm of fancy. Homer thinks of the world as a round plane about which flows the river Oceanus, and of the sky as a roof supported by pillars upheld by Atlas. The main occupations of the people in Homeric times were agri- culture and the raising of cattle. The chase was popular; fishing was looked down upon. Flesh was the principal food, and wine diluted by water was the universal drink. ISIany of the metals were known, and formidable and artistic armor was already fashioned. Slaves did the menial work. Weaving was a favorite occupation of the women. The house of a chieftain was commodious, and free iSee Scott's "The Unitv of Homer." GREEK LITERATURE 63 hospitality was dispensed. We have a fine picture of graciousness and good taste in the account of the house of Priam in the IHad and of ]\Ienelaus and Helen in the Odyssey, while by way of contrast a view is given of a house in disorder — Penelope struggling with un- toward conditions. There seems to have been free social intercourse between the sexes ; monogamy was universal. The picture presented by Homer is perhaps drawn too favorably, for we must remember that the epics were recited in court circles, and disagreeable in- cidents were largely excluded. In our own society Helen would be looked upon askance, yet she is taken back by Menelaus and re- stored to her full position at his court. It was a time of piracy and robbery on sea and land. Enemies were treated brutally and dead bodies defiled. The system of gov- ernment was primitive : the king was little more than a chieftain, whose power was slight except in time of war. Single combat seems to have been the rule on the battlefield. Great heroes are described at length and the common soldier is ignored. "But when he heard one of the lower sort Shouting and brawling, with the royal wand He smote him, and reproved him sharply, thus : 'Friend, take thy seat in quiet, and attend To what thy betters say.'"^ We learn little from Homer of the condition of the poor. \ IVIahaffy makes an interesting comparison between the Homeric ' hero and the medieval knight. The cardinal principles of the latter involve courage, truth, compassion, and loyalty. The princes of the Iliad and the Odyssey are frequently brave, with a certain furi- ous rage that brings certain victory, but their courage is spasmodic. Even Hector does not disdain to flee before the onset of Achilles. Both gods and men have a low standard of truthfulness : deceit is frequent, and the wily Odysseus is praised. Compassion is not in- stinctive but occasional, the rights of women are frequently ignored, and old age is not commonly honored. In general, loyalty is at a 1 Translation by Bryant. 64 literaturp: of the world discount, and there is a notable lack of allegiance to superior au- thority. Moral ideas check men, but gods are under no restraint, as is clear from Hayman's description of Pallas Athene: ''Her character is without tenderness or tie of any sort : it never owns obligation, it never feels pain or privation, it is pitiless ; with no gross appetites, its activity is busy and restless, its partisanship un- scrupulous, its policy astute, and its dissimulation profound." At death the Homeric hero is accorded elaborate funeral rites and his body is cremated. The rites are important, since until they are performed his spirit cannot mingle with other spirits in Hades. On the way to Hades is Erebus, a place of gloom. In the nether world a spirit is "strengthless," although its occupation is that of the living man. Odysseus is able to converse with the spirits by giving them strength through a draught of the blood of a sheep. The characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey. On the Greek side there are eight heroes of the first rank. Agamemnon, com- mander in chief of the expedition against Troy, is king of Mycenae. His brother, Menelaus — the theft of whose wife, Helen, by Paris, son of Priam of Troy, is the occasion of the expedition — is petulant, a mighty warrior, an implacable enemy. Achilles ; Ajax Telamon ; Diomed ; the aged Nestor ; Patroclus, friend of Achilles ; and the wise and crafty Odysseus complete the circle. In the Iliad Achilles is the chief character, and his "wrath" the controlling element. In the Odyssey we are concerned with Odysseus, who is now ''the much-enduring" and altogether a finer personality than in the earlier epic. Opposed to the Greeks are the no less redoubtable leaders of the Trojans, to whom Homer does full justice : Priam, the king ; his sons, Hector, Paris, and Deiphobus; their relative -(Eneas; and Glaucus and Sarpedon. Of this number Hector is the great heroic figure. Only Achilles is able to overthrow him. Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen in the Iliad, and Nausicaa, Penelope, and the restored Helen in the Odyssey are all clearly and admirably drawn. In a barbaric age these women are sensi- tive, gracious, delicate, courageous, beautiful — all types of true womanliness. GREEK LITERATURE 65 The Olympic gods, dwelling in their home among the clouds and mingling in the affairs of men, make interesting figures, as clearly defined as the Homeric men and women. Zeus (Jupiter) aimed at impartiality in the fortunes of Troy. Hera (Juno), Athene (Minerva), and Poseidon (Neptune) favored the Greeks; Aphro- dite (Venus) and Ares (Mars), the Trojans. Phoebus Apollo took sometimes one side, sometimes the other. The following outline indicates in very condensed form the material of the Iliad and the Odyssey: THE ILIAD It is the tenth year of the war, and the Greeks are on the plain of Troy besieging the city. A furious quarrel arises in the Greek camp between Agamemnon and Achilles over the female captive Briseis, who is claimed by Agamemnon. Achilles yields the point, but with- draws from the conflict and sulks in his tent. Nevertheless Agamem- non, misled by a dream, induces his host to make a general attack upon the Trojans. At the moment of attack Paris, spurred on by Hector, challenges Menelaus to single combat, the result to decide the war. Paris is worsted, but is saved by Aphrodite and there is no decision. The gods succeed in breaking the truce between the two armies, and a furious general battle is waged, with heroic exploits by Diomed, Ajax, and Hector. The Greeks, with fortune against them, are driven back to their camp and build a wall for protection. Zeus commands that the gods shall be impartial. An embassy, headed by Odysseus, is sent to Achilles, for the Greeks are in sore straits, but Achilles answers with scorn and withholds his assistance. In the ensuing battle Agamemnon does heroic deeds until he is wounded, but by slow degrees the Greeks lose ground, and finally Hector breaks through the Greek wall at the head of his troops. However, the god Poseidon at this point eludes the vigilance of Zeus and aids the Greeks in person. Both sides show great prowess. Hector is wounded by Ajax, but he is restored by Apollo, and the Trojans force the Greeks back to their ships, where Ajax proves the chief tower of defense. Patroclus pleads the Greek cause with his friend Achilles and, borrowing the armor of Achilles, appears in the Greek ranks in the guise of the mighty leader, thus bringing a turn in the fortunes of the Greeks. Back the Trojans are driven, but Patroclus is ultimately slain by Hector. There is a desperate struggle for his body. Achilles, informed of the loss of his friend, is filled with grief, and his 66 LrrKRATURl-: Ol- THE WORLD raRc against Hector is unbounded. He is reconciled to Agamemnon and enters the fight clad in a glorious suit of armor forged by Hephaestus. The battle is on a stupendous scale ; even the gods descend from high Olympus and join forces with both sides, ^neas is saved from Achilles only by the interposition of Poseidon, and Hector by Apollo. In his rage .'\chilles even insults the god of the river, who fights with him until Hepha-stus interferes. At last the Trojans, fleeing before Achilles, seek refuge within their gates, but Hector remains to engage in mortal combat with Achilles. In momentary terror he turns and flees and is driven three times around the walls of Troy, until Athene by a trick induces him to face his enemy. Meanwhile Zeus weighs the lots in his golden scales, and the Trojan hero's death is decreed. Hector is slain by Achilles. News of the tragedy causes consternation and sorrow in the city. Achilles drags the body of Hector exultantly around Troy, returns to camp, and there presides over the elaborate funeral rites in honor of Patroclus. The aged Priam of Troy comes by night to plead with Achilles for the body of Hector. His prayer is granted, and Priam returns. With the funeral of Hector the poem closes. THE ODYSSEY Ten years have passed since Troy's fall. Various adventures have hindered Odysseus from reaching his home in Ithaca, and he is now in an island of the far west, detained by the sea nymph Calypso. Athene, planning for his release, visits Ithaca and urges Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, to go in quest of his father. His journey carries him as far as Sparta, where he visits Menelaus and Helen and learns of Odysseus' whereabouts. Penelope in his absence, though sore beset by boisterous and insolent suitors, is comforted by Athene. Calypso is now forced by the gods to let Odysseus go. The hero builds a raft and sails away, only to be wrecked by his old enemy Poseidon. Saved by the goddess Ino, he is cast on the shore of the land of the Phaeacians. Odysseus discov- ers the princess Nausicaa, who leads him to her father's court. Here he narrates his adventures since leaving Troy — first in Thrace, then among the Lotus-eators, then in the land of the Cyclopes. He tells of his ex- periences with the wind god. .T.olus, and the consequent disaster; of his ill luck with the barbarous Laestr>-gonians ; of the sorceries of Circe; of his visit to the abode of the dead and his talks with departed spirits ; of the Sirens, and of the frightful monsters Scylla and Charybdis ; of the slaughter of the sacred cattle of the sun, the loss of his men, and his final escape to Caly-pso's isle. The friendly Phaeacians convey Odys- GREEK LITERATURE 67 seus to Ithaca, and here, with the help of Athene, he takes the disguise of an old beggar. He talks to Eumaeus, his long-time swineherd, but is not recognized. Telemachus at this point returns from his journey and in the dwelling of Eumaeus meets his father, who reveals himself. A plan is made for the overthrow of the suitors. Arrived at the palace in his beggar's garb, Odysseus is recognized by his old dog Argos. Pe- nelope does not know him, but she discloses many facts regarding her present situation. By chance Odysseus' old nurse, Eurycleia, discovers his identity, but guards the secret. A trial of skill with the bow of Odysseus is now proposed to the suitors by Penelope, but in the attempt none of them can as much as bend the bow. The supposed beggar per- forms the task with ease. Odysseus now throws off his disguise and, with the aid of Telemachus and two others, slays the suitors. Penelope in joy discovers her lord. In two episodes Hermes conducts the souls of the suitors to Hades, and Odysseus visits his aged father, Laertes. The poem ends with the solemn peace made between Odysseus and the Ithacans. Technical matters. Homer's verse form is dactylic hexameter. It is a form not very familiar to us, though occasionally used, as by Longfellow in "Evangeline." A few lines from Matthew Arnold's experiments in translating Homer in the original meter will be illuminating : '"I of myself know well, that here I am destined to perish, Far from my father and mother dear : for all that I will not Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed.' So he spake and drove with a cry his steeds into battle." Seymour says : "The language was the most graceful and flexible which the world has ever known. The verse itself would indicate that epic poetry had been cultivated in Greece long before Homer's day. Its laws are fully fixed : its favorite and its forbidden pauses ; the places where a Hght and those where a heavy movement is preferred. No verse known to man is so well suited to a long Greek narrative poem. No other verse has less monotony or more dignity and stateliness. It was nobly 'de- scribed and exemplified' by Coleridge's lines : 'Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows; Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.'" 68 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD In tin- Iliad and the Odyssey there are twenty-four books each, of differing length (the shortest about four hundred lines and the longest about nine hundred). The Iliad is the more imaginative, the Odyssey the more diversified. Both are written in what Matthew Arnold terms "the grand style." He says, "Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner." Epithets and similes abound. Of the latter there are one hundred and eighty in the Iliad and a much smaller number in the Odyssey. Much of the attractiveness and nobility of these epics disappears, of course, in the translation, yet the verse renderings of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and Bryant are all good, as well as the prose transla- tion of Lang, Leaf, and Myers (Iliad) and that of Butcher and Lang (Odyssey). Palmer's rhythmical prose version of the Odyssey should also be mentioned. The extracts given below are taken for the sake of unity from one translation, that of Bryant. Homeric characteristics and poetic qualities. The actual events of the Iliad are confined to a few days. The same sense of unity and compression is gained in the Odyssey by the device of having Odysseus tell to the Phseacian king at a single sitting his varied adventures during the preceding years. The narrative moves on swiftly. In the Iliad the wrath of Achilles dominates everything. His quarrel with Agamemnon affects the Greeks unfavorably at once, as later his fierce rage against Hector spells ruin for the Tro- jans. Hector is doomed long before Zeus lifts the scales. In the Odyssey the impression is conveyed early that Odysseus' long travels away from home are about to close and that vengeance upon the suitors is imminent. Both epics abound in great scenes, as the quarrel between Aga- memnon and .Achilles. Hector's parting with Andromache before the battle, the death of Patroclus, the heroic conflict between Hec- tor and .Achilles. Odysseus' experience with Polyphemus, the en- chantments of Circe, the visit to the dead, the episode of Nausicaa and her maidens, the slaughter of the suitors. To examine in detail both poems would carry us beyond our limits. But let us make a brief study of the Iliad. Our first impres- GREEK LITERATURE 69 sion is of sheer barbarism — blood, dreadful carnage, hatred, fero- cious cruelty, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth : "They met each other man to man ; they rushed Like wolves to combat. Cruel strife looked on Rejoicing." "As on some tall rock Two vultures with curved talons and hooked beaks, Fight screaming, so these two with furious cries Advanced against each other." Achilles is as brave as a lion, but also as savage. "With him there dwells no touch of pity." "Amidst them all the great Achilles stood, Putting his armor on ; he gnashed his teeth ; His eyes shot fire ; a grief too sharp to bear Was in his heart, as, filled with rage against The men of Troy, he cased his limbs in mail." "'Accursed Hector, never talk to me Of covenants. Men and lions plight no faith, Nor wolves agree with lambs, but each must plan Evil against the other. So between Thyself and me no compact can exist. Or understood intent.'" But Homer moves in a large and spacious world, and along with the barbarism of his times, so faithfully recorded, we get as power- ful a picture of heroism and great deeds. "Upon his brow The gleaming helmet nodded as he moved. On every side he tried the phalanxes, If haply they might yield to his assault, Made from beneath that buckler ; but the Greeks In spirit or in order wavered not." 70 LITERATURK 01- THE WORLD "Then they dici fight like fire. You could not say The sun was safe, nor yet the moon, so thick A darkness gathered over the brave men Around the corpse of Mencetiades." The Iliad displays a close observation of men and nature. Many of the similes used are very beautiful and are characterized by great exactness. "The assembly wavered to and fro Like the long billows of the Icarian Sea, Roused by the East wind and the South, that rush Forth from the cloudy seat of Father Jove ; Or like the harvest-field, when west winds stoop Suddenly from above, and toss the wheat." Pallas causes a flame to appear upon Diomed's head, "Like to the autumnal star that shines in heaven Most brightly when new-bathed in ocean tides." Diomed trembles as he beholds the god Mars, "And, as one who, journeying Along a way he knows not, having crossed A place of drear extent, before him sees A river rushing swiftly towards the deep, And all its tossing current white with foam, And stops and turns, and measures back his way, So then did Diomed withdraw." "Not with such noise the ocean-billows lash The mainland, when the violent north wind Tumbles them shoreward ; not with such a noise Roar the fierce flames within the mountain glen, When leaping upward to consume the trees ; And not so loudly howls the hurricane .\mong the lofty branches of the oaks When in its greatest fury, as now rose GREEK LITERATURE 71 The din of battle from the hosts that rushed Against each other with terrific cries." There are a thousand human touches in the Iliad — pictures of life, pathetic incidents, moments of high resolve, reminiscences of personal experiences and common joys. "At once they reared the mast And opened the white sails ; the canvas swelled Before the wind, and hoarsely round the keel The dark waves murmured as the ship flew on." "Paris in the Trojan van pressed on, In presence hke a god. A leopard's hide Was thrown across his shoulders, and he bore A crooked bow and falchion." We have a picture of Helen in the palace, "Weaving there An ample web, a shining double-robe, Whereon were many conflicts fairly wrought." Hector's farewell to Andromache and his child is very beautiful: The boy is frightened at the nodding plume on his father's head, but Hector removes his headdress and kisses the boy and tosses him up in play before he departs. In another place Hector proposes nobly to Ajax on the field of battle : "Let us now Each with the other leave some noble gift, That all men, Greek or Trojan, thus may say : 'They fought indeed in bitterness of heart, But they were reconciled, and parted friends.'" Patroclus, seeking comfort for the disasters of the Greeks, is com- pared to 'A little girl that by her mother's side Runs, importuning to be taken up. 72 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD An