CHAPTER I.
WHAT IS WORLD-LITERATURE?
§ 61. The fundamental facts in literary evolution are the extent of the social group and the characters of the individual units of which it is composed. So long as social and individual life moves within the narrow associations of the clan, or of the city commonwealth, the ideal range of human sympathy is proportionately restricted. It is true that the clan life of the Hebrews supplied in its Beríth or League, in its communal associations of property and descent, the central conceptions of a national ideal. It is true that the city of the Greeks supplied the ideal of Greek centralism as of Greek local patriotism. But before the larger destinies of humanity as a whole could come home to either Hebrew or Greek minds, the associations of the clan and the city commonwealth alike required to be widened by enlarged spheres of social action. This expansion among tribal communities like the Hebrews and Arabs leads to religious cosmopolitanism, to an ideal of human unity deeply social in its character, and strictly confined within the circle of a common creed. A similar expansion in municipal communities like Athens and Rome leads to political cosmopolitanism, to an ideal of human unity within a circle of common culture whose peace is secured by centralised force and whose character is intensely individual. Between the world-religions of Israel and Islâm and the world-cultures of Alexandria and Rome there are, no doubt, very wide differences. Yet, though the former reach universality through social bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through the unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both is to rise above old restrictions of place and time, and to render possible a literature which, whether based on Moses or Homer, may best be termed a "world-literature."
What, then, is world-literature? What are the marks by which it may be known? What is its proper place in the evolution of literature?
The leading mark of world-literature has been already stated; it is the severance of literature from defined social groups—the universalising of literature, if we may use such an expression. Such a process may be observed in the Alexandrian and Roman, the later Hebrew and Arab, the Indian and Chinese, literatures; and this universalism, though differing profoundly in its Eastern and Western conceptions of personality, is alike in the East and West accompanied by the imitation of literary work wrought out in days when the current of social life was broken up into many narrow channels foaming down uplands of rock and tree. Closely connected with this imitation of early models is the reflective and critical spirit, which is another striking characteristic of world-literature. Language now becomes the primary study of the literary artist, and the causes of his devotion to words are not difficult to discover. Just as the language of Hebrew life, in its struggle with Northern and Southern invasion, and in its own internal break-up, underwent a gradual change which necessitated the production of Targûms, or Paraphrases of the Law, Prophets, and Writings, and thus led to a scrupulously exact study of the sacred texts; just as the Sanskrit, in the course of likewise becoming a dead language, roused that spirit of grammatical criticism for which India from early times has been famous; so among Greeks, Romans, and Arabs deterioration in language was met by the rise of verbal criticism. The triumph of Islâm occasioned the corruption of Arabic by making it the official tongue of the conquered, and turned later Arab literature into a pedantic study of classical words which exactly reproduces the Alexandrian spirit. Magdâni, a contemporary of the famous Harîri, collected and explained Arab proverbs precisely in the manner of Suidas; and Harîri's Makâmât, in their forced display of erudition, deserve comparison with the Cassandra of Lycophron. . This development of linguistic criticism, among the Arabs, as a consequence of their world-wide conquests, illustrates the need of Alexandrian criticism, when the conquests of Alexander had made the Greek a world-language and proportionately increased the danger of its being corrupted into barbarous jargons. The corruption of Arabic in foreign lands also illustrates the necessity which Roman writers experienced of setting up a refined standard of speech, opposed at once to plebeian coarseness and to provincial barbarism. The need and value of grammatical studies at Rome may be estimated by the deterioration of language which set in after the Augustan age. "In the first century of the Imperial period," says Professor Teuffel, "prose begins already to decay by being mixed with poetical diction, and becoming estranged from natural expression. The decay of accidence and syntax begins also about this time. Later on the plebeian element found admission; and when the influence of provincial writers, who were not guided by a native sense of the language, and who mixed up the diction and style of all periods, became prevalent in literature, the confusion became still greater." It can be easily understood how the classical language of India, likewise, in its conflict with a great variety of local dialects, came to depend more on the verbal criticism of grammarians than on that creative originality which in our days of national languages, stereotyped by the aid of printing and widely diffused education, is rightly accounted so much more valuable than the study of words.
But, besides the universal idea of humanity and the critical study of language as the medium of sacred books or models of literary art, there is a third characteristic of world-literature which to our modern European minds is perhaps the most interesting. This is the rise of new æsthetic appreciations of physical nature and its relations to man. Among the Hebrews and Arabs, it is true, we cannot observe this characteristic of world-literature so distinctly as elsewhere. For the Hebrews the idea of Yâhveh was so closely connected with physical conceptions—sunshine, storm, rain, lightning, thunder—that the sights and sounds of Nature were scarcely realisable save through the creator-god of his peculiar people. The Allâh of the Arabs is even a closer approach to that One Unhuman Power which modern science tends to reduce into an Impersonal Force; moreover, the Arabs, while, like the Hebrews, prevented from treating Nature as distinct from the Deity, found the proper subjects of their literature within the limits of the Qurʾân's language and ideas. But in India, China, Greece, and Italy it was otherwise. Indian poetry, for example, through the medium of its polytheistic religion, could deify physical nature without offending religious feelings. The myths of early Greece had been closely connected with physical nature; and, though the city commonwealth tended to humanise and rationalise these myths, they remained, even in the days of Greek world-literature, a treasure-house from which Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion could bring forth things new and old for those who were tired of the crowded and dusty thoroughfares of Alexandria. Italy, indeed, had no real mythology of her own, and the purely practical value attached to agricultural life by the old Romans was fatal to any poetical sentiment of Nature; yet in the world-empire of Rome also we find the poet turning away from man to physical nature, and, though the inspiration of Lucretius may smack too much of the savant, and that of Vergil too much of manuals de re rusticâ, we are justified in regarding the world-literature of Rome, like that of India or Greece, as a witness to the sentiment of Nature in man.
But here we must draw a distinction between some of the world-literatures known to history and others. No doubt the habit of realising humanity as a whole accustoms the mind to the contrast between man and physical nature, and sets it the difficult task of reconciling the claims of each; but the social conception of humanity is connected with physical nature in a different manner from the individual conception. Wherever the idea of personality as distinct from all social ties has been reached, the aspects of the physical world are and must be altered. Hence the great differences between the sentiment of Nature as manifested in the Græco-Latin literature of Alexandria and Rome, and the same sentiment as manifested in the literatures of India and China. In the latter no separate relation between each individual and the physical world is observed; all is social, and differences of human personality do not obtrude themselves between the world of Man and the world of Nature. But in the former the isolated feelings of individuals, their personal loves, their personal pains and pleasures, are brought into constant contrast or comparison with Nature's life. The Western idyll is a "picture-poem " of dramatic and descriptive character curiously differing from such abstract, social, and impersonal poetry as India offers in abundance; and, whatever the origin of the idyll may have been, its essential features—dramatic perception of individual character and picturesque description of physical nature—show how differently the individualism of the West looks upon Nature, compared with the monotheistic social view of Hebrews and Arabs and the polytheistic social view of Indians and Chinese.[1]
But, though it may be readily admitted that in the history of the world there have been certain social stages sufficiently similar in the literature they produced and the conditions of their literary production to warrant our use of the word "world-literature," it may be said that our order of treatment—after the literatures of the city commonwealth and before those of the nation—is not in harmony with prevailing ideas of literary development. Why not pass, it may be asked, from the city commonwealth to the nation, and from national literatures reach the universalism of world-literature? No doubt much might be said for this arrangement if the philosophy of ancient Greece, if the language, law, and religion of ancient Rome, were not so closely intertwined with the growth of our European nationalities; if their social and political progress had not been so profoundly affected by the world-wide ideas of Roman law and the Christian religion. But, since it is clearly impossible to treat of national progress in Europe without allowing great weight to these powerful influences, it would be highly inconvenient to pass from the city commonwealth to those national groups whose internal and external developments have owed so much to days of world-empire and world-literature. We shall, accordingly, examine the literary characteristics of the latter before we approach the national groups.
Footnotes edit
- ↑ M. Victor de Laprade (Le Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modernes, p. 216) notes the vastness and profundity of the Indian sentiment of Nature and contrasts it in these respects with the Greek. The source of the difference is plainly to be found in the individualism of Greek contrasted with the socialism of Indian life.