CHAPTER I.
WHAT IS NATIONAL LITERATURE?
§ 87. What is a "nation"? The question has been discussed for a variety of purposes, political and philosophical, without apparently leading to any satisfactory definition, Mr. Freeman, for example,[1] admitting the difficulty of definition, tells us that the word "suggests a considerable continuous part of the earth's surface inhabited by men who at once speak the same tongue and are united under the same government." This unity of territorial possession, language, and government, together with the vague requirement of a "considerable part of the earth's surface," affords an easy mark for captious criticism. At least Mr. Freeman's conception of nationality shows that historical accuracy compels us, while assuming some normal type of nationhood and treating it as if it were permanent, to admit that no definition of nationality can express more than a limited range of truth. Such a definition cannot cover the entire course of national life, for the beginnings of a nation are lost in countless little channels whose union has afterwards formed the full stream; and if we pursue this stream far enough we come out upon an ocean in which distinctions of clan, city commonwealth, nation, are alike lost in cosmopolitanism.
The word "natio" points to kinship and a body of kinsmen as the primary idea and fact marked by "nationality." "Nation," like dêmos, carries us back to the groups of kinsmen in which social communion all the world over is found to begin, But the "nations" of modern Europe have left these little groups so far behind that their culture has either forgotten the nationality of common kinship, or learned to treat it as an ideal splendidly false. Old ideas of common descent have been weakened in European progress by many causes. As the barbarian invaders settled down, ties of communal brotherhood tended to be displaced by ties of locality, just as among the Hebrews "Sons of Israel" had given way to the "Sacred Land." Sir Henry Maine, in his Early History of Institutions,[2] has admirably described this process by which "the land begins to be the basis of society instead of kinship;" and in a familiar passage of his Ancient Law he has traced a corresponding development of territorial from tribal sovereignty. Feudalism, linking personal obligations with the ownership of land, played a prominent part in this development. Moreover, the feudal seigneurs in another way aided in weakening the old sentiments of kinship; like the Roman patricians, they united ideas of privilege and descent, and prevented conceptions of common kinship from being popularised. Feudalism, indeed, based as it was upon the life or death or coming of age of an individual, could not but undermine corporate ideas of clanship and kinship. Christianity, again, but in a very different manner from feudalism, weakened European ideas of national kinship, turning the hopes of the scholar and the serf alike to that great democracy of Christian brotherhood before which all earthly distinctions of national as well as personal descent were but filthy rags in the light of the eternal sun. Thus, if feudal exclusiveness narrowed ideas of descent in a manner likely to chill popular sympathies as soon as "the people" should arise out of isolated bourgs and the serfs, the universal ideas of Christianity also tended to weaken national kinship by counting every individual, irrespective of land or race, as a spiritual unit and nothing more. Finally, the growth of the towns, upon which the growth of national sentiments, as distinct from the localism of feudal life and the universalism of Christianity, was so largely to depend, laid the foundations of a comparative and historical inquiry not to be far pursued without discovering the hybrid character of European nations.
But, though community of blood is disproved by the history of each European nation, vague feelings of common kinship, no doubt supplemented by love of native land, still form the groundwork of national sentiments for the masses. In cultured minds the place of such feelings has been taken by respect for common language and the long line of literary and scientific achievements embodied in that language, and by sympathies with the historical doings and sufferings of those men and women who from age to age have borne the nation's name. To unity of country and government—a material rather than an ideal unity—we must add, as an element of nationality, respect for the monuments of national literature. National literature is an outcome of national life, a spiritual bond of national unity, such as no amount of eclectic study or cosmopolitan science can supply. So thought Goethe, when he said that the Germans of his youth, though acquainted with all the kinds of poetry in which different nations had distinguished themselves, lacked "national material"—"had handled few national subjects or none at all;"[3] and yet Goethe is the admirer of world-literature.
National literatures, then, require a vigorous and continuous national life; and if we seek for perfect types of national literature, we shall find them only under such conditions. In Italy, neither a language delightfully musical nor an early development of individualism of character within her cities could make up for the loss of such a life; nationality was here paralysed by the overlordship of the German emperor, the presence of a world-religion visibly centred in that ancient capital which might have been the heart of an Italian nation, the strife of city commonwealths strangely like and unlike those of ancient Greece. In Germany the isolation of the feudal princes and of the towns aided the cosmopolitan ideas of the Holy Roman Empire in checking the progress of nationality. Russia, long the prey of Asiatic invaders, and exposed as a kind of rude barrier for the security of quiet culture in the West, was equally slow in manifesting signs of national life. In short, we may say that only in England, France, and Spain do we find truly national groups; and, when we remember how the burst of national life in Spain under Charles V. and Philip II. was succeeded by three centuries of comparative stagnation, we may add that, if continuous development be one grand mark of nationality, England and France, especially from a literary standpoint, are the only perfect types of nationhood yet known to history. But they are types to be contrasted as well as compared; and the contrast will enable us to distinguish two aspects curiously different under which national literature has revealed itself.
§ 88. A. W. Schlegel, discussing the progress of the Italian drama, notices the opinion of Calsabigi, that the decline of dramatic poetry in Italy was caused by "the want of permanent companies of players and of a capital." In Italy and Germany, says Schlegel, "where there are only capitals of separate states but no general metropolis, great difficulties are opposed to the improvement of the theatre."[4] These observations of an Italian and a German critic suggest the most vital distinction in the literary development of England and France—the different degrees of literary centralism reached by the two countries.
In the literature of France, since the firm establishment of centralised monarchy in the seventeenth century, we everywhere feel the presence of that centralising spirit which in the Académie Française found a local habitation and a name. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his essay on the literary influence of academies,[5] has shown how much may be said for literary centralism. The improvement of the French language, as the statutes of the Academy bear witness, was the great aim of the institution; and opponents of such institutions must admit the usefulness of this aim and the success of the Academy in this direction. In a democratic age, moreover, when, as De Tocqueville observed, accuracy of literary style is liable to be lost in the temporary predominance of inferior work, a central tribunal may maintain an ideal of style which in the rush of trade-literature is likely to be trampled underfoot. Still, Mr. Arnold's conception of provincialism cannot be accepted either as in harmony with English literary development in the past, or as a prophetic forecast of its future. A critic, himself thoroughly imbued with the spirit of French criticism, would plant on English soil an exotic as indigenous to Paris as it is unsuited to the atmosphere of English national life. Another critic—Macaulay, in his essay on the Royal Society of Literature,—takes a very different view of learned academies and their literary influences. It is in literary academies, he tells us, that "envy and faction exert the most extensive and pernicious influence." The history of the French Academy, in particular, has been "an uninterrupted record of servile compliances, paltry artifices, deadly quarrels, perfidious friendships." Governed by the court, the Sorbonne, the philosophers, "it was always equally powerful for evil and impotent for good"—sought to depress Corneille, long refused to notice Voltaire, and even under the superintendence of D'Alembert was the home of the basest intrigues. There is some exaggeration in this view; yet Macaulay expresses the national spirit of English literature. Local and individual independence from the control of any central corporation is the peculiar characteristic of English literature—an independence equally removed from the dictation of a tribunal like the French Academy, and that total absence of any literary centre which Schlegel and Calsabigi deplore.
Mr. Arnold's transference of the French centralism into the life of English literature is capable of its best defence from the standpoint of cosmopolitan culture. From this standpoint national centres like Paris and its Academy become the best substitute for a world-centre which differences of language and national character cannot permit. "Let us conceive the whole group of civilised nations," says Mr. Arnold,[6] "as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation bound to a joint action and working towards a common result. This was the ideal of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our modern societies more and more." Yes; the ideal of world-literature, which Herder's Voices of the People did so much to foster in Germany, is attractive, especially to men who have never known true national unity. But, however deeply national literature may be indebted to an international exchange of ideas, however splendid may be the conception of universal principles in literary production and criticism, the true makers of national literature are the actions and thoughts of the nation itself; the place of these can never be taken by the sympathies of a cultured class too wide to be national, or those of a central academy too refined to be provincial. Proyincialism is no ban in truly national literature. The influence of London has indeed been continually expressed by Chaucer, by Shakspere, by Milton, by Dryden, by Addison and Pope and Johnson. Perhaps the flavour of London life has been sometimes too strong in English literature.[7] But provincial language as well as spirit have found a ready place in the literature of England.
Here, then, we have two types of national literature—the English, blending local and central elements of national life without losing national unity in local distinctions such as Italy and Germany have known too well; the French, centralising its life in Paris, and so tending to prefer cosmopolitan ideals. Montesquieu tells us that he would subordinate his personal interests to those of his family, those of his family to those of his nation, those of his nation to the good of Europe and of the world.[8] In the development of national literatures we must picture something of the same kind, only allowing for the early influence of Christian world-religion, and not forgetting that special causes have given to some national literatures of Europe a more cosmopolitan aspect than to others. To watch the internal and external development by which local and national differences give way in turn to national and cosmopolitan ideals—this is one line of study open to students of national literatures; another is the deepening and widening of personal character which accompany such social expansion; a third is the changing aspect of physical nature which this social and individual evolution likewise involves. But to chronicle the rise of new forms, new spirits, of verse and prose in each European nation, and the gradual separation of science from literature; to trace such growth to its roots in social and physical causes; finally, to compare and contrast these causes as producing the diverse literatures of England and France and Germany, of Italy and Spain and Russia; this, truly, were the task of a literary Hercules. We shall here but briefly illustrate the evolution of individualism in national literatures and the effect of such evolution on man's views of physical nature.
Footnotes edit
- ↑ Comparative Politics, pp. 81, 83
- ↑ pp. 73, sqq.
- ↑ Wahrheit und Dichtung, bk. vii.
- ↑ Dramatic Art and Literature, lect. xvi.
- ↑ Essays in Criticism, pp. 42, sqq. (ed. 1884)
- ↑ Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems.
- ↑ It has been said of Hogarth (1697–1764) that he depicted the manners of the London populace rather than those of the English people; the remark might be applied to a good deal of English literature in the eighteenth century.
- ↑ Œuvres de Montesquieu, Pensées diverscs, t. ii. p. 456.