Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

Rawlinson speaks of some characteristic tales which were preserved from generation to generation, such as the Tale of the Two Brothers (charmingly narrated by the late Amelia B. Edwards), The Doomed Prince, The Possessed Princesses, etc. He also refers to collections of correspondence apparently preserved to serve as models or patterns, after the fashion of the “complete letter-writers” of to-day.

Karpeles points out that the early Egyptian literature was particularly rich in folk-tales, or Märchen. It is possible that in Egypt, as in Greece and Persia, the folk-tales as well as the folk-songs, and such an occasional epic as the Poem of Penta-on, were recited to the people by peripatetic reciters or rhapsodists. There are references to such recitations taking place at court and at the banquets of the rich.

It would have been interesting if it had occurred to some Hebrew scribe, endowed with a sense of humor, to send for the royal library in Thebes, as a remembrance of the guests who had gone out of Egypt, an Egyptian rendering of the Book of Exodus, or even of the Song of Miriam.

China.

—The dates of the beginnings of literature in China are uncertain. If we could accept as authentic the claims of the Chinese historians, the origins of their civilization must be traced back to a period antedating by thousands of years the accepted records of Chaldea and Egypt. It is, however, I understand, the present conclusion of the archæologists that the beginnings of the development of the civilization of the Chinese, as also of that of the East Indian peoples, are to be placed at a time considerably later than the date of the earliest records of the peoples of Mesopotamia. According to certain authorities, written characters existed in China as early as 5000 B.C. According to others, they first took shape more than a thousand years later. The Emperor Fu-hi, reigning about 3500 years before Christ, is credited with the invention of the Chinese alphabet. As the Emperor was walking near his palace, possibly musing on the inconveniences of ruling a country without an alphabet, his attention was attracted by the beautiful markings of a very large toad that he encountered. He took the beast home with him, and (under the guidance of the proper deity) evolved from the designs on the toad’s back the figures of the original Chinese characters. He very probably said to himself (paraphrasing the old nursery saying), “It looks like an alphabet, and it hops like an alphabet, why not call it an alphabet?” One can imagine a scholar in later years, puzzling over the lengthy series of Chinese characters, wishing that his Imperial Highness had happened to meet a smaller or a less variegated toad.

About the year 3000 B.C., the Emperor Hoang-ti is said to have invented the decimal system and the measurement of time, and also to have completed the organization of the Empire. If this date is to be relied upon, the organization of the Chinese State was taking shape about eight centuries after the time of the great Sargon of Agadê, who brought to its highest power the earlier Chaldean empire. The national ballads or folk-songs, later collected under the title of the Book of Odes, are believed by Legge to antedate the Empire—that is, to have come into circulation while the territory was still separated into a number of independent states or principalities. These folk-songs were collected by the minstrels and historiographers working under the direction of the feudatory princes, and the complete collection, when reshaped by Confucius, is said to have comprised as many as three thousand songs. The writer of the article on China in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) speaks of the collection as probably antedating any other known work of literature. The folk-songs themselves certainly existed from a very early date, but, according to Karpeles, the collection did not take the form of a book until after 1000 B.C. Karpeles believes that the earliest known work in Chinese literature is the Y-king, the Book of the Metamorphoses, or of Developments, which dates from 1150 B.C., about two centuries earlier than the generally accepted date of the Homeric poems. The author, Wang-wang, having been put into prison for some political offence, employed his enforced leisure in working out a philosophical system based upon the maxims of the Emperor Fu-hi.[5]

The Book of the Developments continued in high honor for many centuries, and early in the fifth century B.C. was reissued by Confucius, with an elaborate analysis and commentary, serving to make its teachings available for later generations. He also issued a “final edition” of the Book of Songs, which comprised, out of the three thousand of the old collection, the three hundred which were best worth preservation. Confucius takes rank in China as practically the founder of its literature, of its system of morals, and of its religious ideal or standard. The name Confucius is the Latinized form of Kung Fu-tsze—Kung, the teacher or master. He was free, says one of his disciples, from four things: foregone conclusions, arbitrary determinations, obstinacy, and egoism. A good American of the present time may express the regret that Confucius, or some disciples like him, had not been spared to occupy seats in the Senate Chamber at Washington.

What is known as the religion of Confucius, comprises in substance the old-time national or popular faith freshly interpreted into the thought and language of the later generation, and shaped into a practical system of morals as a guide for the action of the state and for the daily life of the individual citizen.

It is interesting to compare the different forms taken by the earliest literary traditions of the different peoples of antiquity. The Greek brings to us as the corner-stone of his literature and of his beliefs, the typical epics, the Iliads and the Odyssey; poems of action and prowess, commemorating the great deeds of the ancestors, and describing the days when men were heroes, and heroes were fit companions and worthy antagonists for the gods themselves.

The imagination of the East Indian has evolved a series of gorgeous and grotesque dreams, in which all conditions of time and space appear to be obliterated, and in which the universe is pictured as it might appear in the visions of the smoker of haschisch. It is difficult to gather from these wild fancies of the earlier Indian poets (and the earlier writers were essentially poets) any trustworthy data concerning the history of the past, or any practical instruction by which to guide the life of the present. The present is but a tiny point, between the immeasurable æons of the past and the nirvana of the future, and seems to have been thought hardly worthy the attention of thinking beings.