But Hysminias and Hysmine[185] has interests of character which distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always, perhaps, based on or buttressed by direct acquaintance with the original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for the attraction is one of style. Its style.Neither Lyly nor any of our late nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched, Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic, and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern—the present tense, the use of catchwords like ὅλος, the repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the descriptions of Hysminias and Hysmine more mediæval than those of Achilles, more like the Romance of the Rose, to which, indeed, there is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of epithet—"a man athirst, and parched, and boiling"—meet us. There is a frequent economy of conjunctions. There is the resort to personification—for instance, in the battle of Love and Shame, which serves as climax to the elaborate description of the lovers' kissing. In short, all our old friends—the devices which every generation of seekers after style parades with such a touching conviction that they are quite new, and which every literary student knows to be as old as literature—are to be found here. The language is in its decadence: the writer has not much to say. But it is surprising how much, with all his drawbacks, he accomplishes.
Its story.
Whether the book, either as an individual composition, or more probably as a member of an extinct class, is as important in matter and in tone as it is in style is more doubtful. The style itself, as to which there is no doubt, may perhaps colour the matter too much. All that can be safely said is that it reads with distinctly modern effect after Heliodorus and Achilles, Longus and Xenophon. The story is not much. Hysminias, a beautiful youth of the city of Eurycomis, is chosen for a religious embassy or kerukeia to the neighbouring town of Aulicomis. The task of acting as host to him falls on one Sosthenes, whose daughter Hysmine strikes Hysminias with love at first sight. The progress of their passion is facilitated by the pretty old habit of girls acting as cupbearers, and favoured by accident to no small degree, the details of the courtship being sometimes luscious, but adjusted to less fearless old fashions than the wooings of Chloe or of Melitta. Adventures by land and sea follow; and, of course, a happy ending.
Its handling.
But what is really important is the way in which these things are handled. It has as mere story-telling little merit: the question is whether the spirit, the conduct, the details, do not show a temper much more akin to mediæval than to classical treatment. I think they do. Hysminias is rather a silly, and more than rather a chicken-hearted, fellow; his conduct on board ship when his beloved incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was countryman ex hypothesi of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The "battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am never reminded in other parts of the Scriptores Erotici.
Its "decadence."
Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are "rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"—the masque of a moribund art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger and hopefuller craftsmanship, but the general effect is the same. We are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which, though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet surely exist and reappear at intervals—the contortions of style that cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary reminiscence (ὅλος itself in this way is at least as old as Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "analysis" of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about being "né trop tard dans un monde trop vieux" has been true of many persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of him.
Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but be refreshing to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with those of the past, even had it existed.
Lateness of Italian.
Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature, however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in Italy shows very little trace of classical influence[187]: and though that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language, it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different influences are perceptible. One of them—the influence of the literatures of France, both Southern and Northern—is quite certain and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and the development of Provençal literature far anticipated, both in date and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh century. But two other strains—one of which has long been asserted with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the country—are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be, the fashion to assign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse, common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by some.