The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

A very prolific department of literature, and one which has served as a rich source of inspiration, imitation, and allusion in all subsequent times, was that of the fable. In this domain the name of “Aesop” is supreme. Whether there was ever an historical person bearing precisely this name has been questioned. The tradition which places him in Rhodes as a slave in the middle of the sixth century B.C. cannot be implicitly trusted; but it is difficult to understand how the special name of “Aesopus” can have come to attach itself to a series of beast-stories, unless some individual who bore it, or of whom it was a sobriquet, had been distinguished for his invention, or at least for his promulgation, of such satirical narratives. It is indeed almost certain that a large number of “fables of Aesop” originally came from India and the East; yet it is in Greece that Europe first makes acquaintance with those fables which are still the best known, and which most constantly appear in the existing collections or selections. All educated or even sophisticated Greeks were supposed to know “Aesop.” At a later time (in the third century A.D.) the Graeco-Roman Babrius versified such fables as were known to him, and he again was copied into Latin verse by Avianus. The Indian fables of Pilpay were not circulated in Europe till five centuries later than Babrius, nor did they ever gain such wide currency. It was primarily along the Greek channel that there was derived, if not all the matter, at least the inspiration, for the fables in French by La Fontaine, and the English fables by Gay, together with all the collections which have been printed, or which were current before the days of printing, and which have become part of the répertoire of childhood and a fund of reference for proverbs and for all classes of writers.

Of other kinds of writing which appear already in ancient Greece may be briefly mentioned:

(1) Character-sketches, first produced by Theophrastus (about 320 B.C.), and imitated by La Bruyère (Characters) in France, and in England in such works as Hall’s Characterismes of Virtues and Vices, Overbury’s Characters or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons, and best in Earle’s Microcosmography.

(2) Essays in rhetoric, literary criticism, and belles lettres, such as the Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, the latter of which exerted so profound an effect upon the verse, and particularly the dramatic verse, of the French, and thence upon that of the English so-called “classical” school; the essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (25 B.C.) upon the style of the Attic orators; and the treatise On Sublimity by Longinus, a writer who cannot be identified, but who wrote in the flourishing times of the Roman imperial epoch; (3) the works in grammar and dictionary-making, which range from the textual criticism and comment of great Alexandrians, like Aristophanes of Byzantium (200 B.C.), to the school grammar of Dionysius Thrax and the lexicons of the early centuries A.D.; (4) geographies and descriptive guidebooks, the former particularly represented by Strabo, about the beginning of the Christian era, and the latter by Pausanias (in the second century A.D.); (5) Miscellanies, antiquarian or literary, such as the famous Pundits at the Dinner-Table of Athenaeus (end of second century A.D.); (6) letters (i.e., fictitious epistles), such as those of Alciphron (second century A.D.); (7) romances, of which the extant examples are mostly much later than the classical period, those of Longus and Heliodorus dating from the latter part of the fourth century A.D.

We have now cursorily surveyed the course of Greek literary history. We have shown that it comprised all the forms of literature now known to us; that in this respect at least we can claim no originality. We have incidentally alluded to some of our debts, though that part of the subject remains to be dealt with more fully. The question which now arises is—what is there distinctive about this Greek literature as a whole, to make it possess such a precious and perpetual salt and savour?

We may reply that, to begin with, the Greek writers were characteristically possessed of one prime literary virtue—lucidity, whether in their picturing of scenes or in their expression of a thought. And they expressed clearly because they saw clearly. Besides being lucid, they were restrained. For the most part they went directly to their point, and did not suffer themselves to be drawn away from the point by irrelevant attractions. They knew, as Lowell puts it, how much writing to leave in the ink-pot. There is so much “not to say.” They shrank from overdoing. Floweriness, extravagance, bombast, irrelevance, these were an abomination to classical Greek taste. The Greeks proper did not fail to recognize fustian when they saw it. They were a critical, and a self-critical, people. What we see in the purity of their sculpture and architecture, we may see in their literature. A word or phrase must have a rational and artistic purpose, or it must not be there.

Again, they were eminently sane men, those Greeks. They looked out on the world with eyes like those of their Goddess of Wisdom, the imperturbable eyes of unabashed intelligence. What they saw they saw frankly: they knew facts from fancies, and recognized facts when they met them. They were mentally a healthy people, not constitutionally given to moodiness and mysticisms and impossible aspirations. They took meanwhile a wholesome delight in living, and in the boons of physical life.

This whole way of looking at things has received a name of its own. It is styled “Hellenism.” The Greeks called their country “Hellas,” and themselves “Hellenes.” Hence this name, which means so much. Hellenic thought means direct and fresh, if not always profound, thought; Hellenic art means art of consummate simplicity, art of clear principle. Hellenic style means in literature a perfect directness and lucidity, with just so much of the figurative as will flash light upon the sense.