The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Pass onward for some generations, till we come to the days of Pope and Addison. The study of Greek is more careful and more widely spread, its history and mythology have dropped into truer perspective and proportion. Greek life, Greek thought, are somewhat better comprehended, though still far from well. Much that the Greeks have written has now become general property. Better still, criticism is alert. The principles of the Greeks have passed, in a garbled form, it is true, through Rome to France, from France to England. The English have awakened to the fact that what deserves to be said at all deserves to be said concisely and precisely. So far, so good. Perhaps we do not profoundly admire the spirit of the literature of the age of Pope and Addison. But we must perforce admire its great advance in polish of expression. As literature, it may fail from want of ideas, from thinness of its substance. In that respect it departs as far from the Greek ideal as it approaches near the Greek ideal in skill of execution. The aim of Greek literature is to express thought or feeling perfectly. But there must be a real thought or a real feeling to express. And this spontaneousness or compelling sincerity the school of Pope and Addison did not, in the main, possess. Yet it did invaluable work. It furnished a later generation, which had ideas and was not ashamed of feelings, with an improved conception of expression. The “Classical” school these writers have been called, but classical they distinctly are not, for to be classical is to express matter of sterling worth in a style for ever fresh. To utter brilliantly a nothing, an artificiality, or a commonplace, is not classical.

The Queen Anne and early Georgian school, then, so far as Greek literature is concerned, owe to it sundry healthy principles of style, not yet properly assimilated; they owe many allusions, better ordered and digested than in Spenser or Chaucer; but of its higher thoughts and deeper imaginings they exhibit little influence.

Let that century expire, and come to the generation of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. In them we meet with rich ideas in plenty, and with abundance of exquisite expression. Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron had studied Greek; Shelley read it all his life. Keats, who knew no Greek at first hand, but who had innate in him that part of the Greek spirit which, as he puts it, “loves the principle of beauty in all things,” had steeped himself in Greek legend; he revelled in Greek mythology; he assimilated the Greek view of nature and at least the passion of Greek life. All the literature of this period is shot through and through with the colour of Greek myths, Greek philosophy in its widest sense, Greek ideas. It shows an advance upon the age of Pope; for now once more the matter is made of the first account, although the manner is duly cultivated to form its fitting embodiment. Expression is fashioned to great beauty in Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and often in Wordsworth. But the matter is of the first moment. A great advance is this upon the perfectly uttered proprieties of Pope. Yet still the age of Shelley was less Greek than the following “Victorian” age. The magnificent outbursts of the “spontaneous” and “romantic” schools of the beginning of last century too often ended in extravagance of fancy and riot of imagination. The transcendental rhapsodizings of Shelley and the sensuous revellings of Keats lack the sanity and self-repression which we associate with the name of Hellas. But the aim of the last age has been to secure the perfect union of sane, clear, yet unhackneyed thought with sane, clear, yet unhackneyed phrase. This was the aim of Tennyson, as of Matthew Arnold. Even Browning aims at this ideal in his most perfect moments.

Now, if what has been said of the ages of Chaucer, Spenser, Pope, Shelley, and Tennyson respectively is true, it is anything but a paradox to assert that, generation after generation since Chaucer’s day, we have been passing more and more under the domination of Greek thoughts and Greek literary principles, and that we are groping forward to a literary ideal which turns out to have been the ideal of ancient Greece.

The full influence of Greece, then, was not felt all at once, nor in the same way and in the same respects.

Early English literature never came into direct contact with Greek books. Our old writers knew no Greek, for it is only since what is known as the “Revival of Learning” that the borrowing, whether of thought or style, has been at first hand. Nevertheless the debt was there, though the fathers of our literature were not conscious of it. Even King Alfred drew from Greek sources, though he knew no more of Greek than of baking cakes. When there was not a man from one end of England to the other who could properly read a Greek book, the men of England were nevertheless deriving, in a mutilated form no doubt, but still deriving, philosophy and ideas from that ancient Greece which to them was shrouded in the darkness of distance and of a tongue unknown. We may endeavour to see how this came to pass.

In the first place, if our earliest writers could not read Greek, they could read Latin. If they could not read Homer, they could read Virgil; if not Sappho and Pindar, they could read Horace. The Latin literature was with them, in a considerable measure. It is true that in the Dark Ages many of the best works of Latin literature lay concealed, and that others were deliberately neglected. The taste of readers in those ages ran rather in favour of the later and inferior Latin authors. Nevertheless, Latin literature of considerable extent they did study and assimilate; and what was this Latin literature, speaking generally, but an avowed imitation or copy of Greek models? The Roman Virgil copies the Greek Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus. The Roman Horace copies Sappho, Pindar, Archilochus, Anacreon. The Roman Plautus and Terence are practically plagiaries of the Greek Menander and his like. Latin literature is, in a very large degree, Greek literature borrowed, adapted to inferior taste, played upon like studies with variations.

When Rome became the mistress of the world, it aspired to greater glory than mere conquest can ever impart, to the glory of culture and the arts. It found these perfected in Greece, and it became the pupil and imitator of that country, just as England has at various times become the pupil of Italy or France. It would hardly be too much to say of Latin literature, as of Roman art, that most of what is vital and perennial in it comes from Greece, while its faults and shortcomings are chiefly its own. Those who possess Latin literature possess a body of Greek thought and Greek material, but lacking the sure Greek taste and the soul of spontaneity. Our English writers down to Chaucer were in this position. Even their Latin reading was unsatisfactory enough, but, so far as they practised it, they were drinking of Greek waters rendered turbid by Roman handling and adulteration.

King Alfred knew Latin enough to translate Boethius. The monks and scholars, who, till Chaucer’s time, were the only writers, kept alive the reading of Latin literature. But, so far as the Greek was concerned at first hand, there was but one poorly equipped scholar here and another there in all the West of Europe. So little was it known that, even in Wyclif’s day, it was necessary for that reformer in translating the New Testament to render from the Latin Vulgate, the Greek original being veritably “all Greek” to him. Chaucer, again, writes indeed of Greeks at Thebes and Troy, and refers to Aristotle and Greek authors; but his acquaintance with these is all at second hand, through Roman poets like Ovid and Statius, or even at third or fourth hand, through the literature of Frenchmen or Italians, who themselves derived from writers in Latin and not from the Greek originals.