The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Of bucolic or pastoral poetry, as written by the Greeks, something has already been said, as also of the pedigree of this species before its arrival in the literature of England. In Latin literature it is represented almost solely by Virgil, his later imitator Calpurnius being of little account either in himself or his effects. Virgil is the first to introduce the species into Latin, and the line of descent from Theocritus through Virgil to the Italians Sannazaro and Mantuan, and thence to Spenser, is distinct and undisguised. In verse of a certain subtle charm of movement, tinged occasionally with a deliberate rusticity, and pervaded with a suggestion of pensive sympathy rare in Latin writers, Virgil ostensibly tells in dramatic or semi-dramatic form of the loves, labours, sorrows, and songs of shepherds, goatherds, and other simple rural folk. Under this cover, however, he is often in reality touching upon his own personal experiences and those of his friends, or gently couching some poetical moral, or finding a safe vent for the mild philosophizings of his meditative youth. Something of the kind had already been done by the Greek imitators of Theocritus, but Virgil goes much further than they. He has thus changed the whole nature of the pastoral, and, artistically considered, for the worse. The shepherds are no longer real and convincing, and the truth of nature’s mirror is destroyed. Nevertheless, through a happy trick of cadence, felicitous touches of natural description, and an indescribable atmosphere of sympathy, the Eclogues are wont to exert a charm which defies criticism to do its worst.

Didactic poetry is met with in Virgil’s Georgics, or Rules for Husbandmen. In four compositions he deals with corn-crops, fruit-trees, cattle-breeding, and bee-keeping. The model was supplied, as usual, by the Alexandrian Greeks, and for these the ancient inventor and the source was Hesiod. There is no reason to doubt Virgil’s genuine interest in these practical rustic themes. But, being essentially a poet and not a farmer, he is not to be satisfied with versifying, however skilfully, a list of useful precepts. If the work was, as Merivale considers it, the “glorification of labour,” it served meanwhile as a frame for special passages of great beauty upon topics more or less naturally associated with the matter in hand. The poet on occasion finds it no long step to take from the weather to eclipses, from eclipses to the death of Caesar, and from Caesar to patriotic reflections. The digressions are not so far afield, nor so numerous as in Cowper’s Task, but that work may perhaps be cited in partial illustration.

Didactic in another kind is that short Art of Poetry, written in deft verse by Horace, which was copied by Boileau in his Art Poétique, and freely utilized by Pope in his Essay on Criticism. Its professed aim is to inculcate certain principles of poetic composition, and, in particular, the composition of drama. Inasmuch as Horace was drawing upon Greek doctrines derived from Aristotle, but not always understood by their somewhat superficial Roman poetizer; inasmuch also as poetic drama had no real existence in the days of Horace, there was little prospect that the Art of Poetry would shed any new illumination upon the world. To those who have read the seminal work of Aristotle, the precepts of Horace inevitably appear rather trite and shallow. The writer here, as elsewhere, is marked by shrewd and humorous good sense and a gift of terse expression, and it must be admitted that these form an excellent endowment for the middleman of intellectual traffic. The essay would doubtless be read by his contemporaries with enjoyment, and in many cases with edification. The misfortune is that, from the later seventeenth century onwards, it was the superficial Horace rather than the fundamental Aristotle who served as dictator of the laws of verse to both England and France.

Philosophic verse, which is, of course, a species of the didactic, finds its best representative, not merely for Latin literature, but for the literature of the world, in Lucretius, who wrote during the latter days of republican Rome. His poem On the Nature of Things is an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, as developed from the physical speculations of Democritus. According to this philosophy the original contents of the universe were minute atoms, the “seeds” or “elements” of things, moving in a void. By their fortuitous collisions and various combinations were formed all things as they are or have been. To this extent had ancient speculation, combining bold imagination with close reasoning, anticipated modern chemistry and astronomical hypothesis. From crude and accidental beginnings, says Lucretius, there ensues a “survival of the fittest,” and thus, though unaided by modern scientific appliances, and imperfectly directed from the point of view of modern scientific method, ancient speculation anticipates also the doctrines of modern evolutionists. In the application of these results to the conduct of life (which is the practical aim of philosophy) it is evident that current theology must receive a severe blow. To Lucretius the chief blessing derived from the true philosophy is that man is emancipated from superstition, with all its terrors in life and death and all the mischiefs it has worked. We may conjecture that the soul of the poet himself, which was brooding and melancholy, would have been eminently impressible by superstitious dread, if it had not been fortified by this wisdom of “the master.” His fervent onslaught on religio (in the Latin sense) and its crushing effects can hardly be otherwise explained. He does not—nor did Epicurus—absolutely deny the existence of gods; these are logically as producible as other “things.” What he denies is their interference with the processes of nature. All this and more he sets forth in the six books of the De Rerum Natura.

In the use of verse as the vehicle of philosophic teaching, Lucretius is but following the lead of the older Greeks, Empedocles, Xenophanes, or Parmenides. The task is technically difficult, and in modern times it would be purposeless. But for Lucretius we must not only grant the utility of the method in awakening intellectual interest as widely as possible among a community less prepared for philosophy than for poetry; we are also compelled to recognize that his effort to make philosophy talk in Latin verse was technically a triumph. Yet Lucretius is much more than a translator of Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters. He is a poet. Doubtless the passages in which he is setting forth bare statement of theory, or bare argument, are of necessity as dull as many passages of theologizing in Milton’s Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, or as many passages in Wordsworth’s Excursion. But when the poetic opportunity arrives, and when he is irresistibly borne away with such reflections as those upon the life and death of man, he writes in lines as splendid as those of Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Through all the work there is a tone of the ardent missionary of intellectual deliverance, blent with a certain melancholy which recalls Ecclesiastes. Latin literature is not strong in great intellectual forces, but among these Lucretius must hold a foremost place.

Narrative poetry, apart from epic, occupies no large space in the literature of Latin. The Metamorphoses of Ovid practically stand alone. These, written in a lighter and more fluent hexameter than that of Virgil’s Aeneid, are a series of stories dealing, as the title shows, with the various transformations undergone by human beings in mythology or legend. If there is anything in Latin answering to the “romantic” elements in Ariosto or Spenser it is to be found here. The author, knowing the stories to be fabulous, employs all his fancy and inventiveness, his descriptive power and gift of language, in embellishing them. Men and women are turned into beasts, birds, monsters, trees, or stones with much poetic gusto of circumstance. The want of real unity is no drawback to the work; the telling of the legends is brilliant; the stories themselves are such as at all times appeal to the lovers of the romantic and the marvellous, and particularly to the young. From these causes it is not too much to say that the influence of the Metamorphoses has been immeasurable. The usual mediaeval, renaissance, and modern répertoires of mythological story have been almost entirely derived from Ovid. To the better read contemporaries of Chaucer, as of Shakespeare, Ovid supplied not only the matter, but the spirit of such narrative. Such a familiar legend as that touching one of Philemon and Baucis may be Greek in origin, but it is Ovid who has made it the property of the later western world.

Not inappropriately may be introduced here the mention of a minor writer, whose work, despite its slender substance and its narrow range of genius, has been far-reaching in its legacy. This is Phaedrus, the versifier of fables in the reign of Tiberius. With no special brilliancy or gift of invention, but with a style of lucid simplicity which is excellent for such narration, Phaedrus puts into verse the Greek fables—commonly fathered all alike on “Aesop”—which he could find current in his day. The collection is probably much the same as that of the Greek Demetrius Phalereus (300 B.C.). From the point of view of both morals and language the book served admirably for schoolboys, and it is at least one of the main sources of the fables which found their way into England, first with Alfred, and later, in more force, with Caxton’s “Aesop.”

In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram, a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of composition known as satura. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in “a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally satura meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament of the writer, the satura might become either a moral essay or a satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such compositions, and in the Satires of Horace there is comparatively little of that quality. His Epistles, which are practically only saturae under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality. Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a vigorous but rough invective in his saturae, but for us it is Horace who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated writing. To him these compositions were sermones, or “talks,” and they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not unlike that of the Essais of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise, but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep. Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by the term. Juvenal became, and has remained, the very prince of those who condense wit and sarcasm into pungent and rememberable lines of the most consummate terseness. He possesses a singular power of presenting moral vices and social foibles and follies in all their contemptibleness, and there is ample reason to believe that, as he expressed it, it was indignation which created his lines. It is Juvenal and Horace, though chiefly the former, who have served as models for Dryden and Pope, for Hall and Butler, and for Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The less fierce and more descriptive part of Juvenal’s work also found a notable imitation in Johnson, whose London is copied from one satire and his Vanity of Human Wishes from another.

Often cognate to satire is epigram, as treated by Martial, a writer of the generation preceding Juvenal. An epigram is, in fact, apt to be a stinging satire in little. This is, however, a very distinct departure from the nature and province of epigram as employed by the Greeks. Of this something has already been said. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to suppose that the narrow sense now usually, if erroneously, given to “epigram” was equally the sense in which it would have been understood by the contemporaries of Martial. The “sting in the tail” is by no means indispensable. That the wit and verbal dexterity of Martial were so often applied to caustic purposes was no hindrance to the use of the same qualities in epigrams of compliment, of fancy, of description, and of mere humour. We cannot, it is true, assign to Martial a place in “poetry” proper. A man without convictions or much refinement of feeling, but well acquainted with his world, witty, and a manipulator of phrase, he poured out more than a thousand of these little pieces, many excellent, many execrable, many indifferent. But in this species of literature—be it worth what it may—it is Martial who has determined the form and matter of the epigram for modern Europe.

In prose, Roman literature is very copious, although not equally rich in all domains. Its chief strength lies in history, after which come philosophical works, oratory, and letter-writing. With Roman jurisprudence and with grammatical (or philological) writing we are not here concerned. The famous Cato, the Censor (184 B.C.), has left us a treatise On Agriculture, consisting of practical maxims which are scarcely literature; and a large number of didactic works (many of which are not preserved, or only preserved in fragments) were produced at different dates of the republic or the empire by men of distinction. Thus Varro, a most erudite contemporary of Cicero, wrote voluminously upon Antiquities Human and Divine, upon The Latin Language, and upon Agriculture. Seneca the elder, in the reign of Tiberius, collected educational examples of methods of rhetorical disputation. In the time of Claudius medicine was treated by Celsus. Columella exhausted the subject of agriculture. During the Flavian régime Frontinus composed a treatise on aqueducts and another upon military operations, and the laborious Pliny the elder put together thirty-seven books on Natural History, a vast cyclopaedia of mixed truth and untruth concerning all departments of natural science, the arts connected therewith, and the fine arts to boot. But, whatever merits and demerits of style these works display, they hardly merit discussion in so general an outline of literary history as this. It is impossible to say what information or ideas in our modern possession might be traceable to writers like these, but they can scarcely rank as appreciable “literary influences.” Doubtless Pliny’s encyclopaedia is ultimately responsible for much of the confused natural history of the middle ages, and not only Chaucer, but also the sixteenth-century Euphuists, with their egregious similitudes, are almost certainly in his debt. The affiliation of scientific knowledge and error, however, lies beyond our scope.