The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

(3) The matter and influence of the literature of the Church, comprising the Hebrew Scriptures, chiefly in the shape of the Vulgate, commentaries, moral works, and also religious legends, lives of saints, and the like.

(4) The material and spirit brought in by the Teutons in the shape of their own old epics and sagas, with the myths which formed their basis.

(5) The Celtic feeling, traditions, and compositions which made their way into the répertoire of such countries as contained a Celtic population.

(6) The learning, literary matter, and literary art of the Saracens, whether introduced by way of Spain or by that of Sicily, and whether derived from Oriental or from Greek sources.

(7) Literary influences from the Greek world, including remnants of classical and post-classical compositions, mediaeval productions of Byzantium, and tales of the East which had been rendered into a Greek form.

It is difficult to disentangle these various threads, which interlace each other in complex ways, but on the whole the most satisfactory procedure will be to make a note or two upon each. Such notes will necessarily be brief to the point of mere hinting.

(1) It was, perhaps, to be expected that, with the decline of Latin culture, the “fittest” part of Latin literature to survive in the knowledge of the semi-barbarized west should be that which lacked the highest artistic qualities. It is only with the dawn of the first Renaissance, which led up to and was assisted by the great Tuscan trio, that the true classics began to reappear among the common reading of men of superior learning. Virgil, indeed, was not wholly forgotten, nor was Cicero, and in the age of Charlemagne there was promise of a much wider scope. But, unless with the piously inclined—and often even with them—the Dark Ages were more interested in scraps of miscellaneous information containing a spice of the wonderful, derived and garbled from Pliny, in stories with a similar spice of the marvellous and, by preference, of the licentious, such as are to be found in the Satyricon of Petronius and the Golden Ass of Apuleius, or in traditions of the art of love culled from Ovid and crudely transmitted. For those of a more serious turn there were the mild philosophizing of Boethius, the history of the Spaniard Orosius, and the encyclopaedic educational medley of Martianus Capella; and, for the religious, the hymns of Prudentius served as a model. Yet, though sparingly met, the reading of literary Latin never quite failed, and verses, for example, continued to be written as much in the style of Claudian as writers could command. Latin comedy was not unknown to the monasteries, since the German nun Hrotswith is found in the tenth century composing prose imitations of Terence. It is impossible, in the defect of our material, to tell with any precision the extent to which Latin reading was directly kept in vogue. Capella and Orosius, at least, were accepted as standard works, but in respect of the legends, stories, mythologies, and pseudo-marvels of natural history, such matter as shows itself at the birth of the new literatures had in a large measure come back in roundabout ways and through other channels.

(2) It is more easy to name the chief Latin productions of the Dark Ages themselves. If we regard Boethius as the last figure in Roman literature proper, the series consists mainly—for the sixth century—of the voluminous writings of Cassiodorus, historical and educational; the informal History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours; and the work of the Goth Jordanes concerning his own people. To the seventh century belong the Christian and didactic Moralia of Gregory the Great, and the encyclopaedic Origines of Isidore of Seville. To these we must add two writers of Great Britain; the one, Gildas, who wrote in Wales, in the middle of the sixth century, his dolorous account of the conquest of Britain by the Saxons; the other, the Englishman Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History and biographical works belong to the eighth. The age of Charlemagne, with its vigorous encouragement of education, consolidated all the promiscuous learning of the time, in which style plays a part altogether subordinate to the multifarious contents. From a literary point of view the creations above-named are of little moment to our subject, except in so far as information and misinformation from this uncritical mass of material found its way into all the work of our pre-Renaissance writers. Their chief merit is that they kept the channels of classical influence from being completely blocked. We must, however, note one important innovation in literary form. This was the introduction of rhyme into Latin hymns. The exact source of the novelty is unknown, but it began as early as the fourth century, and, together with Arabic influence, it helps to account for the use of rhyme which became current in the neo-Latin countries before their modern languages produced a real literature.

(3) The Hebraic influence which came through Christianity is as obvious as it was far-reaching. Every step in the Christianizing of Europe meant the conveying, not only of new sentiment and new ways of regarding things, but also of new materials in the way of Biblical history, however distorted in perspective. From the new doctrines of self-mortification there grew legends of the saints; from the traditions of their sanctity, legends of miracles; from the persecutions, legends of the martyrs. Both the Old and the New Testament already existed in a Latin form even before the more competent and authoritative version of Jerome (about A.D. 400). It should also be observed that the Bible which was thus rendered accessible was then read, far more than in later times, as a book containing matter interesting in itself, and therefore to be utilized and recast in story, apart from its uses in theology. Meanwhile round the original Scriptures both the earlier and later “Fathers” built up large masses of comment. When we remember that in the Dark Ages it was the churchmen who kept alive literary cultivation and production, and that the Bible narrative, the legends, martyrologies, and Christian doctrines were conveyed to every mind by sermons and other agencies, it is manifest how extensive must have been the effect upon thought and matter before the newly forming literatures emerged. On actual literary art and style it is true that there could be but little palpable influence, until, or unless, the Bible came to exist and to be widely read, as it eventually did in England, in the vernacular. But of this something more will be said in a later section of this book.

(4) With the Teutonic invaders of France there came in the spirit of feudal relationship. For centuries this spirit survived. Combined with the Celtic exaltation which is so pronounced in the Arthurian legends, and also with the sentiments of Christianity, it became embellished into the well-known mediaeval conception of knighthood with its vows of utter loyalty and self-devotion. The way was thus prepared for the knightly, or chivalrous, romances which are to be described in the chapter on the literature of France.