The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

But, besides this feudal spirit shown in the Franks, there had already existed among the Germanic tribes before their settlement in France or Britain an orally transmitted literature. Its form was epic, and its themes the superhuman exploits of heroes among scenes of slaughter and carousal, in contest with huge monsters, and under the dispensation of rude pagan deities, Woden, Thor, and the rest of the Teutonic pantheon. Between the fourth and sixth centuries this heroic poetry of Germany grows into appreciable form, and both the Franks of the Continent and the Anglo-Saxons of England bring with them their several portions. In Germany itself it is much later that the Nibelungen Lied is edited into a connected shape; but to England there came in the sixth century the epic legend of Beowulf, of which the source is to be found in events of southern Sweden and the Western Baltic dimly recorded. This poem was edited in Christian times, and with some Christian additions, during the literary flourishing of northern England in the early part of the eighth century. Another poem carried from the mainland by the Englecyn was the Song of Widsith (the Far-Traveller), a wandering gleeman who has much to say of the deeds and generosity of the Gothic and other German chiefs among whom he roamed “as his fate willed,” and to whom he “unlocked his word-hoard.”

In point of matter this Germanic contribution to Dark Age literature is perhaps of little account. But its vigour of action and strenuous temper did no little towards determining the virility of the French chansons de geste, which formed so large a portion of English reading in the pre-Chaucerian period. In point of form it is necessary to note that the Anglo-Saxon method of versification, based on accent, alliteration and assonance, is naturally inherited from the German tradition. With very slight modification the method of Anglo-Saxon poetry is also that of Langland in his Piers Plowman of the Chaucerian age. Though this was subsequently abandoned by English poets in favour of the French system of rhyme and numbered syllables, the use—all the more artistic for being disguised—of alliteration and accent has survived as one of the chief formal beauties of all our poetry.

Whereas the Teutonic poetry, when it came in contact with Christianity in England or France, soon lost its characteristic themes, its mythology, and much of its savagery, the older matter and spirit still flourished among the pagan Norsemen, and were re-imported into northern England with the invasions of the Danes.

(5) More distinguishable and pronounced effects upon the literature of western Europe were produced by a backward invasion of the Celtic themes and temperament. There was much Celtic blood in northern Italy and in Spain, still more in France and the British Islands. When once the Celtic temperament emerged in literature it was sure of a ready and wide response. Perhaps no such emergence would have happened if it had not been that in the Dark Ages the Christian scholars—the only authors of that epoch—were especially cultured and ardent in Wales and Ireland. The racial and patriotic feelings of the British Celts were pathetic and intense, and, whether among those in western Britain, or among the emigrants to Brittany, the exploits of their race were celebrated in song marked by a high spirit of pride, as well as by a peculiar mysticism and a remarkable sentiment of chivalry and romance. The actual contributions of the Celts to our own literary making are the subject of brief remark elsewhere.

(6) The influence of the East during the period before the first Renaissance was of no small importance. The language through which it came, but not often the language in which it originated, was the Arabic of the Saracens, whether as invaders of Spain or of Sicily. It is precisely while the literary state of Europe was at its lowest that the Saracenic culture was at its height. Into Spain, where the Moors had established themselves in splendour and opulence, there followed all the learning of the Semitic East, in philosophy, natural science, and medicine, together with the literary forms of the Arabs and the music of their accompaniments. Though the western Saracens were politically altogether separate from the Caliphate of Bagdad, the literary language was common to the Moslem world, and men of learning and artistic gift—whether Arabs or Jews—were equally welcome at either end. In the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman, in the early part of the tenth century, there particularly flourished in Moorish Spain the light verse of love and its gay surroundings. Meanwhile Cordova developed what was practically a University, to which congregated all manner of Oriental talent, and in which studies in science and philosophy were prosecuted with zeal. Nor was the diffusion of all this culture restricted to the Arabs or their Spanish subjects. Many Christians from other parts of western Europe sought a knowledge of mathematics or medicine at Cordova, nor were these severer accomplishments all that the visitor would acquire.

To literature proper the true Arabs would have contributed little. In their original home their poetry had mostly taken the shape of the qasîda, a loosely connected ode, in which an introduction concerning the forsaken camping ground was regularly followed by reflections on the singer’s love affairs, and these by thoughts concerning his desert wanderings, his steed, and finally his chief. Of most importance to us, perhaps, is the fact that this Arabic verse was in rhyme, and that short odes, or ghazels, of fourteen lines, appear to anticipate the sonnet, a form which arose in Sicily in a court frequented by cultured Moslems.

After the establishment of Islam, the new religion at first exercised a cramping effect, but the same fondness for rhyme (which, indeed, was associated with notions of sacred or magic power) introduced it even into the prose of the Koran. When the Saracen conquest had extended widely and included Persia, the superior culture of the Persians gave them, from about A.D. 750, a predominating influence at the court of the Abbasids at Bagdad. Arabic literature, therefore, widened its forms and themes, and its poetry now embraced lyrics of love and wine, satires and elegies, largely of Persian origin. Of this poetry in general it may be said that it is marked by a peculiar predilection for sententious wisdom in the shape of proverbs and aphorisms, and for fables and allegories which convey similar maxims. These, we shall find, appear in full force in Spain, where they are converted into part of the earliest literature in Spanish. For the collection of such fables the Arabs and Persians could reach a hand in either direction. From the west they could take the Greek fables of Aesop and convert them into the Arabic fables of Loqman; from the east they could gather the Indian fables of Pilpay (or Bidpai), translated first from the Indian Pancatantra into the Middle Persian (better called Pehlevi), and thence by Muqaffa into the Arabic Kalila and Dimna. In this collection the actions of the beasts serve subtly to convey to a prince rules of wise conduct, more moral than the later principles of Macchiavelli. The Orientals showed an equal passion for purely romantic stories, provided that they contained wonderful and magical occurrences, much prowess, and luscious suggestions of magnificence and pleasure. The Thousand and One Nights, better known as the Arabian Nights, form an immense body of such compositions, which have been perpetually translated and re-translated, and which are still among the standard books of the world.

But the Saracens were by no means sunk in sententiousness or frivolity. They were impassioned for philosophy and science, especially the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. For their acquirements in these directions they were indebted to the Greeks, and chiefly through the Syrians of Mesopotamia. Here Hellenism, introduced by Alexander, had grown into peculiar strength, nor was the Greek blood itself inconsiderable. From the Syrians the Arabs derived their knowledge both of Aristotle and of Plato, although, from their practical turn of mind, it was the Aristotelian philosophy which they mainly affected, and which passed into the famous Arabic translation of Averrhoes. Carried to Cordova, much of this learning, and particularly that derived from Aristotle, was disseminated through western Europe. The Arabic influence on thought, reflected from Greece, was therefore great. From a more purely literary point of view, we must reckon with the introduction of Oriental apologues and tales, although many of these, as will be seen immediately, come in also from eastern Europe through a Greek medium.

In point of form it is impossible not to conclude that the minstrelsy and poetry which prevailed in Moorish Spain contributed liberally to the fashioning of the troubadour poetry of Provence. The itinerant Arab minstrel was not welcomed solely by Moors; he played his part among the true Spaniards, and Spaniards themselves turned minstrels after the same fashion. The eastern, or Catalonian, part of Spain was in language virtually identical with the neighbouring south of France, and no border separated the Catalonian minstrelsy from the Provençal districts. In 1112 the Count of Barcelona became the ruler of Provence, and in his train followed all the poetry and song which had grown familiar in Catalonia. It is dangerous to attempt to decide the more and less of direct borrowing; but the manner of the troubadour, his rhymes, his themes of the tenso, the planh, and the morning and evening songs, so closely recall the machinery and devices of the Saracens, that the affiliation can hardly be denied.

(7) Direct effect of Greece upon Europe to the West was in abeyance from the fall of Rome till the Renaissance. Occasionally indeed, but very seldom, we hear of scholars who read some Greek, and Theodore of Tarsus actually visited and taught in Anglo-Saxon England in the later seventh century. But such influence of Greek work as appears during the dark and mediaeval times comes only in circuitous ways and from inferior writers of inferior matter. It for the most part appears in stories derived from the post-classical Greek romances, or from Oriental tales first translated into Greek and then recast into Latin.