# Comparative Literature/Book 1/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
RELATIVITY OF LITERATURE.
§ 7. Literature, however rude, however cultured, expresses the feelings and thoughts of men and women on physical nature, on animal life, on their own social communion, on their individual existence. It is incumbent, therefore, on the champions of universal literary ideas to discover the existence of some universal human nature which, unaffected by differences of language, social organisation, sex, climate, and similar causes, has been at all times and in all places the keystone of literary architecture. Is there one universal type of human character embracing and reconciling all the conflicting differences of human types in the living world and in its historic or prehistoric past? Can really scientific reasons be advanced in support of the sentimental belief in that colossal personage called "man," whose abstract unity is allowed to put on new phases of external form, but whose "essence" is declared to remain unaltered? Unfortunately any such scientific inquiry has been generally supplanted by explosive or pathetic assertions of dogma. Yet the relativity of literature may not unaptly be illustrated by the dogmatic assertions of its opponents.
Kingsley, in his address on "the limits of exact science as applied to history," reminded his audience ​that "if they wished to understand history they must try to understand men and women. For history is the history of men and women, and nothing else. If you should ask me how to study history I should answer, Take by all means biographies, wheresoever possible, autobiographies, and study them. Fill your minds with live human figures. Without doubt, history obeys and always has obeyed in the long run certain laws. But these laws assert themselves, and are to be discovered not in things but in persons, in the actions of human beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings shall we understand the laws which they have obeyed or which have avenged themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism; if it be such, it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions under the name of laws rather as persons than as things." Kingsley's confusion in this passage of physical, social, and political "laws"—orderly successions of the forces in physical nature and of cause and effect in social organisation with those commands of a person or body of persons which do indeed require to "assert themselves" and depend on the "obedience" of "human beings"—cannot easily escape detection. But with this confusion we are not at present particularly concerned. We prefer to observe how Kingsley has here expressed that side of history with which creative art finds itself most at home. Why? Because clear-cut personality, individual being without any touch of the collective and impersonal, is evidently capable of more concentrated interest, of more artistic treatment, than the hazy outline of a multitude or an impalpable abstraction. How, indeed, can an artist conceive the conduct of his hero or heroine as the ​expression of an impersonal "law," of an order of events to which innumerable social and physical causes have contributed? It is the work of creative art to bring before us "live human figures;" and an artist's view of literary and every other kind of history is best conceived from this strongly individual standpoint. But requirements of art are one thing, truths of science another; and a little reflection will convince us that Kingsley's idea of character-history is far less truthful than artistic.
§ 8. To understand history we must understand men and women. True; but men and women are exceedingly complex units, and their treatment as purely isolated units would not only fail to contribute to the understanding of history, but would tend to resolve all human knowledge into a mass of disconnected atoms among which all general principles and even thought itself would perish. In order to understand either ourselves or history we must therefore combine and compare these personal units with each other, with the rest of the animal world, with physical nature. The bodies of men and women consist of components which may be chemically resolved into the vegetable and mineral elements of other animals and of physical nature. Their unreflecting emotions seem to be a current of sense-life not greatly different from that of other animals. But their social sympathies vary from a sense of obligation as narrow as that of clan-ties to one as wide as universal brotherhood; and their individual reason varies from the weakest sense of personal existence to the most profound depths of subjective philosophy. So far as the elements of each individual man or woman are shared with other animals and physical nature, we have certainly not reached the sphere of biographies or autobiographies. But when we have reached the sphere within which ​differences make their appearance not merely between human beings and physical nature, between human beings and other animals, but between different groups of men and women and different individuals composing these groups, it is a matter of little importance whether with Kingsley we use the concrete phrase "men and women," or prefer to sum up varieties of group or individual in the highly abstract term "man," provided we never forget that our abstract groups as well as our individual "men and women" depend for their character on space and time, on conditions of social organisation, on physical influences, geographical, climatic, and the like.
To select one out of many examples of the dependence of human character on social development, look at the different manner in which different literatures, or different periods of the same literature, have treated the characters of women. The status of women in different conditions of social life has left its marks in literary pictures of their character amazingly different. Simonides of Amorgos, in a very famous poem, contrasted different types of female character by comparing them with a hog and a fox, a dog and an ass, a weasel, an ape, and a bee; but if we were to search through the various likenesses of female character in literatures of the East and West, we might not only increase at will this uncomplimentary catalogue, but discover how profoundly female liberty or tutelage, public freedom or private seclusion, have affected the general and particular characters of women in different ages and countries. The women of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese dramas are, as we would anticipate, different enough from those of Attic tragedy and comedy, or from those of our modern European theatres. But such differences are by no means confined to countries so far removed from each other in social and physical ​circumstances. The careful study of any literature possessing a history sufficiently long reveals the most diverse treatment of female character within its own limits. Even in the "stationary" East the heroines of the classical Indian dramas possess a degree of independence impossible under the system of seclusion which has followed the Mohammedan conquest of India; and those of the early Chinese drama likewise contrast with the domestic prisoners of modern China described by the Abbé Grosier and others. But in the "progressive" West the evolution of female character may be more readily illustrated. Thus, Mr. Mahaffy has the merit of being among our earliest critics in contrasting the various conditions of women at different stages of social life in ancient Greece. The women of the Iliad and Odyssey—Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa—bring before us social relations very different from those of Aristophanes' women. Elsewhere like contrasts may be seen. The songs of Miriam and Deborah, even the witch of Endor, carry us back to days of Hebrew social life when the woman possessed a status far higher than one of her lord's harem. Again, the Roman women of the early republic, under the perpetual tutelage of their fathers, husbands, sons, or guardians, could have supplied no such rumours of ill fame as Juvenal voices, and, deprived of that freedom which permits at once the development and the display of character, might have realized the Periclean ideal of the sex. But the lesson which comparative literature must draw from such contrasts is something more than the dependence of human character on social conditions; it is also the impossibility of exact historic truth in the workmanship of literary art. In this impossibility lies one of the great facts which our phrase "relativity of literature" is intended to mark. We ​shall, accordingly, illustrate its nature and bearing on the scientific treatment of literature. But let us first understand the full meaning of historical propriety by contrasting it with the universal assumptions of unhistoric criticism.
§ 9. Macaulay, commenting on some of Dryden's plays (Aurungzebe, the Indian Emperor, and the Conquest of Granada), observes that the sentiments put into the mouths of certain dramatis personæ violate all historical propriety; that, in fact, "nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe. The truth of character is the first object, the truth of place and time is to be considered only in the second place. We blame Dryden, not because his characters are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women—not because love as he represents it could not exist in a harem or a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere." This is a moderate estimate of historical propriety, allowing, as it does, certain universal characteristics of all men and women while assigning a subordinate position to those differences of time, place, and social life which it is the part of the historical artist to indicate. But our Shaksperian critics of the subjective school will have nothing to do with such limitations of art. Shakspere's characters are to their minds true for all space and all time; nay, they rise above time and space, being apparently conceived, if not worked out, in an altogether Platonic world. Shakspere, says Coleridge, will not, like Plautus or Molière, draw for us the character of a miser because such a character is not "permanent;" and Shakspere's characters "must be permanent, permanent while men continue men, because they stand on what is absolutely necessary to our existence." Certainly of permanence, in one sense, we have ​enough and to spare in Shakspere's plays; for his chivalrous and Christian men and women of the Elizabethan age, the clergy, the clowns, and even the London artisans, are permanent enough to find a place in the Rome of Coriolanus and of Julius Cesar impartially; and if the dramatist had undertaken to depict the contemporary life of Russia, Hindustan, or China, we cannot doubt that the conditions of his art would have demanded a similar display of "universal ideas," and that the scenery of Warwick or some other English county would, if required, have done excellent duty in the country of Romanoff or of Shah Jehan as the physical background for English men and women in something like (or perhaps not at all like) Russian or Indian dress.
We do not honour Shakspere by ignoring such truths; we merely display our ignorance of the necessary limitations of dramatic art which result from its social nature; we merely impose upon ourselves the penalty of ignorance—self-contradiction. If we wish to see the contradictions into which the subjective school of criticism is perpetually betrayed by its anxiety to raise a human idol above the sphere of human associations, we need only compare different passages of Coleridge or Carlyle inter se. Unwilling to find in the Elizabethan age the models of Shakspere's characters, looking upon them as "creatures of his meditation," "fragments of the divine mind that drew them," Coleridge, in spite of his ultra-idealism, cannot avoid self-contradiction; and his twofold defence of Shakspere's "conceits" is a reductio ad absurdum of itself. "If people would in idea throw themselves back a couple of centuries," he says, "they would find that conceits and puns were very allowable because very natural. We are not to forget that at the time Shakspere lived there was an attempt at, and an affectation of, quaintness and ​adornment, which emanated from the court, and against which satire was directed by Shakspere in the character of Osric in Hamlet." So much for the critic's admission of Shakspere's dependence on the associations of his age, with which of course we have no fault to find save its inadequacy. In treating the matter thus, Coleridge is aware that he is "only palliating the practice of Shakspere; he ought to have had nothing to do with merely temporary peculiarities; he wrote not for his own only, but for all ages." So far his conceits must be regarded as defects; "they detract sometimes from his universality as to time, person, and situation." But the critic has already made the conceits and puns of Shakspere "natural" or universally proper; the latter, he tells us, "often arise out of a mingled sense of injury, and contempt of the person inflicting it, and as it seems to me, it is a natural way of expressing that mixed feeling." Self-contradiction is likewise the fate of Carlyle's Platonism; he, too, in spite of a display of the mystic universal worthy of Novalis, is compelled to admit, for example, that "Dante knows accurately and well what lies close to him; but in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what was distant." Miserable fall! for one who writes above space and time to depend on the printer's "devil" or the telegraph-clerk. But even the author of Heroes and Hero-Worship allows that "Dante does not come before us as a large Catholic mind, rather as a narrow and even sectarian mind," and that this narrowness is at least "partly the fruit of his age and position"—an opinion which any one who compares the social life of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the Divina Commedia will heartily endorse.
​If we are determined to lay down the dogma that Shakspere, or Dante, or any other poet wrote above space and time, above the social and physical conditions under which he lived, we really exclude historical propriety by a creed of literary inspiration which has been frequently asserted, if not believed in, with theological assurance. We imitate the criticism of the Arabs and make a literary Qurʾân out of our Shakspere or Dante. "Were we to examine the Qurʾân," says Baron de Slane, "by the rules of rhetoric and criticism as they are taught in Moslem schools, we should be obliged to acknowledge that it is the perfection of thought and precision—an inevitable result, as the Moslems drew their principles of rhetoric from this very book." Reasoning in circles can supply as good foundations for a literary as for a theological creed, and save both a good many historical troubles. Yet it is remarkable that, in spite of their anti-historical dogma, our subjective critics are always anxious to show not only that Shakspere's characters are, in Macaulay's phrase, "men and women," but that they are the men and the women of the particular time and place which the poet represents on his stage. In the Rome of Coriolanus appear English drums and doublets, coals and bowls, and the Devil, English "gentlemen," "testy magistrates" from the Puritan Corporation of London, "divines" and "bare heads in a congregation" (Cor. iii. 2), while the servants of an English household take the place of slaves; and in the streets and Forum "Hob and Dick" (Cor. ii. 3), and the London trades oust by the rights of a free bourgeoisie the slaves and freemen of the Eternal City. But is it not pedantry to be careful about these things? And if an English clock strikes in the Rome of Julius Cæsar, or rime is there spoken of, or a proper English ​clown appears in Cleopatra's Alexandria, why not dismiss the anachronism with a smile? Because to do so would be to accept false views of human nature and of dramatic art; because the historical critic cannot forget that he who mistakes the social life of a group must misinterpret the characters of its individual units, that he who Londonises the public life of the Roman plebs is sure to Christianise or feudalise the private relations, feelings, thoughts of the Roman wife and mother and son and father. We are told by critics who should know better that "Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Roman life and character;" and the most accurate historian will scarcely dislodge the notion that the great dramatist's English "histories" are altogether correct descriptions of the individual and social characters of their times and places. But this shallow universalism is merely a last resource of subjective critics whose method—at least in the hands of such an extremist as Coleridge—is almost as fatal to true historical science as the Moslem belief that the language and ideas of their Bible came direct from God Himself. In opposition to all such critics, we are prepared to maintain not only that Shakspere's historical characters are often highly inaccurate, but that attempts of the kind, if they are to be dramatically successful, must be inaccurate; that the inaccuracy results from the most profound truth about literary and all human ideas—their limitation or relativity; and that the subjective critics are not only mistaken in their views of individual character, through overlooking the social, but that they have failed to grasp the real conditions of dramatic art.
§ 10. The dramatist draws his characters of men and women not for himself, not to be visible only to his own eyes, or to eyes as penetrating as his own, but to live and move and have their being in the sympathies and ​antipathies, in the senses and emotions, in the imaginations and intellect of his audience. This is the reason why the drama discloses in some respects better than any other branch of literature the average character of the age. Orestes on the stage is driven to crime and madness by the effects of a long descent of inherited sin, but the feelings and beliefs which make his story tragic are in the heads and hearts of the Athenian audience.
The Ali or Hosein of the Persian passion-plays are figures splendidly and tragically beautiful, not as the æsthetic workmanship of any writer, but because they are seen through mists of religious faith by the devout audience of the tekya. The sensuality of a Vanbrugh lived in the hearts of his audience before it walked his stage. The refined intrigue of a Molière or Sheridan was performed to the life dramatised. This is why the Roman plays of Ben Jonson courtly circles before it was were a failure, while those of Shakspere succeeded. What mattered it whether the Catiline of Sallust or the Sejanus of Tacitus were presented to Elizabethan men and ​women? They had to live in Elizabethan feelings or they were dead, long since dead, and, worst of all, not buried out of sight. He who, as Walt Whitman says, "drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet," who "says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you," is the truly great dramatist; but to do this the puppets of the show must move along many a subtle wire which the feelings of the audience have supplied, but which their intellect shall not detect. The tribute of the heart must be paid to the past much as the Chinese offer their oblations to living persons representing their deceased ancestors; and no culture of the intellect must be allowed to destroy the fiction. So the "Romans" of Shakspere might not be historical Romans, might not even belong to the social life of Rome at all, but they were living human figures for the men and women of the Elizabethan theatre because they resembled themselves. The women of Shakspere's " Roman" dramas—Portia, Calphurnia, Volumnia, Virgilia—are not really pagans; they are Christian women, married by Christian marriage, and standing towards their sons and husbands in the Christian and chivalrous relations of family life. Volumnia enjoys a position which perpetual tutelage could not have tolerated; and the public freedom of the Roman woman is conceived in a thoroughly Elizabethan, or rather Elizabethan-London spirit. So, too, the men of Shakspere's Roman plays are as free from any sentiments of the Roman family as Elizabethan London can make them; and if in the Rome of Coriolanus we have clergy, and Christian clergy too, ("Hang 'em! I would they would forget me, like the virtues which our divines lose by 'em." Cor. ii. 3), Coriolanus himself is more a medieval knight than a Roman citizen.
​All this is historically inaccurate; but it is so just because no dramatic or other poet is universal in his conceptions of character any more than in his conceptions of plants, or animals, or scenery. It is so because the social and individual developments of character prevent historical accuracy save at the expense of that conscious contrast between our own and different social and physical environments in which science delights but art perishes. It is so because historical accuracy is banished by the conditions of language and thought under which the dramatist writes, and through which his art must work. It is so because the dramatist's similes and metaphors, as well as his men and women, are not derived from "airy nothing," nor from an equally airy everything, but from a limited sphere of human associations, of animal and plant life, of physical nature. If a contemporary people, differing from ourselves in language and customs, should supply our stage with characters or incidents, strict accuracy is for similar reasons impossible. Thus the Persians of Æschylus, though the Athenians must have known a good deal about the would-be conquerors of Greece, are to a considerable degree Persians in Attic dress; and when Shakspere merely reminds us that we are in France by an occasional phrase like the Dauphin's "cheval volant," or by the mixture of French and English in the scene between Katharine and Alice, he displays a far deeper acquaintance with dramatic art than Plautus, who in his Pœnulus makes the Carthaginian Hanno deliver a speech in Phoenician which, for the benefit of the audience, he is compelled immediately to translate into Latin. So closely is the dramatist bound within the limited sphere of his audience's thoughts and feelings, so completely does he depend on their average associations and the degree of social evolution they have ​attained. If the autos sacramentales of Calderon, with their abstract and allegorical personages, and their intense feelings of Roman Catholicism, would fail to awaken profound sympathy save in a devoutly religious people like the Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a people among whom the average feelings and intelligence of men and women would give life even to such personages in the sacred spectacle—the mysteries of medieval England would be something worse than a farce in the England of to-day. Turn where we may, we shall meet the relativity of dramatic art wherever a drama of any description has been developed.
§ 11. But the critical as well as the creative spirit of the drama serves to illustrate that limitation of literary art which results from the development of social and individual character. Such an illustration, for example, is supplied by the three famous unities over which so much angry and dogmatic discussion has been expended. The unities of time, place, and action have been very differently understood and derived. A. W. Schlegel has been at some trouble to show that they are not found in the Poetics—at least in the form which French criticism had fathered upon Aristotle. Coleridge sees in them the results of the Greek chorus, the centre of the Athenian drama, not to be easily moved from place to place, or from time to time. Others have regarded them as resulting from the architectural arrangements of the Greek theatre. Every one knows how differently they have been discussed and valued in different ages of European literature. Victor Hugo, for example, tells us that if we imprison the drama in a classical unity of place, "we only see the elbows of the action; its hands are elsewhere." Shall we reduce our dramatic time to twenty-​four hours? The same poet and critic reminds us that every action has its own duration, that to apply the same time-measurements to every action would be to act like a shoemaker who could make only one size of shoe for all sizes of feet. Moreover, it is easy to show that "unity of action" is a very indefinite phrase, which might mean harmony of character with conditions of place and time, or harmony of events with the central incident of the drama, or both of these combined and confused. But it would be a serious error to rise from the study of conflicting opinions on the nature and origin of the unities with a self-satisfied belief that, whatever the classic rules may owe to the theatres of Athens and Paris, we may now rest in a broad declaration that we hold with the "Romantic School," and that the unities have no significance beyond the ancient drama and its modern imitators. The truth is that under an aspect conventional, pedantic, and therefore repulsive alike to creative and critical freedom, the unities conceal an attempt to solve certain problems involving the highest efforts of philosophic inquiry. The need of dramatic limitation in space, time, and action is no mere whim of critical fancy. It rests on truths which the evolution of man, socially and individually, establishes, and which his animal and physical environments amply confirm.
The drama is a picture of individual character, social life, and, to some degree—in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese plays to a considerable degree—physical nature. If its characters and social life are patchworks of different ages—sentiments of blood-revenge blended with courtly refinement, associations of Elizabethan London in the Rome of Cæsar or the Athens of Alcibiades—we only enjoy the medley seriously so long as we are unconscious of the historical contrasts which, to ​the eye of those who can see them, cannot but lend the most solemn tragedy a look of caricature. In this way scientific knowledge may incapacitate us for pleasures which depend on limited vision. This will be seen from a case which Mr. E. B. Tylor, in his Anthropology, incidentally notices. "The negro," says Mr. Tylor, "in spite of his name, is not black, but deep brown, and even this darkest hue does not appear at the beginning of life, for the newborn negro child is reddish brown, soon becoming slaty grey, and then darkening. Nor does the darkest tint ever extend over the negro's whole body, but the soles and palms are brown. When Blumenbach, the anthropologist, saw Kemble play Othello (made up, in the usual way, with blackened face and black gloves, to represent a negro), he complained that the whole illusion was spoilt for him when the actor opened his hands." Descriptions of impossible scenery and animal life in which the flora and fauna of India and Iceland, England and China, should be indiscriminately confused, will not strike the listener or onlooker as ridiculous if he knows nothing of such distinctions. So also with human character and customs. A play to be performed before an audience of antiquaries would need to reach their standard of accuracy; and every one sees how different this standard would be from that of an ordinary audience. But every one does not see that the difference between the scientific few and the unscientific many is only on a smaller scale the difference between an uncivilised and a civilised audience; that the degrees of accuracy demanded increase with the widening ranges of experience, with an expanding sphere of comparison and contrast. Still less does every one see that in social and individual character there are limits to this accuracy resulting from the direct conflict between feelings and ideas of very limited ​evolution, and those of one far more advanced. It is just in such widening spheres of social development—clan, city, nation—and this impossibility of representing certain species of human character save as contrasts to our own, that the relativity of literature peculiarly discloses itself.
Social circumstances, it may be added, possibly produced the local limitations of the Athenian tragedy quite as much as the chorus or the architecture of the theatre. We have seen how differences of custom and language give rise to a conflict between what can and what cannot be dramatically represented through the medium of the spectators' speech, and thoughts, and feelings; and in the practice (not the merely critical rules) of the unities, especially that of place, it is possible that we have an unconscious feeling of such a conflict. But, it will be asked, how could Greeks, so slow to compare "barbarian" manners and customs with their own, so disdainful of everything beyond their own Greek associations, acquire any sense of social contrasts as affecting dramatic art? By the striking social and political contrasts of their little city commonwealths, contrasts to which the intellectual energy of Greece was so largely due. Here were opportunities for the recognition of relativity in miniature. What was true of individualised life at Athens was by no means true in the corporate organisation and sentiments of Sparta; the men and women of the Asiatic Ionians differed in many respects from those of Thessaly or Bœotia; and differences of dialect helped to emphasise those of social and political life. When we remember how largely these contrasts contributed to create the comparative thinking of the Sophists, and (by force of repulsion) the universal ethic of Socrates and the universal metaphysic of Plato, we cannot help believing ​that Greek contrasts, social and political, within the narrowest local limits, may have affected Athenian tragedy and limited its spheres of local propriety. The local differences of feudalism and the medieval towns were far indeed from producing any such limitations in the mysteries and miracle-plays. But why? Because a world-creed had in the mean time supplied Europe with a vision of the world's past and future before which all local and temporal distinctions appeared to vanish. But in the little commonwealths of early Greece, local differences formed the very life-blood of local character and patriotism; and it was not until the days of Isokrates and Alexander that the Greek ceased to be a citizen in order to become a cultured cosmopolitan.
§ 12. But the drama is far from being the only branch of literature from which literary relativity may be illustrated. The lyric—to use a vague but necessary generalisation—will supply the student of comparative literature with many evidences of its dependence on social and individual evolution. Mr. Palgrave (in the preface to his Golden Treasury of English Lyrics) has attempted to define the meaning of "lyric," but, as he himself admits, with no very remarkable success. Lyrical, he holds, "essentially implies that each poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation;" "narrative, descriptive, and didactic poems have been excluded;" so, too, "humorous poetry, except where a truly poetical tone pervades the whole;" and "blank verse, the ten-syllable couplet, with all pieces markedly dramatic, have been rejected as alien from what is commonly understood by song, and rarely conforming to lyrical conditions in treatment." We must be struck by the variety of elements on which this definition depends—elements of spirit, such as thoughts and feelings, and elements of form, ​such as the metres employed; and yet this is little more than an effort to define the English "lyric." Turn to Dr. Buchreim's Deutsche Lyrik, and we shall find even greater varieties of spirit (the Vollksleid, the Kirchenlied, songs of the Göttingen Hainbund, of Goethe, of the War of Liberation, of personal Weltschmerz) and of form (from the metres of Luther to those of Heine) in the development of the German "lyric." If, moreover, we were to examine the songs of France or Spain, of Italy or Russia—to say nothing of the literatures of the East—we should find many other and conflicting varieties of form and spirit summed up in the generalisation "lyric." Reverting, then, to Mr. Palgrave's attempted definition, it would be easy to prove that the lyrical idea it expresses can claim only limited truth even within the literary evolution of England. But students of comparative literature should rather thank Mr. Palgrave for an anthology exquisitely illustrating "the natural growth and evolution of our poetry" than find fault with a definition to which that evolution necessarily allows only limited accuracy.
The truth is that "lyric " poetry has changed prodigiously both in form and spirit, not only with differences of language and nationality, but with the alterations which social and individual character undergo in the development of any given community. If in the songs of the Shih King we find the sentiments of the Chinese family and its ancestor-worship, if in the hymns of the Rig-Veda we discover the spirit of the early Indian communities and their nature-worship, the song of the Saxon Scôp with its appeal to clan feelings, of the Norman troubadour with its feudal chivalry, of the English minstrel on Chevy Chace or Robin Hood, remind us that each country has its own "lyrical " developments ​expressing the changes of its social life. The "lyric" has varied from sacred or magical hymns and odes of priest-bards, only fulfilling their purpose when sung, and perhaps never consigned to writing at all, down to written expressions of individual feeling from which all accompaniments of dance or music have been severed, and nothing remains but such melody as printed verse can convey, and the eye or ear of the individual reader detect. In the rude beginnings of literature among loosely federated clans we find the communal "lyric" reflecting the corporate organisms and ideas of contemporary life. Even in Pindar, the communal, as opposed to the individual characteristics of the "lyric," are still visible, the victor of the games being often merely a centre round which the achievements of his clan or city are grouped. But as the old communal brotherhoods break up before the powers of the chiefs' families, as even family life is in its turn weakened in city democracies, the "lyric" becomes more and more an expression of individual feelings. No doubt we have excellent specimens of communal "lyrics" on a colossal scale at the present day—the sea-songs of England, the war-songs of France, the German Freiheits- und Vaterlandslieder—and whenever any great movement sets masses of our modern men on foot, we may be sure that a Campbell or a Körner will be ready to sound its reveille in song. But the development of individualism has left its marks deep upon the modern "lyric." The span-life of the individual contrasted with the corporate existence of social groups and of the human species, contrasted still more regretfully with the apparent eternity of physical nature, becomes a recurring theme in social conditions which thrust the life of the individual into vivid consciousness of itself, its brevity, and its littleness. It is this individualism ​which invests with such intense feeling our "lyric" poetry of youth and age, which lingers over personal associations within the limits of its own time and space with a sadness almost inexpressible in the language of any group, and which watches the withering of its own passions and emotions with the conviction that "there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away."
"Dewdrops are the gems of morning, But the tears of mournful eve."
§ 13. Formal distinctions in literature often survive in the language of criticism into conditions totally different from those among which they arose. Our European criticism has in this way inherited from the Greeks such words as "epic," "lyric," "dramatic," which we have learned to bandy to and fro with astonishing facility. But though these words are so constantly on our lips that we have come to regard the ideas they generalise as not only permanent, but almost sufficiently concrete to be touched and handled, we rarely remember that the conceptions they denoted for Greeks differ greatly from those which we denote by the same names, that their meanings varied among the Greeks themselves at different stages of their civilisation, that among Greeks, as among ourselves, there were days when none of these literary forms existed, much less were distinguished inter se, and that there have been and are states of social life in which only some or even none of them have been either developed or named. As rarely is it remembered that other peoples ​(ourselves included) have produced literary forms unknown to the Greeks, or that countries widely removed from European culture possess such forms as no European language can correctly express, because among no European people have they been developed. Our à priori notions of "epic," "lyric," "dramatic," can only be dispelled by such comparisons; and not until we have taken the trouble to trace the rise of different species of literature in different countries, and have thus learned the more or less different general and special ideas of literature entertained in each, can we hope to rise above the gross errors to which such à priori notions must expose us.
We have already seen the weakness of searching for universal conceptions of the “lyric; " let us now turn for illustrations of a similar weakness to the "epic." When Hallam contrasts Paradise Lost in choice of subject with the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, Thebaid, Jerusalem Delivered, he implies that all these poems belong to a common species which he calls "heroic poetry; " and, according to Macaulay, in his comparison of Milton with Dante, this is "the highest class of human compositions." Now, whether we use the name "epic" or "heroic " is, of course, a verbal matter; the important point is that we declare certain poems of very different ages and countries to possess certain common characteristics, and to approach some universal model. Of such a model Coleridge was evidently thinking when he said ​that an "epic" poem "must either be national or common to all mankind." Such common characteristics M. Géruzez seeks when, criticising Voltaire (Histoire de la Littérature Française, vol. ii. p. 410), he says that "scenes depicted with vigour, portraits sketched by an artist powerful and ingenious, some beautiful lines, some noble ideas well expressed, are not enough to make an epic; there must be varied characters, personages full of action and heroic life, communion between heaven and earth, in fine, unity of action and interest—vital conditions which are not observed in the Henriade." These marks of an "epic," evidently collected from Homer and Vergil, do not carry us much farther than Johnson, who praised the "universal" interest of Paradise Lost and the "integrity" (or unity) of its design. Possibly M. Géruzez did not mean to say more than that the "epics" of Greece and Rome are models of such compositions; and we can hardly object to the harmless assertion that persons or poems are models of themselves. But when Johnson tells us that the question "whether the poem (Paradise Lost) can be properly termed heroic is raised by such readers as draw their principles of judgment rather from books than from reason," we may see that he at least, like Schlegel and Coleridge, is thinking of some universal model not to be discovered in the Iliad or other epics, but innate in the human heart or intellect as a kind of literary conscience, If our subjective critics would only stop to ask how far their literary conscience extends, to what countries, or ages, or social groups it belongs or does not belong, we should soon hear no more of universal ideas of the "epic " or any other species of literature. But it is much easier, much more showy, to talk and, if possible, to think in the free and splendid language of universals than to accept the ​awkward consciousness of a prisoner confined within the necessary limitations of human thought. We may judge, however, from these examples of the "epic" idea—the word "epos" simply takes us back to the rise of poetical recitation without musical accompaniment, and suggests the Arab Reciter—the necessity of insisting on the relativity of literary growth to social evolution as opposed, on the one hand, to the treatment of literature as the mere imitation of arbitrary models; and, on the other hand, to à priori conceptions alike of the genus literature and of its species.
§ 14. We shall now seek the signs of literary relativity, not in the comparison of different species ofliterature, nor in the different characters of men and women in various stages of social life, but in that effort to transfer the thoughts expressed in the language of one social group into that of another, which we call translation. How far is accuracy of translation possible? It is clear that both in prose and verse there are difficulties in the way of the translator sometimes insurmountable. Even in prose translation objects such as animals or plants nameless in the translator's language, or customs and institutions unknown to his group, or ideas, political, religious, philosophic, similarly nameless, may present such obstacles. But in verse, besides these difficulties, there is the close connection between sounds and ideas which in every language is more or less recognisable. For example, in the Chinese drama Ho-han-​chan, Tchang-i's delight at the falling snow is expressed by changing the regular stanza, apparently reserved for dignified monologues and solemn descriptions, into the irregular or free measure which frees itself from the rule which subjects Chinese verse to the double yoke of cæsura and alliteration; in short, as M. Bazin "we must be able to read the verses in the original to gain an idea of the harmony which subsists between the style and the situation of the personage." How can this harmony be retained in the process of translating into any European language? If an effort were made to reproduce the Chinese metres in English, for example, the result would look ridiculous, even if it were not a complete failure; but that it would be a complete failure is clear from the fact which another Chinese scholar (Sir John Francis Davis) observes, viz. " that every word in Chinese poetry, instead of being regarded as a mere syllable, may more properly be regarded as corresponding to a metrical foot in other languages." Hence, one of the striking characteristics of Chinese verse is its parallelism in sound and sense, which has been compared with the parallelism of Hebrew poetry so carefully discussed by Lowth. Suppose, then, we were to translate a stanza of Chinese parallelism into Hebrew, would the result convey the Chinese form without alterations due to the Semitic dress? Far from it. The formations of the Semitic verb, noun, and particle are so different from the monosyllabic Chinese, that nothing like the Chinese parallelism could be produced either in Hebrew or Arabic. Here, then, is a case to illustrate the dependence of that harmony of sound and idea which we call "verse" upon the different sound-structures of languages, sound-structures which must be attributed to the varying appreciation of sounds possessed by the peoples whose ​social developments made the languages, and which may be as untransferable into a given Semitic or Aryan speech as certain barbarous notes of music into our European system of musical notation. Moreover, this Chinese example is only adopted because it is peculiarly striking. The same relativity of linguistic sounds to the group by which the language is spoken may be illustrated by contrasting, say, Arabic sounds and metres with Sanskrit, or Italian with English, or Russian with German, or by observing the loss of the hexameter and the appearance of a new form of verse with the rise of modern Greek in the eleventh century. We may, indeed, gauge to some degree the progress of discrimination in sounds by contrasting the ruder forms and metres in a given people's language with the more advanced—the confused union of syllabic and metrical scansion in Plautus with the Pope-like smoothness of Vergil, a similar confusion in Chaucer with the machine-like regularity of the ten-syllable couplet, the monotonous repetition of rimes in the Chansons de Geste with the Alexandrine of modern France, or (to take two examples from prose) the harsh antitheses of Thucydides with the delicate perceptions of sound in Isokrates, and the clumsy sentences of Milton with the modulated harmony of Ruskin. Such progress ​in the appreciation of sounds explains, indeed, the failure of attempts to modernise early poetry, such as those of Dryden and Pope. In such cases we expect the old harmony between earlier sounds and ideas to be kept up by the moderniser, whose ideas and sounds are both more or less different, and consequently the harmony into which he transforms the old verse. Our expectation is, of course, disappointed; it overlooks at once the subtle progress we have observed, and the peculiar fitness of certain sounds for certain ideas—a fitness which the poet of any age, just in proportion as he is a poet, is sure to detect and to express for him who has the ears to hear.
If there ever lived a poet who was likely to clearly express these very subtle relations of sound, speech, and thought, and their effects on translation, that poet was Shelley; and, though it often happens that a man who himself knows how to produce an effect has not reflected upon his powers so as to rationally explain their operation, we may see from the following quotation that Shelley was not unconscious of the process by which his own exquisite harmonies of word and thought were produced, and the impossibility of transferring them from one language to another, which must needs be a different sound-instrument. "Sounds, as well as thoughts," says Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, "have relations both between each other and towards that which they represent; and a perception of the order of these relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thought. Hence, the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence than the words ​themselves without reference to that particular order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creation of a poet." The Aramaic expression for translating (targêm, from which our "dragoman" is descended) conveys the figure of "throwing a bundle over a river;" and the truth is that in the translation process the bundle never arrives at the other side exactly as it was before starting. Language, in fact, is a sound-catalogue of all the objects and thoughts familiar to the community to which it belongs, be that community ever so small or ever so large, be it an African tribe or the widespread speakers of English or Arabic, be its average senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste—as sharp, but unæsthetic, as those of an American Indian, or as æsthetically appreciative, though perhaps physically inferior, as those of the most cultured people. With the contents of this catalogue the individual makers of a group's literature must be content. Beyond it they cannot pass. To modify it to any appreciable degree they cannot hope. Their work, so far as the sound-materials they use, is one of arrangement not of creation, and, in one sense, they are the servants of the language they employ. If that language is full and melodious, such is their treasury of expression. If it is poor and rude, they can only hope to make the best use of materials which have been made for them, not by them. Even the intensely developed individualism of ​Greek literature could not overlook this truth. For example, Professor Jebb, in his admirable account of the "Attic Orators," observes that one of the leading contrasts between Athenian and modern eloquence, such as that of Pitt or Burke, is to be found in the artistic feeling of the Greek orators, who, having once discovered a combination of words peculiarly fitted to convey a certain combination of ideas, do not hesitate to repeat such a sentence or phrase; whereas the modern orator, from whom at least the appearance of an extempore speech is expected, carefully avoids such repetitions. These relations of sound to idea may, moreover, partially explain two facts exceedingly interesting in the development of literature, the growth of poetic diction and the decadence of poetry in an age of analytic thought—facts in which we shall find further illustrations of the relativity of literature to social life.
§ 15. We are all familiar with Wordsworth's conception of "poetic diction" as an "unnatural" growth. The early poets of all nations, he tells us, wrote generally from passions excited by real events; they wrote "naturally," and so their language was daring and figurative in the highest degree. But succeeding poets mechanically adopted such language, applied it "to feelings and thoughts with which it had no natural connection whatsoever," and insensibly produced a language "differing materially from the real language of men in any situation." This conception of "poetic diction" as a "distorted language," gradually separated from that of real life, is only true of certain literary epochs which may be ​called epochs of classical imitation. It would be easy to show that some of the grandest specimens of poetry in the world (Greek and Indian epics, for example) offer many a mark of stereotyped diction in repeated epithets. Partially, such epithets may be attributed to an early and inartistic age in which the dependence of memory on the verse—writing being yet unknown—must have tended to stereotype many a striking epithet as a kind of resting-place for the memory. So far, "poetic diction" would seem to be the common property of poetic guilds, religious or secular, common aids to the memory of bard- clans like the Homêridæ. But partially, also, "poetic diction" may be attributed to a very real feeling of art, the feeling that made the Greek orator rest assured that an exquisite turn of phrase, when once discovered, was the most artistic combination of thought and sound of which his language was capable, and should be repeated in preference to any search for variety. "Form," says Victor Hugo, "is something much more fixed than people suppose. It is an error, for example, to think that one and the same thought can be written in many ways, that one and the same idea can have many forms. One idea has never more than one form peculiarly its own, excellent, complete, rigorous, essential, the form preferred by it, and which always springs en bloc with it from the brain of the man of genius. Hence in the great poets nothing is more inseparable, nothing more united, nothing more consubstantial, than the idea and the expression of the idea. Kill the form and you nearly always kill the idea." Here is a conception of "poetic diction" which is neither that of lifeless imitation nor that of antique epithets stereotyped as aids for the memory, one by no means peculiar to Victor Hugo, but which, wherever we find it, ​derives its significance from the figure of an artistic individual author gathering with free hand in the garden of his country's language such words as shall blend with his ideas in a beautiful harmony of thought and speech. Days without writing when poetic guilds were the great conservators of human tradition—days of courtly imitators crowning their brows with the withered roses of buried poets—days of democratic art when he who has the living spirit is free to choose its proper embodiment—so various are the epochs of social life and literature to which "poetic diction" may belong, so different are the facts and the ideas which it may express.
But, it will be asked, how does the decadence of poetry in an age of analytic thought illustrate the dependence of literature on social conditions? Can we find any connecting links between analytic thought and social conditions, and between both of these and the spirit and form of poetry? We have seen how closely related are the idea and its embodiment, the thought and the language, of poetry, and how different are the harmonies in which they may be combined in different societies or in different ages of the same society. Sever such relations between sound and idea by the separate consideration of each in scientific analysis, and you reach the inartistic or analytic conception of prose as the proper instrument of reflection and totally unconnected with poetic form—you Aristotelise your prose; and poetry, so far as it depends on the harmony of sound and idea, vanishes before a "philosophic" contempt which would ridicule or deny altogether the subtle relations of sound and idea in the languages of social groups. But, however analytic thinkers may deride such relations, the forms of poetry, and even of prose to some degree, prove by the ​best of human proofs—evidences unconsciously given—the existence of harmonies between idea and sound varying in different states of language and social life. Still, it may be asked, where is the connection between analytic or individualising thought and social conditions? How is the desire to see the individual object in preference to the general idea connected with social evolution? Let social life be decomposed into individual units, let men's sympathies be narrowed into the sphere of self, in a word, let the group be individualised, and we shall find that men's imagination is impaired, that it ceases to pass spontaneously beyond self, that it too becomes individualised. Such imagination may be wondrously inspired by nature, but hardly by human life. Thus the individualising process in social life which thrusts analytic thinking to the front, not only impairs the sympathetic imagination—and there is little imagination without sympathy—but undermines the belief in those harmonies of sound and thought of which poetry so largely consists. We may, therefore, find a very profound relation between what are called "prosaic" ages and individualism in social life, as well as between "poetical" ages and such social conditions as foster imagination by their vigorous sympathies, and do not affect to break the harmony of sound and idea by refined analysis.
But if we turn from men and their languages and life to animal and physical nature, we shall not only find the ​relativity of literature in the different kinds of animals and plants and scenery it depicts—the physical, or, as we formerly called it statical, relativity of literature—but even discover new aspects of its social relativity already discussed.
§ 16. The mere presence of a beautiful physical environment can do little towards the creation of a beautiful literature if social life moves under conditions adverse to sentiments of sympathy with nature. This man who, like Wordsworth's Wanderer, has lived among the wildest and grandest scenery earth can offer, is moved by none but petty motives, and reflects in his spirit neither the dignity nor the beauty of his native mountains. Another, who has passed his life in the grimy atmosphere of an English factory, surveys with boundless delight the ice-field of a glacier or the dizzy dangers of an Alpine pass. The sturdy, narrow-minded mountaineer is callous to sights and sounds of nature, whose gigantic features have not merely lost their interest for him from their constant presence, but have always been associated in his mind with very real hardships. Such common cases as these warn us against rashly inferring any sense of natural beauty or any deep sympathy with nature in consequence of her companionship with man, no matter how beautiful the dress she may wear. From under the rainbow arch of the cataract rises the witch of the Alps—but for whom? For Manfred, or rather for Byron's shadow called "Manfred," for one whose intense feeling of self has turned away from man to nature for poetic inspiration. What cares the chamois-hunter for witch or cataract? Search the pages of Greek poets and orators, and you will rarely find a picture of the varying forms of nature such as our town-begotten literatures of modern Europe present with rather monotonous frequency. And yet the literature of Athens, in a far deeper sense than ​that of modern England, France, or Germany, is town-begotten. Whence comes the contrast? From the different aspects not only of physical, but much more of social, life. The isolated city commonwealths of Greece saw beyond their own walls little but the work-fields of their slaves, or an exposed borderland which war and brigandage were perpetually devastating; where roads, if they existed at all, were as often the highways of enemies as the conductors of friends, and where the best of nature's favours would be a network of impassable rocks, to be valued for their practical defence, not admired for any beauty of their scenery. So, too, with the expanding town-sovereignty of Rome. Into the wilderness of nature and men uncivilised she throws her outposts of armed towns, and views with infinitely deeper sympathy the tiresome regularity of her military roads than all the splendid scenery of lake and mountain coming within the widening horizon of her empire. This is the march of human force armed cap-a-pie; before it nature is good for growing corn, raising men and cattle, for the soldier's ambuscade or the evolutions of horse and foot—and that is all. If the Roman poet turns his face away for a moment from the Forum and the city-folk to nature, it is (like Vergil) to nature humanised as the agricultural mainstay of man's life, or (like Lucretius) to nature humanised for the purposes of social theory. In the same way different social conditions in contemporary life may be observed to affect the aspects of nature; the same physical circumstances summon up different associations for the bards of the Homeric princes and for Hesiod, the singer of the people; the country life wears a different look for the medieval burgher and the medieval knight. Schiller tells us that the sun of Homer still shines on ​us; but, though the sunshine be the same, nature has changed her looks since the days of Homer, of Athens, of Rome, not only because our vision of the world has been greatly widened and corrected by discovery, but even more on account of changed conditions in social life.
If such effects attended municipal life in ancient Greece and Italy, if men under such social conditions could not feel the life of nature till it was humanised—as it was even by Theocritus—we shall be prepared to find a very different aspect of nature in the literature of a social life widely removed from that of Athens or Rome. Sanskrit poetry, as readers of such a poem as the "Indian Song of Songs " need hardly be reminded, is full of adoring reverence for nature and her elements. Moreover, contrary to European ideas of dramatic propriety, the Indian drama delights in lengthy and vivid descriptions of nature. Thus in Mrichchhakatí, or "The Toy-Cart," we have a description of the Indian rainy season which we shall elsewhere quote; and the splendid forest-scene in Vikramórvasí completely subordinates man to nature. This strong sentiment of nature cannot be attributed to Indian scenery and climate alone. The Greek, too, was surrounded by splendid scenery; yet, as Schiller says, nature appealed to his understanding rather than his feelings, and while his few descriptions of nature are faithful and circumstantial, they exhibit only such warmth of sympathy as the embroidery of a garment or the workmanship of a shield might arouse. To understand the contrasts of Indian and Greek sympathy with nature, we must remember the Indian village community and the Greek city as well as the scenery by which they were each surrounded. Nor is the explanation to be found solely in the village and agricultural life of India contrasted with the city communities of Greece. ​The system of caste, with its corporate and impersonal conceptions of human being, could not humanise nature in at all the same manner as that strongly-developed individualism which meets us in the cities of Greece. Ideas of human existence more or less impersonal are found in all early communities where, as in the clan, the individual is morally merged in the corporate being of his group; and the weak sense of personality in such social conditions is readily transferred to the phenomena of nature. Indeed, one of the main results of that development of personal consciousness which everywhere accompanies that of individual independence from communal restraints, is to see nature no longer clothed in the confused and confusing garb of man's early personality, but in clear contrast with a profound consciousness of each man's individual being.
But we have now illustrated the social and physical relativity of literature at sufficient length. It is time for us to ask what use the scientific student of literature can make of such relativity. Over and above the influences of climate and scenery, plant-life and animal-life, can we discover any tolerably permanent principle of social evolution round which the facts of literary growth and decay may be grouped? And, assuming that some such principle has been discovered, what is the proper method by which the collection of facts and their reference to this central principle shall proceed? It is to these questions that we now propose to turn; and first to the problem whether the growth and decay of literature contain any such guiding principle in spite of their apparent chaos of limited causes and effects.
* ↑ Lectures and Notes on Shakespere (ed. T. Ashe), p. 93.
* ↑ Ib., p. 73.
* ↑ Preface to translation of Ibn Khallikân's Biographical Dictionary.
* ↑ M. Bazin (Théâtre Chinois, introduction, p. li) makes some observations on literature in general, and the drama in particular, as reflecting the forms of social life, which may be here translated. "We have already remarked that literary productions initiate us more rapidly and sometimes more accurately in the secrets of social institutions than works apparently more serious; and we do not fear to maintain that probably not a single Chinese play exists which does not throw light on some facts altogether ignored. Thus, the comedy translated by Davis has determined the true position of the legal concubine contrasted with the legitimate wife. Before the publication of that comedy the oblations of the Chinese at the tombs of their parents were often mentioned; but did we know the prayers which they recite in these mournful ceremonies or the terms of the ritual they employ? Does not the first drama of this (M. Bazin's own) collection furnish an example of marriage brought about by order of the emperor, and for the celebration of which the couple and the parents are freed from the formalities prescribed by custom and the rites? The piece called The Singer similarly presents us with the formula of contract-of-sale in the case of a child; moreover, we find in it a scene which, as far as the evidence goes, proves that the sale was simply a mode of adoption. Such facts, it must be admitted, were at least very obscure points in Chinese character and custom."
* ↑ Preface to Cromwell (p. 24).
* ↑ Mr. Matthew Arnold (preface to his edition of Wordsworth's Poems) has observed with justice that Wordsworth's method of classifying his own poetry as belonging to "fancy," imagination," and the like sources—that is, classifying by "a supposed unity of mental origin"—is "ingenious but far-fetched." But when Mr. Arnold proceeds to maintain that "the tact of the Greeks in matters of this kind was infallible, that their categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural propriety and should be adhered to," we cannot help refusing our assent, not because we have any objections to urge against the Greek classifications of their own poetry, or the various uses to which modern critics have applied them, but because neither the art nor the criticism of the Greeks (or any other people) can possess that infallibility and "natural" propriety which Mr. Arnold would admire. If we find a certain propriety in Greek classifications, it is not because they possess any universal "nature," but because, shorn of many ideas they conveyed to the Greek mind, they fall in with modern modes of thought and conceptions of life similar in some respects to those of the Greeks, especially the Alexandrian Greeks.
* ↑ "Epos" (root vep, cf. Latin vox) seems at an early period of Greek life to have been used especially of an oracular "saying." These "sayings" were given in verse (the development of metre and music being in early Greece, as elsewhere, partly in priestly hands), and so "epos" came to mean "a verse." When lyric songs set to music, "melê," as the Greeks called them, came to be distinguished from merely spoken verses, the "epos" or "recited poetry" was separated from the "melos" or "poetry of song." (Cf. the recurring invocation, ἔσπετε μοι, Μουσαι, "recite for me, ye Muses," and the root σεπ-.)
* ↑ The rudeness of this versification, says M. Géruzez (Hist. de la Litt. Fran. vol. i. p. 27), is marked by monorimes, of indeterminate length, which only stop when the trouvère, having exhausted his final consonants or assonants, thinks fit to continue his psalmody on another rime till it, too, is in its turn exhausted. In the Kasida of the Arabs (to which we shall elsewhere refer) the same rime is, likewise, repeated, only in this case at the end of every verse throughout the entire poem, and the râwi, or "bindfast" letter, which remains the same throughout, may be compared to a rivet driven through the verses and holding them together. (Cf. Wright's Arabic Grammar, vol. ii. pp. 378, 379, and the European and Arab authorities cited by Dr. Wright on p. 377.) In ages when writing was either unknown or the monopoly of a few, it is clear that this repetition of the same rime would have supplied a powerful prop for the memory. But on this subject we shall have something to say presently.
* ↑ The relative influences of inflectional and analytic languages on metre are subjects deserving careful attention. The most superficial observer cannot fail to remark that the former, allowing greater freedom of position to words, tend to foster metrical scansion such as the poetry of Greece and Rome presents, while the latter, allowing far less freedom of position, tend to prefer the less stringent systems of rime or assonance. It is no mere accident that the Greek and Latin metres admit of easy imitation in German, with its comparatively strong inflections, while in English, the language of lost inflections, efforts such as those of Tennyson, Longfellow, A. H. Clough, contrast feebly with those of Schiller and Goethe.
* ↑ Littérature et Philosophie, vol. i. p. xxiv.
* ↑ "The constructional parallelism of sentences," says Sir J. F. Davis (Chinese Poetry, p. 26), extends to prose composition, and is very frequent in what is called Wan-chang or "fine writing"—a measured prose, though not written line beside line, like poetry. Other examples of rhythmical prose (or the recognition of harmony between sound and idea in prose), such as the Hebrew and Arabic, are well known; and it is to be remembered that such prose manifested itself among peoples unaccustomed to that analytic thought which carved out of Greek, Latin, and modern languages prose instruments for itself. Mr. Ruskin is certainly not an analytic thinker; so much the better for the delicate rhythm of his prose.
* ↑ "Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! sie lächelt auch uns." (Der Spaziergang.)