The March of

LITERATURE

FROM CONFUCIUS’ DAY TO OUR OWN

by

FORD MADOX FORD

© 1938 by Ford Madox Ford, copyright renewed 1966 by Janice Biala

Introduction © 1994 by Alexander Theroux

First Dalkey Archive edition, 1994

Second printing, 1998

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Ford, Ford Madox, 1873-1939.

The march of literature : from Confucius’ day to our own / Ford Madox Ford ; introduction by Alexander Theroux. — 1st Dalkey Archive ed.

Originally published: New York : Dial Press, 1938

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

PN523.F61994809—dc2093-21208

[‹Rare Bk Coll.›]

ISBN 1-56478-051-1

Partially funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Dalkey Archive Press

Illinois State University

Campus Box 4241

Normal, IL 61790-4241

visit our website: www.dalkeyarchive.com

Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America.

A DEDICATION WHICH IS ALSO AN AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

TO

JOSEPH HILLYER BREWER AND ROBERT GREENLEES RAMSAY PRESIDENT AND DEAN OF MEN, OLIVET COLLEGE, MICHIGAN

My dear Mr. President and Mr. Dean,

It is usual for a dedicator to assure his dedicatees that without their help he could not successfully have concluded his labors. That is true in a literal and physical sense, in this case, because, had you not provided me with a room in your admirable library, I should never have been able to finish this book—or not in ten years. But my spiritual obligation to you is no less deep. We have been working together for some time now, I under your presidency and deanship, in the attempt to restore to the youth of this state a lost art—that of reading . . . and in the hope that that art may spread from this state in ever widening practice to the ends of the earth.

Its present condition must be humiliating to every thinking man. The population of your nation is 150,000,000, that of mine over 450,000,000, every soul of whom is at least taught to read English in the schools. Yet of those six hundred million how many do, after their school days, read any books at all, much less any book that a reasonably cultivated man would not be ashamed to be seen reading? Well, a good—a very good—sale for a book of any literary merit whatsoever would be in my country, 14,000 copies; in yours 40,000. There are also, I have seen it estimated, in our joint vast realms, over 50,000 professors of literature. That means that one professor in a life of conscientious labor induces about 1.08 pupils to become, after tuition, reasonably civilized human beings. . . . And, in addition, there must be in existence hundreds and hundreds of thousands of learned works dealing with literature.

So it occurred to us three that there must be something wrong with the way in which the attractions of literature and the other arts are presented to our teeming populations. The solution of the problem seemed to us to be that that presentation must be in the wrong hands—that, in fact, such tuition, whether by word of mouth or in books, should be, not in the hands of the learned, but in those of artist-practitioners of the several arts—in the hands, that is to say, of men and women who love each their arts as they practice them. For it is your hot love for your art, not your dry delvings in the dry bones of ana and philologies that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.

So you set up your educational institution in which the professoriate consists solely of practicing artists—amongst whom it was my pride to enroll myself and my pleasure to serve. And having, thus, your corporate assurance that I was an artist, I thought I might undertake this book.

It is the book of an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting. So it is an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading. But that imposes on me certain limitations—the first being that, contrary to the habits of the learned, I must write only about the books that I have found attractive: because if I lead my reader up to unreadable books I risk giving him a distaste for all literature. Too many of the classics that the learned still mechanically ram down the throats of their pupils or their readers have lost the extra-literary attractions that once they had and so have become but dry bones, the swallowing of which can only inculcate into the coerced ingurgitators a distaste for all books. At the same time, I have such a distaste myself for writing injuriously about my fellows of the pen, though they may have been dead a thousand years, that I have, as you would say, panned hardly any writer, except for one or two stout fellows whose reputations may be considered as able to take care of themselves. So there may well be here certain omissions that may astonish you until you reflect upon the matter.

I have, in fact, tried to do here, making allowance for the differing nature of the medium, what you do with your students. You turn them loose in your library. You say: “Choose a book. Try it out thoroughly. If, after a sincere trial, you find it distasteful, reject it and try something else. If you like it, study it carefully and study the other books of its author and his circle, observing what you can of his methods as to which we shall afterwards speak to you. Then try other books until you find more to which you are attuned. . . .”

I, of course, have had to dilate upon the methods of authors when recommending readers to read various books, otherwise my method has been the same as yours. I have taken book after book that I liked—and that in so many cases I have liked since my adolescence—and have suggested that if the reader likes the idea of the writer that I present to him, he should try steeping himself in that author’s books, and so I have attempted to trace for that reader the evolution from the past of the literature of our own day and our own climes.

In any case, I beg you to accept the assurance of my affectionate thanks, of my hopes for the continued success of your admirable labors, and of the fact that I am

Your humble and, as I hope you have always found me,

Obedient servant,

F. M. F., D.LITT.

Olivet College, Michigan

14 July mcmxxxviii

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

THE author must make the usual acknowledgments for the innumerable quotations with which his pages have been beautified; the quotations are acknowledged where they are made. Unless otherwise stated, translations and adaptations are by the author. For the sake of space he has omitted the translation from foreign languages of passages whose interest is purely stylistic.

INTRODUCTION

by ALEXANDER THEROUX

Goethe once said that all writing is confession. It is a truism, if one at all, that applies here. We tend to learn as much about Ford in The March of Literature, this compendious tour of worthy writing to which he is guide, as we do of the work itself. It is, among other things, a record of his own quaint prejudices and fixed tastes, though, for being that, no less valuable a book. There is no end to the remarkable thoughts and theories he brings to world literature. He believed that Herodotus was the first great prose writer and that Icelandic literature was highly refined (“one of the few earthly near-paradises that the world has ever seen”) and that the great novels of the world have all been mystery stories. He was convinced greater material luxury leads to self-expression. The poorer a race is, he felt, the less will be the number of its accomplishments. He ignored Tolstoy, judged Leon Daudet “so great a genius as to be almost alone in the world,” and badly overrated Heine whom he called “the most exquisite of all the world’s lyrists” (his word, though Heine never played the lute) “since the great Greeks.” And while he abused many of our most honored novelists, notably Fielding and Cervantes—a sentimentalist as profound as his own Ashburnham, Ford thought chivalry might have saved Western civilization and despised Cervantes in bringing it under ridicule for destroying it—he considered the genre and its practitioners in a way that Thackeray himself would have approved, when he wrote, “There’s no good novelist who isn’t a good gossip.”

It was also Ford’s belief—and he had the habit by way of testing it of always turning to page 90 of an author’s work and quoting the first paragraph (which I did in this volume only to find it somewhat basic and low-flown)—that a passage of good prose is a work of art in itself, exclusive of context, “with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for the piano of Debussy.” Along with that he felt that being “slightly mannered” is characteristic of the work of all great writers, an idea that may come as a blow, constructive, one would hope, to the now popular Less Is More school, the Reporter-As-Novelist, today’s undermedicated hack, etc. Ford explained: “In great moments the convention which is a necessity for all works of art must be enhanced by just the merest notion of the screw and the language must, by the merest shade, marmorealize itself.”

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), although he attended the Praetorius School at Folkestone and the University College School in London, never went to college—as was the case, curiously, with most of the well-read people he grew up with and later respected. He converted to Catholicism at nineteen years old. He entered the army at forty-one as a second lieutenant, writing a poem “Antwerp” that T. S. Eliot once said was “the only good poem he’d met with on the subject of war.” (Ford was shell-shocked during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.) He spoke fluent French and German, some Italian and Flemish, and a lot of Greek and Latin. He could quote long passages from memory. He was prolific and in his lifetime wrote eighty-one books, over four hundred articles, and edited two notable literary magazines, the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. He was the complete writer, brought up to believe that artists were the only serious people, that everyone else was simply “stuff to fill graveyards.”

He was a fat man, ponderous, with blond hair that became almost white in old age, bad teeth, rosy cheeks, and a heavy mustache. He was a heavy smoker—Gauloises (“dust and dung,” he called them). In 1894 he married Elsie Martindale, who was formally his only wife, and although never divorcing her, for the marriage broke up in 1908, he had many affairs. (Supposedly he had eighteen major relationships with women over the course of his lifetime.) Although a prodigious writer, he was financially strapped all his life. He also had a prodigious memory and once began a French translation of his masterpiece The Good Soldier without a copy of the book or a note at hand. Thirty-seven pages of that truncated version survive at Cornell University.

In a sense, the critical book he wrote in 1929, The English Novel, prefigures The March of Literature in that it is subjective, personal, and unashamedly unacademic, “almost more an after-dinner conversation than a book,” according to one biographer, Alan Judd, who observes that “the voice that addresses you is warm and intelligent, its judgements made more definite—for good or ill—by an overwhelming love for its subject.” The premise of chatty, open-ended comment is indeed quite the same, though it was a much more laborious undertaking, this last great book which he wrote in his declining years, and in spite of its quirkiness one that represents a much vaster and more comprehensive erudition.

The March of Literature was written over the course of a year. Ford had been staying with his friends Allen and Caroline Tate, and through them met Joseph Brewer, the new president of Olivet College in Michigan. Brewer was impressed enough with Ford to offer him the post of writer-in-residence at the college, a position in which Ford saw an opportunity finally to write a commentary on world literature that had long been on his mind. He managed to interest the Dial Press in the project and began the book during the swelteringly hot summer of 1937 in Clarksville, Tennessee, where, living with the Tates at their house “Benfolly,” he made progress though he found the place rackety and complained of “the children and chickens and birds and cows and steamboats and Tennessee voices and doors slamming in the wind.” Nevertheless, before leaving for Olivet in the fall he managed to do most of the required reading, often in original texts, and sedulously began cranking out about a thousand words a day, dictating much of the book to Wally Tworkov, the sister-in-law of Janice Biala, his last consort. The poet Robert Lowell, who as a young man was also living there, described the atmosphere as “Olympian and somehow crackling.”

Upon arriving at Olivet, he secured an office in the basement room of the college library and by December had completed half the book, some four hundred pages, whereupon he and Janice went off to Paris. He suffered a minor heart attack there and generally was not well. Ford and Janice then returned to Michigan in April 1938 where he resumed work on the book, toiling away often from early morning to evening, as he had promised the publisher that he would finish the book by July, which in fact he did. Results were mixed. It turned out, much to Ford’s dismay, that Dial cut out most of the untranslated quotes as being too formidable, the book sold poorly in the end, and even the original manuscript disappeared after being donated by Ford for a Spanish Civil War organization to sell for funds.

It was Ford’s strong conviction that the tuition of presenting literature “should be, not in the hands of the learned, but in those of artist-practitioners . . . men and women who love each their arts as they practice them.” “Hot love,” says Ford, as distinguished from “dry delvings.” He had simple premises for what should be included by way of analysis in The March of Literature. Is a work readable or not? Is it creative, imaginative, and poetic or just “factual writings”? And while he says it is rash “to set one’s private judgements up against the settled opinions of humanity,” for contemporary literature the only test, he assures us, is one’s personal taste. To him, the working writer was by far the best judge of literature, which is interesting to me, since for twenty years in academic life I myself have often seen constantly preferred to good writers eighth-rate academics on the tenure track—classic examples of 1 Corinthians 3:18—with narrow monographs and mediocre books of criticism dropping out of their insufficiencies like eggs from battery fowl, never failing to call to mind for me those lines from Yeats’s “The Scholars”:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair

To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

The envy of scholar for artist, the preposterous idea that a literary critic sees—is capable of seeing—more deeply into a writer’s work than he himself can, is a commonplace in American academic life and is, among other things, the driving force behind much modish criticism of recent years, most of it the sort of impenetrable wall of noise we find in university periodicals where costive functionaries with Ph.D.s and prooftexting pencils make sad sallies into the world of the imagination, which for most of them is foreign travel. (“What Poe failed to understand about ‛Ulalume’ was . . .”)

Critics and textual commentators of literature—the “professorio-academic pack”—Ford found hopelessly pompous. Scholars to him tend to kill literature, invariably approaching it in the wrong light, as morticians, untrained psychologists, the kind of deconstructionist theorists of the sort I met with during my years at Yale with their fatuous poses, unbearable jargon, and sophomoric “zones of meaning” (“I’ve got a secret”). The teacher as expositor is often a complete and utter fake, frequently complicating the obvious and obfuscating what he is paid to clarify. I can’t tell you how many professors I’ve known who pretty much echo Faulkner’s overly circumspect Flem Snopes and his cunning reflection, “It can’t be right, it isn’t complicated enough.” One of the leitmotifs of The March of Literature is the ruination by formal education of the joy and innocence of reading. With Ezra Pound, Ford quite despised overly pedantic or professional anybodies. “For them the controlled monochrome of reason,” he might have said with novelist Patrick White, who also dismissed academic critics in his memoir Flaws in the Glass, “for me the omnium gatherum of instinctual color which illuminates the more often than not irrational behavior of sensual man.”

The March of Literature, then, taken altogether, is a “massive and idiosyncratic survey from Confucius to Conrad,” anecdotal, erudite, observant, mostly unpretentious, full of adventures of the mind and unexpected moments, what the French call accidenté. If anything, its fault can be found, not in its quirkiness—for it is often singularly wrongheaded and even outlandish—but in its wordiness. There is a good deal of the “project” in it, the verbal equivalent to my mind of something like handmade furniture, which we value not only because of but in spite of its flaws, a vast and elephantine personal undertaking, at once encyclopedic, unwieldy, overdetermined here, too slight there, something along the lines of, say, the monumental wooden plane called the Spruce Goose (it flew only once) built by amateur aviator Howard Hughes, a fellow, curiously enough, whom Ford actually mentions in this book! It was Ford’s ambition, in short, not only to take us on this literary tour but to save literature from the corrupt province of the learned.

To make various points in the book, Ford often argues from his own life. He writes that if he had to send a child to school, he “would give the strictest possible orders that he was to be taken through none of the great classics by any teacher,” and expressly identifies with a friend of his for whom, he recalls, Jesus and Shakespeare, having been taught in classrooms, became figures who had the faces of schoolmasters. It is the reason Ford says he could never read Goethe and Kleist, Klopstock and Schiller. “Shakespeare profited above [his contemporaries], no doubt, in the fact that he did not go to university,” says Ford, and benefited rather “in running, like De Quincy, the cruel streets of London.” The bold and vital unself-consciousness of that period allows for Ford to plead that overintellectualizing Shakespeare is wrong. “The Elizabethan wrote to be ranted. He needed overaction and vast, harsh voices to cow and affright his audiences.” It was Ford’s belief, therefore, that Shakespeare is intelligible to “any fourth-form schoolboy” or fourteen-year-old. “No teacher can teach Shakespeare,” pronounces Ford, who never quite forgave the schools for doing it so poorly. “The most the ‘teacher’—and, alas, quis docebit ipsos doctores?—can do for a pupil is to perform the functions of an easier dictionary, telling the meaning of a tassel gentle, a hernshaw, a fardel, a bourne.”

And with what relish does Ford report Gibbon’s dissatisfaction, for example, with his own English education. “To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation,” wrote the historian, “and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.” Gibbon, who was disgusted by the curriculum there, thought that universities from their early beginnings have proved not the advancement but the very ruin of learning and the arts, “an assertion,” Ford adds significantly, “with which we are not minded to disagree.” Surely the echoes of his own bitter memories and lost opportunities underscore Ford’s remarks.

The craft of the writer, with “a sort of priestly and lawyer-like respectability attached to the man who could write,” was always venerated. And so it is predominantly Ford the writer, not the critic, who takes us from ancient Egypt through the Golden Age of Chinese Literature, the Old Testament, which Ford called “an anthology”—the more lucid if read when “freed from the shadow of unreasonable gloom and almost insane vindictiveness with which one is accustomed to invest the Sacred Writings” (he is quite good on the Psalms)—to solid Aristotle through Cicero and Horace, into the Middle Ages, and beyond. Ford shows great learning in his explanations, in spite of the brief he has with academics. (Even his earnest thumbnail biographies are quite compelling.) He can single out his favorite lines of Ovid, explain Virgil’s intricate vowel-coloring, and speak off-handedly about Persian poets of the thirteenth century like Jalal ’U Ddin Ru’Mi and Fari’Da Ddin with ease, never sacrificing as he rambles along an anecdote, a story, or a sudden idea, which of course adds great charm to the book.

We learn in The March of Literature, for example, how and where cigarette-smoking was introduced to the West, how Mussolini relied on Ciceronian rhetoric, on what points of poetry he and Pound disagreed, and so forth. And he is always ready to digress or interrupt himself—a digression about World War I, for instance, on page 295, in the middle of a discussion of the Border ballads, lasts three pages—a wonderful irony, it might be noted, in light of Ford’s blasts against Henry Fielding for his own authorial intrusions.

But as this is not history—Ford, while trying to be reasonable, is not running for mayor—he can be not only unpredictable in his tastes, but positively maddening. He devotes six pages to the Roman poet Tibullus and then doesn’t mention Melville. He takes three pages to sing the praises of the “great” Jean Paul Richter, of whom he ludicrously writes “a man is hardly a complete man until he has read a great deal of Jean Paul,” and proceeds to dismiss James Joyce in a few lines as a word-juggler, the content of whose books “is of relatively little importance.” He vilifies Tasso, pronounces Dryden’s dramas to be worse than awful, rejects Ibsen’s plays as “almost unreadable,” and unequivocally denounces Victor Hugo for being a snob who wanted Paris to be named after himself.

Ford hated snobs. Byron was “odious” and wrote nothing but the “verse and language of a nobleman who considered himself impregnable behind his rank and the fashion of the day.” (Ford also blames him for the rise of Marxism!) He is no kinder to the English novelist. Defoe was “an insufferable bore.” Jane Austen overdrew her characters. Goldsmith was a materialist and Dickens a loudmouth and Thackeray a despicable misconstruer of plots as well as a snob. (“The dread spectre of the Athenaeum Club was ever in his background.”) “Both Thackeray all his life and Fielding in Tom Jones were intent first of all on impressing on their readers that they were not real novelists,” said Ford, “but gentlemen.” Tom Jones, in fact, remained for Ford “one of the most immoral books ever written.” Dickens was “vulgar” and “excruciatingly bad.” “He overwrote; he exaggerated; he was without delicacy; his humor was the humor of a tough in a Putney barroom today. There was no literary fault that he did not blaze out all over his pages all of the time.” Paradoxically, while faulting Dickens for vulgarity, it disgusted Ford that Fielding avoided certain low details, for it was Ford’s contention that the snobbish and self-promoting Fielding claimed to be unfamiliar with such facts. The fact that Ford rated Trollope’s Framley Parsonage “higher than any other English novel” seems to save him somehow from joining with E. M. Forster in that writer’s hair-raising remark, “There has never been a first-class novel written in English.” Ford Madox Ford, who ironically wrote one of them, comes perilously close to agreeing.

It may be this hatred of snobbery, at least in part, that gives a distinct anti-English tone to the book, which begins even as he dismisses Beowulf as “a rather clumsily constructed sackful of legendary wisdoms, human instances, and longueurs.” It is a poem, he says significantly, that has “all the imperfections of clumsiness that has distinguished English workmanship from time immemorial” (my italics). Can this explain his shocking indifference to Milton? Why he gives nine pages to Lessing and only one each to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, whom he snipes at for his clichés? (Ford seems to have begrudged him the £8000 he received for his Homeric translations, judging him “no scholar.”) He calls Dryden a “hack poet” and compares Smollett to Le Sage to the detriment of the former for lacking both sardonic and lambent humor—he finds him “cruel” (“almost the most insensitive of this world’s greatest writers”)—just as he resents the phony “manly” model Tom Jones has become in Britain, a novel he finds “heartless,” artlessly digressive, of negligible story, etc. On the other hand, he loves Clarissa in spite of its poundage, and goes on to add a rather severe criterion of value for a writer’s worth: only Richardson and Henry James among Anglo-Saxon writers are “international-minded.” Jane Austen, whom to some degree he condescends to admire, you see, never attained that status.

If he’s woeful on the English eighteenth century, he’s ruthless to the nineteenth. A dislike of the Victorians harbored by many of his generation lingered long in Ford and seems only to exacerbate his dislike of its many writers. Byron, as we’ve seen, to him was a prig, Southey “second-rate,” and Tennyson tepid. “You will find nowhere in the world such a body of ill-written stuff as in the English nineteenth-century poets; nor so great an inattention to form either of sentences or of stories; nor such tautology; nor yet such limp verbiage,” wrote Ford who thought highly of only Browning and Christina Rossetti, whom he inexplicably raises to the empyrean as “the one consummate artist that the English nineteenth-century produced.” (Hadn’t he heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had been published by 1918?) Nor was it just this or that in poor Tennyson. Ford makes it a sweep: “There was nothing that Tennyson touched, in fact, that he did not water down—to the very day of his death.” Ford’s favorite pejorative, “backboneless,” is repeatedly used in these chapters as he scores off one poet after another.

Ford’s quirks are utterly memorable. “The academic critic,” he writes, “despises the novel as he dislikes most forms of art,” but which of them with Ford would have called Cervantes “a chronically impoverished hack author” with whom, as he says, he had “a complete want of sympathy.” Or said this: “I have no intention of increasing, however microscopically, the number of his readers by writing of him.” Don Quixote he calls “a hideous affair,” “a masterpiece of ill-taste, whose sole effect was to go towards rendering the world fit for Big Business.” There is often no accounting for his favorites. He thought Captain Marryat to be “the greatest of English novelists” but doesn’t mention Tolstoy at all. And where is Proust? He rated the sentimental and moralizing Paul and Virginia as “necessary to a world that would be poorer without them.” He makes mention at the very end of Dostoevsky (whom he had clearly forgotten) but devotes three or four reverential pages to Alfieri, eight to Chateaubriand. He adores James Fenimore Cooper (“a magnificent prose-writer”) and Molière (“no other genius save Jefferson ever lived so completely”), and he especially treasures Dante. Gibbon wrote, he felt, “as if he were throwing at you pieces of his own heart.” So much did he admire The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that, throwing caution to the wind, he wrote “unless a man has read Gibbon he scarcely merits the name of an Englishman, an Anglo-Saxon, or even a man at all.”

All in all, then, his criticism is biased, tendentious, and even unfair. But in his defense Ford never wanted to be anything but forthright. His concern is almost always about how writing works—where and why writers fail, where and why succeed. The March of Literature is in a sense less a story of literature, a compendium, a college course, than one man’s constatation of it, to use one of Ford’s favorite words, though it is, as is quite obvious, far, far less dispassionate a presentation than that term denotes. He has worked to pull together what by saving he wants you to know and by knowing to remember and by remembering to treasure against changing fashion and foolery. “It is the book of an old man mad about writing,” said Ford. “In the great sense, the supreme art is the supreme expression of common sense,” he once wrote, making a rather strange remark about art, but he was a great believer in the practical and the unpretentious and even the odd.

Robie Macauley called Ford “the least academic man who ever taught,” duly pointing out that “for him all books in themselves were contemporaneous.” I like to think of Ford as believing that, who also humbly knew that glory never happens in the presence of guides or lecturers. Vision, like poetry, resists academic pretension, just as dogma evaporates on contact with the mystery of true spirituality.

BOOK I

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

THE modern English sense of the word “literature” is something very difficult to define. The original Latin word from which it is derived, “litterae” (even without the adjective “humaniores”), was apparently exclusively applied to what we now call “belles-lettres” or “humaner letters.” It would be a good thing if the term were today restricted exclusively to those departments of the written, printed or the incised word.

Rather unfortunately, for a century or so, the word has here been applied to two or three other departments of human activity—to records, to catalogues, to tendential works of every kind. People say, for instance, “The literature of the subject comprises,” and they will follow with a catalogue of books or pamphlets descriptive of almost any object under the sun, from flowers or women’s clothing to astronomic speculations. Thus refreshing my memory as to Ancient Egypt, I might say: The literature of the subject includes Budge’s (Wallis) The Mummy, Weigall’s The Treasury of Ancient Egypt, Burrows’ Discoveries in Crete, Maspero’s Contes Populaires, Torr’s Memphis and Crete. And I might continue with a long list of learned works devoted to this subject. Practically none of these compilations will display any imagination, human insight or literary talent—with the possible exception of Professor Maspero’s French renderings of early East Mediterranean folklore.

But actually, in the earlier sense of the word, if we wrote the “literature of Ancient Egypt includes,” we should have to follow it by “the Messianic prophecy derived from the poem of Ipuwer of the 12th Dynasty; a number of peasant songs dating from the fourth millennium B.C.; the more naïve later literature of the age of Rameses the Second,” and so on. We should catalogue, that is to say, the works of imagination or pure literature produced by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. We should completely exclude the works of learned Egyptologists of every nation under the sun who, in the last century and a half, have dug into the sands of the Egyptian deserts and discovered, deciphered and then, not writing anything of human interest, have merely catalogued the objects of every description that they have found.

In the book that follows, we shall confine ourselves exclusively to chronicling the humaner letters of the world. If we succeed in turning out a work of insight and imagination and one couched in clear, uncomplicated and not harsh prose, we may make ourselves see the great stream of literature issuing from its dark and remote sources and broadening through the centuries until it comes to irrigate with its magnificent and shining waters, almost the whole of the universe of today. If we succeed in that, we too shall have produced . . . a piece of literature.

This may appear a contradiction of the paragraph immediately preceding the last one. That would appear to say that history cannot be literature. Actually, whether a history be literature or not depends entirely upon the animation, the perspicacity, the insight, the incisiveness, the poetic qualities—upon, in short, the personality of the writer. Thus Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the story of Ruth and Boaz may both be classed as history and also as prose or poetic literature. But Mommsen’s Roman History or a textbook of geography for the use of high schools would be neither.

The term “literature” even in its strictest sense of “belles-lettres” or in the more poetic term, “the humaner letters,” does not exclude works on account of their form or their subject. On the face of it, the pamphlets of political propagandists would not appear to come under either heading. But, because of their fire, their close-knit styles, the passion of their invectives, and their lucidity, it would be a bold man who denied that the Philippics of Demosthenes, the In Catalinam of Cicero or in the lesser rank, the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, or the famous oration of Patrick Henry were either belles-lettres or humaner letters. In short, the quality that is necessary for the production of the Art of Literature is simply that of a personality of wide appeal. An art is the highest form of communication between person and person. It is nothing more and nothing less. The more attractive the personality making the communication, the wider in extent, the deeper in penetration and the more lasting, will be the appeal. What the subject may be, is of no importance whatever. The famous Greek Idyl of a woman outside a temple carrying a baby and trying to see a procession is as poignant as any of the cantos of the Divine Comedy, any of the books of the Bible, any passage from Shakespeare, or from Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal or any story by Turgenev.

The quality of literature, in short, is the quality of humanity. It is the quality that communicates, between man and men, the secret of human hearts and the story of our vicissitudes.

It is therefore in the sense of creative, imaginative, or poetic work that we shall henceforth employ the word “literature.” This, at any rate, in Anglo-Saxondom, is contrary to the existing fashion. The French, the Germans, the Italians, and most other civilized nations differentiate between the two classes of writing by calling all imaginative literature “poetry,” and all merely instructional or cataloguing matter, generally prose. Hence the word “prosaic.” But in Anglo-Saxondom the tendency has always been to regard instructional writings as being on a higher plane and creative literature as being, at any rate, relatively frivolous. In England it is not unusual for newspapers to list books that they receive for review under the headings “Serious Literature” and “Other Books.” Thus I remember having seen in one and the same journal a volume of short biographies of music hall stars and another devoted to recipes for cocktails, classified as “Serious Literature” while Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems were dismissed as “Other Books.” American papers seldom go as heroically far as that. But the tendency of the public on either side of the Atlantic is, on the whole, similar. It would, however, be absurd to write a history of factual, scientific or instructional books and call it a History of Literature. Records of facts, statistics and scientific theories are always so swiftly superseded that in a very few years almost no trace of them remains on the public consciousness. We may doubt, for instance, if any lay people today read Darwin’s Origin of Species, or the book called Babel and Bible, works which, some decades ago, shook the civilized world. But a couple of score novels and volumes of poems written since the 1880’s are part of the necessary pabulum of every man or woman who passes for educated or who takes pleasure in the written word. And if you consider the number of serious works of the imagination that, since men began to write, have passed a similar test, the disparity is so great as to be farcical. Let us glance backwards. The educated reader needs to know of the literature of ancient Egypt a few folksongs, a few small collections of precepts written by sages, and the few first forms of the legends that are important as showing the solidarity, the permanence that unite humanity throughout all the ages—the first forms of legends of the Deluge, of the Creation, of the Messiah, of the Trinity, or of the stories told by Scheherazade. The same is true of the writings of Babylon or of Crete. Then immediately you come upon the immense mass of propaganda and prophecy that make up the Hebrew Bible.

Contemporaneously, or immediately afterwards, came the great mass of Greek poetry and drama, and later the imaginative works of the Latin writers. As against these, you have on the borderline between the serious and the creative, the dialogues, say, of Plato, a few geographical or historical works like the writing of Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, and possibly Strabo, Pliny, and the De Bello Gallico of Caesar. These serious writings that will hold the critical or pleasure-loving intelligence are very rare.

It is here necessary to make an effort to be explicit. The dialogues of Plato or Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico are philosophic or factual works. But Socrates before beginning an argument will mention that there is a hill with trees outside the city wall to which it will be agreeable to retire for discussion. The passage is so brilliantly written that you have at once an addition to your mental picture of Athens. Or Caesar, with the detail as to chariots used by the blue-stained Briton, will make you see an early battle field. That is literature. If a work devoted to the biographies of music hall stars or to cocktails contained a sufficiency of such passages, that also would be literature. Actually there exist innumerable written or incised documents, records of law suits, market accounts, astronomical speculations and codices of the Egyptian, the Babylonian, in addition to the Classical Greek or Roman unreadable matter just mentioned. But they are of a sort that is unlikely, however the taste of mankind may change, ever to bulk very large in the human consciousness, so they could hardly be called literature. There exist, for instance, case-books of Greek and early Arab physicians. In the diagnoses that they contain, even the medical layman may find a certain pleasure. He will discover that, two to three thousand years ago, people had very much the same symptoms as at times are felt by himself. And, the earliest written document in existence, being a Babylonian lawyer’s pleading in a law suit, may be equally interesting. For, in the remotest times, testamentary uncertainties were as frequent as they are today. But these things are of importance merely because of their quaintness or because they are evidence of what I have called human solidarity. . . . They show the sameness of the vicissitudes and passions of humanity down the ages. . . .

In the meantime there was being written a great—a very great—stream of literature that, coming from the East, has ever since impinged on the current of our western writings. Actual contact between Chinese, Indian, Persian and other Eastern literatures is not very hard to establish. In Greek philosophic writing, like that of Pythagoras, unmistakable traces of Chinese thought are visible. Pythagoras was a semi-mythical Greek philosopher of the sixth century whose existence is traceable almost solely, as quotations, in writings by his successors. But amongst those traces we discern many of the Precepts of Confucius. Thus, even if we didn’t know historically the commercial and aesthetic associations uniting Greece to the farthest East, we should have to suspect that some such contact had taken place. Moreover, in the great body of the great literature written in Arabic the influence and even the name of Plato occur very frequently. In any case it will be well if the reader gets into his head the image of a vast panorama of the Eastern world across which shimmered two streams of literary influence. The one descended the Nile, the other came from China, yet both discharged themselves into the Mediterranean to form that Mediterranean civilization which is today our own.

The Far Eastern Chinese stream we may take for the moment as having been more “serious” than the one which descended between Nile banks. Or it would be perhaps more just to put it that the Western world has found more use for the philosophy than for the creative imagination of the East. The names of Oriental works which spring immediately to the mind are those of the Moral Precepts or Canon of Confucius, the four Vedas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana. Against them one may set the Sakuntala of Kalidaça, a heroic epic.

Into these things we shall have to go more fully later, but it may help our initial impression to say that, as against Mediterranean literature, Oriental writings have been better preserved. The notorious First Emperor of China made, like Mr. Hitler, a spirited attempt to destroy the records of all Chinese civilizations that had preceded that over which he reigned. But he excepted from this auto-da-fé all works on agriculture, medicine and divination; thus, if he had succeeded, the balance might have gone heavily down on the side of “serious” books. But, after his death, hidden copies of the works of earlier poets and philosophers were discovered in plenty. For instance, a copy of the Canon of Confucius was found in the ruins of the house he had inhabited. Thus this holocaust is petty compared with the burning of the library at Alexandria and the almost complete rooting out, for eight hundred years or so, of the classic Greek and Roman literature. This last took place at the successive sacks of Rome and of all the littoral cities of the Mediterranean before and during what were known as the Dark Ages. Thus, the view of what we have remaining of Greek and Roman literature may well be unbalanced. The works of many reputedly great writers of whom we have traces only in the quotations made by their admirers have completely disappeared. Thus, of Hesiod almost nothing remains—sixteen hundred lines or so. And even of these it is questionable whether a thousand of them may not have been written by one of his disciples. Yet in his own day—which fell in the eighth or ninth century before Christ—and for hundreds of years later, Hesiod was a poet esteemed as on a level with, or even greater than, Homer. Similarly, almost nothing remains of the writings of Sappho.

Thus when estimating the relative outputs of imaginative or of “serious” writing in the Graeco-Roman classical age we must always remain more or less at fault. But it would seem fairly safe to say that, in what remains to the public consciousness of today, their creative imaginative literature immensely exceeds their factual writings. You might say that for one person who today, outside law schools, reads the Codices of Justinian, one hundred thousand delight in the athletic prowess of the heroes of Homer or in Virgil’s account of the fate of Laocoön and his sons.

With the re-ascent towards civilization that began after the Dark Ages, the estimation becomes at once much clearer and much easier. Almost none of the “serious” work that was written for a thousand or so years after the fall of the Roman Empire would today be taken seriously or even read for its quaintnesses. You might read an Anglo-Saxon Bestiary for philological reasons or in order to discover how much knowledge of natural history was possessed by tenth or eleventh century Anglo-Saxons. But you would hardly read it either for pleasure or to improve your knowledge of the habits of beasts or birds. Similarly you would not read the fourteenth century Travels of Mandeville to help your geography. Nor yet would you read Culpepper’s Herbal for its botany, nor Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to add to your knowledge of history. But there at once we come upon a snag. For it is quite possible to read Culpepper because of the quaintnesses of his conceits and language and Malory must, with his words, his imagination and the beauty of his point of view, have given inconceivable delight to uncounted millions since his day. There exists, however, another branch of science—if theology be indeed a science—that must give serious pause to anyone wishing to classify what the pen has produced. Where exactly would you place the Imitation of Christ? Yet only a few years ago a German firm of international booksellers declared—and there is no reason to doubt their veracity—that the masterpiece of Thomas à Kempis or Gerson or Vercellius or whoever wrote it, was the most read book in the world, the number of copies sold exceeding even those of the Bible. This last statement, as an Anglo-Saxon, one may imagine to be an exaggeration. Nevertheless, the sale of the Imitation may be taken to be immense. It finds readers of practically entire populations wherever the Roman, Greek or Coptic rites flourish, whereas to read the Bible is not a necessary act of faith for Catholics. And next in sales to the Imitation of Christ, comes Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress which must at one time or another have been read by every Protestant child on the globe, an exception being made for the Protestant populations of the Danube and Balkan states. They for their part read an almost exactly similar work, by Comenius. But here again the safest test dividing imaginative from “serious” work must simply be the quality of the execution of the task, the poetic imagination of the writer. And, even at that, there are many books which must fall on either side of the borderline.

How, for instance, would you classify the mystic writings of the great St. Theresa?

Or how, indeed, today—otherwise than by their good or bad writing—would you classify the innumerable romanticized biographies of every imaginable type of historical character from Helen of Troy to Mrs. Harriet Ward Beecher Stowe?

Let us then sum up Literature as that which men read and continue to read for pleasure or to obtain that imaginative culture which is necessary for civilizations. Its general characteristic is that it is the product of a poetic, an imaginative, or even merely a quaintly observant mind. Since the days of Confucius, or the earliest Egyptian writers a thousand years before his time, there have been written in stone, on papyrus, wax, vellum, or merely paper, an immense body of matter—innumerable thousands of tons of it. This matter is divisible into that which is readable and that which is unreadable except by specialists in one or another department of human knowledge. The immediate test for one’s self as to what is literature and what is not literature—biblia a-biblia as the Greeks used to call this last—is simply whether one does or doesn’t find a book readable. But if a book has found readers in great numbers for two thousand or five hundred or merely eighty or ninety years, you would be rash, even though you could not read it yourself, to declare that it was not literature—not, that is to say, a work of art. You may dislike Homer as much as this writer actually dislikes, say, Milton. But neither of us would be wise if we declared that either the Iliad or Paradise Lost were not literature. We should be unwise because it is foolish to set one’s private judgment up against the settled opinions of humanity for generation on generation, and because our tastes may change before the end of our lives. This writer used, for instance, as a boy, very much to despise Ovid, as a poet, mainly, perhaps, because he was forced at school to memorize an immense number of lines from the Metamorphoses. But today one of the chief consolations of his existence is that he has still a great number of those lines by heart and can recite them to himself at night when he is unable to sleep.

But for the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one’s personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout to you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.

There remains in the settling of these preliminaries the question of what is and what is not poetry. As we have said, the Anglo-Saxon world—the British Empire and the United States—stands alone in considering that verse is the necessary frame of poetry. A fine novel is called in French poésie, in Italian poésia, in German Dichtung, and in almost all other languages the same classification is made. It is to be wished that we did the same because that classification is more reasonable and indeed more scientific. But since insisting on calling the Morte d’Arthur or Flaubert’s St. Julian or Turgenev’s The Singers or Cunninghame Graham’s Beattock for Moffatt “poems” though they are written in prose—since to do that would cause confusion—we had better throughout this work use the term “poetry” only for that which is written in verse.

Verse it should be remembered is much the older medium of the two. It served for the expression of the most early and most savage passions. The naked prehistoric savage jumping up and down and yelling “Rah, Rah, Rah, Ho, Ho, Ho,” like the university cheerleader during a football game today, was laying the foundations of the verse-poetry that should—and shall—succeed them. These wordless chants, dating from before the time when humanity could communicate its thoughts by words, gradually stereotyped themselves as rhythms, then adopted some sort of musical inflection and later took words to themselves. They expressed rage. They incited to war. They timed the stroke of paddles, as, later, they gave the signal for the hauling of ropes on ships. These primitive, utilitarian developments of verse, particularly on the seas, accompanied humanity, until very late times, in the form of sea chanties. So that, if you could write a history of these chanties from the earliest times until the coming of steam, you would have a very useful epitome of the earlier development of verse in almost all civilizations.

Whilst civilizations remained primitive, whilst men were mainly hunters, nomads or pioneers, their verse retained the quality of primitive chanting. Then as civilization attained to luxury, and the greatest of all luxuries, that of leisure, the thoughts that they thought became less passionate. They passed hours in reverie, in the sports of love, or in loitering in pleasure gardens. They found words to express these moods or occupations, but these moods or occupations, not being rhythmic, they could not express them in verse like that of the chants of the cavemen. So, gradually, out of these non-rhythmic but pleasurable or emotional occupations, was born the more sophisticated and the more difficult art of prose.

Strong emotions, nevertheless, continued to call for rhythmic expression such as distinguishes early Chinese, Arabic or American-Indian odes.

Later again, as in the artificially accented or stressed verse of the Romans, the actual form of the verse itself began to become important. The poet began to take pleasure and to attempt to convey pleasure to his hearers by all sorts of verbal devices from rhymes that would become even puns, to the repetition of whole sentences so as to make verbal patterns. These tricks are innumerable. In nearly all literatures they began with what is called “onomatopoeia”—the expression of an event, of the aspect of a landscape or of a frame of mind, by the actual sound of the word employed. Thus you have the famous Poluphlisboion or the Anerhythmon gelasma of the Greeks, the one word signifying the sound made by a huge rock when cast into the sea by a hero, or the other expressing the “innumerable smile” of the smooth sea when its surface is broken up into diamond-shaped wavelets. Or the later Romans using recurring vowel sounds attempted to render, in addition to the meaning of the words, the actual exclamation of the emotions expressed. Thus, you had Virgil’s Infandum regina jubes renOvare dOlOrem. Et quOrum pars magna fui quis talia fando. MyridOnum, DOlOpum, etc., the “o” followed by “o-o” sounds heard during the recitation of the poem giving the effect of lamentation for the fall of Troy. Later rhyme came on the scene to add its incentive for admiration to those already afforded by the ingenuity of verse. And it is to be remembered that for many thousands of years, verse was intended to be recited or read aloud rather than read to one’s self. Thus the reader or reciter was to some extent an actor, and the more ingenious his verbal conceits the more the actor would excite his hearers. He did this by all sorts of devices that in no way rendered his meaning clearer or gave more definition to his emotion. Thus, you have the troubadours of mediaeval Provence. Their meanings when their art was at its height became almost completely stereotyped, the verse limiting itself to extolling the perfections of some lady, and recounting the poet’s sufferings, or the deeds that he was prepared to do in order to obtain her favor. Thus, you had in their poems not merely what are called “conceits” or “images” but repetitions of the same rhymes going on through the hundreds of lines of a long poem. As for instance:

Li dous cossire

Quem don amors soven

Domnam fas dire

De vos mas vers plazen

Pessan remire

Vostre cors car é gen

Cui eu desire

E cui non fasz parven,

a poem which continues with the same “ire” and “en” rhymes for a great number of lines. Later, you had the ballad form in which the same line would be repeated at the end of every verse to form what was called a “burden;” later still there were developed the more formal symmetrical and stereotyped forms, such as the rondel, the pantoum, the virelai, the ode, or such slightly less artificial forms as the sonnet—a fourteen ten-syllabled line construction in which, given that his end rhymes went A B B A, A B B A, and that he could find a strong couplet end-piece, the poet might express himself how and about what he liked.

But in whatever age, or with whatever race, the history of the development of poetry has always been the same. It begins with the simplest form of expressions of emotion, goes on to express other emotions more simply, less rhythmically. Then it adopts all kinds of tricks and devices until poetic emotion itself almost disappears behind the jewelled blossomings of tricks and conceits. Then, suddenly, humanity and the poets get tired of so much artificiality and so much sameness, and poetry once more returns to being simply an expression of the simpler emotions.

That recurring phenomenon has distinguished all the literatures of all the ages. And not merely in verse. Several times in the course of its history, Egyptian literature became extremely full of tricks, conceits and word-juggling, and then again, as with the coming of the dynasty most distinguished by Rameses the Second, it returned to a complete naïveté. The great Chinese poets—for prose literature of China is relatively undistinguished—showed exactly the same progressions. Never very passionate then, it tended always towards more and more verbal and metrical felicities, and then in reaction came the naturalistic poetry of the Tao-ist Quietists. For the last thousand years or so, it has remained almost entirely a matter of metrical and verbal juggleries. And if we could—which unfortunately we can’t—accurately date the writing of the Hebrew scriptures, we should no doubt find exactly the same tendencies: the relatively florid writing of the Song of Solomon giving place to the comparatively unornamented Books of Kings and these once more being succeeded by the impassioned writings of the poet-prophets. These, from the very fact of their passions, developed extraordinarily literary aspects.

But to make the matter exactly clear we had better consider the literature of our own race and language. Thus, not to go too far back, you found in Tudor days the highly ornamented and trick-filled prose and verse of the Euphuist and sonnetteer movements giving place to the relative simplicity of the later Shakespeare or Marlowe, and that in turn waning before the complete but wonderfully lucid simplicities of George Herbert and his contemporaries. This again passed into the hammered prose of Browne and his contemporaries. This again was succeeded by the more hammered prose of Clarendon and the more complicated rhythms of Swift, until you had the complete, bewigged artificiality of Pope and the eighteenth century. There succeeded the possibly exaggerated simplicities of the Lake and Cockney Schools of poets—the Wordsworths, Coleridges, Shelleys and Keats. This tendency once more gradually passed away before the comparative artificialities and pastiches of Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite poets. Then once more in the first decade of this century you had a striving towards complete simplicity of diction. This tendency was interrupted by the thunders of the guns of Armageddon, and our poetry is again tending towards a sort of mysticism wrapt up in language of some involution and derivativeness.

The fact is that humanity cannot be static in these matters. It requires, by turns, extraordinarily skillful posturings and stage-tricks in the use of words, accompanied by a relative vapidity of meaning. Then, tiring of rhetoric and histrionics which will have grown out of touch with the spirit of the age, nations will cry out for the expression of strong emotions, of simple aspects of life or of great moral truths couched in straightforward or in merely common diction. Whether it is the call of the public that makes for these changes or whether the revolution of the tastes in poets and prose writers themselves forces these changes upon the attention of the reader is a matter that everyone must decide for himself, according as he is by temperament Plutarchian or anti-Plutarchian. It is sufficient for us here merely to recognize and to state the phenomenon. Let us then put it, that in the extreme East, the voluminous literature of the Chinese has remained almost statically artificial, whereas for nearly a century and a half the tendency of Western and Anglo-Saxon literature has been more and more away from technical rules in the construction, and from artificial felicities in the wording, of both its prose and its verse. This, of course, is a merely by-and-large diagnosis of the case, but it is one sufficiently true to be accepted as a rough pattern in the minds of those to whom literature is a matter of importance.

CHAPTER TWO

AT ALL accurately to chart the enormous sea that is the record of human thought and emotion since the earliest days, it is necessary to take the matter in hand as chronologically as possible. As has already been suggested, all national literatures are products, to some extent, of all the literatures that have preceded them. The earliest civilizations of man in his present dispensation stretched in vast disappeared empires or, in the alternative, in small or large nomadic hordes between the Nile and the Hoang-Ho. Actually to trace today the influence of early Egyptian moralists or later Egyptian imaginative writers on, say, Confucius would at the present state of learning be difficult in the extreme and the task would be too technical for a work like this present one.

But let us attempt to have some vague, misty image of the vast matter of the beginnings of human thought. Let us say that the proud and magnificent civilization of Babylon lasted fifteen hundred years from about 2000 to 500 B.C. This civilization influenced with its moral precepts, its theology and its legends, not merely the literature and thought of the Egyptians and the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the Classical Greeks and Romans, but almost certainly its influence on the Chinese was very great as in turn was the influence of China upon Babylon. You have to consider that all across Asia there was a continual, an unending, going and coming of merchants, of conquerors, of missionaries, of nomads, and that one body of men cannot come into contact with another body of men without maxims, practices, or merely material habits and knowledges getting transferred from the one to the other. Our civilization today is an extraordinary jumble of habits and psychologies derived not merely from our fathers but from the very peoples that our fathers conquered, enslaved, or merely traded with. So it was with the greater, more beautiful, luxuriant, and reasonable civilizations that have preceded this of our own day. I have begun with Babylon, a relatively modern civilization, because such a figure as that of 2000 years B.C. is relatively easily graspable and because relics of Babylonian civilization are fairly numerous and fairly complete. For, when one comes to think that the Old Kingdom in Egypt began at least 8,000 years before our own day, the task for the mind is rather burdensome and appalling. Nor, indeed, does legend begin to play much part in the story of Egypt until 1,500 years or so later than the date of the earliest fragments of the Old Kingdom that have come down to us. That legend dates from about 3,500 years before the Christian era and is that of Memphis, a city with a great civilization founded by a semi-legendary king called Mena, whose solar myth singularly resembles that of our own King Arthur at Camelot. From that to saying that the Arthurian legend is traceable to the similar one in Memphis would, perhaps, be too far a cry. Nevertheless, human conceptions of great kings and Golden Ages must somewhere have had a beginning. The mere image of a great ruler who was also a great civilizer will make itself felt in countries vastly different and after uncounted tales of years. How much influence did not the legends even more than the historic achievements of Alexander, the Macedonian, have upon the mind and thus upon the achievements of Buonaparte, the Corsican? And how much influence have not the legends almost more than the historic achievements of Napoleon not had upon the psychologies of innumerable dictators, newspaper proprietors and owners of dry-goods stores, to the present day, and with what disastrous—or, perhaps in a few cases, happy—results for humanity? So it is not unreasonable to consider that the legendary figure of a good King Mena of the Nile may have had its influence in the creation of the legend of the good King Arthur of the Western Islands.

Be that as it may, the civilization of Mena progressed for, say, 1,500 years until towards 2,000 years before the Christian era. Really great historic kings of Egypt begin to be traceable and with them a literature, that is to say, a record, of human thoughts or imagination begins to be born. As far as we are concerned, the first Egyptian record that appears to be of literary value is Amenemhet I’s advice to his son, a record of some bitterness written after an attempt to assassinate that great sovereign had failed. But even before that records were made of primitive literary attempts. Thus, you have incised tablets giving you the folk songs of peasants and fishermen dating well into the third millennium, say 2,200 years, before the Christian era. Or you had the precepts of the ministers of early kings, like the precepts of Ptahketep, prime minister of King Aessa of the Third Dynasty.

The great period of flourishing of Egyptian literature came about a hundred and eighty years after the death of Amenemhet I under Amenhotep III, who died about the year 1801 B.C. (It is to be remembered that Egyptian chronology like all Eastern reckoning of time is very vague and uncertain. Early and indeed late Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Chinese, like early British, historians numbered time by the births and deaths of dynasties or sovereigns, or from forgotten floods or catastrophes. Nearly all modern historic chronology of these periods is computed from an eclipse which took place in the year 763 B.C. This gives us the fact that Solomon was probably reigning in the year 940 B.C., that the power of the Theban priest kings disappeared at about the same time, or that Ahab was King of Israel in 854. The historian, therefore, has continually to qualify his dates with the word “about,” and this word being usually symbolized in the letter “c” from the Latin “circa,” we may as well in the future so qualify our dates when they are uncertain.)

Literature then and most of the other arts were at their most flourishing in Egypt under King Amenhotep III, who died as we have seen c 1800 years B.C. and whose reign lasted apparently for about forty-five years. This was a period of great architecture, but of architecture not so florid or of such exaggerated proportions as that of Rameses II, who came about five hundred years afterwards, reigned, say, from C 1290–C 1225 B.C., and carried on his enormous works with indentured labor. Thus, you have the historic captivity of Joseph in Egypt.

Not only were architecture and sculpture of the Amenhotep III era magnificent and sympathetic, but in that age Egypt enormously extended her boundaries and sent voyagers to almost every portion of the known world, but more particularly of course to the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. And this magnificence and these exploits are fully reflected in the literature of the time. They still show their effect on our imagination today. Thus, the work called the Voyage of Sinuhe, the fabulous account of a shipman of the great King who was wrecked on a Mediterranean island four thousand or so years ago, is still echoed faintly in our nurseries in the story of Sinbad the Sailor. And the Exploits of Thutiy, the story of a general of Thotmose III who took and sacked the city of Joppa after having introduced part of his army within the walls in grain sacks carried on the backs of asses, is the primitive version of the legend of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. . . .

You have to imagine this literature being produced whilst dynasties rose and fell, whilst Egypt spread herself out in great empires or shrank again into the merest strip of territory along the Nile in the sands of the desert. That strip would be invaded by mysterious barbarians who tyrannized the country and were finally expelled, leaving traces of their own civilizations, material or spiritual. . . . Thus, c 1675 B.C. Egypt was invaded by a mysterious Oriental horde called the Hyksos, whose rule lasted only some 75 years or so. Nevertheless, they left behind them horses and wheeled vehicles, forms of transport and warfare that the mightiest of the empires that preceded them had never known. . . . Thebes had latterly replaced Memphis as the splendid center of the country.

Under the great Emperor Thotmose III, the master of Thutiy of the Forty Thieves, Egypt began once more to expand. She went on expanding under the Amenhoteps, the great Tutankhamen—the rifling of whose tomb proved, if it were needed, the magnificence of the Egyptian civilization of that day—and under the Rameses in their earlier days. That stage occupied the periods of what are called the XVIIIIth to the XXXIIId Dynasties and, in time, lasted about 500 years—from the expulsion of the Hyksos about 1600 B.C. to 1090 B.C. when there fell the last of the kings of the name of Rameses.

It is important to notice when it comes to the name of Rameses that here contact is made and maintained between the Egyptian civilization and literature and that of the Hebrews—the period lasting almost exactly 200 years from the birth of Rameses II to the outstanding date of 1090, these dates being pretty firmly established by the eclipse of which we have already spoken.

The Hebrews of that period were made up of a dozen or so of loosely affiliated nomadic tribes, distinguished by the same habits and gradually emerging from a welter of other not very dissimilar Semitic septs. These all inhabited a large quadrangle of territory to the north of Egypt and to the east of the Mediterranean. All these Semitic tribes were known among themselves as Canaanites and to the Greeks as Phoenicians. They displaced eventually a colony of Cretans known as Philistines. And, as far as the Hebrews were concerned, towards the end of the age of the Rameses, they occupied, as a more or less settled federation, Palestine—the land of the promise of Yahweh. This Hebrew occupation lasted from about 1200 B.C., under Joshua, until the year of the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, in 70 B.C. after a revolt of the Jews against the Roman supremacy. In the year 132-135 A.D. a rising of the Jews of Palestine in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian resulted in the Diaspora—the dispersal of the people. It is curious to consider as a parallel that the occasion of that rising was the establishment of a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem, more than half a million Jews being massacred in that place, whereas today the Arabs are rising against a Jewish recolonization.

What is most immediately interesting to us as students of that history of human thought which is literature, is the Egyptian period from C 1460 B.C. Then Joseph is said to have led his own small sept of the Hebrews across the Nile into Egypt. In c 1025 the power of Egypt was beginning to decline and the Hebrews in a more federated state took to themselves the king, Saul, who was succeeded C 1000 B.C. by David and C 960 by Solomon, when for a short time that federation took on an imperial aspect. What, from our point of view is more important, is that the first six in order of the books of the Bible—the Yahvist Hexateuch which was the Pentateuch plus Joshua—would appear to have been begun under Solomon, about 940. They must have been finished after the division of the Hebrew Empire into the Kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam, who ruled over Judah, Simeon and part of Benjamin and the Levites, and the kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam who was acknowledged by the remainder of the tribes.

During the more or less legendary 360 years from the day of Joseph in 1460 to that of the fall of the Rameses Dynasty and the arising of the Hebrew monarchy between 1090 and 1000 B.C. there occurred the remarkable reigns of the Amenhoteps, of Tutankhamen and, of course, of the Rameses. During that period the first ideas of monotheism in this world rose and temporarily declined under the Amenhoteps I-IV between about 1500 and 1360 B.C. Gradually, that is to say during that period, those monarchs seem to have evolved the ideal of a single deity typified by the sun from whom came all life.

You hear the note in the hymn written by Amenhotep III, who was a mighty man of war, conquering both the Syrians and the Ethiopians in the latter days of the fourteenth century before Christ.

Hymn to the Sun

When thou shinest as Aten by day, the darkness is banished.

When thou sendest forth thy rays, the Two Lands rejoice daily,

Awake and standing upon their feet, for thou hast raised them up.

Their limbs bathed, they take their clothing;

Their arms uplifted in adoration to thy dawning;

Then in all the world, they do their work.

The ships sail upstream and downstream,

Every road is open because thou hast dawned.

The fish in the river leap up before thee,

And thy rays are in the midst of the great sea.

This rather pedestrian poem shows the gradual progress of the monotheistic ideal which had begun to take shape perhaps a hundred years before. Then Amenhotep IV elevated it to the state religion of the Empire. The priests, however, proved too powerful for him and by the reign of magnificent Tutankhamen, all the High Ones of the Nilotic polytheism ruled once more in the great temples—Isis and Nephtys, the Rescuers; Thot Anubis, the God of the Arts and Letters; and the forty-four Incorruptible Divine Ones presided over by the Great God, Osiris, the All-seeing Eye. . . .

Thus, the Hebrews in bondage must have undergone the influence of all the literary and literary-supernatural legends and tendencies of which we have been talking. They came into contact with the ideal of a Messiah of Ipuwer, with the chants of victory of Thutiy in the days of the great Thotmose III, with hymns inshrining the peculiar doctrines of the immortality of the threefold soul which we shall shortly read, with the primitive folk songs of the first felaheen on the earliest tombs as well as of the more sophisticated but highly monotonous Complaint of the Peasant, with the legends of the Creation and the Flood. These themselves were in all probability assimilated by the Egyptians from the mighty Sumerian-Babylonian-Semitic civilizations. At any rate, the Hebrews of the Bondage must have come in contact with Egyptian literature at its greatest. They left the country when, under Rameses II and his successors, it had descended to a very low level. . . . The Ramesian literature, that is to say, was, like the later Chinese poetry of which we have spoken, apparently so stylized and anaemic that now it hardly ranks amongst the great literatures. Nevertheless, owing to a tenacity of both the material in which it was inscribed and of the Egyptian brain, the older and finer literatures of simpler ages persisted and were chanted and sung by the Egyptian peasantry and masons, whilst their feudal and priestly superiors were amusing themselves with the more frivolous poems and tales of the fashion of the day. . . . In much the same fashion, in the Provence of today, the peasantry still chant songs and perform dramas that date back for a thousand or even two thousand years, and are entirely ignored by their French overlords on the Riviera shores. . . . So the Hebrew laborers who took part in the building of the pyramids and temples of Rameses mixed not with the lords and priests but with the laborers and peasants singing at their tasks. They were in the first case brought to Egypt by Joseph and other padrones probably as free indentured laborers, and later, by Rameses II, apparently as prisoners of war, and they shared the hardships of the other laborers of all kinds. Nor was their striking because they were asked to make bricks without straw a solitary insurrection. On the contrary, strikes of almost all the workers in Egypt were of regular monthly occurrence. The conditions in which they lived were terrible, in windowless mazes of huts all under one roof without ventilation or light. And, as their food of millet or chic beans was served out to them on the first day of the month and as it was very insufficient by the end of the month, almost every workman on any given job would be starved into striking. And whilst they struck they chanted endless songs descriptive of their misery—songs which they hoped would reach the ears of the Pharaoh—or chants of defiance for the masters who used them so miserably on the Nile banks beside the great columns of the temples of Osiris of the All-seeing Eye and Isis the Succorer.

So it is not to be wondered at that when the Hebrews finally escaped across the Red Sea they were a people of singers with heads filled with fierce or pitiful legends. . . .

And it is to be remembered that songs and legends are the last comfort and refuge of the destitute. Indeed, from the histories of these great, lost civilizations, one is sorely tempted to make the generalization that the literature of a people will be great, nervous and virile only as long as the people is simple, in poor circumstances and without the spirit of imperialism. But as soon as a people becomes rich, with a luxurious civilization, its talents will expend themselves on the plastic arts, on furnishings, on monuments, on painted tablets displaying the victories and splendors of ancestors, or on temples inscribed with poems to the glory of the avenging or succoring gods. And then, as the victorious and conquering people spreads its territories by force of arms to great distances, the spirit of the heart of the empire will die out; its literature and its arts alike will become degenerate. Until, at last, the whole empire crumbles before the assaults of outer barbarians, and nothing is left but the desert sands whirling in the winds and settling on the ruins of the temples and on the inscriptions recording their forgotten glories. Their legends and tales and chants will far outlive them.

So for eight hundred years or so after the fall of the last king of the name of Rameses—from 1150 B.C. to 330 B.C.—literature itself disappears from Egypt, and the strip of land along the Nile was swept by invasions from Bubastis, from Ethiopia, from Abyssinia. These invaders each held the land for a little time. The Bubastian King Shisak founded the XXII Dynasty in 945 B.C. and reigned for twenty-one years, during the last two of which he took and sacked the unfortunate city of Jerusalem. Then an Ethiopian incursion founded the XXV Dynasty in 712 B.C. Not quite fifty years after that, Sardanapalus drove out the Negroes, and Egypt became an Assyrian colony under, usually, native administrators. Eleven years later one of these consuls made international alliances with a number of Greek and Semitic tribes, and with the help of their mercenary troops drove out the Assyrians, made himself King of Egypt, and founded the XXVI Dynasty. Foreigners of every kind crowded into the Nile valley, until little by little the Greeks assumed the spiritual, if not temporal, mastery of the empire. The XXVI Dynasty lasted for about a century and a half of incessant invasions or expeditions in every direction. The Egyptian kings fought with the aid of Greek and Semitic mercenaries who, when they were displeased, captured and strangled the sovereign. And you have to consider this period of the lands of the East of the Mediterranean as one perpetual tangle of mercenary troops fighting for one sovereign or another, with the Grecian mercenaries as a rule obtaining mastery for whoever had the luck to employ them. The most celebrated of all these expeditions was that of Xenophon with his ten thousand Greeks, an expedition whose chief result was the immortal Anabasis of that writer. In 525 B.C. Cambyses defeated Pfantik III at the Battle of Pelusium, and Egypt became a Persian colony. Then in 332 Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and for a short space the valley of the Nile lived under Macedonian rulers. Then came for 300 years the magnificent Ptolemaic period. Its extraordinary Helleno-Egyptian splendors dazzled the Nile itself, and Egyptian temples rose side by side with those of the Assyrians. Then in the year 31 B.C. came the Battle of Actium; Cleopatra fell and Egypt became a Roman province notable chiefly for the immense quantity of grain of all sorts that she exported to the metropolis of the world. But the main thing for us to remember is that this Egypt and this already mysterious Orient exported also to both Rome and Greece an infinite number of legends, creeds, scribes and sorcerers, so that the Graeco-Roman gods became confounded with the deities of the Nile—Astarte being confounded at once with Venus of the Romans and Aphrodite of the Greeks, Diana being confused with Isis, and Jove himself with the great god Osiris. So civilizations spread themselves and the one modifies the other, England, as you might say, blessing the United States with her woolen goods, and the United States returning her Negro jazz melodies and syncopated turns of speech.

But the main thing to be considered is that during all these revolutions and counter-revolutions the craft of the writer—if not his art—was always venerated. Whether he made his letters with the chisel on stone or painted his idiographs on the walls of temples or palaces, whether he wrote with a stylus on tablets of wax or incised them on rolls of clay which were afterwards baked, or whether in the end he wrote much as we write with a split reed upon sheets of papyrus which is the inner fiber of the papyrus plant—always a sort of priestly or lawyer-like respectability attached to the man who could write at all. He recorded laws and judgments given under those laws; he set down histories from the dictation of conquerors; he kept the accounts alike for market people and for the granaries of the Pharaohs. He was, in fact, the priest of the material necessities of life.

And once again we come upon the problem of whether the Imitation of Christ is to be considered as literature. And once again we have to answer with a “yes.” For the lay literature, like the lay sculpture and the lay architecture of this mighty and luxuriant civilization, fades to nothing beside the immortal effigies and records of polytheistic religion. When you think of Egypt it is not of the exploits of Thutiy or of Sinuhe that you think. Like roots creeping under the earth they have, it is true, made their appearance in our nurseries of today. But Egypt stands for the immense lion gods, hawk gods, and Pharaoh gods—the innumerable effigies of deities in stone that stand forever silent along the banks of the Nile and gaze eternally into distances that no human eye shall ever penetrate. And along with these stone gods goes an immense literature of stone—what M. Mardrus calls “The Book of Stone.” It extends for 1,400 kilometers, say 1,000 miles, along the great river from the upper Nile to the sea. Here you have the irrational, the awe-inspiring, the almost ungraspable religion of the Egyptian soul set out in this vast length and in this almost eternally lasting material, as, buried amongst the sands in their immense mausoleums the innumerable mummies lie waiting through the ages till the Triple Soul shall come again to inhabit them, to let them stride once again over the green banks beneath the palm trees.

The reason for the burying of these mummies beneath those immense piles was of course to insure their safety from the riflings of robbers—and the excavators. This was not merely because of the instinctive hatred of humanity for the idea that its dead should be disturbed or its sepulchres violated. It was because the mummy that had once been flesh must again become flesh and in that flesh see the light of the sun and the works of the gods, and because, if it should be mutilated, its reincarnation would be impossible.

On the mystical side it was necessary for the most divine of the dead man’s three souls to make a confession of faith and belief in the Truth before the terrible tribunal of the forty-four Incorruptible Gods. For if that soul failed to convince the tribunal of the purity of its belief, it could never again inhabit the mummy that had been its flesh. And the mummy must lie still forever or until its final decay. So inscriptions of that Great Book of Stone, when they rise to be literature, consist mainly of the record of confessions of those higher souls before the tribunal of the gods.

When the body died and was preserved by the mummifiers, the three souls took their departure. The first soul—the Human Consciousness—departed and was lost among the winds. The second soul, called the Divine Bird, disappeared into the ether and went from planet to planet for millennium upon millennium until the third soul, Kou, the Luminous, succeeded in gaining the sanction of the gods. The three souls might then enter again into their mummy and their mummy become flesh. The procedure was this:

After purification in an outer chamber the luminous soul was introduced to the Hall of Judgment. It went in supported by its counsel, as a prisoner today goes into our courts. On the one hand were Isis and Nephtys, the comforting and succoring goddesses, and on the other Thot Anubis, the god of writing and painting, who from time to time helped the suppliant with hints.

The suppliant then, before the forty-four Incorruptible Ones presided over by the great god, Osiris, must make his declaration of the Truth. Here is part of one of those declarations:

Before you all, Gods of the Truth, I invoke in my spirit, my Creator, Him of whom I was born, the Unshakable, son of the Unshakable, conceived and born of Himself in the territory of Stability itself.

He is called Ineffable.

He is called the Hidden of the Hidden.

Everything that has existed, everything that exists, everything that shall exist is His Name.

He is the One: He is The Three; He remains The One Alone.

The child in his mother’s womb already turns his face towards Him.

I give homage to this King of Kings:

For I am of a Mummy that lived in its Day.

I live in Truth, in this witness of the Light.

And the Word having been made Truth by my just Voice

I arrive as a Sparrow-hawk and depart as the Phoenix.

(J. C. Mardrus: Textes. Author’s translation.)

CHAPTER THREE

THE years from 551 to 479 B.C. make up between them an era that was one of the most momentous in the history of mankind. They are the years of the birth and of the death of Confucius. His name is more literally rendered from the Chinese by the sounds K’ung-Fu-Tsze, but since to the Western peoples he has been known as Confucius for at least two thousand years it is more convenient for us so to style him.

That man’s span of seventy-two years, being partly contemporaneous with the life of the great rival philosopher of China, Lao-Tsze, was remarkable enough merely because it enshrined the thinking careers of those two sages whose rules of life have had a great share in influencing the mentalities of all civilized humanities from their day to ours. But all through the world known to the ancients, which contained all our ancestors in civilization, all through that world that then stretched from Tokio, say, to the Scilly Islands, and from the Danube to the Cape of Good Hope—those seventy-odd years saw periods of great mental activity expressing itself in literature and of great physical activities and excitements expressing themselves in the conquests of ancient civilizations and their replacement, by force of arms, with newer combinations.

In the Egypt that we have just left, this period coincided with the reign of the Pharaoh Amasis (Ahmose)—a time of great mental activity, caused by the encouragement that the sovereign gave to foreigners to practice their arts and crafts in Egypt. It was the beginning of the Hellenizing of the country.

It was also the period of the great expansion of the highly civilized Persian Empire. Egypt became a Persian province in 525 B.C., Babylon in 538. In the same year the great Cyrus released the Jews who had been taken into bondage, and the Jews began with his aid the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon and the re-constitution of their state. The German school of Biblical commentators—notably Delitsch of Babel and Bible—dates the Jews’ acquaintance with the story of the Garden of Eden and the Flood from the time of their bondage in Babylon; and certainly the Babylonians had a story of a composite single god of many attributes called Marduch. He discomfited the powers of evil by preventing a deluge that they had called into existence in the marshy country at the end of the Persian Gulf. More modern authorities believe the Hexateuch was written in the later years of the reign of Solomon; in that case the Hebrews’ acquaintance with those two stories must have preceded the Captivity by at least four hundred years and they must, as this writer has always believed, have heard the stories during their servitude to the Pharaohs. That is, however, a matter as to which he has no intention of dogmatizing and it is one to which we shall have to return in due course.

The other great world events which occurred during the lifetime of Confucius had their being on the north-eastern shores of the Mediterranean in and around the territory we know as Greece. They were the events of the great struggle between the Greeks and the Persians. Marathon was fought eleven years before the death of the sage, Thermopylae and Salamis two years before, and Plataea in the year of his death itself. Greece had to wait a couple of decades for the Great Age of Pericles; but all these events gave rise to literature enough in all conscience . . . to the most glorious literatures of all.

We are for the moment far to the East of the Mediterranean. After dwelling a little on the exploits of Cyrus and Cambyses, the Persian conquerors, we will return farther east still and think about Confucius and his rival Lao-Tsze, the first great Quietist. The Persian conquerors were mighty men of war before the coming of the Lord. They conquered Babylon; they annexed Egypt; they all but took Carthage; they invaded Ethiopia; they built the bridge of boats over the Bosphorus and trampled all over Greece. They had courts of an unexampled luxury; they constructed military roads and moved innumerable fighting men from end to end of their realms, employing methods of transport that we have not much bettered today. They had even a post office. They called their ruler Khshayathiya-Khshayathiyanam—the King of Kings. The feats of Cyrus inspired the Grecian story of Herodotus of how Cyrus captured Croesus and denuded him of his realms but spared his life and used him as a counsellor, after the Delphic Apollo had miraculously quenched the fire which Cyrus had lit to burn him. . . . According to the Lydians, however, Croesus was about to commit suicide by fire as a sacrifice to the Sun God so that his people might be saved. But the Sun God did not approve of the nature of the sacrifice and extinguished the fire by torrential rains. . . . And again, according to Herodotus, in his work which we may well call both history and literature, Cyrus was at last taken prisoner by the warlike Tamyris, queen of the Massagetes. And she, cutting off his head, put it into a sack of blood . . . so that he might drink his fill. And so, in the end, Darius, the last of the name, falling across Alexander the Great, was slain whilst flying from the Battle of Arbela, and the Persian Empire came to an end. It had produced no very striking writing of its own. The great age of Persian literature was still many hundreds of years ahead. But, Herodotus apart, it had inspired literature enough. . . . As thus:

Thus saith the Lord . . . of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem Thou shalt be built; and to the temple: Thy foundation shall be laid.

Thus saith the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loosen the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved doors; and the gates shall not be shut;

I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron:

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.

(Isaiah: 44.28; 45, 1-4.)

Those things, then, were happening in the world whilst Confucius and Lao-Tsze lived and thought. Cyrus released the Hebrews when Confucius was thirteen. The Greeks began their final beating back of the Persians in the year of his death and the years just preceding that event. And, as we have seen, the life of Confucius coincided in part with that of Lao-Tsze; once at least those two type-sages of the world met; and apparently Lao-Tsze was rather rude to Confucius. So that, if we consider all that—all that Hebrew Holy Writ, and Greek Civilization and the teachings and writings of Confucius and the spoken and written Quietism of Lao-Tsze . . . all that all those things mean to our poor wilting civilization of today—we may well see, or imagine ourselves seeing, evidence of design in the Architect of the Universe.

For if the links of our stages of Western civilization have from time to time been broken, erased even, and then slowly again picked up, the chain of that older and greater civilization of the Far East has continued with a sort of equanimity from that era until today. The rule of the Literati, the exponents of Confucian lore, is being challenged and even shaken in China now. But it has been challenged and shaken before—by Buddhism, by the incursion of Western savages—and it has always reëmerged purged and stronger for the trial. And we have no reason to imagine that our Western savagery will prove any more permanent for destruction in the lands of the Quietist Middle Kingdom than were the savageries and superstitions that have preceded our day.

We may permit ourselves to look at the matter in that light, we ourselves, at any rate for the duration of these present investigations, being Literati. So that our sympathies must go out to any spot of the world or system of government where humane wisdom like that of Confucianism inspires the rulers, and the Quietist teachings of Lao-Tsze give tranquillity to the mentalities of the peoples. For you may yourself be a mining engineer or an electrician or in the alternative a Tammany, or a London County Council, candidate for office. But whilst you have this book in hand you are for the moment at once a Confucianist and a follower of Lao-Tsze.

Speaking as broadly as we must speak in a work of this small extent embracing provinces so vast, we may say that Confucius tried by his teachings, his writings and his anthologies to induce men, for the purposes of better government of human affairs, to become “superior”—as who should say “gentle”-men. Man was to make himself superior or gentle by the study of the maxims of—or the chronicles of ancient lore collected by—Confucius. They would thus become Literati, Masters of Arts, Mandarins. . . . And after their knowledge had been proved by examinations, they would become administrators of this or that department of human activities or, beneath the Sacred Emperor, of the small departments or the immense provinces of which the Empire was made up.

Lao-Tszeism, on the other hand, was in its origins, individualist-quietist. “Give me a jade kettle and a store of wine which has the gift of making men see the Spring at all seasons of the year”: so writes Ssu-Kung Tu, a Secretary of the Board of Rites and so a Confucianist. But he threw up his job in disgust at the futility of the pursuits of men and officials and became a Lao-Tszeist. “Give me,” then he writes

“. . . a jade kettle with a purchase of spring,

A shower on the thatched hut

Wherein sits a gentle scholar,

With tall bamboos growing right and left,

And white clouds in the newly-clear sky,

And birds flitting in the depths of trees.

Then, pillowed on his lute in the green shade,

A waterfall tumbling overhead,

Leaves dropping, not a word spoken,

The man placid, like a chrysanthemum,

Noting down the flower-glory of the season—

A book well worthy to be read.”

(from History of Chinese Literature, by Herbert A. Giles.)

And one may quickly make the note that the same poet later records, as realistically as you could wish, the disadvantages of resigning your official salary . . . the days passing without food, the forced acceptance of offerings of poor meats and poorer wines from peasant neighbors. . . . He, nevertheless, remained steadfast till his death, in his philosophy and mode of life!

The Confucian poets, on the other hand, record the joys of official life, of provincial prefectures or higher mandarinships—but nearly always in terms of reminiscence or bitter regret.

That, I suppose, is natural. A young mandarin spends his evenings with the “purchase of spring” in the beloved companionship of other young or youngish mandarins, sitting amongst illuminated bamboo-rods under colored lanterns that swing from the boughs of trees overhead, watching gilded girls with their shining nudities slip in or out of, or play amongst, the waters of fountains to the sound of their own lutes. And a young mandarin of literary gifts so occupied loses the time that he might have devoted to pouring out his soul in poems. But when came the loss of his job and exile—as often as not because he was reported by spies to have uttered gibes against his superiors or their wives—in remote solitudes at the bitter ends of the Empire he may well find time to write many poems voicing his moods. . . . And his moods will be always those of bitter regret and dispirited longings.

Chinese literature—and in its whole immense three-thousand-year-old mass of production that literature is almost exclusively poetry, the novel never having there reached any noteworthy stage of development and plays being left almost unwritten for the actors to gag unlimitedly—Chinese literature, then, is always a literature of soberness of thought and almost always one of remembrance and regret, a literature of forsaken wives, concubines or lovers, of Emperors mourning murdered queens, of exiles because of politics or because of the exigencies of war. So that, as it were through a diminishing mirror, you look at scenes sometimes of great luxury and splendor, or, in the case of the war-exiles, of great hardships and even horror. But even the hardships and the horrors you will seem to see through a veil of translucent and shimmering glass, since almost always the salient points of the narrative will be in the past.

A poem may begin: “Here we are digging the last fern-roots,” and present you vividly enough with the picture of bowmen exiled as a guard at the extreme northern limits of the Empire, almost without food, conducting endless skirmishes with the barbarians. But the real pull of the poem comes when the poet, if only for a word or two, remembers the softness of his home pillows and the society of his convivial friends.

And the sense of seeing these things through a veil of shimmering glass is added to by the extreme delicacy and brilliance of the shining words and the skill in form of which we have already read. It is really as if the words hung between the reader and the objects or emotions that the poets present.

And so there are thousands—literally thousands and thousands—of the little quatrains called something like “two-ply” poems. Or one might more fancifully translate the name: “come-backs.” Here the form is perfectly rigid. You are sitting, say, in an outside café at the bottom of Fifth Avenue in the bright sunshine—or, if you prefer it, on the Boulevard St.-Germain—and you write:

“Here we sit in the brightness sipping the purchase of spring.

All around us are our friends lifting their cocktails (or apéritifs) in purple or green or scarlet,

The sun is mirrored in the tops of the gay automobiles. . . .

But we . . . we are remembering the delicate shadows of the plane-trees on the Boulevard St.-Germain. . . .”

Or “in Washington Square” according as you choose to consider that you are writing your two-ply on this or the other side of the water. . . . Always, always, you look back—to the women you knew in lands thousands of miles away; to the friends you conversed with thousands of days ago; to the jewels that shone so brightly in your concubine’s frontlet in Barbaria when your Chinese blood ran warmer in your veins. . . . Yes, always, always, you ask “Mais où . . . mais où, sont les neiges d’antan?”

This writer has read in his time a great many hundreds of Chinese poems, as at one time he made a careful study of Chinese music and songs . . . in which he resembled Confucius. But only one poem with a cheerful ending comes back to him—and, alas, he cannot remember either its name or its author. It is one about a poet who loves two ladies with an equally excruciating passion, both ladies regarding his suit favorably. He goes through agonies at the idea that if he chooses one lady he will lose the other. And material obstacles intervene; we do not remember what they were. But at last they are cleared up; and the poet has a brilliant thought. He will marry both ladies at once. And so he does and they all three live happily ever after.

And, of course, in its immense stream, Chinese poetry, concerning itself with every side of human life—except the glories of ideal love, of Heaven or of war—takes note of a great many things to all appearances passionlessly or with a sub-current of semi-sensuous enjoyment. It lingers on rich silks, shining jewels, willows beside broad and tranquil rivers, and, particularly, on that “promise of spring” which is wine, on the rustlings of bamboos, the moon and sunsets.

But always, even in poems apparently of passive enjoyment and contemplation, there is a note of the ruins of the past. Thus, even in this portion of an eighth-century elegy by Rihaku, quoted and translated by Mr. Pound, that touch must come in:

The River Song

This boat is of shato-wood . . .

Musicians with jewelled flutes

Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine

Is rich for a thousand cups. . . .

King So’s terraced palace

is now but a barren hill . . .

(from Lustra, by Ezra Pound.)

And it will be noted that even there the strong note of the poem lies in the line “King So’s terraced palace is now but a barren hill”—as if this were a reminder to the then reigning Emperor, to whom Rihaku of course owes allegiance, that some day his glory too may vanish from sight and memory. Even the nightingales, which are referred to later in this same poem, are not permanent for Rihaku, though, as will appear later, for Heraclitus they are.

The Chinese poem is in fact always full of implications, usually bitter or bitterish, lying beneath even an enjoyable surface like water-weeds that encumber the swimmer’s feet beneath the mirror-smooth surface of a twilit lake. Even a very mediocre Chinese poet can be so subtle as to make the famous two-ply or come-back of the Japanese Emperor Yoshihito written for the Japanese poetry festival of 1894 seem coarse in texture.

I went to fetch water from the spring;

I saw that the honeysuckle had twined its tendrils around the well-rope:

I went and borrowed water from my neighbour.

Compare that with the “Jewelled Stairs’ Grievance” of Rihaku and it will seem a very simple affair. Rihaku, of course, was not a mere technician but one of the relatively rare Chinese poets who was also a poet in our Western sense of the term. He wrote in the eighth century of our era when the Art of Poetry in China was not merely immensely skillful in form, but when the actual poetic content was at nearly its highest and its texture at its most delicate. The “Grievance” is one of the literally innumerable poems recording the grief of a deserted wife or mistress. Later that device became so stereotyped as a subject that the skill of the poet went entirely into playings with words, metres and intonations. But Rihaku, a great poet, was incomparably skillful in the most difficult of all the world-poetic sides of technique. It consists in getting exquisite poetic meaning out of the mere transcription of natural objects, without any comments or ejaculations whatsoever. That is not merely Chinese, it is the supreme achievement in all the poetries of the world. Here is Mr. Pound’s translation of the “Jewelled Stairs’ Grievance”:

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

(from Lustra, by Ezra Pound.)

And Mr. Pound supplies the following explanation of these lines: “Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no reproach.”

It will be noticed that the last line of this quatrain is not, as in the usual come-back, a complete antithesis to the sense of the first three lines. It is, rather, a completion of the sense of the whole. It is true that it is as it were a veiled reproach as if to say: “My lover does not come although the weather is so fine,” the rest of the poem being as it were a passionless statement as to natural objects. But no doubt in that slight alteration of tone, Rihaku, who was a miracle of delicacy, considered that he had sufficiently supplied his dramatic contrast.

You have thus an epitome of one stage of what happens in a literary progression. You have reached with Rihaku a point at which suggestion is more important than the object or the incident presented in a poem or a piece of imaginative prose. That means that you have reached a high stage of civilization and some measure of imperial tranquillity. And, accordingly, in history you find that Rihaku wrote between 618 and 718 A.D. in what is called the Golden Age of Chinese Literature, which was the Golden Age of the Dynasty of Tang. Thus also, Confucius, whose chief characteristic is not a suave literary quality but a sort of chaotic gathering together of human instances, did his work in an era of wars and anarchy. The greater part of the empire, at its two extremities, was then under the tempestuous rule of greater or lesser feudal chieftains. Only the center of the country, known as the Middle Kingdom, had any semblance of order or imperial government. And even that was shaken almost to pieces under Li Yang, who was ruling at the date of Confucius’ birth.

We bring Confucius in again at this point merely to recall him to mind. We must consider the poets a little more before devoting any serious attention to his and Lao-Tsze’s prose, but we should here make the note that between the birth of Confucius and the death of Rihaku was a matter of some 1,200 years.

So let us consider the earlier periods. In these, both matter and manner are more harsh and bitter. The most memorable of them are laments over war in which the soldiers hardly indulge even in reminiscences of their homes. The earliest of them would date to about a thousand years before Christ when the West and East Chow Dynasties of the Middle Kingdom struggled not only against their own feudal semi-subject dukes, but against ceaseless hordes of Mongol invaders. Thus, we have the “Song of the Bowmen of Shu,” by Bun-No, reputedly of 1100 B.C.

Here we are picking the first fern-shoots

And saying: When shall we get back to our country? . . .

The enemy is swift, we must be careful. . . .

We are hungry and thirsty,

Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?

(Ezra Pound’s translation, in Lustra.)

Nor, eleven hundred years later, do things seem much to have improved if we are to believe the famous poem called “Battle” written between 332 and 295 B.C. by Chu-Yuan. Chu-Yuan himself is one of the poets best known to the Chinese—a sort of more decorous Villon, much addicted like most Chinese poets to the purchase of spring by wine, afflicted with a much too sharp tongue as regards his mandarin superiors . . . so that the most famous of all his poems is called “Getting into Trouble”—and he died at a relatively early age, having for his misbehaviors been sent to the wars. Here is his poem “Battle,” as translated by Arthur Waley:

“We grasp our battle spears: we don our breast-plates of hide.

The axles of our chariots touch: our short swords meet.

Standards obscure the sun: the foe roll up like clouds.

Arrows fall thick: the warriors press forward.

They menace our ranks: they break our line.

The left-hand trace-horse is dead: the one on the right is smitten.

The fallen horses block our wheels: they impede the yoke-horses!

They grasp their jade drum-sticks: they beat the sounding drums.

Heaven decrees their fall: the dread Powers are angry.

The warriors are all dead: they lie on the moor-field.

They issued but shall not enter; they went but shall not return.

The plains are flat and wide; the way home is long.

Their swords lie beside them: their black bows, in their hand.

Though their limbs were torn, their hearts could not be repressed.

They were more than brave: they were inspired with the spirit of

“Wu.”*

Steadfast to the end, they could not be daunted.

Their bodies were stricken, but their souls have taken Immortality—

Captains among the ghosts, heroes among the dead.”

(from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, translated by Arthur Waley.)

Shortly after the time of Chu-Yuan, the great infamous First Emperor, Shi Hwang Ti, founded the dynasty of Chin and burned the books containing the wisdom and poetry of the earlier reigns of the Middle Kingdom. Because of that villainy—I had almost called it Hitlerism—men averted their minds from his memory and of all the good or bad emperors who are chosen for mention on the Day of the Celebration of the Imperial Dead, his name alone is never exhibited on the sacred tablets.

He, nevertheless, extended the Middle Kingdom to the sea; broke the power of the feudal dukes; defeated the Mongols, and built the Great Wall of China. His dynasty, however, only lasted for four years after his death. It was succeeded by those of the East and West Hans and for over four hundred years—from B.C. 206 to A.D. 220—China flourished at home, and extended her dominions abroad.

It is a matter of constant argument whether literature and the arts flourish best in periods of peace and plenty or in times of frugality and struggle. We need not propose here to attempt any decision of the matter. We shall notice instances enough of happenings in both directions before we come to the end of this journey and we may then, if we want to, make some sort of summing up. But certainly the upholders of peace and plenty score points in the four hundred years of the Chin and East and West Han Dynasties. For China was then peaceful, and literature—but more particularly commentaries, rituals, and philosophic works such as Confucius had collected and tabulated—literature, then, sprang up in profusion to replace the books that the First Emperor had destroyed.

There ensued four hundred years or so of confusion, civil strife and disasters until another great usurper, Kau-Tsu, in 618 A.D. founded the great Tang Dynasty which lasted nearly three hundred years. That was the most brilliant period of Chinese history and influence, embassies coming from all over the world to the East—from Teheran and Samarkand as from Constantinople; and it is interesting to note that during the Tang Dynasty the Roman Eastern Empire in Constantinople was slowly crumbling away, Rome herself forever fallen before the barbarians. The Persians (who had become Mohammedans) and the Arabs took more and more territory from the Eastern Romans; Charlemagne’s Empire rose and fell; Haroun Al Raschid wandered in the night streets of Bagdad; the Moors conquered Spain . . . and perhaps most immediately important of all, Mahomet’s Hegira—his flight from Mecca to Medina where he founded Islam—took place in 622. That was four years after Kau-Tsu founded the Tang Dynasty in China; and before that dynasty ended, the Arabs had made great progress with one of the other great literatures of the world—the Arabic.

And it was, as we have seen, the Golden Age of Chinese literature—the suave age of Li-Po and Ssu-Kung-Tu and Rihaku and Po-Chu-I, and of such thousands. They were poets of a luxuriating age. . . . They suggest Omar Khayyam and Firdusi, dividing themselves into Confucian bureaucrats in or out of office and Tao-ist recluses in usually agreeable circumstances. Or, again, they suggest the Villon who never knew whether he was or wasn’t in Dutch with his uncle the Canon.

Consider Li-Po who lived from A.D. 705 to 762. Says Mr. Giles:

Li-Po began wandering about the country, until at length, with five other tippling poets, he retired to the mountains. For some time these Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove drank and wrote verses to their hearts’ content. By and by Li-Po reached the capital, and on the strength of his poetry was introduced to the Emperor as a “banished angel.” He was received with open arms, and soon became the spoilt child of the palace. On one occasion, when the Emperor sent for him, he was found lying drunk in the street; and it was only after having his face well mopped with cold water that he was fit for the Imperial presence. His talents, however, did not fail him. With a lady of the seraglio to hold his ink-slab, he dashed off some of his most impassioned lines; at which the Emperor was so overcome that he made the powerful eunuch Kao Li-shih go down on his knees and pull off the poet’s boots.

(from History of Chinese Literature, by Herbert A. Giles.)

So they idled and revelled and sometimes wrote, these poets, until some disorder or some inopportune jest or a mere change in the disposition of the ruler sent them out of the sunlight of the Presence. Some went to minor posts in the provinces; some became hermits and praised in their verse that life; some went into bitter exile at the verges of the empire where they lived eternally remembering the golden past and eternally hoping against hope for recall; some were sent to the hateful wars . . . and they had no hope and avoided even remembering. Let us once more quote Rihaku, not because he was the greatest of the Chinese poets of the era, that glory being accorded by the Chinese themselves to Li-Po. But he has had the luck to find for translator a poet as great as himself who has done for him what Fitzgerald did for Omar Khayyam or Baudelaire for Edgar Allan Poe. No poet can hope for greater good fortune.

The novelist and writer in prose generally can find a translator whose work will at least serve the turn of conveying his thought and some at least of his rhythm into another language. But to get anything like the verbal texture of your verse, the magic of your language, the subtlety of your rhythms, adapted into another tongue . . . for that you must find a poet at least as great as yourself. Such a translator Rihaku and the others have found in Mr. Ezra Pound without whom and his little volume called Cathay the English reader could have little idea of the literary magic and quality of the Chinese poets. Other translators can give you the content, the subject, the conceits and above all the quaintnesses of their poetry. And for these we may be grateful enough, since after a good deal of reading of them we may invent for ourselves some of the texture and quality of the originals—or they will filter through to us. But without someone to give us at least some rendering—a rendering as free as you like—of a foreign literature we will never be able to gather what the real magic and aura of that literature may be. . . . For it is not literal translation that is needed for this purpose. The valuable rendering may be full of verbal mis-translations or even of misunderstandings of meanings. . . . But only consider any exactly correct translation of the Bible as against the Authorized Version. It would be more correct to translate the apple that Eve ate as a shaddock but that arboricultural exactitude helps nobody and would bewilder many; or how would we be helped if in the Second Book of Kings we read (X.11.): “So Jehu slew all that remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel and all his great men and his acquaintances,” instead of “kinsfolk.” We would have a relatively commonplace and obviously inexact word instead of one that has a beauty in itself and is probably more true to the fact. For Jehu can hardly have slain every man who had ever said “How do you do” to Ahab, whereas he would take good care to get rid of all the kinsfolk of that ruler for fear pretenders should later arise. So that though the Hebrew word does actually mean something like “acquaintances” the account of the slaughter gains in intensity from the “kinsfolk” of the Authorized Translator. It gives at least an effect nearer in spirit to that of the inspired writer of the original.

Let us return to China and Rihaku. The regrets and remembrances of the bureaucratic exile from office formed, then, one of the conventional motifs of all Chinese emotional poetry. These motifs as we have seen are relatively few. The writers express regrets of abandoned wives or concubines or abandoned husbands or lovers; they express regrets for banishments and remembrances of good times that are gone. Or, if they are banished to wars, they express bitter regrets, and as a rule do not chronicle their memories as being too poignant for expression, since they have no glimmer of hope of return. But once the limited scale of the motifs is accepted, the forms and the conceits that the poet may adopt become almost infinite. So much is recapitulation so that we may not forget it.

But one should emphasize in one’s mind that the love song or the song of the glories of war are almost completely absent, along with devotional verse. And one should remember as the reason for this that whether the poet be a superior man moulded by the philosophy of Confucius or a hermit swayed by the teachings of Lao-Tsze, each, like his master, would dislike thinking about war and would almost as much dislike any religious or metaphysical speculations or conjectures as to the future state. The orthodox Chinaman believed in—or, at least, did not deny—the existence of a single deity attended by spirits. But as a rule only the Emperor was qualified to address the Divine Being or to offer Him either prayers or sacrifices—and that only twice a year, at the summer or winter solstices. But the orthodox Chinese subject never addressed prayers to his god and, indeed, practically never thought about Him, or about the future of his soul after death. As Confucius put it: Since we know practically nothing about the life that we have and must manage, why should we waste time with thinking about things over which we have no control? And the attitude of Lao-Tsze was much the same.

As regards the love-trimmings of the Westerner and most other Orientals, the conception of those things, too, simply did not exist for the Chinese superior man. If he could have read

Bid me to live and I will live thy Protestant to be;

Or bid me love and I will give a loving heart to thee. . . .

Or bid me die and I will dare e’en death for love of thee

the great Li-Po would have said that that was mere sound and fury signifying nothing. He would have no conception of what the words meant. . . . The actions of sex were agreeable functions having just as much and no more relation to the mentality than eating food or drinking wine. He would take the two latter functions far more seriously than we usually do, but neither they nor the actions of sex cast any extraneous glow over his existence. None of the three were romantic. So the lover promised to his mistress or the fiancée to her accepted, no glory, no immortality, no deathless deeds—and, indeed, no eternal constancy in song. A husband and wife lived, ate, drank and slept together with, as it were, equanimity; and in place of what we call love they expected friendship and agreeable and stimulating conversation. . . . And, indeed, in his poetic regrets the exiled friend or the deserted husband expresses remembrance of, and yearning most for the interrupted friendship and the conversations with which they sent the moon down the sky.

And as with religion, so with war: the Chinese poet acknowledged that it existed, hoped that he would be kept out of it, regarded the professional soldier as a butcher of a lower order of beings—lower even than the slaughterer of cattle, since his functions helped no one—and so that poet never thought about wars. Certainly he never celebrated their glories in song. He found interests enough in life, in friendship, in his bureaucratic career, in his hermitry—and in the purchase of spring sensations through the ingurgitation of innumerable small cups of wine.

That being said, let us prepare to take leave of the Chinese poetry with quotations from two more poems by the inimitable Rihaku. Both are translated by Ezra Pound and appear in Lustra.

Here is a portion of one of Rihaku’s poems treating of war when it must be endured:

Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate the wind blows full of sand . . .

There is no wall left to this village.

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High heaps covered with trees and grass. . . .

And here is a fragment from his famous

Exile’s Letter

And then I was sent off to South Wei . . .

And you to the north of Raku-hoku,

Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common.

And then, when separation had come to its worst,

We met, and travelled into Sen-Go. . . .

And what a reception:

Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jewelled table,

And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning. . . .

And the vermilioned girls getting drunk around sunset,

And the water a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows. . . .

But before we can leave Chinese poetry, we must consider one of her most famous popular narrative poems, The Everlasting Wrong of Po-Chu-I, who flourished between A.D. 772 and 846—a century, roughly speaking, after Rihaku. We have said that after the Golden Age of Chinese poetry that ended about 800 A.D., this art became a matter of verbal and of metrical ingenuities and tricks and so it has remained until the present day. And we have also said that Chinese prose was always more a matter of records, annals and philosophical speculation than of imaginative or literary writing. The novel has remained, according to our standards, in the lower stage of the connected short story. The Chinese Revolution is, however, changing all these aspects: a strong Russian tinge is infusing itself into imaginative work and innumerable revolutionary pamphlets are being written.

It is, nevertheless, worth while to spend a moment on the Chinese play.

The Western playgoer going into a Chinese theatre is appalled to perceive that, as he supposes, a single play lasts a month or so, going apparently from birth to death of a character at the tempo of the ordinary human life. It is true that a Chinese play proceeds as a rule exactly at the tempo of human life—which is to say that it observes the unities of time and place of the Greek Theatre. The Chinese, like the Athenians, were—and are—unwilling to make the mental step of letting time pass as it were unseen behind the back-cloths. They refuse to take the trouble to adopt the modern, comparatively uncivilized, convention of letting the first act of a play take place in France in the summer; the second in Dunsinane in autumn; and the third on the Italian Riviera two springs later, the whole year and three-quarters being supposed to elapse between 8:30 and 11:15 of one evening. That would shock their sense of the reasonable. Their play must take place in the Here and the Now. The Here is the scene represented for the moment of the play; the Now is just the amount of time that the action represented needs to take place in. Thus a Chinese evening at the play means attending as many playlets—tiny representations of incidents—as the spectator has the time or the inclination to sit through. But as the playlets have no indication of division between them, no announcements, no curtain, the Western observer is prone to imagine that what he is witnessing is one play of immense length. Actually a hero, say, will be awaited by brigands in ambush; by bravery or by the intervention of spirits the brigands will be foiled. They will be slain; will get up and walk out with the hero. Without any interval the same brigands will be on the stage again, representing quite other brigands. They will abduct a heroine from one side to the other of the stage; the same hero, representing however a quite different player, will enter, rescue the heroine, slay the brigands and they will all go off, returning however a minute later to represent quite different characters in quite another short story or episode. The time effect would, in short, be exactly that of an evening at the modern western cinema—but an evening in which Miss Garbo and Mr. Clark Gable should play in a number of short pieces, each piece without connection, but each being played by those distinguished stars without change of costume or make-up. There are, of course, longer plays in which a series of episodes in the life of the same hero is performed; and such a play might even last through several evenings, so that the effect would be exactly that of attending a serial at the movies—only each evening of the life of the boards would take up just as much time as was occupied by the spectator in his seat. . . . Thus, most Eastern apparent quaintnesses resolve themselves into reasonable conventions not much differing from those of the West—or at any rate easily explicable.

In one way or another, in fact, the narrative occupies as much time in Chinese life as it does in the Occident—and, indeed, more if the listenings to public story tellers and the theatre are taken into account. So the novel as a form has not much developed itself. The cultured Oriental prefers to take his cultured narrative in verse, because it adds to the romantic effect; his popular fiction he gets through the ear, and the place of the novel is and always was a lowly one.

There are of course novels in Chinese and some of them like the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms have been read with greater or less enthusiasm by limited Western audiences in English or in French. But the novel is not an essentially Chinese form and it will be more convenient to defer our discussion of it until we arrive at its development, in its sixteenth-century western, picaresque form. Specialists of Sinology will object to this—but we are not specialists. Our glass is not big but we must drink out of our own glass.

The Chinese narrative poem, then, recounting incidents, is more popular in genre than the reflective or elegiac pieces of the great poets. This came from the sharp divisions between the three classes of Chinese life: public, cultural and religious. Let us consider them cursorily for a minute, since at one period or another of our western histories the Chinese philosophic, and even their political, examples have played a considerable part in our own cultural and political developments—notably in the eighteenth century, when all our political theories and practices and, above all, our ideals were profoundly influenced by the example of the French Revolution and our reactions against French revolutionary ideas.

It would, for instance, not be fantastic to see in Voltaire a public figure like that of Confucius, and in Jean Jacques Rousseau another resembling that of Lao-Tsze the Quietist. And on Voltaire the influence of Confucius was profound; on Rousseau that influence of echoes of the philosophy of Lao-Tsze was as of something continuously whispering in his ear. Says Voltaire:

By what fatality, shameful maybe for the Western peoples, is it necessary to go to the far Orient to find a wise man who is simple, unostentatious, free from imposture, who taught men to live happily six hundred years before our Vulgar era, at a time when the whole of the North was ignorant of the usage of letters, and when the Greeks were barely beginning to distinguish themselves by their wisdom?

This wise man is Confucius, who being a legislator, never wanted to deceive men. What more beautiful rule of conduct has ever been given man since the world began? Let us admit that there has been no legislator more useful to the human race.

(from Voltaire’s Dictionary of Philosophies.)

And the tendency of Rousseau to see in the Quietism of Lao-Tsze the source of all the gentle and idyllic theorizings of his time was even more pronounced.

There was, however, a third strand in Chinese public life—one much more active, virulent and bloodthirsty: the one which impelled the First Emperor to burn the books of his predecessors and to attempt to wipe out their civilizations. This was the Tao-ist religion, a phenomenon which might stand for the Terror of the French Revolution. It had nothing to do with the philosophy of Lao-Tsze, any more than the executions promoted by Robespierre and the Mountain had to do with the Quietism of Rousseau; but it arose in a fairly similar manner from fairly similar reactions. Voltaire was, like Confucius, an aristocrat trying to restore, by the virulence of his criticisms, virtue and strength to an ancient form of monarchy. Rousseau, like Lao-Tsze, was a person of obscure birth and descent, determined to shake off all the vanities and jealousies of the courts, and to find for himself an hermitage in which he should pass undisturbed days in reflecting on the virtues of sage and primitive peoples like the Chinese.

There remained, however, in each case a third factor—the common people who were neither superior men nor Quietists. And the “common people” of China consisted not merely of the poor. It was made up of every man from the Emperor downwards who was not a philosophic lover of the virtues and rites of the past ages of China.

The superior men of Confucius and the Quietists of Lao-Tsze’s following did their best to ignore metaphysical questions and the nature of the supernatural. Thus, the worship of God was left entirely in the hands of the Emperor, and the common people was completely without guidance as to religion. It set itself to supply the want and, importing every sort of superstition from the West, it compounded one that was a religion with a vengeance. Neither Confucianism nor Tao-ism provided for any kind of retribution either here or in the next world for sins committed in this life. The compounders of the new religion borrowed from the Jews the idea of punishment in this life as it is projected in the book of Job; from Christianity it took the idea of Hell—and, particularly, of Purgatory; from the Buddhists it borrowed metempsychosis and the practices of a priestcraft that has hardly elsewhere been equalled for rigidity of practice and superstition. It incorporated devil-worship, the type of patriotic faith that makes for the murder of all foreigners . . . and the idea of a materialistic Nirvana that resembled faintly the idea of the Christian Heaven but included marriage, polygamy and concubinage galore. That accounts for the passages shadowing after-death blisses that occur in the poem of Po-Chu-I, some extracts from which we are about to read, according to the translation of Mr. Giles in his History of Chinese Literature. Po-Chu-I was born A.D. 772 and died in 846, and his poem purports to tell the story of the Emperor Ming-Hu-ang who was born A.D. 685 and died just ten years before the birth of Po-Chu-I.

In his youth and early manhood this Emperor, according to the poem, was everything that an Emperor should be. Frugal and industrious, he held his courts and gave audiences in the early hours of the morning. Forever on the frontiers, he kept the barbarians at bay or drove them into their own territories. But one day came the femme fatale into Ming-Hu-ang’s life.

The Everlasting Wrong

Hair like a cloud, face like a flower, headdress which quivered as she walked,

Amid the delights of the Hibiscus Pavilion she passed the soft spring nights.

Spring nights, too short alas! for them, albeit prolonged till dawn,—

From this time forth no more audiences in the hours of early morn.

Revels and feasts in quick succession, ever without a break,

She chosen always for the spring excursion, chosen for the nightly carouse.

Three thousand peerless beauties adorned the apartments of the monarch’s harem

Yet always his Majesty reserved his attentions for her alone

Passing her life in a “golden house,”* with fair girls to wait on her,

She was daily wafted to ecstasy on the wine fumes of the banquet-hall.

From that time everything goes wrong with the Empire; the taxes fail, like the harvests; starvation and oppression stalk through the land; the fortifications of the frontiers are neglected. . . . And, at last, the barbarians make such dangerous inroads that the Emperor himself must march against them at the head of his troops. But the wicked one goes with him. For her sake the marches cannot be forced; the Emperor spends hours in her pavilion when he should be on the road. Indiscipline spreads through the army. Until there comes the crisis:

The soldiers refuse to advance; nothing remains to be done

Until she of the moth-eyebrows perishes in sight of all.

On the ground lie gold ornaments with no one to pick them up,

Kingfisher wings, golden birds, and hairpins of costly jade.

The monarch covers his face, powerless to save;

And as he turns to look back, tears and blood flow mingled together.

The Emperor is deposed for many years. But at last reascending his throne, he calls to him a magician who promises to go, like Orpheus, down into the far Eastern equivalent for Avernus and to report to the Emperor how the soul of the beautiful lady is engaged and whether she is still faithful to her lover. The magician finds the lady in a great hall, much resembling in its splendor those that on earth she had inhabited. So:

Then she takes out the old keepsakes, tokens of undying love,

A gold hairpin, an enamel brooch, and bids the magician carry these back.

One half of the hairpin she keeps, and one half of the enamel brooch,

Breaking with her hands the yellow gold, and dividing the enamel in two.

“Tell him,” she said, “to be firm of heart, as this gold and enamel,

And then in Heaven or on Earth below we two may meet once more.”

At parting, she confided to the magician many earnest messages of love,

Among the rest recalling a pledge mutually understood;

How on the seventh day of the seventh moon, in the Hall of Immortality,

At midnight, when none were near, he had whispered in her ear,

“I swear that we will fly like the one-winged birds,*

Or grow united like the trees with branches which twine together.”

Heaven and Earth, long-lasting as they are, will some day pass away;

But the fame of this great wrong shall stretch out forever, endless, forever and aye.

From which it would appear that, outside the circles of the superior men and the Tao-ists, lovers gave pledges and took vows in China, and that love there must have been very much like what it was elsewhere—for the common people.

It is interesting, too, to note that the lady believes that she and her lover will meet whether in heaven or on earth. That is a trace of the Buddhist belief in the transmigration of souls occurring in the Tao-ist religion. The Tao-ists, that is to say, believed that souls were promoted to inhabiting other bodies after a certain stage in purgatory, and that if in that reincarnation it behaved very well its next body might be that of a more and more superior being until at last the soul entered for good into Nirvana—or, that failing, was condemned to eternal extinction. . . . And if a woman behaved very well her soul might be promoted to inhabiting the body of a man . . . which might prove disagreeable to the Emperor Ming-Hu-ang.

* i.e., Military genius.

* Referring to A-chiao, one of the consorts of an Emperor of the Han dynasty. “Ah,” said the latter when a boy, “if I could only get A-chiao, I would have a golden house to keep her in.”

* Each bird having one wing must always fly with a mate.

CHAPTER FOUR

WE COME then by due chronological process to the literature of the Hebrews . . . not that we have by any means really finished with Confucius and the great Lao-Tsze—or even with the writers of the Egyptian Book of Stone that is fourteen hundred kilometres long. And indeed so inextricably entangled is the endless rope of human thought that, once the writers of any one civilization have entered into it, we shall never be rid of them. There are of course literary pockets like that of Japan that so isolated themselves that they have contributed little or nothing, in the way either of letters or that quasi-literature that is found in books of philosophy, to the great current of human thought and its written preservations.

I don’t mean to say that there is not a great Japanese literature, but it is one that derived from and, as it were, desiccated the more generous and untidy literature of the Chinese, and that because of Japan’s millennial self-isolation in no way spread its thought outside the realms of the Island Kingdom. . . . Until indeed a very few years ago under the aegis of Mr. H. G. Wells the Japanese theory of government called Bushido attracted a little attention in the Occident, or, under the aegis of Messrs. Pound and Waley the Japanese play form, called Nô, attracted rather less.*

But we have not in a work of this scale either the space or the time to investigate these pockets. We are concerned with the history of human thought as expressed and handed down through generations, in imaginative letters. That confines us to the five or six great literatures, living or dead, that still exercise great influence on us of today or that so influenced our fathers that we still feel the results of those influences. Considering them, initially, in order of time we find, first, the great stone literatures, the Sumerian, the Egyptian, the Babylonian. Overlapping them in its beginnings and continuing to the present day we have the Chinese at which we have just looked. Overlapping the Chinese and equally continuing into our own times we have, next, the Hebrew—both as an influence on the past and as a still written language.

And so we have the great Literatures of Greece and Rome, the one merging into the other. Then, in Europe, came the Dark Ages when the sacred torch was kept alive and its flames handed down in the magnificent and luxuriating literature of the Arabs. That sprang up after the birth of Mahomet, from the very borders of China, through Persia to Bagdad, and from Bagdad all along the North Coast of Africa to Carthage, and from Carthage to Granada and through all Spain to the foothills of the Alps in Provence—and, the other way round, through the Balkans and Greece to the very walls of Vienna. And all that territory produced and still produces literature in Arabic. Then, as Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages again girded her loins to throw back the Eastern invaders, her varying languages disentangled themselves the one from the other and, amongst the interminable scramblings for each other’s territories that God has not yet seen fit to allow to finish, the great modern literatures began their courses that also have not yet seen their earthly closes. It is they that in consequence have become the receptacles and melting pots of all the philosophies and literatures of all the ages that preceded or accompanied those called Dark—the period of universal barbarian flame over Europe, when only in lost monasteries in hidden valleys was the light of former civilizations kept dimly alive, to emerge again with some steadiness in the tenth and eleventh centuries with the Chanson de Roland, the miracle plays of the nun Hroswitha, the song of Piers Plowman, the thirteenth and fourteenth century compilations of the Roman de la Rose. And their music and traditions, passing across the Channel, gave us the verse of Chaucer, who was the father of our poetry, and the prose of the Morte d’Arthur. And that last work, which was completed in 1469, gave us—in spite of the first modern novelist, called Cervantes—the poor framework of human conduct which still faintly prevails in such chivalry as you may still see faintly in our school playgrounds and our playing fields.

These interweaving influences it is difficult to trace with certainty in all our complicated fabric of days running back into centuries. They are, indeed, almost untraceable, so many of them running into spheres where we have no immediate business. How, for instance, should we trace the influence of Confucius and Lao-Tsze, which—very much exciting the curiosity of the Greeks of the classical age—passed, as an influence, right back again under Alexander of Macedon, with the Greek-Bactrian Empire, into the very shadow of the Himalayas? So that today the lives and habits of thought of the inhabitants of the Punjab are still influenced by the habits and thoughts of the Greeks who were the companions of Alexander the Great three hundred years before the Christian era. And the companions of Alexander had learned their thoughts at the feet of the disciples of Socrates, who himself was not foreign to the teachings of Confucius and still more of the Tao-Teh-King.

But wherever you go in the East before the coming of the Christian era, you find books or stones enjoining on you either the desirability of following a virtuous and austere public life or complete retirement into hermitages. Those were the two great schools of Eastern thought, they too inextricably twining the one into the other over great regions of the earth. We have seen how Buddhism, a popular Indian religion, entered China and gave an added note of savagery and superstition to the popular religion of China. But you have also to think that the Buddha, who also was an almost exact contemporary of Confucius, was like him a reformer, with a philosophical system or religion that was without creed or rites. The inter-relationship between Chinese and Indian thought was at this period very close—if at times opposed. Thus, the Indian despising history as a record, to know anything at all of early Indian affairs it is necessary to consult the Chinese Imperial records.

And alongside that in India went the sterner, more rationalistic, infinitely stricter system of the Brahmins, whose three-in-one deities were Brahma the Creator, Siva the Destroyer, and Vishnu the Preserver; and they again were mental-poetic developments of the primeval religion of the ancient gods of India—the spirits of the hills, the rivers, the lakes, of the sky, of rain clouds—all under the presidency of Dyaush-pitar, the Father of Heaven. . . . And if you consider how nearly that name resembles phonetically that of the father of the Greek gods, you will get one of those little philosophic shocks of suggestion that will affect you continually when you pursue the thoughts of the poets down through the ages—when, that is to say, you study the history of literature.

For tracing down to their sources literature and, more emphatically, the department of literature that is known as poetry, whether in prose or in verse, you traverse continually that double territory that is one part imagination, one part the search after truth, and yet another where the two mingle indistinguishably the one with the other. As if it were a riverine country divided into solid ground, marshy tracts and the great river itself! Nothing might be farther from your thought than any study of comparative or revealed religion; and no subject is more dangerous to peace or more apt to lead to confusion. But, if only because it has been the habit of those servants of the gods called priests continually to call to their aid those servants of mankind called poets, you have no chance of escape from that dangerous study once you embark on the search for poetic illumination. To avoid it, you would have to do without all the literature of the Books of Stone, of nearly all of Homer, of nearly all Greek drama, of all the Old Testament except perhaps the “Song of Solomon,” of all the New Testament and an immense proportion of modern verse and prose.

The Hebrews themselves, being the most austere of all the believers with whom we shall have to do, limit what are called the poetical books of the Old Testament to three, those being the Book of Job, the Psalms and Proverbs—all three having been in the original Hebrew entirely written in alliterated, parallel and, very rarely, metrical, verse, with the exception of Job which has Prologue and Epilogue in prose. But the more liberal Catholic, and such of the Protestant Biblical critics as are inclined to be liberal, call “poetical” all the central books of Holy Writ—that is to say, in addition to the above three, the books called Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, the Protestants omitting Ecclesiasticus, and the Hebrews calling the other four the books of wisdom. The Latin Christian writers, in fact, like the Latin lay writers of today, considered that the books not called poetical by the Hebrews were nevertheless so inspired by passion and rendered so beautiful by the use of image and illustration that though written mostly in prose they could still be called poetry, whereas the Hebrews, like the Anglo-Saxons of today, insisted that whatever was not in verse was prose and so not poetical.

Settle that matter how you like, the fact remains that all priesthoods, stern like the Hebrews or relatively jovial like the priests of the Paphian Venus, have one and all called to their aid both verse poets and prosateurs in un-enumerable profusion and have accorded more or less reverence, according as they were liberal or austere, to the religions and philosophies that have preceded them. Thus, St. Augustine, as I have pointed out, being much nearer to the spirit of the more ancient religions, accords in the City of God considerable weight to holiness that had gone before and had differed in shades from his own. His example has been followed by most Roman Catholic commentators and missionaries since his day, Protestant writers and theologians being more exclusive and apt to believe that the pre-Christian religious were all heathens without light.

The difference comes out most fully in the relation of the various Christian Churches to the combined Confucius-Lao-Tsze system of conduct and belief. The eighteenth and nineteenth century Jesuit missionaries to China, basing themselves as it were on St. Augustine’s declaration that the Church of Christ was not initiated by the Redeemer but had existed for generations in principle until Christ came to assemble all those preëxisting but scattered principles and creeds into one and to give that Church his name—the Jesuit missionaries, then, professed to see in Confucianism plus Tao-ism, as recorded in the Tao-Teh-King of Lao-Tsze, the whole of the pre-Christian religious system, filtering through the Hebrews and the Old Testament. They said those teachings had come to flower in the figure and teachings of Christ as recorded in the Gospels. They said:

The deity of this Chinese system is a triune deity: one god with three aspects, which we will loosely translate as Is-Was-and-Forever-Shall-Be-the-Eternal-God. According to the Tao-Teh-King he was mystically accompanied or even preceded by the mysterious and inexplicable principle called Ta-O . . . as who should say, the Word. So that the beginning of the Tao-Teh-King might almost be rendered in the very words of the Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Again the triune eternal god was waited on by spirits to whom in moments of agony or peril even the common people might appeal, the worship of the eternal being otherwise reserved for the Emperor—thus foreshadowing the angels and archangels and saints of the Catholic rites. And still more remarkable and convincing, they said, was the fact that the name by which the Emperor addressed the eternal in his solstitial worship was I-Ah-Wei, in which, just as in the Dyaush-pitar of the Hindus we may trace the name of Zeus the Father, we may trace the name of the Yahweh of the Hebrews.

Even further: in the divided but not necessarily always conflicting figures of Confucius and Lao-Tsze—who himself was of miraculous birth—you would if you combined them see the earthly and the divine attributes of the Savior of Mankind himself.

Let us then consider—since we have no literary trace of I-Ah-Wei, the Chinese eternal one—the literary remains of the two great Chinese sages. To strike the strongest note at first let us say that it was Confucius who first amongst traceable men laid down the doctrine: “Do not as you would not be done by.” But Lao-Tsze’s whole doctrine was the enforcement of the Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” And it was Lao-Tsze who first amongst traceable men enunciated the doctrine—which was set into poetry by the Hebrews in the Book of Proverbs—“If thine Enemy hunger give him meat; if he be athirst, give him to drink.” That became, in the words of Christ as recorded by St. Luke: “But love ye your enemies and do good and lend, hoping for nothing again.”

To the Western mind the writings of Confucius are tortuous—an immense rag bag of eternal repetitions. Or rather of continuous attempts at the expression of thoughts in which each new attempt carries the thought sometimes only very little forward. As thus: in a dialogue between the Master and his disciples, quoted from The Story of Confucius, by Brian Brown:

Yen Yuan asked, “What is love?”

The Master said, “Love is to conquer self and turn to courtesy, for one day all mankind would turn to love.”

“Does love flow from within, or does it flow from others?”

The Master said, “To be ever courteous of eye and ever courteous of ear; to be ever courteous in work and ever courteous in deed.”

Yen Yuan said: “Dull as I am, I hope to live by these words.”

Chung-kung asked, “What is love?”

The Master said: “Without the door to behave as though a great guest were come; to treat the people as though we tendered the high sacrifice; not to do unto others what we would not have they should do unto us; to breed no wrongs in the State and breed no wrongs in the home.”

Chung-kung said: “Dull as I am, I hope to live by these words.”

Ssu-ma Niu said: “Love is slow to speak.”

“To be slow to speak! Can that be called love?”

The Master said: “A gentleman knows neither sorrow nor fear.”

“No sorrow and no fear! Can that be called a gentleman?”

The Master said: “He finds no sin in his heart, so why should he sorrow, what should he fear?”

Or again amongst the almost millionfold precepts by the following of which the superior man may mould himself into the perfect bureaucrat and in turn mould his province or his Empire into the perfect commonwealth:

“When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.”

“In the way of the superior man there are four things, to not one of which have I as yet attained. To serve my father, as I would require my son to serve me, to this I have not attained; to serve my prince, as I would require my minister to serve me, to this I have not attained; to serve my elder brother, as I would require my younger brother to serve me, to this I have not attained; to set the example in behaving to a friend, as I would require him to behave to me, to this I have not attained. Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license. Thus his words have respect to his actions, and his actions have respect to his words; is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior man?”

The Master said, “In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.”

“Some are born with the knowledge of those duties; some know them by study, and some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some practice them with a natural ease; some form a desire for their advantages, and some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing.”

Lao-Tsze, on the other hand, wrote very little. Confucius moved about all over the Middle Kingdom followed by his pupils and trying to inculcate wisdom into feudal dukes and spreading his fame wherever he went. Lao-Tsze with a complete hatred for what today is called publicity, having been early made librarian to the Duke of Lu, remained, till his disappearance at a very advanced age, amongst his scrolls. If he promulgated his Quietist doctrines at all, he did so by word of mouth to such as visited his retreat. His fame, at least, was very widely spread—a fact that he continually deplored. He said, almost in the words of Keats, that he was one whose name should be written in water. Indeed, for him water was the most satisfactory of all natural symbols since it forever sought the lowest levels. And, said he, if all men imitated water and sought not the highest but the lowest places in the market place or in office, the world would automatically and at once return to its Golden Age.

In the end, the turbulence and disorder of the Empire having grown too great for him to support its contemplation, he betook himself to the solitudes of the outer deserts and was no more heard of. But as he went on his way the guardian of the gate of the valley that leads out of the Celestial Empire stopped him and begged that he would at least write one book so that his teachings might not be forever lost to the world. So Lao-Tsze stayed long enough to write “in 5,000 characters” the Tao-Tseh-King. It is a work, almost of poetry, alternating a deep mysticism when he talks of the Ta-o (the “Word,” the First Principle) with parables and images of an extreme clarity. Thus, he will say: “Ta-o is an Emptiness;” and continue that “both in the processes of nature, known as the action of Heaven and Earth, both in the processes of T’ien* or Iah-Wei, and in the activities of man, what corresponds to that mystic Emptiness is a freedom from all selfish motive, or purpose centering in oneself.” And then immediately he adds, according to James Legge in The Religions of China:

It is said, “The sage deals with affairs (as if) he were doing nothing, and performs his teaching without words. (In the same way in nature) all things shoot up (in spring) without a word spoken, and grow (in summer) without a claim for their production. They go through their processes (in autumn) without any display of pride in them, and the results are realized (in winter) without any assumption of ownership.”

Those sentences curiously foreshadow the sayings of the altruist second century Roman Emperor. For, says Marcus Aurelius:

Whom then shall we call the virtuous man? Is it he who doeth good deeds in the expectation of a reward still greater? Not so. Is it then he who doeth good expecting the exact return of what he has given? No, it is not he. The truly virtuous man is he who putteth forth his good works as the vine lets fall its grapes and when they are gone hath no more any consciousness of them.

And that is not strange when we remember that the father of Commodus lived in the days of the Golden Age of the Chinese Empire and its literature, and that embassies frequently passed in those days between the shores of the Mediterranean and the rivers of Cathay.

Confucius, then, may be said to stand for the almost Divine Teacher of Statesmen; Lao-Tsze for the poet who was the more nearly Divine Educator of Mankind. And, indeed, during the few years when Confucius held office and directed the affairs of a state, he was so successful as to cause his own ruin. For, having brought the Dukedom of Lu to a high state of fiscal and military efficiency, it increased its territories and appeared likely to become a menace to all the surrounding duchies. So the crafty rulers of Chi decided to wean the affections of the Duke of Lu from his minister. They accordingly sent the duke a present of eight hundred concubines and eight hundred Celestial thoroughbred stallions. And the duke, corrupted by these joys, looked so coldly on K’ung-Fu-Tsze that the philosopher’s dignity demanded that he draw his robes about him and depart forever from Lu. He found no other office and from thenceforth to the end of his days wandered mournfully, surrounded by his disciples, all over China. Indeed, rather than have no office at all he contemplated entering the service of a brigand chief who was laying waste whole dukedoms. He pointed out that, so long as his maxims were put into force and an ideal commonwealth was founded to serve as a model for restoring the Golden Age of Mankind, it mattered little what leader ruled the state.

The two great sages met once, Confucius calling on Lao-Tsze in his library. The interview seems to have resembled that between the young Heine and the aged Goethe—Confucius being aged about thirty and Lao-Tsze over eighty. Lao-Tsze, according to Brian Brown in The Story of Confucius, is reported to have said to his young visitor:

“Those whom you talk about are dead, and their bones are mouldered to dust; only their words remain. When the superior man dominates his time, he mounts aloft; but when the time is against him, he moves as if his feet were entangled. I have heard that a good merchant, though he has rich treasures deeply stored, appears as if he were poor, and that the superior man whose virtue is complete is yet to outward seeming stupid. Put away your proud air and many desires, your insinuating habit and wild will. These are of no advantage to you. This is all which I have to tell you.”

And Confucius is said to have exclaimed on returning to his disciples:

“I know how birds can fly, how fishes can swim, and how animals can run. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer may be hooked, and the flyer may be shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon. I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds and rises to heaven. Today, I have seen Lao-Tsze, and can only compare him to the dragon.”

It is, however, to be remembered that those words are reported by Tsze-Ma Ch’ien, a disciple of Lao-Tsze, six hundred years after the interview.

So, from the literary point of view, we may agree with St. Augustine that the ideas of the church of Christ existed for millennia before the coming of Christ himself. . . . At any rate, it demonstrably did so in China. To sum up: we have there the single deity of three aspects, the ministrant spirits and the savior of mankind—divided, in this case, into the two sages. For if, to use a metaphor of Po-Chu-I from The Everlasting Wrong, we regard Confucius and Lao-Tsze as two birds each with only one wing, so that they may fly only together, we find almost exactly reproduced the figure of the Christian Savior. On the one hand, Confucius attended to the affairs of his earth, and kept his eyes on the past much as Christ did when He said “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;” or when He drove the money changers from the Temple; or again when He looked continually back for the examples and sayings of the prophets who had preceded Him. On the other hand, like Lao-Tsze, he looked continually forward to a Golden Age, that should be earned by meekness, by humility and by the extremes of frugality.

The influence of the Chinese sages on Jewish thought is not so easy to trace. If there were any, it came late and probably, as in the case of the Punjab, by way of the Greeks.

It is, of course, hopeless to attempt to date the actual writing of almost any of the books of the Old Testament. That is a task that has occupied men’s minds for centuries. And we are hardly nearer the truth today than were the Christian fathers of the Church or the Jewish writers on the subject nearly two thousand years ago.

Those who believe that every word of any one version of the Bible in whatever language is in fact the word of God Himself, are perhaps today fewer than they were, say, half a century ago. But the moment any concession is made—the moment any imperfection is allowed to the text of Holy Writ—the matter becomes completely bewildering and no one but a master of Biblical exegesis could find any clue to that maze. It is one that has puzzled the minds of the wisest as of the most foolish for thousands of years, and one that as yet has found no solution.

So we may, not inappropriately, leave all that side of the matter to theologians and consider the Bible as if it were an anthology, in Hebrew, of the lore, the edicts, the religious discipline, the hygienic regulations, the legends, and above all, the poetry of an ancient and warlike people. They were at the height of their power a thousand years before the Christian era; subsequently they declined until in the early years of our era they were expelled from their own land, and have ever since been wanderers throughout the earth. Nor is it to be imagined that they left even their literary talents behind them. On the contrary, for many centuries after the Dispersal and more particularly in Spain, the Jews produced a plentiful, and always developing, literature—particularly in verse. As was the case with the races who have produced the other living literatures of the world, the Jewish literary language and forms underwent considerable changes. Their verse like ours, or that of any other Western literature, gradually lost its Oriental characteristics of rhythm and adopted the metres and rhymes that were used by the people amongst whom they found themselves living. A part of the Bible was written in verse, and in all the rest of Holy Writ the prophets and chroniclers had the tendency, in moments of emotion, to burst uncontrollably into verse—but that very fact became obscured to the Jewish learned themselves, and it was actually an eighteenth century Protestant divine who first rediscovered the verse structures, alliterations and rhythms of the poetical books of the Old Testament, though two seventeenth century Jewish writers had before him called attention to the fact that alliteration played some part in the Hebrew biblical writings.

The moment one realizes the fact that a great part of the Hebrew Bible was written in verse and that that verse instead of being confined by the later devices of rhyme, scansions and the rest was of an extraordinary human quality, it becomes apparent that quite apart from its religious aspects, the Bible itself is an extremely profitable work to study from the merely literary side. And the moment that one approaches the Bible from that point of view, it assumes a completely different aspect.

Whilst you regard it solely as a record of the decrees of a jealous deity and of the acts of an isolated people, guided very imperfectly by those edicts, it remains something slightly minatory and aloof from the daily life of mere men. But, as soon as you regard it as a merely human compilation of legends, moralities, stage plays even, and fairy tales and folklore, you may arrive at a stage of mind at once of more wonder as of more equableness. If you have to consider the Bible as in very truth and in every word the inspiration of the Almighty, you are at once browbeaten by the authority and bewildered by the almost insane isolation and vindictiveness of your God and your fellow men.

To put it in another and less dangerous plane: The Greeks said that Apollo rendered his greatest poets mad so that they might the more nearly commune with him and render his thoughts for the perusal of mankind. But every poet having his passages of dullness, bathos and lengthiness, they considered that at such moments the poet was too rational—too insufficiently mad—to be in perfect communion with the godhead. For reasons of his own, the godhead had so willed it. So on occasion the Hebrew God refused His counsel to his anointed: “And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by the prophets.” Saul, that is to say, had for human reasons of his own, departed from following the counsels of Jehovah, and Jehovah withdrew his counsels from Saul. So did Apollo from his poets when he was displeased with them.

Thus, we may consider that, since poets and seers alike continued writing or prophesying whether or no they felt the divine inspiration, their poems or prophecies were more or less inspired according as, when they were doing any particular piece of writing, they were more or less en rapport with the deity. And, prophets and poets were often enough sufficiently wilful in face of the dictates of the godhead. Consider the case of Jonah. At first he would not go to Nineveh to announce that its wickedness had come up before the Lord. Then, being shown by Leviathan the error of his ways, he so vividly announced the displeasure of the Lord to that erring city that, not only did its inhabitants repent of their evil ways in sackcloth and ashes, but “God repented of the evil that he said that he would do unto them and he did it not.”

That did not please Jonah, who betook himself out of the city and made himself a shelter, God subsequently providing him with a creeping plant that it might be-shadow the irate prophet. And then God made a worm that destroyed the gourd; and sent a vehement west wind; and the sun beat on the head of the prophet who was looking out to see whether Nineveh was going to be destroyed or not. So with sun and east wind the prophet fainted and said: “It is better for me to die than to live.”

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?

And he said: I do well to be angry even unto death.

Then said the Lord: Thou hast had pity on the gourd for the which thou has not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:

And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

The moment you read that passage with the shadow of literal inspiration lifted from it—the moment, that is to say, that you read it as if it were a legend or a piece of folklore or part of a book of adventures—it becomes something touching and quaint, and above all humane with a humanity that one does not usually seem to find in the records of Yahweh. If, that is to say, you could regard the story as on a par with a tale of Apollo and one of his naughty old priests, you could take delight in the picture of the reasonable, reasoning, easily placated Godhead, dealing patiently with His rather insupportable prophet and showing kindness and consideration to a gentile nation. And, indeed, the moment you read the Bible freed from the shadow of unreasonable gloom and almost insane vindictiveness with which one is accustomed to invest the Sacred Writings, at once a great deal becomes plain that was not plain before. It is as if different and more humane highlights should spring up in a gloomy landscape.

We are accustomed to think of the Hebrews, portrayed in the Holy Writ, as a people of sadic gloom, ferocity, isolation and xenophobia. And of their God as equally sadic and vindictive. Actually, the note of benevolence and hospitality to the stranger within the gate, and of the Almighty’s tolerance for mankind outside Jewry is sounded in the Commandments at the very beginning of the book and continues so to sound in it right to the very end. The God of the Old Testament so regarded is by no means implacable even to those who have not known His name. He is, indeed, not even insensible to human pleasures. He walks in His garden in the cool of the evening. He takes pleasure in the scent of cooked meats and hot showbreads, and in the shining gold decorations of temples. That His face was not implacably set against extra-Palestinian people, we have already seen in the case of Cyrus: “I have even called thee by thy name; I have surnamed thee though thou hast not known me.” And we have seen it just now in the story of Jonah. And more markedly still you find it in the account of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, where the great King makes it abundantly clear that the Temple existed not merely for the salvation of the Tribes of Israel but also for “the stranger that comes out of a far country for Thy name’s sake.”

Moreover concerning a stranger, that is not of thy people Israel but cometh out of a far country for thy name’s sake.

(For they shall hear of thy great name, and of thy strong hand, and of thy stretched arm;) when he shall come and pray toward this house;

Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and do according to all that the stranger calleth to thee for: that all people of the earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel; and that they may know that this house, I have builded, is called by thy name.

And, indeed, in later days, He appointed even His prophets to be not only His personal servants but also His messengers to the Gentiles. As it is written in Isaiah xlix, 6:

And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

Before then, as in Exodus, according to the Versio Recepta, and in Deuteronomy according to the Septuagint, immediately after the Flood, the Lord shows His solicitude for the tribes of the Gentiles by appointing to each a special superhuman overlord and protector who shall act as His vice-regent for their affairs.

The trouble for the lay or literary reader of the Old Testament is that there exist so many versions in the original Hebrew and so many translations from one or other of the Hebrew versions, and so many of the Hebrew versions are in part written in Aramaic (the language of the Syrian-Mesopotamian descendants of Aram, the fifth son of Noah), that, though the general tone, tenor or impressions of the whole are singularly homogeneous, when it comes to ascertaining particulars on any given point of history or doctrine, you may try to ascertain the information that you need from any one of six or seven major versions and find them all differing in detail or in toto. The main versions that, if we went more deeply into the subject, we should have to consult would be the Hebrew versions in use amongst the orthodox Jews of today, of which, as far as is discoverable, only the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Old Testament, are considered to have been literally inspired by Jehovah; then the Septuagint, a version in Greek made by seventy Hebrew scribes for the use of the literary Pharaoh, Ptolemy Philadelphus, between 285 and 247 B.C.; then the Versio Recepta, an early Hebrew version accepted by the Church of Rome as being nearest to an inspired text. The Vulgate, the Latin version, in use by Roman Catholics to this day, was translated from the Septuagint before the day of St. Jerome and liberally retouched by that father of the Church. It was rejected by the sixteenth century leaders of the Reformation on account of alleged mistranslations and faulty readings—the most salient point of combat, to quote one solitary example, in which the translations of both the Old and the New Testaments are concerned, being the case of the heavenly host of the Nativity.

In the Vulgate those messengers of the Almighty announce Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis (Peace to such men as be of good will). In the Authorized and other Protestant translations, like those of Luther in German and of de Maistre de Saci in seventeenth century French, the passage of St. Luke runs: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: Glory to God in the Highest and peace, good will towards men:” the Reformers seeing in the “peace to men of good will” of the Catholic version an attempt to limit the peace of God to Papists alone.

If you should wish to follow the matter further you would consult Isaiah, ch. 57, v. 19, and you would find that prophet, whom St. Luke most frequently quotes, prophesying that the Jewish Messiah would bring: “Peace, peace, to (him that is) far off,” which would imply ‘to Gentiles;’ “and to (him that is) near, saith the Lord. . . .” This would seem to support the Protestant version.

But if you read further on you will find in the next verse the Lord saying: “But the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. . . . (There is) no peace to the wicked, saith my God.” This would seem to imply that God limited his peace to those that are of good will.

Eventually, in 1546, the papal council of Trent decided, as far as the Church of Rome was concerned, that, though the original Hebrew, mainly in the version called the Versio Recepta, might be consulted by the faithful for historic or aesthetic data, the Vulgate must remain the authority in matters of belief. This decision is responsible for the relatively extreme latitude that Catholic commentators, writing with the full sanction of the Church, could allow themselves over matters like those of history, authorship, date of composition of the various biblical texts. So that whilst believers of other complexions were still shivering over the Assyrian discoveries of Delitsch in Babel and Bible, the Jesuit father Destrées, with the full imprimatur and nihil obstat of the Church, could cheerfully write that, far from being the product of a single inspired pen, the Book of Job must be regarded as a sort of morality play. The greater part of it, he says, being in verse by one or many hands, with a prose prologue of inferior literary quality and religious orthodoxy, written considerably later than the body of the work and in a period of great public disturbance and distress. The whole work, in fact, says he, is a collection of legend and verse from many periods and regions, swept together and edited by a masterful hand at a relatively late period of Jewish independent history.

So that, from a purely literary point of view, we may regard the Bible as being a composite work that underwent many editings—and that many of the editors, even before the Diaspora, made emendations to suit their doctrinal or political views. The great periods of these literary activities may be considered, roughly speaking, to have been, first, in the reign of Solomon, who was an enlightened sovereign of literary tastes and poetic and musical gifts. To his period we may assign the Pentateuch. That would be in the tenth century before the Christian era. At the date of the Babylonian captivity the priestly or so-called “Foundation” manuscript of the Pentateuch—which some sects of orthodox Jews still consider to have been literally inspired—was carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon. After the rebuilding of the Temple, which was not completed till about 515 (in the reign of Darius I, though the Jews had been permitted to return to Jerusalem a quarter of a century earlier), the sacred books were brought back to Jerusalem by Nehemiah. In the relative tranquillity of their subjection first to the Persians, then to the Greeks under Alexander, and then to the Ptolemies of Egypt—that is to say between 500 and 300 B.C.—Jewish editors made many additions to and rearrangements of the holy writings. This culminated in the collection of the Hebrew versions used by the seventy Hebrew scribes for the famous Greek translation called the Septuagint, which was made about 320 B.C. This contains many passages that will not be found in the accepted Hebrew versions and omits many that will.

A further period of great literary activity occurred after the Macchabean emancipation—between 167 and the subjection of the Jews by Pompey in 63 B.C. What is called, by purists amongst the reformers, the last of the canonical books of the Old Testament—the Book of Daniel—seems to have been edited in 165. And it is reasonable to consider that that may have seen the last of its editings, for from internal evidence of language and of fact it is obvious that the book, as we have it, is, like the Book of Job, a compilation of passages of prose and verse written at different dates and in varying places and dialects.

We may, therefore, perhaps consider that the Hebrew Bible as we have it today is a product of continual editings and reëditings beginning in the fifth century B.C., these being particularly active during the literature-loving era of the Ptolemies and in the hundred years of the Macchabeans. These reëditings did not stop even with the Dispersal when, mostly in Spain, the Jews compiled the work called the Talmud, which consists of an anthology of precepts, rabbinical traditions and comments on passages from the Old Testament. It has been accepted by a large section of orthodox Jewry as its final book of discipline; but there are still dissenting Jewish sects that refuse to be guided by anything but the Old Testament.

It must be remembered that like all the great literary works that preceded the mechanical reproduction of books—like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Canons of Confucius, the Vedas, the Sagas, The Arabian Nights, the Mabinogion, the Morte d’Arthur or the Border ballads, which may still be heard carried as it were from mouth to mouth during the centuries in the remoter districts of both Great Britain and the United States—like all those folk-products, the Bible as we have it must be considered as a mass compilation. Before Solomon, Hebrew lore would seem to have been merely traditional with very little of it even written.

Solomon may well, anticipating the practice of Confucius, have decided to gather these traditions into what became the “Foundation” manuscripts of the Pentateuch. And, according to tradition, that manuscript included some, at least, of the psalms. Obviously not all the Psalms of David are by that king, but some almost as certainly are. So during that Golden Age of Hebrew literature—for if the kings were poets, we may be certain that their subjects imitated them—a great many of the poetical and historical books found their first expression, whether they passed from tongue to tongue or were written down. And in one form or the other a certain mass of that literature returned from Babylon to be written down, edited, added to, pruned and rendered suitable to the morals of the day—and to have fresh poems and chronicles and Sapiential books grow up side by side with them . . . all through the days of Alexander, of the Ptolemies, and finally of the Macchabeans. And these last, coming last, certainly had the last word with them.

These final renderings were themselves usually coöperative labors executed by a sage and his pupils. And, indeed, there is a very old Jewish tradition according to which the major prophets themselves called in assistance for the transcription of their prophecies. Thus the tradition recorded in the Talmud as to Isaiah states succinctly: “Ezechias and his college wrote Isaiah,” Cardinal Meignan making on those words the comment: “Thus orthodoxy is in no way at stake should the authorship of some of the prophecies of Isaiah be rejected”—though he adds that the editor probably was “a holy personage other than Isaiah but fully in harmony with the feelings and general conceptions of that prophet.”*

Nevertheless, though fashions in morals, doctrine and practical wisdom may have changed at various dates in the history of the Jews, a sufficiency of former tenets and views would remain after each recension to give to the whole work an aspect of inconsistency, a fact that may well be put down to the strong foreign influences to which during all of their history the Jews were subjected. . . . And this was particularly the case with their arts, their music and their literature and language. Throughout the Bible from the earliest books to the last one—that of Daniel—foreign words, particularly those expressing details of handicrafts and industries, are of continual occurrence. . . . Thus, to quote merely the first, the middle and last books of the Old Testament: in the story of Moses we read: “And when she could no longer hide him she took for him an ark of bulrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch and put the child therein.” The Egyptian word teb, meaning a coffer, is here employed by the Hebrew writer in the form “tebbah,” to mean what the translator in the Authorized Version has called an “ark.” Towards the middle of the Old Testament again, in the relatively cosmopolitan days of Solomon, in addition to Egyptian verbal influences, a great many more western expressions for the products of handicrafts crept into the language; thus:

He was a widow’s son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to king Solomon and wrought all his work.

And he made the pillars, and two rows round about upon the one network, to cover the chapiters that were upon the top, with pomegranates: and so did he for the other chapiter.

And the chapiters that were upon the top of the pillars were of lily work in the porch, four cubits.

And the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also above, over against the belly which was by the network: and the pomegranates were two hundred in rows round about upon the other chapiter.

And, still more to our purpose, Hiram spoke a mixed language of an Aramaic-Palestinian type with a certain admixture of Greek. Thus, to disentangle the words used in the Hebrew Versio Recepta for the checker work and network and pillars and lily work and pomegranates becomes a feat of philological gymnastics that would be out of place in a work of this character. It is sufficient to say that every one of those words is of one of two foreign origins.

The process continued even into the days of the Macchabees. Thus in Daniel the names of the musical instruments are for the most part taken from the Greek—thus Kitharis becomes in Hebrew, Githaris; Psalterion, Psanterin; and Symphony, Sumphonya.

Today, having like the Hebrews the necessity to use Greek-derived words when it is a matter of the sciences or arts, we also say guitar, psaltery and, when we mean the accompaniment to the voice or other instruments, symphony—meaning something that is played simultaneously. This last instrument—the Symphony or Sumphonya, was used for accompanying chants or songs in the reign of Antiochus IV, King of Syria—one of the fiercest persecutors of the Jews. It was said to have been the favorite instrument of that monarch; and he died in 164 B.C., the final revision of the Book of Daniel having been made the year before.

* The reader who wishes, and there is every reason why he should, to acquaint himself more deeply with the literature of Japan could not do better than to read the Tale of Genji by the Lady Murasaki and its five sequels all translated by Mr. Arthur Waley. These books will not merely present him with a series of exciting amours compared with which the adventures of Casanova are dull grossnesses, but in the course of these novels the characters themselves—as we shall later have occasion to find out, indulge in so many speculations as to the technique of not only Japanese literature but of the Chinese from which the Japanese closely descends that the reader will find himself provided with a very good idea of what both literatures represent in the way of technique. He could then proceed to deepen his knowledge by reading W. G. Aston’s Japanese Literature, and C. H. Page’s Japanese Poetry. Mr. Waley has also translated a number of Nô plays which are perhaps Japan’s most significant literary form, and his admirable and indefatigable labors have presented us with renderings of innumerable other Chinese poetic works, his last volume being a very valuable Book of Songs issued in London by Messrs. Allen & Unwin in 1937. The novel of the Lady Murasaki is also obtainable from Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

* i.e., Heaven and earth united, and so the triple godhead I-Ah-Wei.

* Quoted in A General Introduction to the Old Testament by Father Francis Gigot, S.S.