A just appreciation of any modern European literature is not to be
derived from the study of that literature alone. Not one has grown up
spontaneously and independently from the soil of the national genius.
Some seeds at least have come from elsewhere. Often whole forms of
writing have been transplanted bodily. We must particularly recognize
these truths when dealing with English literature.
The basis of the English mind is chiefly Teutonic, in some measure
Celtic. If the English genius had been left to itself, to develop its
spiritual and intellectual creations in its own way, English literature
would have been a very different thing in both substance and form. But
in reality English literary history is the story of the Teutonic and
Celtic tendencies “corrected and clarified,” and the Teutonic and Celtic
invention immensely assisted, by influences and ideas flowing in from
other sources. There have been large ingraftings from other stocks,
either partially kindred or altogether alien—from Greeks, Romans,
Italians, French, Spaniards, Germans, as well as from Hebrews and other
Orientals.
All sound study is comparative. We must place other literatures beside
our own, if we desire to appraise rightly our national genius, its
capacities, and its creations. We find our English writers composing
their works in certain forms, and giving expression to a certain range of
ideas. How came they to employ these particular forms of creation? How
did they arrive at these particular ideas? How is it with other nations?
Have they built upon the same lines and with the same materials, or how
is it with them? Have we borrowed from them, or they from us? If there
have been borrowings, when and in what measure did they occur? Looking
back over the changes of spirit and form which our poetry, for example,
has undergone, we shall encourage altogether false notions of the causes
of such changes, unless we see how, every now and then, a shower of new
ideas, a stream of new light, has come in from abroad. Most readers know
in some vague way that Chaucer avows or betrays his debts to France
and Italy; that Shakespeare did not invent his own plots, but borrowed
from Italians, from Plautus, from Plutarch, and others; that Milton
was steeped in the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics. But we want to
know more than this. We want to perceive with some definiteness how far
the whole course of English literature has been enriched by tributary
streams, and what sort of waters they brought. It would be instructive to
draw a diagram of our literary history; to liken it to the course of a
river, and to picture its various fountain-heads and tributaries pouring
in their several quotas at their several times.
In all modern literatures there is a large proportion which is unoriginal
to them. Milton has been mentioned already. Those who read only English
works find Milton full of nobility of thought and imagery. Yet, before
Milton produced his greater poems, he had read, re-read, and deliberately
steeped himself in, the literature of Greece, Rome, modern Italy, and
France. Precisely how much of Milton is made up of Homer, Euripides,
Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and other predecessors, can only be known to such
as have those authors at their finger-ends. Shelley, again, is commonly
regarded as one of the most daringly original of English writers. Yet
Shelley’s mind was an amalgam of himself, Homer, Euripides, Plato,
Virgil, Dante, Calderon, Goethe; and this, once more, is but another way
of saying that it had incorporated the genius of generations of Greeks,
Romans, Spaniards, Italians, and Germans. We cannot therefore arrive at
the true genius of Milton or of Shelley, or speak understandingly of
their originality, until we have surveyed those other literatures and
their relations with our own.
Let us, indeed, claim with a proper national pride that the influence of
English literature, of our Shakespeare, our Bacon, our Locke, our Byron,
upon foreign writers has been profound. Her debt to modern literature has
been repaid by England, and, at least in the influence of Shakespeare,
more than repaid. But with that question we are not here concerned.
One prefatory remark has yet to be made. It is that there is no discredit
in this literary borrowing. Nations can no more be independent in the art
of literature than in other arts. To be independent, to be unaffected
by others’ genius, inaccessible to others’ ideas, would be to render
our literature as stagnant and as grotesque as the paintings of China
and of old Japan. It is a condition of progress in literature as in
science, that new inspiration must be continually sought, new conceptions
assimilated. One vein is soon worked out; another must be opened. True
art is of all the world, and a nation does best in art when it corrects
its own peculiar faults and expands its own particular ideas, without
meanwhile surrendering itself to a servile imitation of that for which
its genius is naturally unfit. And English writers may glory that they
have seldom been servile imitators.
I