Initiation into Literature Part 1

Initiation into Literature.

by Emile f.a.guet.

PREFACE

This volume, as indicated by the t.i.tle, is designed to show the way to the beginner, to satisfy and more especially to excite his initial curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the march of facts and of ideas. The reader is led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins to the most recent efforts of the human mind.

It should be a convenient repertory to which the mind may revert in order to see broadly the general opinion of an epoch--and what connected it with those that followed or preceded it. It aims above all at being _a frame_ in which can conveniently be inscribed, in the course of further studies, new conceptions more detailed and more thoroughly examined.

It will have fulfilled its design should it incite to research and meditation, and if it prepares for them correctly.

E. f.a.gUET.

INITIATION INTO LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

ANCIENT INDIA

The _Vedas_. Buddhist Literature. Great Epic Poems, then very Diverse, much Shorter Poems. Dramatic Literature. Moral Literature.

THE _VEDAS_.--The ancient Indians, who spoke Sanscrit, possess a literature which goes back, perhaps, to the fifteenth century before Christ. At first, like all other races, they possessed a sacred literature intimately bound up with their religion. The earliest volumes of sacred literature are the _Vedas_. They describe and glorify the G.o.ds then wors.h.i.+pped, to wit, Agni, G.o.d of fire, of the domestic hearth, of the celestial fire (the sun), of the atmospheric fire (lightning); Indra, G.o.d of atmosphere, a.n.a.logous to Zeus of the Greeks; Soma, the moon; Varuna, the nocturnal vault, the G.o.d who rewards the good and punishes the evil; Rudra, the irascible G.o.d, more evil than well disposed, though sometimes helpful; others too, very numerous.

The style of the _Vedas_ is continually poetic and metaphorical.

They contain a sort of metaphysics as well as continual allegories.

BUDDHA.--Buddhism, a philosophical religion, sufficiently a.n.a.logous to Christianity, which Sakyamuni, surnamed Buddha (the wise), spread through India towards 550 B.C., created a new literature. It taught, as will be remembered, the equality of all castes in the sight of religion, metempsychosis, charity, and detachment from all pa.s.sions and desires in order to arrive at absolute calm (_nirvana_). The literature it inspired was primarily _gnomic_, that is, sententious, a.n.a.logous to that of Pythagoras, with a tendency towards little moral tales and parables, as in the Gospel.

This literature subsequently expanded into large and even immense epic poems, of which the princ.i.p.al are the _Mahabharata_ and the _Ramayana_.

THE _MAHABHARATA_; THE _RAMAYANA_.--The _Mahabharata_ (that is, the _great history of the Bharatas_) is a legend or a novel in verse intersected with moral digressions, with episodes vaguely related to the subject, with discourses and prayers. There are charming episodes full of delicate sensibility, of moving tenderness--that is to say, of human beauty, comparable to the farewells of Hector and Andromache in Homer; and everywhere, amid tediousness and monotony, is found a powerful and superabundant imagination.

The _Ramayana_, the name of the author of which, Valmiki, has come down to us, is a poem yet more vast and unequal. There are portions which to us are quite unreadable, and there are others comparable to the most imposing and most touching in all epic poetry. Reduced to its theme, the subject of _Mahabharata_ is extremely simple; it is the history of Prince Rama, dispossessed of his throne, who saw his beloved wife, Sita, ravished by the monstrous demon Ravana, who made alliance with the good monkeys and with them constructed a bridge over the sea to reach the island on which Sita was detained, who vanquished and slew Ravana, who re-found Sita, and finally went back happily to his kingdom, which had also been re-conquered.

The most noticeable exterior characteristic of the _Mahabharata_ is the almost constant mingling of men and animals, a mingling which one feels is in conformity with the dogma of the transmigration of souls. Not only monkeys but vultures, eagles, gazelles, etc., are brought into the work and form important personages. We are in the epoch when the animals spoke. Battles are numerous and described in great detail; the _Ramayana_ is the _Iliad_ of the Indians; pathetic scenes, as well as those of love, of friends.h.i.+p, of grat.i.tude are not rare, and are sometimes exquisite. The whole poem is imbued with a great feeling of humanity, heroism, and justice. Victory is to the good and right is triumphant; the G.o.ds permit that the just should suffer and be compelled to struggle; but invariably it is only for a time and the merited happiness is at the end of all.

After these two vast giant epics there were written among the Indians a number of shorter narrative poems, very varied both in tone and manner, which suggest an uninterrupted succession of highly important and animated schools of literature. Nearer to our own time--that is, towards the fifth or sixth century of our era, lyric poetry and the drama were, as it were, detached from the epopee and existed on their own merits.

Songs of love, of hate, of sadness, or of triumph took ample scope; they were more often melancholy than sad, for India is the land of optimism, or at least of resignation.

DRAMATIC POETRY.--As for the dramatic poetry, that is very curious; it is not mixed with epopee in the precise sense of the word; but it is continually mingled with descriptions of nature, with word-paintings of nature and invocations to nature. The Indian dramatic poet did not separate man from the air he breathed nor from the world around him; in recalling the moment of the day or night in which the scene takes place, _the actual hour_, the poet, no doubt in obedience to a law dictated to him by his public, kept his characters in communication with earth and heaven, with the dawn he described, the moon he painted, the evening he caused to be seen, the plants he portrayed as withering or reviving, the birds which he showed everywhere in the country or returning to their habitation, etc.

From the purely dramatic aspect, these plays are often affecting or curious, possessing penetrating and thoughtful psychology. The most celebrated dramas still left to us of the Indian stage are _The Chariot of Baked Clay_ and the affecting and delicate _Sakuntala_ the gem of Indian literature, the work of the poet Kalidas, who was also a remarkable lyric poet.

GNOMIC POETRY.--Gnomic, that is sententious, poetry, which, it has been indicated, very early enjoyed high appreciation among the Indians, long continued to obtain their approval. It was always wise and often intellectual. The collection of Barthari, who belonged to the sixth or seventh century A.D., contains thoughts which would do honour to the highest moralists of the most enlightened epochs. "The fortune, ample or restricted, which the Creator hath inscribed on thy forehead thou wilt a.s.suredly attain; wert thou in the desert or in the gold-mines of Meru, more couldst thou not acquire. Therefore, of what avail to torment thyself and to humiliate thyself before the powerful. A pot does not draw more water from the sea than from a well."

And this might be by a modern man opposing La Rochefoucauld: "The modest man is one poor in spirit, the devout a hypocrite, the honest man is artful, the hero is a barbarian, the ascetic is a fool, the unreserved a chatterbox, the prudent a waverer. Tell me, which is the virtue among all the virtues that human malice cannot vilify?"

Here, finally, is a truth for all time: "It is easy to persuade the ignorant, still easier to persuade the very wise; but he who hath a commencement of wisdom Brahma himself could not cajole."

Indian literature continued to be productive, though losing much of its fecundity, until the fifteenth or sixteenth century of our era. Without exaggeration, it is permissible to conject that its scope extended over twenty-five centuries. It possesses the uniquely honourable trait that it is, a.s.suredly, the only one which owes nothing to any other and is literally indigenous.

CHAPTER II

HEBRAIC LITERATURE

The Bible, a Collection of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious Writings. The Talmud, Book of Ordinances. The Gospels.

THE BIBLE.--The Hebrew race possessed a literature from about 1050 B.C.

It embodied in poems the legends which had circulated among the people since the most remote epoch of their existence. It was those poems, gathered later into one collection, which formed what, since approximately the year 400, we call the Bible--that is, the Book of books.

In the Bible there are histories (_Genesis_, _History of the Jews up to Joshua_, the _Book of Joshua_, _Judges_, _Kings_, etc.), then anecdotal episodes (_Ruth_, _Esdras_, _Tobit_, _Judith_, _Esther_), then books of moral philosophy(_Proverbs of Solomon_, _Ecclesiastes_, _Wisdom_, _Ecclesiasticus_), then books of an oratorical and lyrical character (_Psalms of David_ and all the _Prophets_). Finally, a single work, still lyrical but in which there are marked traces of the dramatic type (the _Song of Songs_).

THE TALMUD.--To the works which have been gathered into the Bible, it is necessary to add the Talmud, a collection of commentaries on the civil and religious laws of the Jews, which forms an indispensable supplement to the Bible, to anyone desiring to understand the Hebraic civilisation.

THE GOSPELS.--The Gospels, published in the Greek tongue, have nothing Hebraic except that they were compiled by Jews or by their immediate disciples and that they have preserved something of the manner of writing of the Jews.

BIBLICAL WRITINGS.--The Biblical writings, regarded solely from the literary point of view, form one of the finest monuments of human thought. The sentiment of grandeur and even of infinity in _Genesis_; the profound and simple sensibility as in the _History of Joseph_, _Tobit_, and _Esther_; eloquence and exquisite religious sentiment as in the _Book of Job_ and the _Psalms of David_; ecstatic lyricism, vehement and fiery, accompanied with incredible satiric force as in the _Prophets_; wisdom alike equal to that of the Stoics and of the serious Epicureans as in _Ecclesiastes_ and the _Proverbs_; everywhere marvellous imagination, always concise at least, if not restrained; lyrical sensuality which recalls the most perturbed creations of erotic Greeks and Latins, whilst surpa.s.sing them in beauty as in the _Song of Songs_; and throughout there is this grandeur, this simple majesty, this easy and natural sublimity which in the same degree is to be found only occasionally in Homer and which appears to be the privilege of the people who were the first to believe in a single G.o.d. That is what makes, almost in a continuous way, the astonis.h.i.+ng beauty of the Bible, and which explains how whole nations, of other origin, have made down to our own day, and still continue to make, the Bible their uninterrupted study, and draw from it courage, serenity, exaltation of soul, and a singular ferment of their poetic and literary genius.

As has been the case with many other literary monuments, it is possible, without owning that it is desirable, that the Bible may even survive the numerous and important religions which have been born from it.

CHAPTER III

THE GREEKS

Homer. Hesiod. Elegiac and Lyric Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and Historians. Lyric Poets. Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. Orators. Romancers.

HOMER.--The most ancient Greek writer known is Homer, and it cannot be absolutely stated in what epoch he lived.

Since the seventeenth century it has even been asked if he ever existed and if his poems are not collections of epic songs which had circulated in ancient Greece and which at a very recent epoch, that of Pisistratus, had been gathered into two grand consecutive poems, thanks to some rearrangement and editing. At the commencement of the nineteenth century the erudite were generally agreed that Homer had never existed. Now they are reverting to the belief that there were only two Homers, one the author of the _Iliad_ and the other of the _Odyssey_.

THE _ILIAD_.--The _Iliad_ is the story of the wrath of Achilles, of his retreat far from his friends who were endeavouring to capture Troy and of his return to them.

It is the poem of patriotism. It is filled with the spirit that when a people is divided against itself, all misfortunes fall on and overwhelm it. Achilles, unjustly offended, deprived his fellow-countrymen of his support; they are all on the point of peris.h.i.+ng; he returns to them in order to avenge the death of his dearest friend and they are saved.