March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own

By Ford Madox Ford and Alexander Theroux

This 900-page survey of world literature, "From Confucius' Day to Our Own" (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars and teachers give a false sense of literature, Ford brings alive the pleasures of reading by writing about books he is passionate about. Beginning at the beginning - with ancient Egyptian and Chinese literature and the Bible - Ford works his way through classical literature, the writings of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, continuing up to the major writers of his own day like Ezra Pound, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. With his encyclopedic reading and expertise in the techniques of writing, Ford is a reliable and entertaining guide. Ford also includes a chapter on publishers and booksellers, noting the key roles they play in literature's existence. Novelist Alexander Theroux (Darconville's Cat, An Adultery) has written an insightful introduction for this reissue, the first time this monumental book has been made available in paperback.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 1994
• ISBN: 9781564787781

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

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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