European literature

“ It is a very simple and primitive state of culture, whose ships, arms, agriculture, and domestic life are given us in clear and pleasing pictures. Our own country is largely lacking in a mythical age. Our culture sprang, more than half-grown, from the midst of Europe's choicest nations, and out of institutions that had been centuries in forming. The myths of Europe are therefore as truly ours as they are the treasure of Englishmen, of Germans, or of Greeks. Again, our own literature, as well as that of European states, is full of the spirit and suggestion of the mythical age. ”

“ I fail, therefore, to feel any apprehension as to our literature becoming Europeanized, because whatever is American in it must lie deeper than anything European can penetrate. More than that, I believe and hope that our novelists will deal with Europe a great deal more, and a great deal more intelligently, than they have done yet. It is a true and healthy artistic instinct that leads them to do so. ”

“ Still more important considerations are the great stimulus which the national life has received from the introduction of European ideas, and the attention which has been recently directed to the poetry of Europe, especially of England. ”

“ Nor, in observing such effects of social evolution on literature, will the student by any means confine his view to this or that country. He will find that if England had her clan age, so also had Europe in general; that if France had her feudal poetry, so also had Germany, and Spain, and England; that though the rise of the towns affected literature in diverse ways throughout Europe, yet there are general features common to their influences; and that the same may be said of centralism in our European nations. ”

“ I am at least certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed differences in the literature and art of the different European countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art and literature are really one. ”

“ In all essential respects they have given the world an intellectual product differing from all others, both in character and form, though of course continually influenced by the other streams of European culture. ”

“ The experience and sagacity, the moral sentiments, the invention and fancy of many obscure centuries may be discerned more fully and favourably in these various fictions than in their elaborate treatises. No one of the European nations stands so high in this respect as the German; their ancient tales have a raciness and truth which has been only imitated by others. ”

“ And though it was relatively easy for poets to write stanzas of irregular lengths instead of the tanka or for novelists to turn from the style of their predecessors in favour of works closely approaching European realism, the expression or creation of individuality remained, and I think still remains, the great problem. Again and again the European reader is likely to ask of a character in a novel or a play, “What is he really thinking?” Only gradually does one come to the conclusion that he is really thinking just what he says, or if he is silent, just what the conventional response would be. ”

“ In the early European poetry, the art sedulously cultivated by so many nations, we are struck by characteristics that distinguish [Pg 64] it from the remains of antiquity, and belong to social changes which we should be careful to apprehend. The principles of discernment as to works of imagination and sentiment, wrought up in Greece and Rome by a fastidious and elaborate criticism, were of course effaced in the total oblivion of that literature to which they had been applied. ”

“ On the other hand, the benefits of the movement to European civilization were varied and positive. The classical revival gave to Europe, not only faultless literary models, but large stores of valuable knowledge. ”

“ To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidities should not make us blind to the fact that in the higher regions there is already a continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard Wagner and Paris (1830-50) . Goethe and Greece. All things are impelled towards a synthesis of the European past in the highest types of mind. ”

“ But what European consciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than master into clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism of perfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as an affair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage in the general progress of man's knowledge of himself. ”

“ In coming to understand a mood which so fully reflects an unknown world, the European mind will discover principles which will make it rise superior to itself. May this broad comprehension of human thought lead Europe to estimate with greater justice a civilization numbering its years by thousands, and to refrain from thwarting the fulfillment of its destiny. ”

“ England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving ages of time is but of yesterday. ”

“ There is so much that is lovable in my people, such charm in their simple naïve beliefs. It may sound strange, but it is, nevertheless, a fact, that you Europeans have taught me to love my own land and people. Instead of estranging us from our native land, our European education has brought us nearer to it; has opened our hearts to its beauties, and also to the needs of our people and to their weaknesses. ”

“ Then at length, with the growing feeling of a general Germanic nationality and a general Germanic spirit and culture, with religious freedom established and controversy worn out, with the ideals of learning homogeneously spread, the time has come when literary genius finds its apt environment, and the thought and feeling of Germany take shape in dramas, ballads, lyrics, novels, and all other wonted forms. And then, for a generation, German literature is the dominant literature of Europe. ”

“ Wherever we have gone, we have carried Europe with us; wherever we have gone, we have never got beyond the power of the two influences which, mingling into one, have made Europe all that it has been. The whole of European history is embodied in the formula which couples together the ‘rule of Christ and Cæsar;’ and that joint rule still goes on, in the shape of moral influence, wherever the tongues and the culture of Europe win new realms for themselves in the continents of the western or in the islands of the southern Ocean. ”

“ The European, with his larger leisure, and generations of leisure in his brain, his interest in everything, and knowledge of many things,—above all of the world,—has reduced gallantry to a fine art. He may give his fancy, his sentiment, his passion, even his leisure, to one woman at a time, but his heart—well, unless he is very young—that remains quite intact. ”

“ And, as the European impressionist painters create an illusion of reality in spite of the fact that their landscapes are composed of seemingly arbitrary splashes of green, orange, blue, and all the other colours, so the apparently disconnected incidents of a Japanese novel, blending into one another, leave us with an imprecise understanding of their life. ”

“ In the past seventy years or more Japanese literature has been intimately affected by all European trends and, in fact, may be regarded in effect as forming a part of the modern movement in Western literature. ”

“ However, Natsume’s naturalism did not lead him to the portrayal of the lower depths of society, as frequently in European works. He preferred instead to treat the day-to-day experiences of quite ordinary people, usually of the middle class. Sometimes Natsume describes moments when the lives of such people are touched by dramatic events, but he was especially interested in the quiet routine of daily living. Natsume’s works still delight Japanese, largely because of his beautiful style, but a Western reader may find the oriental calm achieved by Natsume to be at times insufficiently engrossing. ”

“ They are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is Europe, the ONE Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art--whither? ”

“ The folklore of Europe shows the bearing of the one branch of study on the other, if only it is considered, not as a set of barren facts, but as the rungs of the ladder by which we have climbed, the landmarks of the successive stages through which we have passed, to reach our present level, a level to which others have yet to ascend.
The preference of savage to European folklore has also, as it seems to me, affected the progress of anthropology among classical students. ”

“ This trouble in the heart of the eleventh century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and thought it vainly strove to imitate. ”

“ But the art and literature expressed by the genius of the masters, reflected in the tastes of society, and to be taken by Europe as a model throughout a whole century, are no criterion of the social and political order of the day. ”

“ Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. ”

“ Arnold tells us that the meaning of culture is “to know the best that has been thought and said in the world.” It is the criticism of life contained in literature. That criticism regards “Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their common outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. ”

“ To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [94] with difficulties. ”

“ But what has no sense as an expression of the real may have some as the expression of certain tendencies. And it is easy to recognise in the ideology of the primitive the expression of the ethical and national tendencies, aspirations and pretensions of modern Germany. Up to the end of the eighteenth century Germany had felt herself and recognised herself to be a backwater of the traditional European culture of which the Latin nations received the direct heritage from Greece and Rome. ”

“ But which, under the influence of European genius, have reached a degree of excellence, that has wrought an important change in the constitution of society.
Far from looking back, and forming itself slavishly on the past, it is characteristic of the European intellect to be ever on the advance. Old discoveries become the basis of new ones. ”

“ They built, planted, cultivated Europe; all the while saving the treasures of learning, knowledge, human justice, politics, and art. We shall ever recognize in Europe the places where those radiant centres once were. ”

“ If Tsubouchi’s Essence of the Novel did not lead to any general outburst of individual emotions, it did encourage the development of types of fiction previously unknown in Japan. European realism, as found in the numerous translations of mid-Victorian novelists and, to a lesser extent, certain Russian writers, led Japanese to turn from the ponderous historical romances or the fantastic stories which Tsubouchi so deplored to accounts of contemporary life. ”

“ Be this as it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic, homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm Meister, or Siebennkäs, or Götz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and Millstream. ”

“ What the Europeans shared with each other, which in their own eyes distinguished them from everyone else and made them capable of ‘discovering’ and ‘civilising’ the rest of the world, was a distinctive kind of consciousness or conscience. ”

“ Continental Europe was a mystery to English-speaking people. Those who traveled abroad took their own servants with them, spoke only English, and went through the whole European maze with absolute indifference. To them the socialist, who had scarcely received a name, was an imaginary being. ”

“ Classical philosophy, history, poetry, and art, nourished the European mind, and were almost the sole foundation of its culture, through all the period during which the Latin and Teutonic races of Western Europe were slowly elaborating languages and literatures of their own. They were thus of necessity the main instrument of culture of the schools during the period when, save the obsolete scholastic philosophy, no other instrument was forthcoming ”