The Interdependence of Literature | Page 4

rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The
first speaks to the mere discursive understanding, the second speaks
ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but
always through affections of pleasure and sympathy." Thomas De
Quincey "Essays on the Poets." (Alexander Pope.)
B. Herder, 17 South Broadway, St. Louis, Mo. and 68 Great Russell St.,
London, W.C.
1917
PREFACE.
The author has endeavored in these pages to sketch, in outline, a
subject that has not, as far as she knows, been treated as an exclusive
work by the schoolmen.
Written more in the narrative style than as a textbook, it is intended to
awaken interest in the subject of the interdependence of the literatures
of all ages and peoples; and with the hope that a larger and more
exhaustive account of a very fascinating subject may some day be
published.
Chicago, Ill., June, 1916.
CONTENTS. Ancient Babylonian and Early Hebrew Sanskrit Persian
Egyptian Greek Roman Heroic Poetry Scandinavian Slavonic Gothic
Chivalrous and Romantic The Drama Arabian Spanish Portuguese
French Italian Dutch German Latin Literature and the Reformation
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Philosophy English
ANCIENT BABYLONIAN AND EARLY HEBREW.
From the misty ages of bygone centuries to the present day there has
been a gradual interlinking of the literatures of different countries.
From the Orient to the Occident, from Europe to America, this slow
weaving of the thoughts, tastes and beliefs of people of widely different

races has been going on, and forms, indeed, a history by itself.
The forerunner and prophet of subsequent Christian literature is the
Hebrew. It is not, however, the first complete written literature, as it
was supposed to be until a few years ago.
The oldest Semitic texts reach back to the time of Anemurabi, who was
contemporaneous with Abraham, five hundred years before Moses.
These Semites possessed a literature and script which they largely
borrowed from the older non-Semitic races in the localities where the
posterity of Thare and Abraham settled.
Recent researches in Assyria, Egypt and Babylonia has brought this
older literature and civilization to light; a literature from which the
Hebrews themselves largely drew. Three thousand years before
Abraham emigrated from Chaldea there were sacred poems in the East
not unlike the psalms of David, as well as heroic poetry describing the
creation, and written in nearly the same order as the Pentateuch of
Moses.
The story of the Deluge, and other incidents recorded in the Old
Testament, together with numerous legends, were known and treasured
by the Ancients as sacred traditions from the earliest ages of the world.
We learn from St. Paul that "Moses was skilled in all the knowledge of
the Egyptians." He must therefore have been familiar not only with the
ancient poems and sacred writings, but also with the scientific,
historical, legal and didactic literature of the times, from which, no
doubt, he borrowed all that was best in the Mosiac Code that he drew
up for the Chosen People of God. This old literature Moses confirmed
and purified, even as Christ at a later period, confirmed and elevated all
that was best in the Hebrew belief. Hence from these Oriental scholars
we learn that the Hebrew was only one of several languages which
enjoyed at different times a development of the highest culture and
polish, although the teaching of the old Rabbis was that the Bible was
the first set of historical and religious books to be written. Such was the
current belief for many ages; and while this view of the Scriptures is
now known to be untrue, they are, in fact, the most ancient and
complete writings now in existence, although the discovery in
Jerusalem, thirty-five or forty years ago, of the inscriptions of Siloe,
take us back about eight hundred years before Christ; but these Siloeian
inscriptions are not complete examples of literature.

"The Ancient culture of the East," says Professor A. H. Sayce, "was
pre-eminently a literary one. We have learned that long before the day
of Moses, or even Abraham, there were books and libraries, readers and
writers; that schools existed in which all the arts and sciences of the
day were taught, and that even a postal service had been organized
from one end of Western Asia to the other. The world into which the
Hebrew patriarchs were born, and of which the book of Genesis tells us,
was permeated with a literary culture whose roots went back to an
antiquity of which, but a short time ago, we could not have dreamed.
There were books in Egypt and Babylonia long before the Pentateuch
was written; the Mosaic age was in fact an age of a widely extended
literary activity, and the Pentateuch was one of the latest fruits of long
centuries of literary growth."
There is no doubt