LITERATURE

A man walking down Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly to Charing Cross

Road passes the _Lyric Theatre_. If it is the evening, a _dramatic_

performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a _tragedy_, or

some form of _comedy_. If it is a _musical comedy_ and he enters, he

will see elaborate _scenery_ and a play which may open with a _prologue_

and which is partly composed of _dialogue_ between the various

_characters_, partly of songs in various _metres_ sung by a _chorus_ to

the accompaniment of an _orchestra_. As the words in italics indicate,

our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected

it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the

aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of

Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled

at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking

at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to

recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the

altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home.

The same imprint, clear or faint, is on all our literary forms, except

perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history,

biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the

novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin,

and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a

doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the

Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost.

There are even one or two _genres_, such as the imaginary speech, which

Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found in modern

literature. When the curtain rose on Homer, European literature did not

exist: long before it falls on the late Byzantines, the lines were laid

on which it has moved up to our own day. This is the entire work of a

single people, politically weak, numerically small, materially

poor--according to the economy of nature which in things of the mind and

the spirit gives a germinating power to few. The Greeks are justly

admired for individual poems, plays, and pieces of writing; but it was

something even greater to have explored the possibilities of literature

so far that posterity, while it has developed Greek _genres_, has not

hitherto been able to add to them. This is one part of the Greek Legacy

to literature.

Another part are the works themselves. Literature can only be judged by

reading it, and certainly it cannot be characterized in a few pages. But

a man ignorant of Greek and anxious to estimate its value might form

some idea by inquiring the opinions of qualified judges. He would find

them unanimous: I suppose it is true that no man of eminence qualified

to speak has ever spoken of Greek literature in any tone but one. The

first testimony is that of the Romans. It is borne by their literature,

starting in translations from Greek, adopting one after another of their

_genres_, permeated through and through (and most of all in the greatest

writers) by imitations, reminiscences, influences of Greek, confessing

and glorying in the debt. 'In learning,' says Cicero, 'and in every

branch of literature, the Greeks are our masters.'[101] A Roman boy

should begin his studies with Greek, Quintilian thought, 'because Latin

learning is derived from Greek.'[102] The same note is repeated in the

literature of the Renaissance, and re-echoed by the most various voices

of our own century.

[101] _Tusc._ 1. 1. 2.

[102] _Inst. Or._ I. 1. 12.

'Though one of the Greek tragedians may seem rather greater and more

complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading

quality. It is marked by grandeur, excellence, sanity, complete

humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful

intuition (_Anschauung_). We find these qualities in their surviving

lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their

philosophers, orators, and historians and, to an equally high degree, in

their surviving sculpture.'[103]

[103] Goethe, _Gespräche_, 3. 387.

'Beside the great Attic poets, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am

absolutely nothing.'[104]

[104] Ibid., 3. 443.

'He spoke with great animation of the advantage of classical study,

Greek especially. "Where," he said, "would one look for a greater orator

than Demosthenes; or finer dramatic poetry, next to Shakspere, than that

of Aeschylus or Sophocles, not to speak of Euripides." Herodotus he

thought "the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible,

which had ever been written".'[105]

[105] Wordsworth, _Table-talk_.

'The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death

of Aristotle is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with

reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent

destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the

world.... The wrecks and fragments of these subtle and profound minds,

like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur

and perfection of the whole. Their very language ... in variety, in

simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other

language of the western world.' Then, after some words on their

sculpture, he adds: 'their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though

not so disproportionate a rank, in the comparison' (with other

literatures).[106]

[106] Shelley, _On the Manners of the Ancients_.

'The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed.... They

were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which

the modern world makes its boast.... They were the first people who had

a historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest

kind) as their oratory, their sculpture, and their architecture. They

were the founders of mathematics, of physics, of the inductive study of

politics, of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made

the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the

rest.'[107]

[107] Mill, _Dissertations_, ii. 283 f.

'I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing

to myself.... I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual

enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one

science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius

has employed about the victory over superstition "_Primum Graius homo_".

I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these

great masters while still in the full vigour of life and when my taste

and judgement are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever

read before they are five-and-twenty.... A young man, whatever his

genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high

opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind

accustomed to historical researches and to political affairs; and I am

astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not

bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults

undoubtedly. But what a poet!'[108]

[108] Macaulay, _Life and Letters_, i. 43.

These men--and there is no difficulty in adding to their number--are not

only qualified but unprejudiced witnesses. They have no _parti pris_.

They cannot be accused, as schoolmasters and dons are sometimes accused,

of holding shares in a great Trading Bank of Greece and Rome Unlimited,

and having a personal motive for their enthusiasm. Nor can it be said

that they admired Greece because they knew nothing better. All--Goethe

no less than the others--had English literature in their hands, knew it

well and appreciated its greatness. Yet this, given in their own words,

is the impression which Greek made on them. _Securus iudicat orbis

terrarum_; and the verdict here is plain. It is clear that we have in

Greek a surviving body of poetry and prose which is of unique interest

to any one who cares for literature.

* * * * *

I have tried to give a summary answer to the question, What did the

Greeks achieve? They invented every literary _genre_ which we know, they

laid the lines which European literature has followed, they created a

body of prose and poetry which has won the homage of the world. The

further question, What can the world still learn from them, is less easy

to answer. The answer lies in Greek literature, and the essence of a

literature cannot be extracted and bottled in a number of abstract

formulae. No literature is great in virtue of its qualities, which are

always something less than the literature itself, but only in so far as

it expands to the breadth of the universe and climbs to its height. This

is the final test which must be applied. How far Greek literature

satisfies it, can be judged from the testimonies which have been quoted

above.

Remembering this let us deliberately narrow our view and talk of

qualities: and here, narrowing it again, let us confine the discussion

to certain qualities, which are found indeed in all literatures, but are

elsewhere neither so universal nor carried to so high a power. No one

can think of Greek literature without thinking of them; they live on the

lips of its admirers, and in them the inspiration of Greek literature is

chiefly enshrined. These essential qualities are Simplicity, Perfection

of Form, Truth and Beauty. Greek literature is much more than these

qualities. The _Agamemnon_, the _Oedipus_, the _Bacchae_ are not to be

explained wholly by them. The greatness of these plays is partly

something individual, and partly it is what makes _King Lear_ or

_Faust_ or _Brand_ great: and that is neither entirely nor mainly

simplicity or beauty or truth or form. But my object is to emphasize

qualities for which Greek is exceptional, and though some critics may

have talked of the beauty of Greek literature till beauty was absurdly

supposed to be its chief or only quality, they were right to recognize

the prominence of beauty there, and though truth is a mark of the

greatest writing in all languages, it is more universal in Greek than in

any other literature.

* * * * *

If a reader turned from Milton to Homer, from Shakespeare to Sophocles,

from Plato or Aristotle to some modern work on ethics, politics, or

literary criticism, he would find one point of difference between the

earlier and the later writers in the greater simplicity of the former.

They are briefer: the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ has 1530 lines while the first

two acts of _Hamlet_ alone have more than 1600, and Greek histories and

philosophical writings are correspondingly shorter than their modern

counterparts. The whole of Thucydides could be printed in a twenty-four

page issue of _The Times_, and leave room to spare; the essay of

Aristotle on Poetry, which for generations dictated the principles of

dramatic writing, has forty-five short pages; the _Republic_ of Plato,

which has influenced thought more than any other philosophic work, has a

little over three hundred. Brevity indeed is not always simplicity, and

it is possible to be at once simple and lengthy. But any one who

examines these Greek writers will find that they are brief, because,

avoiding bypaths and by-plots, elaboration or minute detail, they strike

out the central features of their picture with an effortless economy of

line. Their writing has a double quality. It shows a firm hold on the

central and fundamental things: and it presents them unmixed with and

unconfused by minor issues, so that they stand out like forest trees

which no undergrowth of brushwood masks. It is important to make this

distinction, for all great literature has the first of these qualities;

the second is largely an accident of time. As civilization moves further

from its origin, it cannot but receive a thousand tributaries that

continually augment its volume, and colour and confuse its streams: at

the sources it flows clear and untroubled. The interests of an early age

are the primal and essential interests of human nature and the

literature of such an age presents them unalloyed and uncomplicated by

lesser issues. In the thinkers the main and fundamental problems stand

clearly out, and Plato and Thucydides take us straight to them. The

poets make their poetry from emotions and interests that are as old as

man, and have none of the refinements and complications which education

and a long inheritance of culture superadd to the essential stuff of

human nature. 'You Greeks are always children,' said the Egyptian priest

to Solon; and he spoke the truth in a sense which he did not mean. The

Greeks' feelings were not dulled or sophisticated by the _damnosa

hereditas_ of the past. Neither their life nor their mental atmosphere

was complicated. They had not 'thought themselves into weariness'. They

were the children of the world, and they united the startling acuteness,

directness, and simplicity of children to the intellects of men.

Pater took _La Gioconda_ of Leonardo da Vinci to symbolize the

difference of modern and ancient art, and to illustrate the intricacy

and complication of the former, as compared with the simplicity of the

latter. 'Hers is the head,' he writes of the Monna Lisa, 'upon which all

"the ends of the world are come", and the eyelids are a little weary. It

is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little

cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite

passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white goddesses or

beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this

beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the

thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in

that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward

form.... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the

vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the

grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day

about her ...; and all this lives only in the delicacy with which it has

moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand

experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of

humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of

thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of

the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.' Slightly fanciful and

Pateresque as these words are, they are substantially true, as any one

who sets Monna Lisa by a piece of fifth-century sculpture can easily

see. There is the same contrast between Greek literature and our own.

How 'troubled' would Homer or Sophocles be by the writings of Browning

or Meredith, of Henry James or Conrad, in whom so many eddies and

cross-currents of thought and experience unite.

Compare the story of Hector and Andromache with some famous passage from

any of these writers. 'So spake glorious Hector and stretched out his

arm to his boy. But the child shrunk crying to the bosom of his

fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at the look of his dear father and in fear

of the bronze and the horsehair crest that nodded fiercely from his

helmet's top. Then his dear father and his lady mother laughed aloud:

forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all

gleaming, on the earth; then kissed he his dear son and danced him in

his arms, and spoke in prayer to Zeus and all the gods, "O Zeus and all

ye gods, grant that this my son may be as I am, pre-eminent among the

Trojans, and as valiant in might, and may he be a great king of Troy."

So he spoke and laid his son in his dear wife's arms; and she took him

to her fragrant bosom, smiling through tears. And her husband had pity

to see her and caressed her with his hand, and spoke and called her by

her name: "Dear one, I pray thee be not of oversorrowful heart; no man

against my fate shall send me to my death; but destiny, I ween, no man

hath escaped." So spake glorious Hector and took up his

horsehair-crested helmet; and his dear wife departed to her home, often

looking back and letting fall great tears. And she came to the

well-built house of man-slaying Hector, and found therein her many

handmaidens, and stirred lamentation in them all. So they wept for

Hector, while he yet lived, in his house; for they thought that he would

no more come back to them from battle.'[109] These are emotions shared

by mankind twenty centuries before Christ and twenty centuries after

him, common equally to Shakespeare or Napoleon and to the stupidest and

least educated of mankind; and these emotions are expressed with a

simplicity as elemental as themselves. Subjects as simple may be found

in our literature; expression as direct would be hard to find. Even a

primitive like Chaucer is the heir of dimly apprehended inheritances

from Greece and Rome, and is haunted by fancies from lost and living

fairylands of literature. It is in our Bible that we find the elemental

feelings of Homer and an expression even more direct. 'And she departed

and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the water was spent in

the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went

and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot:

for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat down

over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.'[110]

[109] Homer, _Iliad_, vi. 466 ff. (with omissions: chiefly from the

translation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers). It should be remembered that,

of the three figures in this scene, the husband will be dead in a

few days, while within a year the wife will be a slave and the child

thrown from the city wall.

[110] Genesis xxi. 14 f.

Like the writer of the Pentateuch, Homer lived in a world whose

emotions were elemental, and writing of this kind came naturally to him.

The weight of tradition began to weigh on succeeding ages, but it never

became heavy, because the accumulations were small and the world was

still comparatively simple. Also its poets and prose writers moved in

the fields of action as soldiers and politicians, continually

confronting the realities of life, and knowing them as they are, not as

they appear in a study. Thus their topics are central, the writing is

simple. The subjects of the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Hercules Furens_

might be called morbid; but not the handling of them by Sophocles and

Euripides. The unnatural element is in the background and almost

unnoticed; the interest lies in the spectacle of great men in

overwhelming disaster--an elemental theme and belonging to the general

life of man. The treatment is as simple as in Homer, the figures few,

subordinate interests out of sight, the light thrown full on the central

tragedy. Hence comes a rare intensity, an immediacy of impression, a

sense of nearness to the thing described, which will strike anyone who

reads the messenger's speech in the _Hercules Furens_, or the scene

where the identity of Oedipus is discovered, or indeed any great passage

in Greek Drama. This simplicity of treatment persists, when with

Menander and the Alexandrians we pass into a world more like our own and

find literature, still simple in form, but more artistic, more

intellectual, more literary, less centrally and fundamentally human.

It would be foolish to demand that modern writers should have the

simplicity of Homer or the age of Pericles, or to pretend that they

cannot be great without it. Every age must and will have its own

literature, reflecting the minds and circumstances of those who write

it. Nor is the advantage entirely on the side of the Greeks. A drama of

Shakespeare or a novel of Tolstoi, with their long roll of _dramatis

personae_, are more like life than a Greek tragedy with its absence of

byplot and its few, central, characters. A modern historian would have

recorded and discussed aspects of the history of fifth-century Greece

which Thucydides ignores. Modern literature may claim that, with less

intensity, it has greater amplitude and a more faithful presentation of

the complexity of life. On the other hand the Greeks are free from that

dominance of the abnormal which is one danger of modern literature; they

do not explore sexual and other aberrations or encourage their readers

to explore them. They are also free from that dominance of the

unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but

more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their

simplicity is refreshing and salutary. _Porro unum necessarium._ In life

human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few

simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their

souls. In literature, which is the shadow of life, they need to do the

same.

* * * * *

The simplicity of Greek literature is accompanied by the highest

literary art. Nothing could be more surprising. The primitive conditions

that preserve simplicity are apparently incompatible with technical

perfection, which is a late-born child of literature and the creation of

matured taste, long experiment, and patient work. But in Greek, and

perhaps only in Greek, _naïveté_ and art go hand in hand. There is

something almost uncanny in Homer's union of the two: it is a paradox

that the character of Achilles, the death of Hector, the primitive

cunning of Odysseus, should be portrayed in such a metre and such a

vocabulary; it seems unnatural that so highly wrought and refined a

medium should be used to depict the life and ideas of a society which is

nearer to savagery than to civilization. But unnatural or not, so it is.

The most obvious quality of Greek literature is its form, the high level

of its technique. There are exceptions: the earlier plays of Aeschylus

are crude in conception, the prose of Gorgias is as fantastic as that

of Lyly, the sentences of Thucydides are often awkward and

ungrammatical; Aeschylus stands at the origin of drama, Gorgias and

Thucydides are the creators of periodic prose, and they have the

weaknesses of pioneers. But in general, Greek work in poetry and prose

is highly wrought and finely finished; and so rapidly did their art find

itself, that within the lifetime of Aeschylus Sophocles reached the

highest level of dramatic and literary technique, and within a

generation from Thucydides Plato evolved his unequalled style. An

artistic instinct was in the blood of the Greeks, and betrays itself

throughout their literature, in the choric odes with their complicated

respondencies and subtle variations; in Plato arranging and rearranging

the first eight words of his _Republic_; in the interest which the

Greeks took in the theory of literary art, seeking here as elsewhere

λογον διδοναι {logon didonai}, to give an account of their practice. How

much more they reflected on it than we do, the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle,

the _De Compositione_ of Dionysius and the endless writings of the

rhetoricians show.

This is universally admitted, but justice is more rarely done to even

clearer evidence of the Greek gift for technique. Other nations have

understood the art of writing, and left those monuments in words which

are as unsubstantial and fleeting as air, yet more imperishable than

brass or stone; but no nation has created literary art in the sense in

which the Greeks created it, or developed, as they did, the various

literary _genres_ out of nothing. They had no models or guides or

external help. Rome had Greek literature to follow and herself gave

patterns to her successors; but the Greeks made what they made out of

nothing, and are thus creators in the true sense of the word, and as no

other people have been. Two instances, Homer and the Greek Drama, will

serve to show this.

In the dawn of a literature at least, we expect roughness and crudity,

an uncertain judgement and a faltering hand; but the first known Greek

poem, like Athena in the myth, is born full grown and mature. Yet its

makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and

unrivalled metre for themselves. It does not lessen this achievement

that the Homeric poems may have been the fine flower of a period of

poetic growth; the work that went to form them was done by Greeks. But

it needs imagination to appreciate the difficulty of the task which they

undertook unconsciously and performed without theory or deliberate

purpose by the mere light of nature.

It is hard to create even a primitive poetic vocabulary, where one does

not exist, and there is nothing primitive about

ὁι δ' ὡς τ' αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαι

πετρη εφ' ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,

{hoi d' hôs t' aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilai

petrê eph' hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,}

or

ὁσσον δ' ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισιν

ἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον,

τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.[111]

{hosson d' êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisin

hêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton,

tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.}

[111] _Iliad_, xvi. 428 f.: 'As vultures with crooked talons and

curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.'

_Ibid._ v. 770 f.: 'As far as a man's view ranges in the haze, as he

sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far

at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the gods.'

It is hard, as the beginnings of Roman poetry show, to devise a metre

which is not rough, unmusical, or even grotesque: yet for richness and

strength this first metre of Europe has never been rivalled by the

Greeks or by any one else. The same natural technical skill appears in

more subtle things even than metre or language. Homer is born knowing by

some instinct the profound secret of literary art which Aristotle

formulated centuries later as the principle of unity of Action. The plot

of a play, he writes in the _Poetics_, 'should have for its subject a

single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an

end.... It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which

of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all

that happened within that period to one person or to many, little

connected together as the events may be.... Such is the practice, we may

say, of most poets. Here again the transcendant excellence of Homer

appears. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of

his poem. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced

in a single view: while if he had kept it in moderate limits it would

have been over-complicated by the variety of incidents. As it is, he

detaches a single portion.'[112] Once stated, the principle of unity of

action becomes a commonplace of literary art. But, as the _Annals_ of

Ennius or the _Faerie Queen_ show, it is not obvious until stated, and

the poets from whose practice Aristotle made his induction, must have

had a rare technical instinct unconsciously to preserve unity of

interest through the complications of a long epic or drama. Such

achievements were only possible to a people with a natural genius for

literary art. In the hands of the Greeks the various elements of

literature found their τελος {telos} and achieved their natural form,

almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to

its predestined shape.

[112] _Poetics_, c. 23 (tr. Butcher).

This can be illustrated even better from Greek drama. A modern author

who wishes to write a play may not find the task easy, but he knows the

general form which a drama has to take and the general principles to be

followed in writing it. The right length is given him, the division into

scenes and acts, the methods of exposition and dialogue, the conception

of a _dénouement_, the law of unity of action, and the rest. The fathers

of Greek tragedy had no such help. They had no drama in our sense of the

word, but simply a band of fifty persons dressed like satyrs, and

dancing round an altar and singing a song. Out of this anything or

nothing might have been made. The Greeks, with the instinctive and

unerring motions of genius, developed from it the highest and most

elaborate of literary forms, and within a hundred years are writing

plays which Shelley classes with _King Lear_, and which Swinburne can

call, 'probably, on the whole, the greatest spiritual work of man'.

In divining the principles of literary art and evolving the various

kinds of literature no people can be compared to the Greeks, and

probably none can show a mass of work executed with so uniformly high a

finish. But when we compare writer with writer we shall find individual

artists to rival them. Though the strength of English literature does

not lie in technical perfection, Milton, Pope, and Tennyson--to name no

others--have in their different ways as firm a grasp of it as any Greek,

and it can be learned from French writers, with whom it is the rule

rather than the exception, as well as from the Greeks. This is hardly

true of another quality of Greek writing, which may be classed with

technical finish, though it is in fact something more. It is one of the

most characteristic features of Greek; yet on first acquaintance, it is

often disconcerting and even distasteful. If a reader new to the

classics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one

of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Shelley or Tennyson, he came

across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae,

ω ξειν', αγγελλειν Αακεδαιμονιοις ὁτι τηδε

κειμεθα, τοις κεινων ῥημασι πειθομενοι,[113]

{ô xein', angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti têde

keimetha, tois keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi,}

he might see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding

simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed

to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making

the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which

is always at its greatest when most simple, and he would have been face

to face with a characteristic quality of it.

[113] 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obeying their

words.'

The contrast with the usual English manner may be illustrated by

quoting a famous epigram--Ben Jonson's epitaph on a boy actor:

Weep with me, all you that read

This little story;

And know, for whom a tear you shed,

Death's self is sorry.

'Twas a child that so did thrive

In grace and feature,

As heaven and nature seemed to strive

Which owned the creature.

Years he numbered scarce thirteen

When Fates turned cruel,

Yet three filled zodiacs had he been

The stage's jewel;

And did act (what now we moan)

Old men so duly,

As sooth the Parcae thought him one,

He played so truly.

So, by error, to his fate

They all consented;

But, viewing him since, alas, too late!

They have repented.

These lines--and they are not the whole of the poem--are enough to

illustrate the difference between the Greek method and the English, the

latter rich and profuse, following the flow of an opulent fancy, the

former reticent and restrained, leaving the reader's imagination room

and need to play its part. There are materials for half-a-dozen epigrams

in Ben Jonson's poem. Had he been Simonides or Plato, he would have

stopped after the fourth line and, in the opinion of some critics, by

saving his paper he would have improved his poem.

In their theory and in their practice the Greek writers were true to

this principle of Economy. Their proverbs proclaim it 'the half is

greater than the whole': 'sow with the hand and not with the whole

sack.' The great passages of their literature illustrate it. It is to be

found no less in Thucydides' account of the siege of Syracuse and in the

close of the _Phaedo_ or the _Republic_ than in the death of Hector or

the meeting of Priam and Achilles. The Greek writers may have emotions

that would seem to demand vehement and extended expression, topics to

inspire a poet and tempt him to amplify them; but resisting the

temptation they set the facts down quietly and pass on practically

without comment. The close of the _Phaedo_ exemplifies this restraint.

Plato has just related with severe economy of detail the death of his

master. His comment on the event which saddened and confounded his whole

life is but this: 'Such, Echecrates, was the death of our friend, the

best man, I think, that I have ever known, the wisest too and the most

just.'[114]

[114] _Phaedo_, 118 B.

There are noble examples of reticence and economy in English literature,

some of the most conspicuous of which can be traced to classical

influence; but no one would contend that these qualities are the rule in

our great writers. The English genius is rich and lavish rather than

restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho,

Ἑσπερε, παντα φερων οσα φαινολις εσκεδας' αυως,

φερεις οιν, φερες αιγα, φερεις απυ ματερι παιδα,[115]

{Hespere, panta pherôn osa phainolis eskedas' auôs,

phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida,}

[115] fr. 95: 'Star of evening, bringing all things that bright dawn

has scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring

the child back to its mother.'

than like Byron,

O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things--

Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,

To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,

The welcome stall to the o'er-laboured steer;

Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,

Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,

Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;

Thou bring'st the child too to its mother's breast.

Something may be said in favour of both methods. Amplitude of treatment

and fullness of detail enrich the imagination while economy stimulates

it. The latter may become jejune, and is safe only in the hands of great

writers: the former is apt to provide too rich a feast and to leave the

full-fed mind inert. Everything is done for it and nothing left it to

do. Economy on the other hand throws the reader on his own resources. It

sets the imagination wandering in the fields of infinity. Some readers

find this one of the essential delights of literature, though others

prefer that the author should take them by the hand and indicate every

detail with the precision of the sign-posts at a German _Kurort_.

Economy is the reflection in literature of that σωφροσυνη {sôphrosynê},

which is the most deeply-rooted of Greek ideals, the most untranslatable

of Greek words. But it was helped by an accident. If the art of printing

were lost, modern works would contract within narrower limits, and the

Greek economy was encouraged by the fact that Fust was not yet born. We,

who do not rely on hand-copying for the propagation of our books,

naturally write at greater length: and while it loses in conciseness,

literature has a compensating gain in amplitude. But the habit of

writing for money, which encourages abundant production, and the

existence of the printing-press, which makes it easy, expose us to

dangers from which the ancients were free. The newspapers are the worst

offenders, saying many things which need not be said at all, and saying

everything in a superfluous and excessive way. But literature suffers

hardly less. The greatest figures of the last fifty years, such as

Browning, Meredith, Hardy and Conrad, dilute their pages with

unessential, if not inferior, stuff, and produce writing which has not

received the _summa manus_. Had their work been less by a half--a

modest reduction--it would have been more perfect because more time

could have been devoted to it, more powerful because each stroke would

have been precise and strong, more telling because these strokes would

not have been combined with ineffective blows. This is even truer of

lesser men and other forms of literature. It is because the _Agricola_

of Tacitus extends to but thirty pages, that the biography of a Roman

civil servant of no great genius will outlive those of far greater men.

The art of omission is the art which English writers most need to learn;

the literary _lima_ is their least-handled tool. Both art and tool were

perfectly understood and constantly used by the Greeks.

* * * * *

The third mark of Greek Literature, with which I have to deal, is

perhaps its most important, certainly its most universal quality. It is

truthfulness. The Greeks told no fewer lies than other races, but they

had the desire and the power to see the world as it is. By this

essential quality they gave Europe the conception of philosophy and

science. These we inherit from them alone; Palestine and our German

ancestors neither created them, nor show any signs of the temper that

creates them, and Rome received her share from Greece.

The word 'Truthfulness' may seem to suggest the realism of some modern

writers. But the Greek truthfulness was different. It should be

distinguished from the laboured detachment and painful impartiality of

such a writer as Flaubert, whose realism conceals him in the same sense

as the walls of the engine-room conceal the panting machines within. The

Greek Truthfulness is spontaneous, natural, and effortless--the native

quality of the artist, who sees, and forgets himself in the vision. Nor

has it anything to do with photographic realism. It has not the

impersonality of that method or its flat and lifeless effect. A man, and

no machine, makes the picture, feeling intensely what he sees, and

though this intensity does not distort his vision, we are conscious, as

we read, of a human personality, and we feel the electric thrill of

life.

Nor is it akin to that type of modern realism, which, like a noxious

drug, lays hold on the spirits and depresses the heart--the realism

which paints so black a picture of human life, that it affects us

physically like days of continued fog, and gives us no more complete and

truthful a picture of the world. There is hardly any Greek writer,

perhaps none at all, of whom this can be said. Many moderns can

faithfully describe what is disagreeable, but their effects are often

brutal and always depressing. The gift of portraying suffering and evil

with unflinching truth, yet of conveying other feelings than those of

mere horror, is reserved for few. Its rarity perhaps explains the rarity

of great tragedy, of which it seems to be a condition that it shall

truthfully show what is darkest in life, without leaving a final and

dominant sense of gloom. The great Greek writers possessed this secret.

They are as sensitive to evil and suffering as any writer and fully as

faithful in recording them. But whereas other men are simply depressed

or disgusted or appalled, lose their vital forces, and gaze in paralysed

fascination, these writers, in virtue of a sense which is more aesthetic

than moral, are aware of tremendous issues, see in sordid suffering the

agonies of a labouring universe, and feel awe and wonder, not mere

disgust and distress, at what human beings suffer and endure. That is

why Homer leaves us with another feeling than depression, when he tells

how Priam begged his son's body from the man who killed him. 'So Priam

entered unseen of them and stood near and clasped with his hands the

knees of Achilles and kissed the terrible murderous hands that had slain

so many of his sons. But Achilles was amazed at the sight of Priam, and

amazed were the rest, and they looked at each other. And Priam entreated

and addressed him. "Remember your own father, godlike Achilles: he is of

like years with me, and stands on the hateful road of old age. Perhaps

the neighbours round about harry him and there is none to keep misery

and ruin from him. Yet when he hears that you are alive, he rejoices and

hopes, day in, day out, to see his dear son returning from Troy. But I

am utterly wretched, for I begat the best of sons in Troy, and none of

them is left. The one I had, who was the stay of Troy and its people,

you killed but now as he fought for his country--even Hector. Respect

the gods, Achilles, and pity me, and remember your own father. I am more

unhappy than he. I have faced what no other mortal man ever yet

faced--to stretch my hand to the face of my sons' slayer."'[116] There

is suffering and evil enough here, and there is no attempt to disguise

or lessen them. Yet most readers, I think, would read this passage with

different feelings from those provoked by the close of _Madame Bovary_

or of _Jude the Obscure_. Its truthfulness is neither ugly nor

depressing.

[116] _Iliad_, xxiv. 277 f. (with omissions).

Nor again is the Greek truthfulness identical with objectivity. An

objective writer tells his story and conveys his impressions, as far as

possible, by relating facts without commenting upon them. Dramatists and

novelists are compelled by the nature of their art to be objective in

this sense of the word (though Fielding and Thackeray in the one field,

and Ibsen and Shaw in the other, manage to make their comments with

their own lips, not those of their characters). But such a writer would

not of necessity be more truthful or impartial than any one else. He can

distort truth as thoroughly by selecting certain facts and ignoring

others as by making misleading comments. He may be violently one-sided

and present only the facts that support his view, thus indirectly

putting himself into what he writes quite as fully as a confessed

partizan, though less openly. Such a writer is objective, but his

objectivity with him is no more than a literary method. Now it is true

that the Greeks use this method, telling a story without personal

comments, not only in their epics and plays where this method is

natural, but also in their histories and elsewhere. Thucydides for

instance tells the story of a great war, yet his comments on it are few,

and are mainly given in the dramatic and would-be objective form of

speeches by leading men of the day. But the Greeks have objectivity in a

far more important sense than this. Their objectivity is no literary

device but a quality of mind. They have the power of standing aloof from

matters in which they are personally interested, and surveying them from

outside like impartial spectators, with the keenest interest, but

without bias. As the Delphic priestess in the act of prophecy lost her

individuality and became the mouthpiece of the god, so the Greek allowed

facts to speak for themselves, became their mouthpiece and banished the

intrusive ego. If therefore we call the Greeks objective, all this must

be included in our definition of the word.

We shall understand Greek 'truthfulness' best, if, dropping

philosophical terms, and forgetting modern meanings, we remember a

saying of Anaxagoras, who, when asked for what purpose he was born,

replied: 'To contemplate the works of nature.' The disinterested passion

for contemplating things, which gathered inquiring groups round Socrates

to discuss what justice and friendship mean, or whether goodness is

knowledge and can be learnt, has its counterpart in literature. The

Greeks were fascinated by the spectacle of man and the world, and their

fascination is seen not only in their formal philosophy. Of their poets

too it may be said that they were born to see the world and human

life--not to moralize or to indulge in sentiment or rhetoric or

mysticism about it, but to see it. Keats's description of the poetic

temperament fits them closely: 'It has no self, it is everything and

nothing.... It enjoys light and shade.... A poet is the most unpoetical

of anything in existence, he is continually in, for, and filling some

other body.' In such a mood men will write literature that may justly be

called truthful. Avoiding the didactic, they will not distort truth to

suit personal bias; avoiding rhetoric, they will not sacrifice it to

fine phrases; avoiding sentiment and fancy, they will not gratify their

own or their hearer's feelings at the expense of truth; avoiding

mysticism, they will not move away from facts into a world of emotions.

Their care will be to see things, and their delight will be in the mere

vision. They will echo the words of Keats, 'If a sparrow comes before my

windows, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel'[117]:

they will not treat it as Shelley treats the skylark, or even as Keats

and Wordsworth treat the nightingale. Herein is one of the secrets of

Greek poetry, for the Greek poets, more than any others, bring us in a

manner entirely simple and natural into immediate contact with what they

describe, and thus escape the thousand distortions for which epigram,

rhetoric, sentiment, fancy, mysticism and romanticism are responsible.

This secret may be called 'directness'. It is the habit of looking

straight and steadily at things, and describing them as they are, the

very contrary of the habit of didactic comment and of rhetorical or

emotional inflation. The 'direct' writer, in the fullest extent that is

possible, keeps himself and his feelings in the background. He does not

allow the mists which rise from a man's personality to come between him

and his subject.

[117] I have taken these quotations of Keats from Bradley, _Oxford

Lecture on Poetry_, p. 238.

A few instances of directness will give a better idea of it than many

definitions. The epigram quoted a few pages back shows how the Greek

writer lets his subject speak instead of expressing his own feelings

about it. So does the following epitaph, placed by a father on his son's

grave.

Δωδεκετη τον παιδα πατηρ απεθηκε Φιλιππος

ενθαδε την πολλην ελπιδα Νικοτελην.[118]

{Dôdeketê ton paida patêr apethêke Philippos

enthade tên pollên elpida Nikotelên.}

[118] Callimachus, _Epigr._ 20: 'His father Philip laid here to rest

his twelve-year old son, his high hope, Nicoteles.'

The bereaved father says nothing of his sorrow, or the greatness of his

loss, but records his son's name and age and says that he was his

father's 'high hope', and so doing gives us everything. Simonides does

not express his own feelings about the heroism of the Spartan dead;

their grave speaks for them to the passer-by. Nor is this a mere

literary method, a way of writing which states facts and leaves them to

make an impression by their own weight, unaided by comment or

explanation. A comparison of Ben Jonson's epigram with the Greek

epitaph, will show that directness is much more than this. The fancies

with which Jonson closes are pretty; but they are false, for they are

really incompatible with deep feeling: the Greek directness never loses

from sight the dead child; it sees only that and the father's sorrow.

The following extract deals with a very different subject, but

illustrates directness equally well. The scene is the Athenian colony of

Amphipolis on the Struma; the dramatis personae are the Spartan general

Brasidas who wishes to capture it, and the Athenian Thucydides who was

then at Thasos, distant half a day's sail from Amphipolis. 'As soon as

Thucydides heard the news about Brasidas, he sailed quickly to

Amphipolis ... in order to garrison it if possible before it could

capitulate, or at any rate to occupy Eion (its seaport). Meanwhile

Brasidas, fearing the arrival of the Athenian fleet at Thasos and

hearing that Thucydides ... was one of the leading men of the country,

did his utmost to get possession of the city before he arrived.... He

therefore offered moderate terms.... These terms were accepted, and the

city was surrendered to him. On the evening of the same day Thucydides

and his ships sailed into Eion, but not until Brasidas had taken

possession of Amphipolis: another night, and he would have seized

Eion.'[119] The gist of the story contained in this extract is plain.

The Spartan general Brasidas seized the important town of Amphipolis,

and the Athenian general came too late to save it. But who would guess

that the Athenian general Thucydides was the historian Thucydides who

wrote these words, and that the episode which he here describes with

such detachment and neutrality earned him perpetual exile under pain of

death, from the country which he passionately loved? Thucydides has told

the bare facts, objectively, as if they related to some one else,

without a comment, without a word of protest, excuse, explanation or

regret on the crowning disaster of his life. He writes of himself in the

third person. This is not the way in which modern generals write of

their mishaps, but it is the Greek way. Thucydides has forgotten himself

and his feelings; he sees only the disastrous day when he sailed up the

Struma with his ships and found the gates of Amphipolis closed against

him. He ignores himself so far that he does not call it disastrous,

though disastrous it was for himself and his country. With the same

detachment he speaks of the enslavement of Melos and the tragedy of

Syracuse, though he thinks, and makes us feel, that the one was the

crowning crime, the other the crowning disaster of his country. He

narrates the plain facts and leaves the reader to draw his inferences.

If we did not know that he was an Athenian, we could hardly tell from

his history whether he took the side of Athens or Sparta in the war; so

entirely are he and his feelings kept in the background. Yet he was an

ardent patriot, and he is describing the war in which his country lost

supremacy and empire. No historian of the war of 1914-18, whether on the

Allied or the German side, is likely to write of it in this way.

[119] _Thuc._ iv. 104, 105, 106 (tr. Jowett, mainly).

The art of Homer has the same quality of detachment. He is a Greek,

writing of a ten years' war between Greeks and Asiatics, yet most of his

readers sympathize with Hector rather than with Achilles. He himself

preferred neither, but saw and felt equally with both; with the hero who

fought the losing battle for Troy, and with him who lost his friend,

and, intoxicated with sorrow, could see and feel nothing but a passion

of revenge. It would seem hardly possible to write the close of the 22nd

Book of the _Iliad_, where the heroes meet, without taking sides; we, no

doubt, should take Hector's side. But Homer stands apart from the

quarrel, and sees both men and the feelings of both, writing with the

pen of the Recording Angel, not of the Judge. What he or Thucydides

thought in each case can only be guessed at. They have presented the

facts without comment, and the facts tell their own tale, explain

themselves, carry with them the feelings they should evoke, and shine by

their own light, like the phosphorescence of the sea.

Little thinking is needed to see that the direct, detached, objective

temper is the generative principle of the Greek achievement, for it is

the parent of science and philosophy, which are the children of a desire

to see things in themselves as they are, and not as the seer might wish

them to be. The effects of this temper in poetry can be appreciated by a

comparison of certain phenomena of our own literature which are absent

from Greek. The comparison will indicate, too, what modern writers can

learn from the Greeks, and enable us to judge whether the lessons are

needed.

The habit of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of

directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality,

sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and

recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I

have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and

have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120] I shall pass to diseases which

are more particularly modern, and with which directness is equally at

war.

[120] _The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us_, pp. 74 ff.

The richness of the English language is in itself a danger. English,

like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacity discovered by

the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have

exploited the musical quality of English. This is clear from such a

collection as the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_, which faithfully

represents the output of the age, and contains some fine poetry, but

also a very large percentage of what Horace called, _Versus inopes rerum

nugaeque canorae_. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little

bread among the imitators of Tennyson. To such rhetorical or musical

trifles no better antidote can be found than Greek literature, for there

is no rhetoric in it, and what melodious nothings it contained, were

parodied in its own age and have scantily survived to ours. In general

it avoided both by its directness. The rhetoric of Lucan or Byron, the

predominance of sound over sense in some of Shelley and much of

Swinburne arise because those poets shut their eyes to the real world

and become lost in the music of words. The Greek, starting with facts,

not with sounds or with feelings about facts, could not easily become

the victim of words. The temptation did not arise for him, or if it did,

his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for

poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pass into an unearthly

paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of

things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her

flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her

communication with it open.

Directness is also a protection against that literature of egotism which

is the excess into which subjective poetry easily falls. Legitimate when

kept within bounds, the habit of putting oneself into what one writes

can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not

free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less

detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or

Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the

shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at times a total,

eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects

himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with

the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of

Carlyle's pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm

of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant

of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as

much as of morals, and has its peculiar effect and its appropriate

penalty. Its effect is to distract a man's attention from major to minor

issues, from the large world to the small self; its penalty is that it

wearies its audience, and the next generation, if not its own, dislikes

the continual obtrusion of an element in which it has no interest. Hence

oblivion, often unjust, is the punishment which the egotist suffers.

Even our age, interested as it is in personalities, has little time to

spare for those of Byron or Carlyle; it is too busy with the characters

of its own contemporaries to trouble about those of its predecessors.

But no Greek writer is forgotten for this cause. Whatever their other

offences, the Greeks are free from literary egotism. Directness turned

their eyes to the external world, and taught them to see even themselves

from without.

Egotism is a minor defect in English literature. To some it may even

seem to be a virtue. A more serious weakness, which our literature

shares with other modern literatures, is one-sidedness or incompleteness

of view, which reveals itself by a series of reactions, and in England

has taken the form of an oscillation between sentimentalism and a rather

cruel realism, the latter being dominant at the present time. These two

schools represent excesses of temperament, the one of generosity and

kindliness, the other of truth; and among our writers of genius Dickens

and Hardy typify them well. The one school desire in fiction to reward

their good characters and punish the bad, just as they would wish that

life should do; and truth is not allowed to thwart their benevolence or

their indignation. In defiance of all probability Micawber and Mr. Mell

make a success of life in Australia, though truth cries out that they

were born to be failures; while the foot of punishment moves more

swiftly and visibly in the pages of Dickens than it does in fact. Then

comes the veracious person, who, growing indignant at a travesty of life

that misleads the reader and insults truth, gives us the opposite

extreme in an imagined world where the shadows are deepened and the high

lights carefully blocked out. Scott and Dickens picture a world in which

at the end vice finds itself in the gutter while virtue marries the

heroine. Later, Thomas Hardy has given us _Jude the Obscure_ and _Tess

of the D'Urbervilles_.[121] Here is a protest, a redressing of the

balance, by an advocate who rises to supply a side of the case which has

been ignored. Yet once again Truth is violated, and by her sworn

servant; for the world that Hardy portrays is not the world as it is.

When Dickens makes Mr. Micawber the District Magistrate of Port

Middlebay, he is not representing life, but saying what he and his

audience would like to believe in order to feel comfortable when they

close the book. As a protest therefore against him in the next

generation comes Thomas Hardy, who after recording the miserable end of

Tess, writes 'The President of the immortals had ended his sport with

Tess'. In so writing he is no true recorder any more than was Dickens,

but the self-appointed Judge of a universe which he conceives to be

cruel.

[121] In these novels and in _The Dynasts_ Mr. Hardy allows his

personal views to depress one side of the scales: in his lesser

novels he has often shown that he can hold the balance even. This

distinction should be borne in mind in all the criticisms of his

work, which I have ventured to make.

Neither Dickens nor Hardy can be called unveracious writers; both give a

picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs

less by distortion than by omission; he sees one side of life, but at

the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and

lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No

one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and

largely true of all, that they see life steadily and see it whole. Still

less can this be said of their followers, who, after the fashion of

disciples, imitate and develop their defects, and oscillate between

sentimental falsity, and the starkness and brutality which have been

familiar in English literature during the last twenty years and in

French literature for a much longer period. None of these writers, not

even the best, is direct. Like Dickens, they consult their generous

hearts, or, worse, ask: 'Can truth be told without making the public

angry?' Or, like Hardy, they veil a didactic purpose under the name of

realism, and register a bitter personal protest against the cruelty of

life. In either case they narrow their view, and see the world through a

mist of temperament.

This point may be illustrated by examining a famous passage from Homer,

and then asking how a sentimental and a realistic writer might have

treated it. Imagine the death of Hector in the hands of Dickens or

Hardy. The first most probably would not have permitted it to occur, or,

if he had, would have made Achilles the villain of the piece and

emphasized and developed the tragedy in the manner of his death scenes,

till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a

tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may

guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the

savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such

things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his

readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would

have made the tragedy more tragic, and the brutality more brutal. It is

thus that he has treated the death of Jude. By so doing, both Dickens

and Hardy in their different ways, would have been allowing their own

personalities rather than the facts to speak, and, seeing only one side

of the story, would have made it less complicated than life and less

complete. But in the _Iliad_ we see nothing of Homer's personality and

hear no voice but that of the facts. The story tells itself without the

heightening of artifice. The two men are brought before our

eyes--Hector, the last hope of Troy, with his wife and child waiting for

him at home--Achilles, mad with the memory of his dead friend. There is

no judgement and no comment, but only the thing as it was.

To those who would maintain that Dickens or Hardy give an accurate

picture of the world, there are two answers. First, their world is not

the world as Shakespeare or Meredith sees it; this for many persons will

be a sufficient disproof of its reality. Second, the history of English

and French literatures has been for the last 150 years a history of

successive reactions. The classical school was followed by the

romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a

reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a

cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some

excess to provoke them. The existence of a reaction is a symptom of

disease, and not only would it never take place apart from disease, but

there is always a chance that it may go too far; for as in the body, so

in the world of letters, a balance once disturbed is difficult to

restore. But Greek literature, unlike our own and unlike French, at no

stage developed by reaction. Its epic poets are followed by the lyrists

and these by the tragedians: tragedy passes into the New Comedy, which

is followed by the learned and artistic poetry of Alexandria. In prose

the unperiodic style of Herodotus is succeeded by the style of

Thucydides; while Plato and the various orators develop different types

of writing. None of these styles, however, and none of these writers,

are in reaction against one another. Some traces of reaction against

the Homeric outlook of Sophocles may perhaps be found in Euripides. But

this contrast lies between two individual writers and not between two

literary schools, and has no analogy with the relation of the romantic

to the classical or to the realist movements. It is far less marked, for

instance, than the contrast between Voltaire and Victor Hugo or that

between Victor Hugo and Flaubert. There is no reaction in the

development of Greek literature, because at no stage is there any excess

to react from; and there is no excess, because the Greek writers are

direct and objective, because they are mirrors that reflect life, not

imperfect lenses that distort it each according to its own imperfection.

The literature of the Elizabethans here resembles Greek. It is indeed

more wayward, more fanciful, more personal, more luxuriant than the

Greek; but it is on the whole more disinterested, freer from any

didactic bent, more inclined to contemplate life for its own sake than

the literature of any succeeding epoch in England. Since the Puritans a

didactic strain has continually appeared in our writers. We have had

revolts and protests, and then, by reaction, more protests and revolts.

However admirable in morals, this Protestantism is injurious in

literature, for, like all rebellions, it ends in excess and destroys the

even-balanced temper which is essential to the creation of the greatest

literature. This didactic temper, often disguised as realism, has never

been stronger than in our own age, when many who might have found their

profession in the Churches are diverted to other paths and seek in

literature an outlet that in the past would have been found in the

pulpit. Messrs. Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy--to mention no others--are

parsons _manqués_, who were designed by nature to write not plays or

novels but sermons. Or rather they are dual personalities: clergyman and

creative writer have been combined in them and the clergyman has

corrupted the poet. The unsatisfied appetite for preaching which a

hundred years ago would have been quieted by writing an evangelical

tract, to-day issues in a novel or a play. The moral differs, the form

changes, the intention and temper are the same.

It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which

animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the

British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that

of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the

truest thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of

it: we, on the other hand, can learn something from their intellectual

disinterestedness which in political and social controversies would make

opposing views more intelligible and the path to truth easier and

plainer, in literature would free us from excesses that are followed by

reaction to a contrary excess, and in national life would guard us from

the materialism which besets an industrial and commercial age. It is not

confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual

truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first

brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their

literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.

* * * * *

The last quality of Greek literature of which I wish to speak is not one

which we should expect to find in combination with truthfulness; it is

certainly very rare in modern realists. Yet the Greek instinct for

beauty is beyond question. There is the evidence of Winckelmann, who,

living in a world that had forgotten Greek, rediscovered it; or of

Keats, who was not brought up to the familiarity with Greek that breeds

obtuseness and indifference, but made acquaintance with it when he was

of an age to judge. The impression made both on Keats and Winckelmann is

that of a new and surpassing beauty. There is the evidence of 'the

beautiful mythology of Greece',[122] the offspring of an untaught

folk-imagination, and so far richer in the quality of beauty than the

mythology of the North. Even in the sawdust of a mythological dictionary

the stories of Atalanta, Narcissus, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice,

Phaethon, Medusa keep their magic.

[122] Keats, _Preface to Endymion_.

The following extract from the hymn of Demeter may illustrate this

beauty, though it is not one of the greatest passages of Greek

literature and its writer is unknown. It is the story of the Earth

Mother and her daughter Persephone:

ἡν Αιδωνευς

ἡρπαξεν, δωκεν δε βαρυκτυπος ευρυοπα Ζευς,

παιζουσαν κουρησι συν Ωκεανου βαθυκολποις

ανθεα τ' αινυμενην, ῥοδα και κροκον ηδ' ια καλα

λειμων' αμ μαλακον και αγαλλιδας ηδ' ὑακινθον

ναρκισσον θ', ὁν φυσε δολον καλυκωπιδι κουρη

Γαια Διος βουλησι χαριζομενη Πολυδεκτη,

θαυμαστον γανοωντα· σεβας το γε πασιν ιδεσθαι

αθανατοις τε θεοις ηδε θνητοις ανθρωποις·

του και απο ῥιζης ἑκατον καρα εξεπεφυκει,

κωζ' ἡδιστ' οδμη, πας δ' ουρανος ευρυς ὑπερθε

γαια τε πας' εγελασσε και ἁλμυρον οιδμα θαλασσης.

ἡ δ' αρα θαμβησας' ωρεξατο χερσιν ἁμ' αμφω

καλον αθυρμα λαβειν· χανε δε χθων ευρυαγυια

Νυσιον αμ πεδιον, τη ορουσεν αναξ Πολυδεγμων

ἱπποις αθανατοισι[123]

{hên Aidôneus

hêrpaxen, dôken de baryktypos euryopa Zeus,

paizousan kourêsi syn Ôkeanou bathykolpois

anthea t' ainymenên, rhoda kai krokon êd' ia kala

leimôn' am malakon kai agallidas êd' hyakinthon

narkisson th', hon physe dolon kalukôpidi kourê

Gaia Dios boulêsi charizomenê Polydektê,

thaumaston ganoônta; sebas to ge pasin idesthai

athanatois te theois êde thnêtois anthrôpois;

tou kai apo rhizês hekaton kara exepephykei,

kôz' hêdist' odmê, pas d' ouranos eurys hyperthe

gaia te pas' egelasse kai halmyron oidma thalassês.

hê d' ara thambêsas' ôrexato chersin ham' amphô

kalon athyrma labein; chane de chthôn euryagyia

Nysion am pedion, tê orousen anax Polydegmôn

hippois athanatoisi}.

[123] _Hymn to Demeter_, l. 2 ff. The translation is mainly from

Pater, _Greek Studies_. 'Whom, by the consent of far-seeing,

deep-thundering Zeus, Aidoneus carried away, as she played with the

deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of

soft grass and roses and crocus and fair violets and iris and

hyacinths and the strange glory of the narcissus which the Earth,

favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth to snare the

flower-like girl. A wonder it was to all, immortal gods and mortal

men. A hundred blossoms grew up from the roots of it, and very sweet

was its scent, and the broad sky above, and all the earth and the

salt wave of the sea laughed to see it. She in wonder stretched out

her two hands to take the lovely plaything: thereupon the wide-wayed

earth opened in the Nysian plain and the king of the great nation of

the dead sprang out with his immortal horses.'

Turn from this to some parallel poem in English literature, such as

_Oenone_ or _Tithonus_. Beautiful as Tennyson is, the Greek has a better

beauty, a beauty not of words or metaphors or highly-wrought art, but

simpler, more spontaneous and more instinctive, as though not man but

nature herself was speaking. Two writers, who are qualified to judge by

being themselves among the great poets of the world, and who knew and

appreciated other literatures, but speak in this way about Greek alone,

have testified to the uniqueness of this beauty. Goethe says stiffly but

precisely: 'in the presence of antiquity the mind feels itself placed in

the most ideal state of nature; and even to this day the Homeric hymns

have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the

terrible burden which the tradition of many hundreds of years has rolled

upon us.' In these words Goethe has touched on the simplicity and the

naturalness of Greek beauty, in contrast to the more exotic and

elaborate beauty of which mediaeval and modern art and literature are

full. Keats writing about the Grecian urn also had in his mind the

liberating power of Greek beauty:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all

Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

These words point to another trait of Greek beauty, which any one who

has seen Greek statues must have felt: it does not provoke speculation

just as it does not excite desire, because no elements are mingled with

it that might stir such feelings. It has no admixture, but is mere

beauty, sought for itself.

Not only is Greek beauty different in quality from our own, but it is

more abundant. This surely would be the verdict of an impartial critic

who compared Homer, the lyrists, the tragedians, Plato, Theocritus, the

epigrammatists, with the corresponding names in modern literatures. It

amounts to a different way of viewing the world; the Greeks were more

sensitive to beauty than we are, just as some people are more sensitive

than others to colours or sounds, to moral or intellectual issues. This

is curiously illustrated in their treatment of tragic themes. There is

no want of tragedy in Homer or the dramatists--their view of life is

probably darker than our own--and they have been praised for a pessimism

that faced and admitted the black truth. Yet the cloud of evil is

continually broken by rays of beauty. Thus Homer lights up the tragic

parting of Hector and Andromache by the story of the child and the

nodding plumes, yet does not use the incident, as many writers would

have used it, to heighten the tragedy, which indeed it neither

emphasizes nor diminishes: it is merely a gratuitous touch of delight in

children, as accidental and natural as the brighter moments which, in

life if not in realistic novels, diversify the darkest hours. Thus too

Aeschylus preludes the bloody slaughter of Salamis with the white horses

of the dawn, the echoes in the cliffs, the foam whitening beneath the

oars, and when he speaks of the island where the Persians are butchered,

does not forget the dances in which Pan rejoiced there of old. Thus,

again, one of the most tragic moments in the _Hippolytus_ is followed by

the song,

Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,

In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod;

Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding,

As a bird among the bird-droves of God!

Could I wing me to my rest amid the roar

Of the deep Adriatic on the shore,

Where the water of Eridanus is clear,

And Phaëthon's sad sisters by his grave

Weep into the river, and each tear

Gleams, a drop of amber, in the wave.[124]

[124] ll. 732 f. (tr. Murray).

The union of beauty and tragedy may be a paradox, but no reader can miss

its power. The mere story of Hector's death as told by Homer is

poignant, even when read in an English translation: the magic of the

original language and metre doubles the effect. The combination of these

two apparently inconsistent things, which is one of the marks of Greek

poetry, is, of course, found in other literatures; the description of

Ophelia's death in _Hamlet_ is an instance of it. But no drama except

Greek has that regular interweaving of tragedy with exquisite lyrics by

which some of its most powerful effects are secured.

Effect is the wrong word to use, for we have here no literary trick, but

a view of life, which is naturally complete and clearsighted, which is

sensitive to the beauty that no evil can destroy, which sees the

splendour in tragedy itself, and remembers that though the days of

darkness are many it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun.

This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to

many people. Those who disagree with the philosophy will not quarrel

with the beauty itself. Hellenism is one of the forces which are

continually being buried and re-found, and which, like talismans, have a

disturbing power when they fall afresh into human hands. Those who read

the literature of the age which rediscovered Greek will see that it

brought above all a sense of liberation and expansion. At the

Renaissance as in the eighteenth century, Greece found the world in

chains, and broke them and threw down the prison walls. The fetters of

the two epochs were different, but freedom was brought, at the

Renaissance partly, and in the age of Winckelmann entirely, by the

vision of beauty which Greece exhibited. Our own age has many chains and

knows well the burden of which Goethe spoke. It has multiplied ugliness

far faster than beauty, and its writers, prolific, interesting, and

thoughtful as they are, do not help it here. It may well find, as other

ages have found, in this quality of Greek literature a healing and

liberating power.

* * * * *

English literature is surpassed by none, but its defects or dangers are

at points where Greek is strong. Greek simplicity recalls us to the

central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge

to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the

falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who,

instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as

their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of

the universe to which ages of thought are often blind. Greek technique

is a lesson in 'form' and a reminder of its place in literature.

Nor is the study of Greek a danger to our national genius. Contact with

highly developed foreign models may warp or cramp a literature in its

infancy, but cannot harm it when full grown and robust. The native

character is then too firmly established to be corrupted, and it is pure

gain to have another standard for comparison, for detection of

weaknesses and their cure. A reference to English literature will

support this view and show that though the influence of Greek there has

often been great, it has not been distorting. Consider the English poets

who owe most to Greece--Milton, Gray, Shelley, Keats, Landor, Tennyson,

Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Bridges. It would puzzle any critic to find a

common denominator between these men, or to trace back to Greece any

universal feature in their poetry, except perhaps perfection of form.

Technical perfection is not so serious or frequent a vice in English

writers, that it can be complained of, and even this common element

vanishes, if we add to the poets already quoted the Brownings, who

prized and understood Greek and the Greek spirit as well as any of them.

At first sight it may seem strange that Shelley and Keats, Arnold and

Swinburne, who were not merely passionate admirers of Greece but drew

their chief inspiration from her, should be so different in style and

matter. The explanation is simple. Some influences are tyrannous; they

impose themselves, they dominate, they enslave. But there is a better

and rarer type of influence, which stimulates and inspires yet leaves

the poet free to develop his own genius with enlarged horizons and

quickened sensibilities. Greek influence on our writers has been of this

kind; perhaps because its literature is singularly free from the

artifice and mannerism which lend themselves to mimicry and seems like

Nature with her many voices speaking.