schools of thought and new modes of expression. When epic poetry was
exhausted new sorts of poetry arose; when these proved insufficient
there was still further development, but all this is to be accounted for
with adherence to law and tradition of some kind. I will take the last
and therefore the most obvious case first. We have in Theocritus, the
latest bloom of pure Greek poetry, bucolic scenes and pastoral language
which were long thought to be the mere echo of the primitive shepherds
who fed their flocks in the uplands of Sicily. We know better now.
Theocritus was a learned man, full of literary jealousies, who wrote in
the sultry atmosphere of the university of Alexandria and at the highly
artificial court of the second Ptolemy. He was probably as remote from
what we call simple human nature as any modern American could be. But he
was a great literary artist, and he felt that while all the other
schools of poetry had gradually lost their contact with real life, and
were becoming obtrusively artificial and outworn in public estimation,
there was still a vein of folk-song, in scenery contrasting utterly with
the crowded sandhills of Alexandria, which might, if treated with
delicate art, appeal once more to the sympathy of a weary and decadent
society. No doubt there were plenty of pedants in Alexandria, who
despised this return to homely and common life, with its vulgar
passions, just as the great French critics repudiated with scorn the
homely scenes and characters in the tragedies of Shakespeare. The
experiment nevertheless succeeded, and this thoroughly artificial but
artistic representation of the sorrows and joys of illiterate peasants,
in lovely metre and with carefully chosen liberties of diction,
fascinated the Greek, then the Roman world, and incited the Renaissance
to similar, but unsuccessful attempts. It has produced its effects upon
English poetry down to the work of Tennyson, who shows more traces of
the influence of Theocritus than of the influence of any other Greek
poet. The secret of it was that, when other schools became exhausted,
Theocritus went back to the people, found among them rude and simple
songs which had never yet been adopted by any school or put into
artistic form, and raised these from the coarseness of nature into the
refinement of a subtle and learned art.
Was not the same process the origin of Greek dramatic poetry, though in
an earlier and far less conscious age? Are we not told that tragedy, and
comedy too, arose from the rude songs of the people and the rude
attempts at acting among simple country folk? The tragedy of Æschylus,
nay, even the perfect diction and metre of Aristophanes, are as far
removed from popular song as it is possible to conceive, yet these too
arose and matured with marvellous quickness from the rude essays of
untutored peasants, whose efforts were wholly beneath the attention of
civilised society.
We know nothing, alas! of the cradles of the lyric poetry of
Archilochus, of Alcæus, of Sappho; we can tell you nothing of the
_incunabula_ of that great and varied development which comprised
several schools. Over the whole surface of those primeval waters, which
cover the world of Greek literature down to the 7th century B.C., we
have but the one great solitary beacon, the poetry of Homer, which tells
us, like the Nantucket light-ship, that we are far, and yet not far,
from the utterances of a literary age:
As the tall ship, that many a dreary year,
Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea,
All thro’ the livelong hours of utter dark
Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave!
But so much the scanty lyric fragments do tell us with a clear voice:
these poets were thoroughly and even elaborately artistic, and their
very careful workmanship, if it did arise from an appeal to the songs of
the people, shows the very same fastidious care which we find in
Theocritus, to purify their art from the clay or the dross of everyday
language. Hence follows as a natural consequence, among a people of
genius like the Greeks, a perfection both in form and in spirit, which
we justly call classical and which forms the model for almost all
subsequent poetry. There are no vagaries of metre or diction; there are
no exaggerations of sentiment. Every civilised man of any epoch, every
critic of judgment, who masters the poetry in the original, finds in it
models of taste which have not since been excelled and only seldom
equalled.
I need not delay long over a few apparent or real exceptions, so few
that they are only enough for cavil, not for serious criticism. We have
recovered recently the _Persians_ of Timotheus, whose musical
performances were very popular in his day. The poem is the worst that we
know coming from its age and country. But we also know that we should
merely regard it as the libretto of a musical performance, such as the
libretti of the Italian operas we used to frequent in our youth, in
which the text was not of the slightest importance and was generally
very bad. The music was the only part of the performance we criticised.
So the _Persians_ of Timotheus is ridiculous as a poem on the great
battle of Salamis, but even so is pronounced by the authorities on
metre, such as Wilamowitz, to be very careful and polished in that
respect. The _Mimes_ of Herondas, another recent discovery, are also bad
poetry, but then they are mere versifications of prose pieces, such as
those of Sophron were, and meant, I believe, for acting on a cheap stage
or for dramatic recitation. They can hardly be called poetry. In much
earlier days, there was a good deal of tame moral teaching and
proverbial philosophy expressed in verse. But that also was so, because
as yet prose had not become an ordinary vehicle of writing, and any man
who desired to teach, such as Solon, or Theognis, or Empedocles, must
express himself in verse.
I will mention but one more feature in which Greek poetry had obviously
an advantage over modern art of the same kind. Being almost altogether
composed, not for a reading, but a listening public, it was closely
associated with other arts, especially those of music and dancing, so as
to form an essential part of many great public festivals. It was the
soul which animated the frame of every national pageant. If a poet
laureate nowadays is asked to celebrate a great public occasion by a
poem, he writes an ode or an elegy, such as Tennyson’s “Bury the Great
Duke, with a nation’s lamentation,” and sends it out to countless
readers. The Greek poet, on similar occasions, would have a solemn
procession, or a dance, or a scenic display, with appropriate music, to
assist him. These environments secured two great qualities, or rather
tended to secure them, for we must not assume perfection as a general
result in any human product. It secured that the poet would aim at
_dignity_, avoiding all mean and trivial topics. It also secured
_brevity_, avoiding discursiveness, which is a fault of much modern
poetry. Thus Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ would have been intolerable to the
poet himself, had he been a Greek, and to come to a more appropriate
illustration, the exuberant and unlimited choruses in Mr. Swinburne’s
_Atalanta_--otherwise a splendid reflection of Greek tragedy--would not
have been tolerated on account of their redundancy, but the poet would
have compressed them within such limits as would not put his chorus out
of breath, or produce dizziness in his hearers.
The production of poetry for local and special public occasions was also
a main cause of the use of distinct dialects, which did not become
national property till some great work had sanctioned their literary
use. Thus the artificial Homeric dialect became the _lingua franca_ of
all epic poets, whatever their country or their date, down to the end of
old Greek history. Doric choral hymns were adopted by the Attic
tragedies and put into the interludes of Attic dialogue. Luckily for us
the Greeks wrote phonetically and did not conceal their local speech
under the cloak of an artificial and false orthography. Thus the poetry
of the nation has come to us in various dialects, but never, except with
deliberate dramatic aim at vulgarity,[5] in the mere language of the
common people.
But I must now abandon these general considerations and turn to the task
of showing you, in some famous examples, how Greek poetry, possessing
the excellence requisite for a high model, acted upon the greatest and
best of our own poets, as well as on others in modern Europe.
Every one knows that the Greeks have left us three long epic poems--one
the epic of war, the second the epic of voyage, the third, that of
Apollonius Rhodius, the epic of adventure combined with a great love
story. There were many other early epic poems composed in imitation of
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, but they have been laid aside and forgotten,
most probably because their material has been worked up by the Greeks
into the nobler form of tragedy. For, as you know, the Greeks, who
confined themselves to mythical subjects for these tragedies, avoided
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and utilised what were called the Cyclic
poets. It is mere commonplace to tell you that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_
have been the unapproachable ideals for all subsequent time. The first
and greatest foreign imitator was Virgil, and through his immortal epic,
indirectly more even than directly, the world of poets has been swayed.
It is nevertheless very remarkable that these two masterpieces, coming
complete from the early genius of Greece, as Athena leaped full-armed
from the brain of Zeus, appearing, like Melchisedec, without father,
mother, or descent, to bless the father of the faithful, should never
again have been equalled among men.
The best epic of modern Europe since the classical Renaissance is the
_Paradise Lost_ of Milton. He has given us ample evidence that he was a
great poet, and yet how far below the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ does he
fall! I need hardly tell you that the controversies which agitated his
mind, and the mind of his age, disturbed the serenity of his poetic
vision and dictated to him many digressions which are blots on the
purity of his golden pages. But that is not to my mind his greatest
defect. The action of the gods which in the _Iliad_ is a mere preamble
to the general action of the poem, or an irrelevant episode, and hardly
interferes with its thoroughly human character, is in the theological
poet far too prominent. It occupies in Milton’s poem the forefront,
compared to which the episodes in Eden are but a small matter. The
tremendous part of the poem is not Paradise lost by man, but heaven lost
by the angels that fell. It is the conflict between gods and Titans, as
the Greeks would have put it, and not the conflicts or mortal heroes
that fascinate us. Another remark obtrudes itself as we pass on. The
weakest book in all the _Iliad_ is the Battle of the Gods. It might
readily be expunged from the poem without loss. In Milton the Divine
wholly outweighs the human in grandeur and is the essence of the poem.
There is another feature in this epic which disturbs our admiration--the
great richness and even redundancy of the learned similes. In this
Milton seems to have taken as his model the third Greek epic, which is
now forgotten, but which had a great vogue in the Renaissance, I mean
the _Argonautics_ of Apollonius. His direct obligations to this poet
have been noticed in many places by the commentators. I have no doubt
that a careful study would show many more, and it is all the more
interesting to reflect how a now forgotten Greek source has had so
lasting an influence. The greatest contribution I know from Apollonius
to modern poetry is the famous scene at the opening of Goethe’s _Faust_,
where the world-weary philosopher determines to take a cup of poison,
but is suddenly recalled to life by the Easter dawn with its
Resurrection hymn. You have but to read the scene where Medea, wracked
by what she believes a hopeless passion, turns at the end of a night of
wakeful agony to the same escape, a cup of poison. But with the dawn and
the awakening of human life, the sounds of men react upon her troubled
spirit and cause her to put aside her dread resolve. With her also, and
with the Greek poet, the conception is fresher and better. It is the
youth and health of Medea, the wine of life glowing in her veins which
calls her back from suicidal gloom when cheerful sounds of human life
illumine the dawn. The effect of the Easter hymn on Faust, beautiful as
it is with our Christian associations, does not seem so natural and is
therefore on a lesser scale as poetry.
But when I have started upon the effects of the Greek epic in moulding
the great English epic, which strives so hard to assume a different
tone, with a different subject, I am understating the general influence
of Greek poetry on Milton. In the days before him we may assume that
most of the English poets knew their Greek at second hand, through Latin
copies, or through French translations. Ben Jonson indeed, we are
assured, knew Greek, and Chapman had in his excellent translation made
the English world acquainted with Homer’s _Iliad_. It is easy to
underrate this second-hand influence and to say that after all it was
Latin and not Greek. Nothing would be more misleading. A poet may feel
the greatness of another even though he does not comprehend his tongue.
Thus Shakespeare, whose drama as a whole was clearly outside of all
Hellenic influences of style, as soon as he read in North’s translation
Plutarch’s _Lives_, saw in them subjects fit for his immortal plays. And
not only as to subject, but as to treatment, he adheres so closely to
the Greek master of biography that you can feel the profound respect and
admiration the playwright had for his work. Thus the _Antony and
Cleopatra_, to cite but one example, adheres point for point to the
famous narrative of Plutarch, and adds nothing to his picture. The
influence of Plutarch on the ruffians of the French Revolution is not
less remarkable, and will, I think, occupy us in another connection. But
then these men had for a century previously been taught by their
classical drama to look to the Greeks for lofty principles and ideal
characters. Yet for my purpose it is more relevant to cite a modern
instance. No one would say for a moment that the Greek tone in Keats was
got through Latin or French versions. Yet he seems never to have known
Greek enough to read the originals, whose spirit he caught from the
echoes of classical dictionaries.
But the indirect knowledge of earlier poets, such for example as the
stray citation by Shakespeare of the words of Eteocles from Gascoigne’s
play, are as nothing when we come to Milton, who shows himself
transfused not only with Greek epic, but with the Greek drama. And from
Milton, as the great master, comes that perfection of poetic style and
of metre which has moulded all English poetry from his time onward.
Matthew Arnold even speaks of him as standing above all his successors
in this unique distinction. But when Arnold compares this excellence
with that of Virgil, he should have added that Virgil also owed it to
the Greeks. Nor do I find in Virgil’s _Æneid_ anything like the
familiarity with Greek tragedy which I find in Milton. Thus the whole
situation at the opening of _Paradise Lost_ is not due to Homer, but
rather to the _Prometheus Vinctus_ of Æschylus, where the Titan,
overcome and chained to Mt. Caucasus by the superior might of Zeus,
nevertheless proclaims his undaunted spirit; and of course this struggle
between gods and Titans, which appears so frequently in Greek mythology,
and hence in Greek poetry, is constantly present to Milton, and suggests
to him simile and metaphor all through his poem.
But why delay over these desultory allusions mixed with those of other
legendary cycles, all grasped by his vast erudition? Consider the
_Samson Agonistes_. Here we have the poet deliberately going back to
strictly Greek form and even, in his notable preface to the play,
defending dramatic poetry against Puritan objections by appealing to
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, “the three tragic poets,” he says,
“unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write
tragedy.” You wonder when you consider that he had Shakespeare before
him, whom he mentions elsewhere with admiration. But the same preface
tells us clearly why he would not concede to Shakespeare’s tragedy the
rank he gives to the Greek masters. He says tragedy had fallen into
“low esteem or rather infamy, happening through the poet’s error of
intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing
trivial and vulgar characters, which by all judicious persons has been
counted absurd.” He took therefore exactly the view of Voltaire, who is
shocked at the gravedigger in _Hamlet_, and the drunken porter in
_Macbeth_. Such was also the view of Milton’s great French contemporary
Racine, who believed that he had composed his plays in the strictest
accordance with the principles of the ancients. And yet the school of
Shakespeare might easily have defended themselves by citing the practice
of those very masters, whose example they were recommended to follow. In
the first place every Greek tragic poet composed a merry afterlude,
called from its official chorus of Satyrs, a Satyric drama, and this
followed immediately upon their tragedy. Secondly, even in this, the
greatest master, Æschylus, does not disdain to bring “vulgar and trivial
persons” upon his stage, such as the watchman at the opening of the
_Agamemnon_, and the nurse Kilissa, who intermix comic stuff with the
tragic sadness of the play, and even enhance the gloom by the contrast.
Of course the tragedy of Euripides, who deliberately sought to bring
his stage nearer to our ordinary life, could not but exhibit such
passages, as any student of him knows perfectly well.
Taking however Milton’s own view of the nature of Greek tragedy, we have
his _Samson Agonistes_ not only constructed on the frame of an Attic
play, but in every scene full of reminiscences and allusions showing a
minute familiarity with the tragic Three. The opening, with its blind
and world-worn hero, seeking for repose, is taken from the opening of
the second Œdipus of Sophocles. So is the entry of the chorus, with
their surprise at the doleful sight, but presently they assume much the
same part as the ocean nymphs in the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus, and it is
from these two plays that he has borrowed most freely. In the
development there is no doubt that Euripides was his real master. The
litigious element, if I may so call it, which was dear to the Athenians;
the introduction of an insolent giant; of the treacherous Dalila, who
put forth arguments to be refuted by Samson, and so to fill up long
scenes in the play--all this is in Euripides’ best manner. So is the
irruption of the distracted messenger near the close, who narrates the
catastrophe.
But nowhere is the thorough appreciation of the spirit of Greek
tragedy, as well as its form, more manifest than in the choruses, and in
the lyrical monodies which are the finest features of the play. He tells
us in the preface, already quoted, that he did not observe the form of
strophe and antistrophe, strictly corresponding, because this implies a
musical accompaniment and performance in singing which was foreign to
his purpose. Still less would he bind himself to rhyme, a shackle
unknown or rather very rare in the poetry of the Greeks. He writes both
lyrical complaints of Samson, and the choral odes which are interludes
to the action, in irregular rythm, which we can hardly call metre, and
which are yet in the strictest sense lofty poetry. These things are not
to the taste of the ordinary commentator. Thus Sir Egerton Brydges, in a
handsome and indeed learned edition adorned by Turner’s drawings, says
at the end of the first chorus: “Though there are magnificent passages
in this chorus, I cannot quite reconcile my ear to the rythm, nor to
some of the expressions, which are, I confess, too like prose.” It is
interesting for you to know that Cicero said nearly the same thing about
Pindar. His elaborate metres sounded to the Roman like prose. But to any
one who is intimate with Greek choruses, nothing has ever been composed
in English which reproduces their effect so perfectly. I need not add
that in substance these odes, partly poetic reflections of a general
sort, partly in direct sympathy with the action of the play, are exactly
the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In one point only we may say
that here Milton is deficient--in that lyrical sweetness which marks
many of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides, so that we can recite
them as independent poems. Probably Milton felt his subject too great
and gloomy for such poetical digressions. For when he chose to give us
lyrical sweetness, what can exceed his _Comus_? Nor do I know anything
more Greek than the lovely though learned lyrical poetry toward the
close of that immortal masque.
I now pass from the father of English classical poetry to later but not
more varied manifestations of Greek influence. The most remarkable work
in the early eighteenth century, which took all England by storm, was
Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_. Chapman’s was already there, a very
meritorious work, and now rated more highly than its successor. But in
Pope’s day style was paramount. The _Iliad_ must read as a great English
poem, and we have Homer dressed in eighteenth-century costume, just as
the boys that played Terence at Westminster played him in wigs, powder,
and patches. It is very easy to criticise Pope’s translation. His whole
attitude was like that of Watteau in landscape; his epithets were
generally wrong, and wrong in principle. “And the conscious swain
blesses the useful light” is the conclusion of a simile. Now Homer’s
swain was not conscious, nor did he bless the light as useful.[6]
Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable drawings of the
Parthenon--for they were done a few years before its disaster--that he
could not even copy Phidias’s work before him, without importing the
style of the seventeenth-century Frenchman. All these things are true
and obvious, and yet the poet, who in translating another, recasts him
into his own mould, though he be faithless as a translator, may be far
greater as a poet. Ever since I was introduced to Homer by Pope, more
than fifty years ago, I have felt that, with all its anachronisms,
Pope’s poem is the greatest and best version of the Greek master, and a
proper one for those to read who cannot approach the original. No prose
translation, however scholarly and accurate, can give the least idea of
the swing of the great epic, and so I feel that the influence of Homer
through Pope has been wide and lasting and that the very defects of so
great a performance have stimulated oft-renewed attempts at reproducing
the great masterpiece. Dryden’s Virgil of course led public taste in the
same direction, so that we have an age very diverse from Greek in taste,
and very incongruous to it, nevertheless dominated, perhaps even more
than people then imagined, by Greek classical models.
The case of lyrical poetry is not dissimilar. The poets of the
eighteenth century had before them Horace’s versions of Alcæus and
Sappho, and the text of Pindar, who was, as Horace had told them, the
greatest master of all. But as he was difficult even for Horace to
understand, so he was to the eighteenth-century poets but vaguely
intelligible. Above all, the very essence of his studied, careful, and
learned genius was wholly misunderstood. He was conceived to be a poet
beyond the bounds of strict art, drunk with the muse and pouring forth a
torrent of splendid thoughts in disregard of all the shackles of metre,
which was so obvious in the Æolic school. Thus they strove to imitate
his apparent impetuosity, and the supposed irregularities of his metre,
and produced many good poems, inspired indeed by the Greek, but wholly
foreign to their model. The greatest of them was he who knew the
originals far better than the rest, and took the pains to master them
with scholarly care. We have in Gray a poet of really Greek temper and
spirit, very learned, very fastidious, very strict in form, though that
form be rich and various, and to my thinking well worthy of comparison
with Simonides or Bacchylides, both in purity of style and splendour of
diction.