Gray, beginning with classical training and making the pseudo-classical
Dryden his model, was nevertheless in middle life swept away by the
Romantic wave which flooded England and which made him prefer Keltic and
national subjects to those derived from Greek and Latin traditions. All
this is perfectly true, yet equally true is it, that no change of
subject could change or mar the splendid form, the pure diction, the
delicate taste which Gray derived from his careful study of the Greek
poets, and which is as clear in his “Welsh bard,” as in his “progress of
classical poesy.” No English poet had hitherto grasped the real
splendour of Pindar, not even Milton, and so the Pindaric odes of
lesser men, such as Cowley and Shenstone, have not survived as popular
poems, whereas Dryden’s _Ode to St. Cecilia_, and a whole series of
Gray’s poems, show clearly the matchless training which Greek poetry
affords the modern poet, whatever be his subject or his school.
It is in fact much more important and interesting to point out these
indirect influences, than to lay stress on the direct borrowing from the
Greek in form and diction. This very conflict or contrast may be
exemplified in Byron’s poetry. He was a leading member of the Romantic
school or fashion, and yet all his life he loved and honoured the
classical perfection of the Greeks, and not infrequently by a stray
passage proves how minute his knowledge even of fragments of Greek
poetry.[7] The political circumstances of modern Greece in the early
nineteenth century, the great struggle of the population against Turkish
tyranny--all this gave a romantic foreground to the classical taste
fostered by the higher schools and colleges throughout Europe; and so
the admiration of the old Greeks in art, politics, and literature was a
sort of classical justification for the Romanticists who had sprung
from the reaction against the false French classicism of an earlier
generation. Byron was first in adding the realities of actual Greece to
its interest as a mere frame or imaginary locus for classical poetry.
None of the eighteenth-century poets, or even the earlier historians of
Greece, showed the smallest curiosity about the actual home of Greek
literature, the actual cradle that nursed all this unequalled genius.
Even Grote and Thirlwall, long after the poets had discovered what
inspiration was to be derived from the mountains and fiords of Hellas,
wrote their immortal histories, without any feeling that they would have
gained, by a knowledge of the ground, a new and living flavour. For they
had both means and leisure to travel and yet they sought no help outside
the books of their libraries. But Byron brought into poetry at least
that realism about Greece which made a study of Greek and of Greece at
first-hand the desire of poets and of artists. Of Keats, who had not the
opportunities, I have spoken. In Shelley, we have that perfect
combination of romantic imagination with profound Greek culture that
makes him the greatest and probably the most lasting of that galaxy that
illumined the early nineteenth century. The least Greek of them all was
Wordsworth, and I venture to say that had he studied Greek poetry, it
would have taught him the essential differences which separate it from
prose--lofty style, select diction, above all, compression within strict
bounds and moderate limits--and thus have saved both us and him from the
dreariness of his prosaic _Excursion_. Let none of you think that I
underrate his poetic work. But in his highest moments it is the glow of
Greek splendour, the spiritual lessons of the august Plato that illumine
his sober genius, and translate him for the hour into the company of the
immortals.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the strong desire
to reproduce the Greek masterpieces not only by people who were poets
for the occasion, like Lord Derby or Miss Swanwick, but also by the
masters who had already proved their greatness to the English world.
Robert Browning has given us versions of several plays, the _Agamemnon_,
the _Mad Herakles_, the _Alkestis_. In the last, he lays stress rather
on the psychological attitude of Euripides, on his character-drawing,
than on the lyrical portions, which are not reproduced in lyrical metre.
But how easily he could do this he proved to me when I asked him to
render a famous ode of the poet in a form approaching the original.
Writing to London from Dublin on a Monday, I had his version on
Wednesday evening. The original manuscript I have given to an American
friend who treasures it; the words appear in my little monograph on
Euripides published years ago.
Swinburne and Matthew Arnold have not translated old Greek dramas, but
have composed plays after that model. To an intelligent reader who has
no knowledge of Greek, I know no better approach than to read the
_Atalanta_ or the _Erechtheus_ of Swinburne, or, if he prefer it, the
_Merope_ of Arnold, which is not so great a poem as either of the
others, but just as faithful a mirror of Greek mind; for the exuberance
of Swinburne’s choruses, the unrestrained riot of his ebullitions
against the providence of the Gods, may be splendid poetry--they are
foreign to the chaste and moderate diction which characterises almost
all Greek literature. If there be a great exception, it is in the gloomy
grandeur of Æschylus, and accordingly no play has been so often
attempted in English as the _Agamemnon_.[8]
When we pass from this large influence of Greek drama to that of the
lyric fragments or the idylls and love stories of our modern poets, I am
met by an old assertion of the pedants, that the Greeks were wanting in
that love and feeling for nature which is the prerogative of the
Romantic school. I see no such contrast between Classical and Romantic.
Gray, the most classical of our lyric poets, was the first to insist
upon the necessity of a poet refreshing his soul with the wild beauties
of mountain scenery. If we had more of Sappho, we should find that she
too was romantic in that as in every other reasonable sense. The last
fragment recovered, which prophesies that her girl friend will shine at
Sardis like the moon among the stars in a summer night, paints the
splendours of such a night in the glowing colours of a true poet of
nature. There is in Theocritus, there is in Apollonius, ample evidence
of a delight in the sights, and still more the sounds, of nature, and so
the most classical of our modern lyric poets, Tennyson, shows great
intimacy with Theocritus, and takes not only his images but still more
his tone from that delightful original. Such images as
Sleep that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,
and again,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmurings of innumerable bees,
are, if not translated from Theocritus, certainly suggested by him. A
more explicit borrowing from the Greek will be found in the comparison
of a strong man’s biceps to the passing of running water over a stone
that does not break it:
And bared the knotted column of his throat,
The massive square of his heroic breast,
And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.
But in every page of that poet which is not mere familiar home life, I
feel in the splendour of his style the very echo of Greek work, and I
can well imagine how Euripides would have revelled in the lines,
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
The influence of Greek comedy is too complicated to be discussed at the
close of this discourse. For the greatest of the Greek masters,
Aristophanes, has so intensely Attic a quality that we might as well try
to imitate the work of Phidias. But his genteel successor Menander has
become, through the versions of Plautus and Terence, the father of
genteel comedy in Europe. He was extravagantly praised and popular in
decadent Greece. I for one cannot hold that his legacy stands high among
the priceless treasures bequeathed to us by his nation. But of his
influence there can be no question.[9]
It remains for me to say a word to those who ask how far this great
poetry of the Greeks was reduced to theory, among a nation who loved to
reduce everything to theory. The climax of this tendency is shown in the
work of Aristotle, as we shall see in another connection, and Aristotle
has either written, or caused to be written, among his multifarious
tracts, an essay called the _Poetic_, which is mainly, so far as we have
it, an analysis of the meaning of Tragic poetry. There are, no doubt,
some very important utterances in this tract, notably the famous
definition of tragedy, upon which so many volumes have been written.
But, on the whole, I know no poorer and more jejune exposition of a
great subject, so much so that I cannot but suspect that it is one of
the many outlying researches that he entrusted to his pupils. Here is
the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of
Aristotle: In the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ Euripides has given us one
distinct type in his wonderful gallery of heroines, all facing death for
the real or supposed public good, either freely or under the coercion of
cowardly or cruel princes. This Iphigenia is a young fresh creature just
blooming into life, and she hears the first news of her fate with an
outburst of passionate tears, and of supplication against the cruel
sentence. Yet presently, when she finds her doom sealed, she resigns
herself with the splendid dignity of an inborn gentlewoman, and so adds
greatly to the “pity and the terror” of the tragedy.
The author of the _Poetic_ says the character is not consistently drawn,
and therefore faulty. What a contemptible judgment! It is only to be
matched by the observation of the worthless pedant who tells us in his
_scholium_ that the Medea of Euripides had no business to shed tears
over her children, as she was a hard and cruel character and about to
murder them. So again this Aristotle says that poetry is essentially
different from prose, and gives as an example that the work of Herodotus
would not cease to be history even were it cast in metrical form. This
observation misses the deeper distinction of poetic and prosaic thought,
which does not depend on metrical form. There are many passages in
Herodotus which despite their prose form are essentially poetry, as we
shall see in the next lecture.
These criticisms will, I trust, console you when I add that I have no
time left for a full consideration of the _Poetic_. It is not always
given to those who do great work to expound how they did it. Even among
the Greeks there was a current theory that the poet suffered under that
divine madness which we call inspiration, and knew not the full force of
what the Muse spoke through his lips. That this inspiration did not
dispense with careful preparation, with elaborate metrical perfection, I
have already told you. We have but recently learned from the _Persians_
of Timotheus that this metrical perfection may also be used to convey
the most ludicrously silly conceits.
Let us therefore take what Time has left us with thankfulness, and not
disturb ourselves or mar our enjoyment by the application of barren
theories. From Homer to the _Anthology_, you can find great poems and
splendid fragments that will exalt you into the higher world reserved
for those that can lay aside material cares. There you will enlarge the
wealth of your souls; there you will enter upon the heritage left you by
those that had attained and taken possession of the ideal to which all
our love of beauty tends as its goal. But let me repeat to those who
cannot quaff this poetry at the source: take it from the vessels of the
English poets that are ready to your hands, not from the laboured prose
of the modern scholar. Take Calverley’s Theocritus; take Browning’s
Euripides; take Whitelaw’s Sophocles; take Frere’s Aristophanes. Thus
may you reach not the real shrine, but, like some proselyte of old, the
outer court of the matchless Temple.
III
GREEK PROSE
I suppose the ordinary critic, when reviewing the great subject before
us, would hardly think to-day’s title one of sufficient importance to
occupy a Boston audience, and yet it ought to be shown that in prose,
fully as much as in poetry, the Greeks have been the teachers of
civilised Europe. Probably also the subject will have to you this
interest, that it is not at all so obvious as that of the last lecture.
Everyone knows about the Greek poets; many of them are the household
property of the modern world. But the origin and the development of
Greek prose is not so generally studied, and its far-reaching influence
not so widely understood. Moreover, we know something more of the early
stages of its history, and though it also surprises us with its absolute
perfection in our earliest authors, and seems to leap from the brain of
the god as fully armed as the poetry of Homer, yet we _have_ some traces
of earlier efforts; we have some inkling of what went before Herodotus,
more than we have of what went before Homer. That is mostly due to the
late origin of prose writing among the Greeks. At first, verse form was
universal for recording all topics of interest. Even genealogies were
composed in hexameters. All the proverbial wisdom of the Seven Sages was
in metrical form. Solon, the greatest of these sages, even preaches his
politics, and gives us his autobiography, in elegiac metre. We seem to
have travelled a long way from the epoch when such a man as Mr.
Gladstone or Mr. Roosevelt would address the Senate or the people in
verse; yet for all that Solon was a lawgiver, probably as great as
either of them, and a very modern man, too, far more modern in tone and
spirit than Mr. Gladstone. Nor am I sure that Mr. Roosevelt would not
enjoy composing his messages to his Senate in verse; still less should I
affirm that the German Emperor would not revel in heroic verse, as the
proper vehicle for his exhortations to his subjects.
I note this in order to bring home to you the fact that late in Greek
spiritual history the greatest men and their audiences remained
satisfied with the shackles of metre, as conveying serious teaching in a
more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the
beginning of society, when there are no written records, men are wont
to clothe their legends and tales in that form, as it is a great aid to
the memory, and can be easily taught to children, who remember the sound
long before they pay attention to the sense. I will not speak of
inscriptions in prose, as they are not intended in early days for works
of art, any more than the earliest letters, which are mere messages
conveyed by writing.
But there _was_ an early attempt made, in the rich society of Ionia, to
clothe thought in an artistic form without the shackles of metre, and
that was the writing of the philosopher Heracleitus. I will speak of his
great and pregnant theory hereafter; what concerns us now is that his
obscure aphorisms were intended to strike the reader by their form, as
well as their matter.
He had apparently a single predecessor in Pherecydes of Syros. The
subjugation of Ionia by the Persians, and especially the fall of
Miletus, seem to have put an end to this early picturesque writing and
thinking until it woke up as the scientific vehicle of the Greek school
of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.
It was in the opposite extreme of the Greek world, the far west, peopled
mainly not by Ionians but by Dorians, that literary prose made a new
beginning, which no political changes were able to crush, till all
Greece fell under foreign domination. The first of these attempts was
the composition, at Syracuse, of a treatise teaching citizens how to
plead their cases in court. It was a time when revolutions in the state
and consequent changes of property, arising from confiscations and
exiles, often reversed by a turn of the wheel of fortune, made it vital
for every plaintiff or defendant to be able to prove his case to a jury
by persuasion. This school, though Doric in origin, passed to Attica,
bred there a school of famous pleaders, from Antiphon to Demosthenes,
who paid the closest attention to the form of their speeches, and so
perfected the eloquence of the bar for all time.
In strong contrast to this school was the eloquence of display, referred
to Gorgias as its earliest master, which made elegant composition and
splendid delivery an end in itself, and, in the hands of the educators
called Sophists, often chose a contemptible or repulsive subject in
order to show how even the most trivial cause was capable of
glorification by art, just as Teniers makes the pothouse and its drunken
boors fit to take their place among the treasures that decorate a great
mansion.
In these widely contrasted pursuits of careful speaking, there were
several points in common. In both, the subject was either ephemeral or
might be trivial; it was the _treatment_ which was the great point of
interest and which gave rise to theories and systems. In neither was it
the intention to instruct or improve the hearer. In the one, to effect
persuasion for the moment, in the other to gain admiration for the
moment, was the object of the speaker. In both also, though most
carefully composed, was the written word wholly subordinate to the
spoken sound. When these studies first arose, there was as yet no
reading public, no gathering of books, and studying them at home; but a
public vastly fond of talking, and of hearing brilliant talk.
There were other occasions and interests in Greek life, where the
_subject_ was of such paramount importance, that for a long time style
was regarded with suspicion, as giving a flavour of unreality to the
statements of the speaker or writer. One was the narrative of those
events that had taken place in past time; the other was the grave
deliberation of public men regarding the future of the state, questions
of justice and of policy in the treatment of citizens, or in the dealing
with neighbouring powers. The earlier leaders of Greece, such as
Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles, and the ambitious men who made
themselves tyrants, all must have studied the art of persuasion with due
care, but it was not for some generations that a professional orator
like Demosthenes was intrusted with the charge of public affairs, and
that the words orator and politician came to mean the same thing. Yet
even here, the tendency in the Greek mind to submit everything to law
and training, to turn every kind of human work into an art, was so
strong, that no form of prose writing escaped this schooling, and all of
it shows a strictness of rhetorical form which seems, at first study of
it, artificial, until we come to learn that the highest products of
human art are not spontaneous, but the result of careful reflection.
While these various efforts towards spoken eloquence were occupying men,
we find that early annalists set down either in rude metrical form, or
even in prose, past events, thus laying the foundation for the greatest
development of prose. I mean history, not merely as a record of past
events, but as an artistic product, on the same level as dramatic poetry
or as fresco painting.[10] The earlier attempts are known to us only
through names and scraps of writing; we cannot now tell how far Hecatæus
and Xanthus the Lydian were historians in the artistic sense; but there
is no doubt whatever that in Herodotus the Greeks have given not only to
the ancient, but to the modern world, a model of the _art_ of history
which has never been excelled. And as if that were not enough, we have
in Thucydides another model (one which professes not the charm of
artistic narrative, but the strict analysis of positive facts) and in
this model, which has imposed itself, or has imposed, on generations of
historians, we have another specimen of the use of prose, which is
likewise the highest model of the so-called _science_ of history. This
latter instance is all the more remarkable because the writer did not,
like Herodotus, chose a great world-subject, but a long and dull civil
war, in which no gigantic interests were at stake, and yet by his
consummate art, by his intense seriousness, little skirmishes in which a
few hundreds of men were engaged have become household words in modern
life, while elsewhere many a shock of myriads has past into oblivion.
Thus the little actions of the Athenian Phormio with his well trained
boats against a superior force have given rise to a far larger
literature than the great world-battles of Actium or Lepanto in the
same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter.
As I think it easier to impress a modern audience with the importance of
Greek prose style in this particular branch of its excellence, I shall
put it in the foremost place. Nothing strikes a reader of the _Poetic_
of Aristotle (or of the treatise so called) as more incompetent than the
illustration the writer uses to show that dramatic poetry is more
philosophical than history. He says that the former portrays the general
features of human character, as they must naturally develop, whereas
history has no object but to narrate the details of what has happened,
_e.g._ what Alcibiades did or suffered. I have already pointed out to
you the astounding stupidity with which he has criticised the
development of a noble tragic character by a great dramatist--the
_Iphigenia in Aulis_ of Euripides. His notion of the portraiture of
human nature as it ought to develop is one of commonplace consistency,
excluding all those storms and passions which suddenly supervene and
which give to human character all its interest and its variety.
I have spoken to you of Aristotle’s judgments on tragic characters; but
I am now concerned with his view of history, as a mere narrative of
particulars, and I come to consider again his statement that Herodotus
if put into metre would nevertheless be only history, and not dramatic
poetry. It is a curious thing that we can here refute the critic from
historical facts which he should have, nay must have, known. One episode
in the history of Herodotus had already become a famous tragedy in the
hands of Æschylus, whom we may fairly assert to be a very excellent
judge of what was proper for a tragic subject. Another historic episode,
the _Fall of Miletus_, was made the subject of a tragedy by Phrynichus,
and if it displeased the Attic audience, who fined the poet, it was not
because the subject was failing in tragic interest, but because it
possessed too much, for it melted the whole audience into tears, and
brought home to them their present misfortunes, as well as their recent
blunders in policy, and their craven desertion of their kindred in
Ionia.
The whole essence of prose history, as an art, first comprehended by
Herodotus, is to regard the course of human affairs not as a mere
catalogue of events but as a great human drama depending on large and
eternal principles, wherein the rise and fall of great nations, still
more the rise and fall of the great men who sway great nations, afford
us the contemplation of “deeds, or series of events of importance and
completeness, producing through the excitement of the feelings of pity
and terror in the reader the purification of these emotions.” Aristotle
adds to this his definition of tragedy that the subject must be
sweetened by graces of diction in every part, and this is exactly what
the first great historian did, and what every one of his successors is
bound to do, if his work is to live as a work of art, and not to be laid
by as a mere repertory for learned reference. History as a matter of
style is therefore one of the great legacies of the Greeks to mankind.