tragedy in Aristotle. He does so also in his subject. This must be great
or dignified, it must have completeness in itself, and it must contain
those changes of fortune which are so peculiarly affecting to every
reader. The struggle between Persia and Greece, its inception, its
varying fortunes, the subjugation of Ionia, the anguish of Greece--all
leading to the climax at Salamis and Platea, and the craven flight of
Xerxes to his home--what greater or more complete subject could a
historian choose? And in order to sweeten it with words, there are many
pauses in the action, filled with delightful digressions, far more
various and more restful than the choruses in a Greek tragedy. These,
and all the main narrative, and the dramatic dialogues which he
composes for his actors, are presented to us in that easy and flowing
style which seems natural and obvious, because it is the most perfect
art.
I do not know whether this admirable simplicity is ever the spontaneous
product of human genius. Whenever I have been able to reach the
evidence, I have found it the result of great labour and fastidious
care. I will give you an instance. There was no one more remarkable in
Europe in his generation for pellucid simplicity of style than Ernest
Renan. I once saw in a friend’s room a proof which Renan had sent him
for revision. I was not allowed to study it, but a glance showed me that
a thin strip of printed matter, the first draft, had been laid down on a
large blue sheet of paper, all the wide margins of which were covered
with corrections, alterations, and rehandlings of the printed sentences.
There was much erased, much added, much changed more than once. There
was perhaps three times as much in the corrections as in the original
draft. The result, as we know, was something so easy and natural that it
seemed to have flowed without the smallest effort from his pen.
But Herodotus is not the only model by whom the Greeks have established
a standard for modern writers. He has about him the air of a
story-teller, and he repeats many legends and wonders, so that graver
and more sceptical generations set him down as a credulous traveller
easily deceived by lying reports, if not as a deliberate writer of
fiction. So many of these so-called lies or inventions have turned out
after all to be true or probable (_e.g._, the tradition that the
Etruscans came to Italy from the coast of Asia Minor by sea) that even
from this point of view Herodotus has been vindicated by modern
research.
If you want a model of the other kind of history--that which professes
to be a sober record of carefully sifted facts, which professes to
discard all that is miraculous or legendary, and insist upon testimony,
then in the opinion of all the ages you find its perfection in
Thucydides. There used to be a general agreement that in contrast to the
obviously artistic turn of Herodotus, his successor had exalted history,
as far as was possible, to the rank of an exact science. We now know
that this view is very far from the truth. Thucydides, as his speeches
should always have clearly demonstrated, was an artist just as
consciously as Herodotus, nay rather a more subtle artist, in that he
concealed his art and deluded mankind under the guise of a solemn and
dignified person, telling nothing but the unvarnished truth.[11] For he
too felt that the tragedies of human affairs were a fit and noble
subject for the contemplation of men; he too felt that the lessons
conveyed by the catastrophes in the affairs of brilliant polities and
brilliant men are as valuable as those borrowed from legendary story for
the tragic stage. The speeches he puts into the mouths of his characters
are not those actually delivered, either in language, or probably even
in substance. They are rather rhetorical expositions of the political
situations, as the historian conceived them, and reflections which he
thinks the reader ought to make. He also knows the more modern way of
dealing with this side of history. His reflections on the Corcyrean
massacre[12] are a famous specimen of this artistic or subjective
writing. I have taken pains elsewhere to show that his picture of the
degradation of politics in Greece so far as he represents it to be new
and sudden, is false. All the vices which make up his brilliant but
lurid sketch were old, well known, and ingrained in the Greek
character.[13] But it was part of his artistic scheme to represent the
vices of that age, and especially at Athens, culminating in a brutal and
wholly unhistorical dialogue with the Melians, as the proper prelude to
the great disaster in Sicily and the consequent fall of Athens. Thus
choosing a far smaller and poorer subject than Herodotus, treating it
also in a far poorer and narrower way, he has by those very restrictions
intensified his book, and infused into it such dignity and pathos as to
make it artistically worthy of the age of Phidias, of Aristophanes, of
Socrates.
When we ask whether the diction of this great work is adequate to its
artistic conception, the answer is not, I think, far to seek. There are
two kinds of diction in Thucydides, a clear, chaste attractive narrative
of facts, without ornament, but rising with its subject to a pathetic
earnestness, which has seldom been surpassed. This narrative, like the
dialogue of tragedy, is interrupted at suitable moments by the pretended
speeches of the actors, which by a curious inversion are like the chorus
in the play, giving the motives of the action and often the disguised
opinions of the writer. These are expressed in obscure and contorted
language, which ancient critics did not hesitate to stigmatise as
thoroughly bad style. With models of clearness before him, such as
Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon, this fault is an idiosyncrasy of
Thucydides, and yet a defect which has not failed to bring to him
certain advantages. For obscurity always produces the impression of
profundity, especially when it occurs in a solid and weighty author.
Thus the many platitudes in Thucydides’ speeches, and the recurrence of
obvious ideas, are disguised by contortions of expression, so that the
discovery of the meaning is a mental exercise which flatters and thus
pleases the reader, if he be curious in such things, still more the
commentator, who finds wonderful scope for his often mediocre talent in
such labour. This is the quality in Mr. George Meredith who makes his
admirers think highly of themselves, while they despise others.[14]
Time fails me to illustrate further, in Xenophon and in Polybius, this
artistic conception of a period of human history as a great drama, in
which the rise, the splendour, and the fall of great men, great cities,
great nations are told us with artistic selection of the details and
artistic perfection of style. This was the conception which moved Gibbon
to write the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. He saw around him,
at Rome, the gigantic relics of a bygone civilisation. He felt within
him the power of style to present the facts in adequate form; and so we
obtained another work of art, in which the presentation of the facts is
not less important than the facts themselves. As the Greeks put it over
and over again, and as Cicero repeats it, history is a form of
eloquence, and _that_ history only will last which possesses the _sine
qua non_ of a great or an attractive style. This is what the Greeks have
taught us, and what many of us have ignored to our own ruin as permanent
teachers.
I will conclude this part of my subject by reminding you that in
biography, which as the idyll gives a single scene, or as a cameo gives
the portrait of an individual--Plutarch has been the model to all modern
biographers. How truly dramatic was his conception and his treatment of
individual great lives will come home to you at once when I remind you
that Shakespeare found in his _Lives_ subjects for a series of
tragedies, and in his diction language which required very little
paraphrase.
Let us now turn back to the sister developments of eloquence, wherein
the writing of history had accomplished such triumphs. These are in
brief the eloquence of debate, and the eloquence of display. And the
eloquence of debate may either be that of the courts, wherein private
individuals, the plaintiff and defendant, are pitted one against the
other, or that of the public assembly, where political deliberations are
held and in which the orator seeks to persuade the majority to adopt his
policy or to reject the policy of a political opponent. Remember that in
all these cases the Greeks were equally adverse to extemporaneous
effusions. They believed in the artistic arrangement and polished
expression of every argument. In the law courts, where litigants had to
appear in person, and not by counsel, it was the advocate’s duty to
compose the client’s speech for him beforehand, and probably to instruct
him in its proper delivery. As we never hear of any breaking down in
court, of any client unable to remember or speak out what the advocate
had prepared for him, I think it possible that the litigants were
allowed to read their speeches. In any case, the composition of these
speeches became a well-known and lucrative profession, and was
accordingly adopted by the ablest men. The practice had long suggested
the theory, and so from early times there were treatises composed, known
as τέχναι, wherein the subtleties of the art of persuasion were
carefully analysed and reduced to rule. The early treatises of this kind
are lost, but we feel their results in the remains of Antiphon and
Isæus, and can affirm that they were eminently practical, and thoroughly
opposed to the froth and fury of what we call popular eloquence. The use
of figures of speech is reduced to a minimum, the so-called flowers of
rhetoric are wholly absent. All is tame, severe, temperate, not
pretending to influence the passions but to convince the reason. And yet
this latter is to be done not by speaking the language of the heart, but
by the careful training of the intellect, and the perfection of the
delivery.[15] To us moderns these things appear at first hearing to
flavour of artificiality; the great bugbear of the modern mind, which
contrasts it with the purity and sincerity of nature. The Greeks knew
this contrast perfectly, and they met it, not by the folly of leaving
nature to follow its own devices, but by making nature the highest
artistic product. Thus the court advocates, composing for various
clients, studied not only the proper arguments to be urged, but that
these arguments must be presented “in character” and so they carefully
kept before them the personality of the speaker. In Lysias especially,
this expression of character in the speaker is part of his art, which so
perfectly apes simplicity that it requires a careful analysis to detect
behind the simple utterance of the homely citizen the subtle
rhetorician.
This refinement of legal rhetoric seems to me to have been disregarded
or abandoned when the pleaders became so celebrated that the fiction of
a client speaking for himself was no longer plausible, and when the
public that thronged the courts went to hear an oration of Demosthenes
or Hypereides delivered by his client. Hence the speeches of Demosthenes
are not so various in ethos, and many of them being delivered about his
own private affairs, had already taught the public to recognise his
great style. In particular, so many of his orations were not court
speeches but political harangues that this latter branch of eloquence
may be regarded as that in which he best showed his pre-eminence. And
there are not a few instances where the ostensible case was only an
excuse for promoting or vindicating a great policy. The acme of all this
branch of Greek literature is the famous _de Corona_ of Demosthenes,
which great lawyers and political orators like Lord Brougham have
declared to be the very _ne plus ultra_ of eloquence intended not only
to persuade, but also to persuade by all the arts of subtle logic, of
brilliant sophistry, of red hot argument. And remember men like Lord
Brougham, though infinitely better practical judges of the effect of
such a speech than are mere scholars, did not know one tithe of the
subtleties of style, which have only been detected by the minute
studies, not only of the old Greek critics, but of modern German
scholars.
Even in such a mighty speech as this you will notice the very scanty use
of ornament. There are none of what we moderns call the flowers of
rhetoric; there is no sounding peroration. It is the picture of a grave
patriot vindicating his life’s work against the carping of his enemies
and the criticism of his opponents. There are indeed passages of gross
vituperation, wherein by scathing reflections on his opponent’s previous
life, he replies to Æschines’ insinuations about his private character.
Nor has the character of Æschines ever recovered from this “raking of
his record,” which was probably not at all kept within the limits of the
truth. But the restraints which have been usual among modern gentlemen
in debate, especially the modern English gentlemen of the last century,
were not regarded as essential to the dignity of the highest Greek court
oration, and that was probably because the jury was composed of the
middle and lower classes who were not shocked by any want of refinement.
Notwithstanding this limitation, there can be no question that in the
oratory of debate the Greeks taught the Romans, then through them
Mediæval Europe, then after the Renaissance, modern Europe directly, so
that even now they are the acknowledged masters in this splendid art. It
is all the more astonishing, as we might naturally think that a society
without printing and consequently without a great reading public would
not have aimed at producing an eloquence which was not only splendid to
read when the heat of controversy was allayed, but worthy of study and
of analysis by the critics of succeeding generations. Nevertheless, with
no better means of publication for readers than manuscript copies, and
without any hope of great celebrity, or of great profit as the authors
of written speeches, these Greeks produced work which has perfectly
stood the test even of new and exacting conditions. In spite of their
limited public, the orators had attained to as clear a notion as we have
of the importance of appealing to a reading and thinking public which
could study their arguments and their style at full leisure, and so, not
content with the orations primarily intended for delivery, they also
perfected the prose essay, and even the prose dialogue, a very peculiar
form of literature, inasmuch as it is the literary stereotyping of an
apparently spontaneous conversation.
But when I speak of a reading public, perhaps I should limit it
somewhat, and say a public accustomed to hear reading aloud. That is the
intermediate stage between a mere audience and the mere readers of
books. I am quite accustomed to that intermediate stage in Ireland. You
may see there any day groups of people hearing a newspaper or book read
out, and if the great body of the public is of this class, then the
writer must think not only of what he has to say but how it will sound
when read aloud. I take the same principle to have animated the
composers of the splendid English Book of Common Prayer. They desired to
affect the hearer not only by the sentiment, but by the sound of their
Liturgy. Now this is the very step in prose writing which was taken by
the Greek students of eloquence, and most notably by Isocrates, the
father of the political prose essay in Europe.
There were no doubt accidental or personal causes which conspired to
this result at this moment. Isocrates, with great natural gifts for
style and for composition, was wholly deficient in voice and in physique
for the profession of public speaking, nor had he the extraordinary
energy and perseverance shown by Demosthenes in overcoming these
defects. So it occurred to him that he might exercise his influence by
prose writing in the form of open letters or political pamphlets, where
he puts his thoughts into the most polished periods and the most refined
language.
I cannot but quote to you a curious parallel of a man of genius turning
a natural defect into a splendid success. When Richard Wagner began to
compose operas of the received form, he failed because of his want of
facility to produce a sustained melody. He then bethought himself of the
use of short phrases instead of sustained songs, and in spite of his
original defect he has obtained a very great and deserved popularity.
There are, of course, other great qualities in Wagner, especially his
novel and splendid use of the orchestra. But the question of melody is
always the vital one in music, and no man ever attained the first rank
that has left us so few sustained melodies. His _Rienzi_ shows what he
could do when he attempted them.
The laws of prose composition, as devised and perfected by Isocrates,
are the most subtle and complete ever put into practice by any living
man, and though of course some of them are only applicable to the Greek
language, and indeed to Attic Greek, the general principles he expounded
have been applied by many writers and in many languages.[16] It is well
known that Cicero modelled himself on this style and through him it
became dominant in Europe. The greatest English example in older days is
the _Areopagitica_ of Milton, who though manifestly inspired by
Isocrates, is far from possessing his perfect control of language,
perfect smoothness of period, perfect clearness of thinking, all of
which make up the charm of the great master. Isocrates was the teacher
of this great style, not only to pleaders and pamphleteers, but to
historians, and he was blamed for making men like Ephorus and
Theopompus, his favourite pupils, in writing their once famous works,
think more of their diction than of their impartiality or their
research. But surely the duty of making history eloquent, such as we
have it in Gibbon, is of paramount value. To this I shall not now
return. I rather desire to call your attention to the supremacy of a
great periodic style even in English, and in these latter days, when
brevity, epigram, impatience of style and an affected neglect of form
are in high fashion. Among the writers of the 19th century, I take by
far the greatest stylist to be John Ruskin, and I consider that far the
largest part of his influence arose not from his ideas, which were often
fantastic, but from the admirable way in which they were set forth. But
he was essentially the master of the long period, for with him you may
find a whole page consisting of one grand sentence, in which many
clauses are co-ordinated, many lesser ideas balanced, many strands woven
into the one great tissue which comes from the writer’s pen as from a
loom. And that is the reason why he was a greater stylist than all the
Froudes and Newmans and Paters, who either use short sentences, or if
they attempt the period, are neither melodious nor clear.
The same law holds good in eloquence, when we can find a master to
illustrate it. The two greatest English orators I have heard during the
last generation were Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Magee. Both dealt in
the long period--the former from constant habit, which was even notable
in his ordinary life, and which spoilt his conversation; the other, who
was brief and pungent enough in ordinary talk, trained himself upon the
model of Chalmers, a great Scotch orator before my day. I have seen
Magee’s copy of Chalmers, and have noted how minutely he had dissected
and analysed it. But both produced the same wonderful effect by (if I
may say so) embarking the audience with them on the billows of great
periods, which excited wonder how they would ever come safely to land.
The rounding off and concluding of such a period not only with safety
but with splendour produced an effect upon their audience unlike
anything else that I have experienced. The style of neither, though both
knew Greek well, was based directly on Isocrates; but most certainly
their speech was based upon the principles he had taught and impressed
so well upon Cicero and his like, upon Milton, upon Jeremy Taylor, upon
Edmund Burke, all of whom appreciated and practised this supreme prose
style.
But if the Greeks here showed the modern world the model of the highest
perfection in the prose essay, they would not have been Greeks if they
had not also shown us the perfection of easy conversation, of everyday
talk, of the play of various styles, and the expression of various
characters in the cultivated language of the day. And so Plato in his
_Dialogues_ has shown the world an unapproachable example of
conversation raised to a high art, which again created a distinct
literary form that has never died out.[17]
All these developments are (with the exception of biography) those of
the Golden Age of Greek Literature, and are the discovery of great
masters who were the glory of that age. But as we shall see frequently
in the course of these lectures, the silver age of Greece was almost as
fruitful in the creation of models for the imitation of modern Europe.
It was only after a great body of splendid authors had lived, that we
could expect to find literary criticism assuming an important place. For
the literary critic is after all a sort of parasite, who lives on the
bodies of greater and more dignified animals. We know that when the
library of Alexandria came to be collected, and the sifting of authors
and of the texts of authors became necessary, there arose a great school
of critical scholars, who purified the received copies, who apportioned
the respective value of the texts, and who developed that censorious
attitude toward the classical masterpieces which is the bane of the
modern world. We still have in the critical essays of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus and still more in the Tract on the Sublime, belonging to
the 1st century A.D., excellent models of what is good and useful in
this reflexive attitude of a later age, and of second rate ability. The
great age of production had been very simple and naïve in criticism; the
attitude of Aristophanes, and even of Plato, in judging poets is merely
a moral judgment and seems never to take into consideration æsthetic
questions. In the Tract on the Sublime we find quite a modern
standpoint, and the judgments of this author have had no small effect on
the literature of the last century. No less a person than Edmund Burke
thought it worth while to translate this tract, and how wide was the
author’s sympathy will appear at once from this fact, that he quotes as
a signal instance of the sublime the opening of a work far removed in
spirit from classical Greek literature--the book of _Genesis_, in the
Greek version.
I need not delay over the many and various Epistles left us by the
Greeks, and which you may see collected in one of Didot’s big volumes of
_Epistolographi Graeci_. But I do not think that we can call letter
writing a distinct form of literature, and it is very certain that every
nation that could use writing materials could hardly fail to adopt it
in some form. Nor do I think the letters extant are in any way
remarkable, perhaps because most of them are the compilations of men
attributing these documents falsely to the great ancients. The letters
ascribed to Plato, Isocrates, and others give us nothing additional of
literary importance.[18] I will therefore pass from these, as well as
from the moral harangues of the later rhetors and sophists of whom Dion
Chrysostom is far the most interesting. I wish modern sermons would
borrow more from this admirable and little used source, for Dion was a
man of the world, a traveller, a sound moral teacher, and gifted with a
great taste for the picturesque.