pathos of the Hebrew rose to heights and descended to depths utterly
beyond the consciousness of the ordinary Hellene, the Hellenes, on the
contrary, attained to a justness of intellectual and artistic perception
which formed no part of the ordinary Hebrew culture. The general manner
of all the Hebrew prophets, of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Joel, is
the same--the manner of the fiercest afflatus, of entire abandonment,
finding expression in phrases of magnificent solemnity and in imagery
of the profoundest awesomeness. This manner the Greeks never show. Not
even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which
he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene
sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place in
the Greek comprehension for that state of mind which can beget visions
like these: "And I looked, and behold! A whirlwind came out of the
north, a gray cloud and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was
about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of
the midst of the fire"--with the further visions of living creatures
"like burning coals of fire," and the "wheels within wheels," with the
rings of them full of eyes. To this there is not and could not be any
parallel in the Greek. When the Persian queen in AEschylus dreams the
most startling dream of her life, it is obviously a vision constructed
by the poet's intellect alone. When Plato sees visions, they, too, are
intellectual constructions with the meaning as clear as the words. There
is nothing rapt, nothing fantastic. Greek imagery in this region is to
Hebrew imagery what the sculpture of Greece is to those weird creations
of symbolism at Nineveh and Babylon, the colossal human-faced bulls and
the genii with the eagle-head. And if you remind me that I am comparing
prophet with poet, and not prophet with prophet, I answer that the poets
are the only analogue of the prophets that Greece possessed; and that
very fact illustrates what is meant when we say that the Hellenic spirit
had no capacity for, the Hellenic view of life no impulse to, that
intensity of feeling which could produce imagery so stupendous in such
awe-inspiring phrase.
The Hebraic character, therefore, is one of strength and depth. Even now
no Jew in fiction is ever a weakling or a trifler. In whatever light he
is presented, a Shylock of Shakespeare, an Isaac of Scott, a Nathan of
Lessing, a Sidonia of Disraeli--revengeful, avaricious, bigoted,
benevolent, magnificent, talented--he is always a character of striking
power and intensity. The ancient type of Greek does not appear in modern
fiction. If he did, it would be as a subtle reasoner, perfect critic,
polished man of the world, full of the intellectual and social graces,
ever adaptable to circumstance, choosing his idea and never letting the
idea govern him. And, in the matter of loves and hates, it was rather
his maxim that one should neither hate nor love over-much, since he
might some day come to hate the person he loved and love the person he
hated. The Hellenic watchwords "nothing too much"; and "measure in
everything"; the Hellenic hatred of "unseasonableness" and dread of
"infatuation"--these things show how the ideal of the Greek was ever to
be master of himself by aid of reason. The Hebraic spirit, on the
contrary, would strive and cry without scruple of measure or season in
any matter on which its conscience or desire was fixed.
The Hebraic spirit is uncompromising; it does not readily admit other
points of view. Hebrew history, for example, is wholly one-sided, seen
wholly in the colour of a Hebrew's feelings. The peoples with whom
Israel comes in contact are either so many impious men made to be slain,
or they are wicked tyrants, allowed by Heaven to chastise the chosen for
some allotted period. This was the necessary outcome of the theocratic
principle. How different from history as written by the Greek
Thucydides! To that historian facts are so many facts, to be seen as
they are, and to be told without undue enthusiasm, without obtrusive
expression of moral approval or disapproval. Never since those Hellenic
days has a historian been able so perfectly to contemplate the triumphs
and disasters of his own country as if himself quite aloof from personal
interest or stake in the result. Unclouded vision, purely intellectual
observation, could no further go.
With such temperaments and mental habits, what view of life did the
Hebrews entertain, and what the Hellenes? Our view of life is in the
greatest measure a matter of religion or non-religion, and the Hebrews
possessed a highly spiritualised and devotional religion, while the
Greeks, if not easy-going polytheists, had at best some rationalistic
system of philosophy. The difference is immense. The Hebrew creed, a
real and absorbing belief, involved a certain code of laws for the
guidance of conduct, certain definite sentiments, certain definite hopes
and fears, certain definite axioms as to the aim and end of existence.
The highest good and the worst evil had for the Hebrews unmistakable
senses. It was not so with the Greeks. They too--when they thought at
all--sought for a systematic conception of life, but not for one in
which they should be subordinated to some authority outside themselves.
They desired to see life steadily and see it whole, but they must do so
by the light of their intellect. Their conduct, aims, sentiments, hopes,
fears, must depend upon axioms to which their reasoning brought them.
What the Hebrews called sin in the sight of Heaven, the Greeks called an
error or an offence to society. It was wrong socially, or it was wrong
intellectually. Greece therefore had no place for religious fervour. It
was tolerant almost to indifference. Athens might arraign Anaxagoras for
impiety or Socrates for heresy, but these charges were either mere
pretexts or were viewed simply in their social bearing. When a Hebrew
speaks of a valley full of dry bones, and of life being breathed into
them, we know that he is speaking in the moral sense. A Hellene would
have meant a revival of intelligence. The Hebrew prophet speaks of
"taking the heart of stone out of them and giving them a heart of
flesh." A Plato would rather have spoken of taking the films from their
intellectual gaze and opening their eyes to the pure essences of things.
The Hebrew would sit in sackcloth and ashes to atone for his offences
and to induce the proper spiritual submission. The Hellene would only
fast, if he fasted at all, so that he might by his plain living secure
high thinking. No ardent missionaries, Jonahs or Pauls, could come out
of Greece; it could produce no martyrs. The _De Profundis_ of a Greek
would signify, not moral abasement, but physical and mental suffering.
Not that the Hellenes were shallow. Far from it. Racially, indeed, they
had neither the Hebraic zeal nor the Hebraic conscience. But of vastly
more importance is the fact that in their conception of life they
started with different premises. They found themselves in life, their
hope ending with life, and their object was to make the best and
happiest of it. The hereafter was not pleasant to contemplate. Achilles,
when he meets Odysseus in the netherworld, declares that he would rather
be a poor labouring thrall on earth than a king among the dead. Had the
Hellenes been shown the modern doctrine of evolution, it is easy to
fancy how eagerly they would have sprung at it. To the Hebraic spirit it
would have been flat, stale, and unprofitable. In a word, while to the
best of Hebrews life was almost a sacrament, to the best of Hellenes
there was nothing sacramental but intelligence. The national pride of
the Hebrews lay in a religious reason--their election as a peculiar
people; the national pride of the Greeks lay in the intellectual,
social, and artistic culture which distinguished them from the
_barbaroi_. If Hellas had had its Zion, it would have meant a city which
was the pre-eminent abode of perfected human thought, society, and arts.
"The name of the city of that day shall be the 'Lord is there,'" is of
the essence of Hebraism. The Hellene would have thought of a city filled
with Hymns to Intellectual Beauty, hymns to Athena, goddess of arts and
wisdom, and to Apollo, the embodied idea of light.
In their outlook upon nature, animate and inanimate, there was a
corresponding contrast. Neither Greek nor Hebrew, indeed, contemplated
nature as we do in modern times. Neither was haunted as with a passion
by the beauty and grandeur of woods and streams and hills. To the
Hellene, as to Dr. Johnson or to Sydney Smith, nature was but a
background for man. Homer's moons and clouds, rainbows and hail-storms,
are used for the most part only for similitudes. To the Hebrew the glory
of the Heavens and the wonders of the deep are meet subjects upon which
to praise the Lord for his wonderful works. At the most, the Hellene
found in nature a sensuous delight, a part of the multitudinous joy
which, in a healthy condition, he found in all life. It is a mistake,
indeed, to suppose that the Greek was insensible to natural beauty. The
daffodils, crocuses, anemones, and hyacinths, the countless laughter of
the AEgean and the gleaming Cyclades, were delightful to his eye, the
trill of the nightingale to his ear; but neither he nor the Hebrew could
have felt much sympathy with the state of mind of a Wordsworth, to whom
nature, in and for itself, had the effect of a living and inspiring
power. Neither would have understood Wordsworth's--
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Of the Hebrew conception of nature as shown in the Psalms or the book of
Job we need say nothing. Let us by an instance or two show just how far
the Greek appreciation of it went. In Theocritus a number of friends
walk into the country to a harvest festival:--"There we reclined on deep
beds of fragrant lentisk, and rejoicing we lay in new-stripped leaves of
the vine. And high above our heads waved many a poplar, while close at
hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own cave welled forth with
murmurs musical. On shadowy boughs the brown cicalas kept their
chattering toil. Far off the little owl cried; in the thick thorn-brake
the lark and finches sang; the ringdove moaned; the yellow bees were
flitting round the springs. All breathed the scent of opulent summer, of
the season of fruits. The pears at our feet and apples by our side were
rolling plentiful; the tender branches, with wild plums laden, were
earthward bowed." Here, it will be seen, the delight is purely sensuous,
a delight in sweet sighs, sweet sounds, sweet smells. In the _OEdipus
Coloneus_ of Sophocles there is a choral song of somewhat higher note
than this: "Stranger, thou hast come to earth's fairest home, to white
Colonus, where the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note
in the covert of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the
God's inviolate bowers, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun,
unvexed by wind of any storm; where the reveller Dionysus ever walks the
ground, companion of the Nymphs, and, fed by heavenly dew, the narcissus
blooms morn by morn with fair clusters, crown of the great Goddess from
of yore, and the crocus blooms with golden beam. Nor fail the sleepless
founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless
tide he moveth over the land's swelling bosom for the giving of quick
increase."
Yet here, too, so far as the charm is not merely sensuous, Nature is but
the background for the passing of the bright Gods to whom humanity owes
progress and delights. There is nothing awesome, nothing pride-abasing,
in nature to the Hellene as to the Hebrew.
When we come to deal with art, whether plastic art or the art of
letters, there stands out the same difference of spirit. And on all
sides it is admitted that in this region Hellenism reached nearly to
perfection. It is scarcely worth while here to descant upon the work of
Phidias or Sophocles, and to analyse its excellence. In the domain of
art the word 'Hellenic' implies absolute truth of form, absolute truth
of taste, grace and elegance. It means the selecting and simplifying of
essentials into an ideal shape; and therefore it implies the absence of
all superfluity, incongruousness, bombast, extravagance or
purposelessness. The Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess
standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica;
Plato's _Apology of Socrates_ breathing serene and lucid thought in
language lucid and serene--these are the types of art as understood by
the Hellenic spirit. We nowadays prate much of real and ideal. The Greek
combined them without prating. The anatomy of a Grecian statue is
anatomically true in proportion and in pose, while the whole figure is
none the less of an ideal beauty which could rarely have existed outside
the imagination. To the French the word _emphase_ has come to mean, not
emphasis, but fustian. To the Greeks, with their love of measure, their
instinctive avoidance of the "too much," _emphase_ in letters or other
arts was irritating and distressful. Mr. Andrew Lang selects a sentence
of Macaulay: "Even the wretched phantom who still bore the imperial
title stooped to pay this ignominious blackmail." And Mr. Lang justly
says: "The picture of a phantom who is not only a phantom, but wretched,
stooping to pay blackmail which is not only blackmail, but ignominious,
may divert the reader." The Greeks were neither deceived nor diverted by
such bad art; their sympathies were chilled, and they called the thing
"frigid." Meanwhile the special art of the Hebrews is, perhaps, the art
of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, music which is so often joined to
profound emotional susceptibility. They had no statuary, their
architecture does not remain for us to criticise it, their literature
alone supplies us with material for comparison, and even in this there
is not that diversity of epic, dramatic, and lyric matter, of history,
oratory and philosophy, which we have from Greece. Nevertheless, so far
as material offers itself, we find in Hebrew art just those qualities we
might expect from Hebraism.
The Hebrews had none of the Hellenic instinct for simplicity and grace
and directness. They delighted in deep symbolism and parable, in thunder
and lightning of diction and imagery, in pomp and state and grandeur.
They felt no scruples about going beyond the golden mean. With them all
art of writing or creating was but means to an end, and not an end in
itself. Let any one read the Bible and observe its unqualified figures
of speech--how the hills skip and the floods clap their hands--and then
let them ponder this Hellenic criticism of Longinus: "AEschylus, with a
strange violence of language, represents the palace of Lycurgus as
'possessed' at the appearance of Dionysus: '_The hills with rapture
thrill, the roof's inspired._' Here Euripides, in borrowing the image,
softens its extravagance: _and all the mountain felt the God_.'"
The Hellene, you observe, is not to let his intellect lose control over
his imagination; the Hebrew wholly abandons his imagination to his
master passion.
This, you may say, is merely the difference between being inspired and
not being inspired; and it may be urged that Plato himself puts the
Greek conception otherwise:
"All good poets compose their beautiful poems, not as works of art, but
because they are inspired and possessed ... for the poet is a light and
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has
been inspired. When he has not attained to this state he is powerless
and unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets
speak of the actions which they record, but they do not speak of them by
any rules of art, they are inspired to utter that to which the Muse
impels them, and that only."
All of which is true enough, but what it amounts to is this--that
artistic rules cannot invent the poetic thought and utterance; it does
not mean that the inventing Muse ever ignores the rules of art. And, as
a matter of fact, there never is, in Hellenic poetry, anything of utter
abandonment. There is reason, warmed and coloured by sentiment and
imagination, but reason is never imperilled by any conflagration of
emotion.
We began by saying that in all our modern thought and conduct we are
either more Hebraic or more Hellenic one than another. In what Carlyle
would call our heroes, in our writers, and in our own lives, the one
spirit or the other predominates. Happy, but exceeding rare, is he who
blends the best elements of both. Literature, perhaps, affords the
readiest means of illustration. Not every sentiment, it is true, of
modern European letters has been either distinctly Hellenic or
distinctly Hebraic in its character. The spirit of romantic poetry, and
of the poetry of nature, has no analogy in Greece or Palestine.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as no great European writer has failed to pass
under the moral influence of Christianity or of Judaism, or to feel
directly or indirectly the intellectual influence of Greece, we may, in
those great voices of a generation who are called its great writers,
listen for the differing tones of these differing forces, as betrayed
either in their substance or in their form.
It is not easy to select complete types of one or the other. Roughly,
perhaps, one might speak of the Hebraic Dante, Bunyan, or Carlyle; of
the Hellenic Johnson, Goethe or Tennyson: but one could not rightly draw
up two catalogues of authors and set them in contrast as perfect
embodiments, the one of Hebraism, the other of Hellenism. On the other
hand, it is not so difficult in the case of a great writer to
distinguish his Hebraic from his Hellenic moods and manners, and to
gather how far the one element or the other holds the chief sway in him.
That Dante's moral force is Hebraic is the natural and correct
impression of one who compares the _Divine Comedy_ with the _Odyssey_ of
Homer on the one side, and with the _Psalms_ or Isaiah on the other. Yet
even in Dante there is a certain repose of contemplation and a careful
justness of language which belong rather to the Hellene. The character
of Luther, again, might seem wholly Hebraic to those who see him only as
a zealot of fiery controversy, so carried out of himself that his very
visions of Beelzebub acquired all the vividness of reality. Yet there
are times when another spirit is upon him, when his reasoning is cool
and colourless as that of a Greek philosopher. The misfortune of Luther
is that he could not, as a Melancthon in large measure could, amalgamate
the best elements of these complementary natures.
If from the names of English literature one were asked to choose our
most Hebraic poet, the name of Milton would perhaps be the first to
offer itself to many minds. Yet this would be a mere illusion. We must
not confound the subject of poetry with its spirit. The subject of
_Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_ is Hebraic;
the spirit and manner are by no means so. Distinguish in these works all
that which cannot properly be said to belong to the poet himself, the
evident paraphrase of Bible language and Bible narrative; set by itself
that which is Milton's own imagining; mark the spirit and manner which
pervade it; and it will be seen that prophetic fervour is hardly there,
profound moral enthusiasm is hardly there. What we chiefly discover is
the intellect of a theological student, working in a certain rich
material, the magnificent Miltonic diction. The true Hebraic note is
rather struck in the sonnet, "_Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,
whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold_," in that
fierce reproach of the Church in _Lycidas_, and in certain passages of
his prose. Milton is in fact a Hellene made subject to Hebraic moods by
his Hebrew studies, the Puritan Hebraism of his training, and the Hebrew
connexion of his subjects. It is when he writes _Comus_ or _L'Allegro_
that he is giving expression to his natural poetic bent. It may seem a
paradox if, on the other hand, we say that there was much of Hebraism in
one whose purity and justness of language and grace of form seem wholly
Hellenic; I mean Shelley. Shelley was intense in imagination, capable of
boundless rapture and absorption, subject to white heats of passion and
conflagration of moral wrath. In truth his nature was a rare blending,
left crude by his early death. As faultless in diction as a Hellene, in
philosophical speculation almost a copy of Plato, he was in capacity for
reaching the heights and depths of spiritual possession the equal of any
Hebrew. And this it is which makes one think that Shelley's early death
robbed us of much that would have been of quite supremest worth in
poetry.
This is not the time and place to take authors and deal with them one by
one, showing how the moral Hebraism is entirely possessed of Bunyan,
how entirely Hellenic are the spirit and style of Goethe and the clear
criticism and unperturbed intellectual processes of Johnson. I will
content myself with touching in no ordered way upon the Hebraic and
Hellenic note as it is uttered by one or two passages which I choose
almost at random. And first let us hear this passage of Carlyle:--
"A second thing I know. This lesson will have to be learned under
penalties. England will either learn it or England also will cease to
exist amongst nations. England will either learn to reverence its
heroes, and discriminate them from its sham heroes and valets and
gas-lighted histories, and to prize them as the audible God's voice
amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them with
heart loyalty, 'Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and guidance for us,'
or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of
Quackhood and so, with what resiliences and reboundings matter little,
go down to the Father of Quacks. Can I dread such things of England?
Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship lies
and stuffed cloth suits, created by the ninth parts of men? It is not
your purses that suffer, your farm rents, your commerces, your mill
revenues--loud as ye lament over these things. No, it is not these
alone, but a far deeper than these. It is your _souls_ that lie dead,
crushed down under despicable nightmares, atheisms, brain fumes."
What is there here but the uncompromising moral attitude and
denunciation of the Hebrew seer? What is there but the same stormy
phrase, tumultuous almost to chaos? Carlyle is our own era's type of the
Hebraic temperament. Behind him follows Ruskin, a Carlyle tempered by
the spirit of Hellenic art without the balance of Hellenic calm. In what
Ruskin has to say on how we live and think, his sentences are one and
all of Grecian form, but the breath they breathe is Hebrew. I read in
Swinburne this address to England:--
Oh thou clothed round with raiment of white waves,
Thy brave brows brightening through the gray wet air,
Thou lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves
And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair:
Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves
And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare:
O! by the centuries of thy glorious graves,
By the live light of th' earth that was thy care,
Live! thou must not be dead!
Live! let thine armoured head
Lift itself to sunward and the fair
Daylight of time and man,
Thine head republican,
With the same splendour on thine helmless hair
Within his eyes kept up a light,
Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight.
These verses might almost be the verses of a Greek. And this is true not
merely of the art and grace of form; it is equally true of the mental
condition of the writer. The sentiment is intellectually just, and the
expression is artistically just. Exhortation there is, a certain ardour
there is, but it is the sober and restrained ardour of the Greeks; it is
not Hebraic. But I read again of how the Armada flies:--
Torn by the scourge of the storm-wind that smites as a harper smites
on a lyre,
And consumed of the storm as the sacrifice, loved of their God, is
consumed with fire,
And devoured of the darkness as men that are slain in the fires of his
love are devoured,
And deflowered of their lives by the storms as by priests is the spirit
of life deflowered.
And here is neither Hellenic seasonableness and proportion, nor Hebraic
fervour, nor truth as it is understood by either Hebrew or Hellene. It
is the work of a man who endeavours to lash himself into an intensity
which is not of him, and who trifles with a Hebraism which rejects him.
Tennyson is, in point of the adaptation of form to matter, in the
absolute justice and delicacy of his diction, in the perfect proportion
and symmetry of his images, the completest reproduction among moderns of
the Hellenic literary artist. What could be more luminously seen or more
luminously expressed than
The curled white of the coming wave,
Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?
Hellenic Tennyson is also in his appreciation of all beauty. More
important, he is Hellenic in his tranquil open-eyed outlook upon the
world. It is in these things that he is his best self. He is least
himself when he seeks to pass into the prophetic sphere. He is _poeta_
more than _vates_, and he is least Tennysonian in a poem like "Maud."
The Hebraic element in Tennyson is not innate, it is but what he has
gathered from his training in Hebraic morality and the sentiment which
comes of it. "His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart
was pure" is not a sentiment natural to a pagan Greek, but it is natural
enough to a christianised Hellene whose Hellenic temperament is
otherwise quite unchanged.