the Greek Genius_ should have been called for so soon is assuredly a
very significant fact. And it is significant in more ways than one. It
not only goes far to refute Lord Coleridge’s theory that Greek has lost
its hold on modern life, but it furnishes one of the many proofs, which
we have recently had, that people are beginning to understand what is
now to be expected from classical scholars, if classical scholars are to
hold their own in the world of to-day, and that scholars are, in their
turn, aware that they no longer constitute an esoteric guild for
esoteric studies. The task of the purely philological labourer has been
accomplished. During more than four centuries, succeeding schools of
literal critics have been toiling to furnish mankind with the means of
unlocking the treasures of classical Greece. Till within comparatively
recent times, the power of reading the Greek classics with accuracy and
ease was an accomplishment beyond the reach of any but specialists.
Unless a student was prepared to grapple with the difficulties of
unsettled and often unintelligible texts, to make his own grammar--nay,
his own dictionary--to choose between conflicting and contradictory
interpretations, and, in a word, to possess all that now would be
required in a classical editor, it would be impossible for him to read,
with any comfort, a chorus of Æschylus or Sophocles, an ode of Pindar,
or a speech in Thucydides. But now all these difficulties have vanished.
Excellent lexicons, grammars, commentaries, and translations, with
settled texts, and editions of the principal Greek classics so
satisfactory that practically they leave nothing to be desired, have
rendered what was once the monopoly of mere scholars common property.
The power of reading Greek with accuracy and comfort is now, indeed,
within the reach of any person of average intelligence and industry.
But prescription and tradition are tenacious of their privileges. Greek
has so long been regarded as the inheritance of philologists, that they
are not prepared to resign what was once their exclusive possession,
without a struggle. It is useless to point out to them that, if Greek is
to maintain its place in modern education, it can only maintain it by
virtue of its connection with the humanities, by virtue of its
intrinsic value as the expression of genius and art, and of its
historical value as the key to the development and characteristics of
the classics of the modern world; by virtue, in fine, of its relation to
life, and its relation to History and Criticism. The revival, indeed, of
the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ of the Middle Ages would not be an
absurder anachronism than it is to draw no distinction between the
functions and aims of classical scholarship, when it was, necessarily,
confined to philologists and specialists, and its functions and aims at
the present day. It has been the obstinate determination on the part of
academic bodies not to recognise this distinction, but to preserve Greek
as the monopoly of those who approach it only on the side of
philological specialism, which has led to its complete dissociation in
our scholastic system from what constitutes its chief, almost its sole
title to preservation. At Cambridge, for example, it has been expressly
excluded from the only School in which the study of Literature has been
organized, and an attempt to substitute Modern Languages in its
place--for a degree in arts--was only defeated by the intervention of
non-resident members of the University. At Oxford a scheme for a “School
of Literature,” in which Greek was to have no place, might, not long ago
have been carried, and the casting vote of the proctor alone saved the
University from this disgrace, and Greek from a crushing blow.[35] But,
fortunately for the cause of Greek, there is every indication that a
reaction, too strong for academic bodies to resist, is setting in.
Scholars are beginning to see that what Socrates did for Philosophy must
now be done for Greek, if Greek is to hold its own. Thus, it has
preserved, and no doubt may preserve, its esoteric side; but that which
constitutes its chief, its real importance--which justifies its
retention in modern education--is not what appeals, and can only appeal,
in each generation, to a small circle of “specialists”--its philological
interest, but what appeals to liberal intelligence, to men as men, to
the poet, to the philosopher, to the orator, to the critic. To this end,
to what may be described as the vitalization of Greek, all the labours
of the late Professor Jowett were directed; and by his means Plato,
Thucydides, and Aristotle are brought into influential relation with
modern life. What he effected for them Professor Jebb has effected for
Sophocles, and not only has this unrivalled Greek scholar placed within
the reach of any person of average intelligence all that is necessary
for the elucidation of the language, art, and philosophy of the
Shakespeare of the Athenian stage, but he has not disdained to furnish a
popular manual of Homeric study, and a popular elementary guide-book to
Greek literature. Professor Lewis Campbell has laboured in the same
field and in the same cause. Great also have been the services rendered
to the popularization of Greek by Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Ernest Myers, Mr.
Walter Leaf, and many other distinguished scholars, all of whom have
shown, both by their published works and as lecturers, that the
masterpieces of ancient Greece may become as intelligible and
influential in the world of to-day as they were more than two thousand
years ago.
We welcome with joy the advent of Professor Butcher among these
prophets. Few names stand higher than his in the roll of modern
scholars, and assuredly few modern scholars possess, in so large a
measure, the power of applying scholarship to the purposes of liberal
criticism and exegesis. He has written a delightful book, in a pleasant
style, full of learning, suggestive, stimulating, a book which no
student of Greek literature can lay down without a hearty feeling of
gratitude to the author. Porson said of Bentley that more might be
learned from his work when he was in error than from the work of a rival
scholar when he was in the right. We shall not presume to accuse
Professor Butcher of error, but we are bound to say that there is much
in his book which appears to us very questionable, and much also from
which we entirely dissent.
Professor Butcher discusses, for example, at great length, the leading
characteristics of the Greek temper, but, in drawing his conclusions, he
has not sufficiently distinguished between what was more or less
accidental and what was essentially peculiar. The fact is that nothing
is so easy as generalisations of this kind, if the deduction of half
truth be our aim; and nothing so difficult if whole truth, or truth
which may be accepted without reserve, is to be the result. The most
mobile, plastic, Protean people who have ever lived, their activity,
within the strict limits of classical literature, extended over about
six centuries, and, if we protract it to the point included in Professor
Butcher’s illustrations, to more than nine centuries. Of their
literature, though we appear to have the best of it, not a third part
has survived. By an adroit use of illustration, it is, therefore, easy
to predicate anything of them. Go to serious epic, to serious as
distinguished from passionate lyric, to tragedy, to threnody, and they
were, if you please, the gravest people on earth’s face; go to
Aristophanes and to the poets of the Old Comedy, and they were the
merriest; go to the Ionic Elegists and to the fragments of the New
Comedy, and they were the saddest and most cynical; go to Thucydides,
Plato, and Aristotle, and they were, like Dante’s sages, _ni tristi ni
lieti_. We do not quarrel with Professor Butcher’s general position in
his Essay on the melancholy of the Greeks, or question that there
existed in certain moods a profound melancholy and dissatisfaction with
life in the Greek temper. But of what intelligent and reflective people
or individual who have ever existed is this not equally true? Where we
do quarrel with Professor Butcher is on the following point, the point
on which he chiefly rests in proving that the Greeks were pre-eminently
distinguished by pessimistic melancholy--an assertion that we deny _in
toto_. He tells us that, with one notable exception, to which he
subsequently adds three others, the Greeks regarded hope not as a solace
and support in life, but as a snare and a delusion, not as a power to
cling to, but as an influence fraught with mischief. Nothing surely can
be more erroneous. The wisest people who have ever lived are not likely
to have confounded baseless and flighty desires or aspirations with what
is implied in hope, though Professor Butcher has done so in the
illustrations advanced by him in support of his theory. All through
Greek literature, from Hesiod to Theocritus--not to go further--the
importance and wisdom of cherishing hope, as one of the chief supports
of life, are emphatically dwelt on. Professor Butcher has surely
misrepresented--certainly Æschylus and the Greeks generally did not
interpret it in the sense in which he has done--the fable of Pandora’s
chest. It was not “as part of the deadly gift of the goddess” that hope
was there; it was as the one blessing amid the crowd of ills. “As long
as a man lives,” says Theognis, “let him wait on hope.... Let him pray
to the gods; and to Hope let him sacrifice first and last” (1143-1146).
Pindar, if he warns man against baseless, wild, or extravagant
expectation, is emphatic on the wisdom of cherishing hope. It is “the
sweet nurse of the heart in old age,” “the chief helmsman of man’s
versatile will.” (_Fragment_, 233.) “A man should cherish good hope.”
(_Isth._, vii. 15.) “It is the wing on which soaring manhood is
supported.” (Pythian, viii. 93.) “The wise,” says Euripides, “must
cherish hope.” (_Frag. of Ino._) Again: “Prudent hope must be your stay
in misfortune.” (_Id._) Life, he says in the _Troades_ (628), is
preferable to death, in that it has hopes. A sentiment repeated by
Euripides again in the _Hercules Furens_ (105-6): “That man is the
bravest who trusts to hope under all circumstances; to be without hope
is the part of a coward.” So Menander: “Hold before yourself the shield
of good hope.” (_Incert. Frag._ xlvii.) The passages quoted by Professor
Butcher from Thucydides are not to the point. It would have been much
more to the point had he quoted the passage in which Pericles eulogizes
those who “committed to hope the uncertainty of success” (II. 42), or
the passage (I. 70) in which the superiority of the Athenians to the
Lacedæmonians in civil and military efficiency is largely attributed to
their reliance on hope. Again, what, according to Cephalus, in the
_Republic_, is the chief solace of old age?--“The abiding presence of
sweet hope.” But it would be easy to multiply indefinitely from the
Greek classics what Professor Butcher calls “rare examples of hope in
the happier aspect.”
The most important chapters in Professor Butcher’s work--indeed they
occupy nearly one half of it--are those dealing with Aristotle’s theory
of fine art and poetry. On no subject in criticism have there been so
many misconceptions current and influential even among scholars,
originating for the most part from mistranslations and misunderstandings
of the treatise in which they find their chief embodiment--the
_Poetics_. This has unfortunately come down to us in a very imperfect
and corrupt state, and, what is more unfortunate still, it became a
classic in criticism long before it was properly understood. Thus, in
the clause in the famous definition of tragedy, where Aristotle
describes it as δι’ ελεου και φοβου περαινουσα την των τοιουτων
παθηματων καθαρσιν, “through pity and fear effecting the purgation of
these emotions,” the French and English critics of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, ignoring the words των τοιουτων, have
totally misinterpreted the passage, and given it a meaning which was not
only not intended by Aristotle, but which has falsified his whole theory
of the scope and functions of tragedy. An unsound text, the insertion
of αλλα before the clause, sent Lessing on a wrong track. From
the misinterpretation of another passage in the treatise (V. 4) has been
deduced the famous doctrine of the Unities. The mistranslation of
σπουδαιος in the definition of Tragedy, and of the same word in
the comparison between Poetry and History, has led to misconceptions on
other points. The scholars who did most in England to place the study of
this treatise on a sound footing were Twining and Tyrwhitt. In the
present century it has received exhaustive illustration from
Saint-Hilaire, Stahr, Susemihl, Vahlen, Teichmüller, Ueberweg, Reinkens,
Jacob Bernays, and others; while such works as E. Müller’s _Geschichte
der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten_ have thrown general light on the
question of Greek æsthetics. That Professor Butcher has not been able to
advance anything new in these essays is very creditable to him, for the
simple reason that, as all that is worth saying has been said, his sole
resource, had he attempted to be original, would have been paradox and
sophistry. With regard to the question of the _Katharsis_, it will
probably be, for all time, a case of “quot homines tot sententiæ”; and
we have certainly no intention of accompanying Professor Butcher into
this labyrinth. We entirely agree with him and Bernays that the passage
in the _Politics_ (V. viii. 7) settles conclusively at least one part of
the meaning, but we differ from Bernays, in contending that the
“lustratio” is included, and from Professor Butcher, in contending that
the “lustratio” is not effected merely by the relief. Professor Butcher
seems here indeed to be a little confused, or at all events confusing.
He first explains “katharsis” as “a purging away of the emotions of pity
and fear,” and then explains it as “a purifying of them”; but it is
neither easy to understand how “purging away” is “purifying,” nor why we
should “purify” what we “purge away.” Surely it is better--but we speak
with all submission--to take the word in two different meanings, the one
signifying the immediate effect of tragedy in its direct appeal to the
passions referred to, the other not to its immediate, but to its
ulterior and total effect in educating the passions thus excited.
Professor Butcher, who appears to belong to the Pater School, dwells
with great complacency on the fact that Aristotle “attempted to separate
the function of æsthetics from that of morals,” that “he made the end of
art reside in a pleasurable emotion,” that he says “nothing of any moral
aim in poetry,” and that though he often takes exception to Euripides as
an artist, “he attaches no blame to him for the immoral tendency in some
of his dramas,” so severely censured by Aristophanes. If Professor
Butcher implies, as he seems to imply by this, that Aristotle would lend
any countenance to the modern art-for-art’s-sake doctrine, and
proceeded on the assumption that there was no necessary connection
between æsthetics and morals, he does Aristotle very great injustice,
and is refuted by the _Poetics_ themselves. In the fifth chapter
Aristotle lays stress on the fact that tragedy is, like epic, a
representation of “superior or morally good characters” (μιμησις
σπουδαιων)--that the characters are to be good (χρηστα). In
the twenty-fifth chapter he says that nothing can excuse the exhibition
of moral depravity (μοχθηρια), unless it be one of the things
implicit in the plot; and that among the most serious objections which
can be brought against a drama is that it is likely to do moral harm
(βλαβερα). In the thirteenth chapter he shows,--and on moral
grounds,--why the protagonist in a tragedy should not be a perfectly
good man or a perfectly bad man. Indeed, the very definition of tragedy
refutes Professor Butcher’s statement. It may be said, no doubt, that
Aristotle maintains that the end of poetry is pleasure, but it must be
“the proper pleasure,” and in the proper pleasure moral satisfaction is
implied.[36] It is only by a quibble that Professor Butcher’s theory can
be supported, and it is a pity to quibble on subjects which may be so
mischievously misunderstood. Aristotle was, we suspect, very much nearer
to Ben Jonson and Milton than to Mr. Pater in his conception of the
functions and scope of poetry.
In the interesting essay on Sophocles there are two statements which
appear to us very questionable. It is surely not true to say that
Sophocles was “the first of the Greeks who has clearly realized that
suffering is not always penal.” Who could have expressed this truth more
forcibly than Æschylus? To say nothing of the well-known passage in the
_Agamemnon_, 167-171:--
Ζηνα ...
τον φρονειν βροτους ὁδωσαντα, τον παθει μαθος
θεντα κυριως εχειν.
σταζει δ’ εν θ’ ὑπνω προ καρδιας
μνησιπημων πονος, και παρ’ ακοντας ηλθε σωφρονειν,--
the doctrine of which is repeated in 241-2 of the same play, and in
other passages in his dramas, notably in _Choephoroe_, 950-955, and in
_Eumenides_, 495, συμφερει σωφρονειν ὑπο στενει. The fact
that suffering and calamity have resulted in blessing is emphasized as
strongly in the concluding drama of the Orestean Trilogy, the
_Eumenides_, as it is in the _Œdipus Coloneus_. Again, when Professor
Butcher says that “in Sophocles the divine righteousness asserts itself
not in the award of happiness or misery to the individual, but in the
providential wisdom which assigns to each individual his place and
function in a universal moral order,” he says what it is very difficult
to understand. Surely in the case of each one of the protagonists in
Sophocles, to employ the word in its non-technical sense, their deserts
are very exactly meted out. Antigone deliberately courts her fate by
setting the law at defiance, though she knew what the penalty was, and
falls, but has her compensation in the applause of her own conscience
and “in the faith that looks through death.” Ajax paid the penalty, as
the poet emphasizes, for brutality and impious insolence; Œdipus
suffers for his impetuosity and intemperance, but, his punishment
exceeding the offence, the balance is adjusted for him in final triumph
over the sons who had wronged him, in procuring blessings for his
protector, in the peace of the soul, and in a glorious death.
Clytemnestra and Ægisthus well deserve their fate, as, in addition to
committing their crime, they continue ostentatiously to glory in it. In
the _Trachiniæ_ Hercules is punished for a base and cowardly murder,
followed by an act of cruel and indiscriminate vengeance, retribution
coming on him through the sister of the man thus murdered, and the
daughter of the prince on whom this iniquitous vengeance had been
wreaked, as Deianeira, but for Iole, would not have sent the poisoned
tunic. Sophocles has even altered the legend to emphasize the guilt of
Hercules. The _Philoctetes_, indeed, is the only play which lends any
support to Professor Butcher’s statement. Here the gods undoubtedly
condemn a man to a life of torture that their designs, irrespective of
the individual, may be fulfilled, and that Troy may not fall before the
appointed time; but how fully, how nobly is he compensated! It seems to
us that the award of happiness and misery to the individual, in
accordance with desert, is as conspicuous in the ethics of Sophocles as
it is in the ethics of Shakespeare. And it is the more conspicuous, when
we remember the hampering conditions under which Sophocles had to work,
the limitations conventionally imposed on the treatment of the legends.
We wish we had space to comment on Professor Butcher’s admirable, though
somewhat defective, chapter on the dawn of Romanticism in Greek poetry,
but we must forbear, and repeat our thanks to him for a book full of
interest and instruction, not the least of its charms being the lively
and graceful style in which it is written.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 35: This blow has, since these words were written, been
inflicted. See _supra_ pp. 45-75.]
[Footnote 36: So he says, _Poet._, xxvi., of epic and tragedy, that each
ought not to produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it
(δει γαρ ου την τυχουσαν ἡδονην ποιειν αυτας αλλα την
ειρημενην, _i.e._ οικειαν).]
THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM[37]
[Footnote 37: _The Principles of Criticism. An Introduction to the Study
of Literature._ By W. Basil Worsfold. London: Allen.]
Bishop Warburton said that there were two things which every man thought
himself competent to do, to manage a small farm and to drive a whisky.
Had Warburton lived in our time, he would probably have added a
third--to set up for a critic. What the author of the best critical
treatise in the Greek language pronounced to be the final fruit of long
experience, culture, and study, directed and illumined by certain
natural qualifications, has now come to be represented by the idle and
irresponsible gossip of any one who can gossip agreeably. Agreeable
gossip and good criticism are, as Sainte-Beuve and others have shown,
far from being incompatible, the misfortune is that they should be
confounded; but confounded they are, and the confusion is the curse of
current literature. We have recently observed, with concern, that the
rubbish which used formerly to be shot into novels and poems is now
being shot into criticism, and that there appears to be a growing
impression that the accomplishments which qualify young men for spinning
cobwebs in fiction and manufacturing versicles can, with a little
management, serve to set them up as critics. There is not much more
difficulty in forming an opinion about a book than there is in reading
it, and as criticism in the hands of these fribbles becomes little more
than the dithyrambic expression of that opinion, the profession of
criticism is one in which it is delightfully easy to graduate. It
requires neither learning nor knowledge, neither culture nor discipline.
It is neither science nor art; it is the gift of nature, a sort of
“lyric inspiration.” With principles, with touchstones, with standards,
it has nothing whatever to do. Its business is to declaim, to coin
phrases, to juggle with fancies and to say “good things.”