HELLENIC LITERATURE.
From the arts the transition is natural to the literature[970] of
Greece, which in the historical period necessarily constituted the
principal agent in ripening and stamping their peculiar character upon
the fruits of education among the people. Literature is in fact the
school-mistress of nations. In it so long as it remains entire, we may
contemplate the whole character, intellectual and moral, of the race
out of whose passions, yearnings, tastes, and energies it may be said
to be fashioned. And this, true of all literature, is especially
applicable to that of Greece, which more than any other bears the
impress of nationality. Every idea, every image, every maxim, every
reflection seems to emanate from one source. Nothing is foreign.
Neither the inspiration, nor the spirit which regulated it and moulded
it into beauty, borrowed a single impulse from anything existing
beyond the circle of Hellenic thought. Greece supplied at once the
matrix and the materials, the active power and that delicate sense of
beauty and perfection which presided over its organisation and
rendered it the delight of mankind.
Footnote 970:
Speaking of the influence of literature on education Plato remarks,
that persons accustomed from their infancy to the loftier and purer
inspirations of the muse will regard with contempt everything mean
or illiberal; whereas they who have always been familiar with low
and vulgar compositions will look upon all other literature as tame
and insipid.—De Legg. vii. t. viii. p. 30.
In characterising this literature many singular notions have been
broached. We have been told that its spirit is exclusively masculine,
which means, of course, that while it abounds with strength and
energy, with sublimity of speculation and impassioned and impetuous
impulses, it is wanting in that sweetness, delicacy, grace, and
tenderness which confer on the intellectual offspring of some modern
nations a feminine aspect. Grecian literature, however, is neither
masculine nor feminine, but androgynous like the son of Aphrodite and
Hermes. There is no excellence of thought or language, of which, even
in its present fragmentary state, it does not offer us some example.
There is a predominance, doubtless, of stern grandeur and colossal
elevation of thought; but, beside these, we discover frequently
modifications of light and airy beauty, infantine purity of sentiment,
ease, grace, felicitous negligence, and a dreamy luxury of speculation
not to be outdone by the most subtile and fanciful literature
existing. If there be a deficiency of any thing, it is of
spirituality. The imagination of the Greeks confined itself too
rigidly perhaps to this “bank and shoal of time.” Not being able to
lift the veil which curtains the realms beyond the grave, it busied
itself too little about those things with which the disembodied soul
must converse for ever. In most Greek writers there is a visible
reluctance to walk amid the forms of Hades. Their fancy will not be
conducted beyond the limits of the visible universe, but shudders,
rears and reverts its eyes towards the light where alone it finds firm
footing for speculation. But on the other hand if it refuse to quit
this earthly scene of existence, how glorious is the flood of sunshine
and splendour which it pours over it! It is in these walks of
literature that we discover truly the freshness and the loveliness of
morning. The very clouds that hover over the landscape only add to its
majesty, by diversifying the prospect and introducing those shadows
and contrasts which the mind delights everywhere to discover.
Poets,[971] it is constantly repeated, commence in every country the
mental movement which evolves civilisation out of the chaos of
barbarism; but it remains a mystery how and by what they themselves
are moved. There may possibly be something more than a figure of
speech in the old affirmation that they were inspired of heaven. Their
imagination towered to so great a height that it was kindled by the
lamps of the firmament, and may be regarded as that fabled Prometheus
who applied the flame of science to the human clay. I do not therefore
see what objection can be urged against our maintaining the old
doctrine that poets partook and partake still, when their minds are
pure, of a divine impulse—that to the infant nations of the earth they
were teachers commissioned from on high.
Footnote 971:
Cf. Lil. Gyrald. Opp. t. ii. p. 2. “Nihil traditum videbis in
religionibus et mysteriis, nihil in theologiâ et philosophiâ
aliisque bonis artibus à principio fuisse sine poeticâ, ita ut hoc
verè me tibi dicturum existimem, ex omnibus disciplinis unam hanc
divinam extitisse, quasi totius vitæ magistram.”
The condition of the mind in those early ages when poets were the only
oracles, it is difficult for men surfeited with the luxuries of a
prolific literature to comprehend. Among the Arabs of the desert we
may still perhaps discover something similar. Deprived of books, but
enjoying much leisure, they eagerly treasure up in their memories the
moral distich, the apologue, the tale which instructs while it
delights, and thus mentally furnished with a few weapons they are
often wiser in deliberation, more persuasive in discourse, more ready
in action than persons of education in civilised countries, whose
intellectual armoury is so full that in the moment of danger they know
not what weapon to choose. Poets, among such a race and under such
circumstances, feel that they have a high mission to fulfil; their
endeavours are not by polished rhythmical trifles to amuse a few rich
and noble persons, but to clothe in befitting language and marry to
immortal verse those great central truths, upon which the whole system
of the future world of civilisation must revolve. We find them always
curiously adapting their revelations to the times. First, the great
fundamental truths of religion, the basis of the social structure, are
infused into the public mind. Next the rudiments of politics and
legislation, the precepts of agriculture, the leading rules of the
useful arts, the observances of civil life, and the first faint
whispers of the passions and affections are treasured up in their
lays. Then, growing bolder by degrees, they aim at subduing the whole
empire of knowledge, and impetuously, with numerous charms and
allurements, hurry mankind forward in a sort of orgiastic rapture to
the very threshold of philosophy.
Among the earliest names in the literary traditions of Hellas are
those of Olen, Pamphos, Musæos and Orpheus,[972] who, for their
wisdom, are said to be sprung from the gods. They were sacred bards,
whose genius obtained for them an ascendency over the minds of their
countrymen. Yet all they attempted, perhaps, was to teach the doctrine
of prayer, thanksgiving, sacrifice, which, being afterwards
misunderstood, caused them to be confounded with those impostors and
incantation-mongers, who, in more recent times, granted absolutions
and sold indulgences both to individuals and states, with a hardihood
worthy of Giovanni di Medici. Musæos, older probably than Orpheus,
though sometimes regarded as his disciple, is said by certain
traditions to have been a teacher of ethics, who delivered a body of
moral precepts in four thousand verses. His country is unknown,—for he
is now represented as an Athenian, now as a Thracian,—but his name and
the name of Orpheus and Eumolpos are associated with the expiations,
orgies, mysteries, celebrated during many ages in honour of Demeter
and Dionysos.[973] We must rest content, however, with very imperfect
notions of what they were, for, in looking back at these great men,
whom we behold on the edge of the horizon, enlarged like the sun at
its setting by misty exhalations, but by the same means rendered dim
and obscure, we can form no just idea of their character.
Footnote 972:
Plato de Repub. t. ii. p. 113. seq. Stallb.—De Legg. t. vii. p. 243.
Bek. Athen. i. 24. Paus. ix. 27. 2. Diog. Laert. Proœm. iv. 5.
Footnote 973:
Muret. in Plat. Rep. p. 699. seq. Cf. Lil. Gyrald. ii. 5. Wolf.
Proleg. in Homer. p. 51.
These, however, and such as these, were the men who fabricated the
first link in that chain of thought and beauty, which, stretching over
the gulf of time and fastened to the skies, still holds up the nations
of the earth from sinking into barbarism. Literature is degraded when
contemplated as an art or as an amusement. It is a paradise, into
which the best fruits of the soul, when arrived at their greatest
maturity and beauty, are transplanted to bloom in immortal freshness
and fragrance. It is the garner wherein the seeds of religion, virtue,
morals, national greatness and individual happiness are preserved for
the use of humanity. It is a gallery, where the likenesses of all the
great and noble souls who have shed light and glory on the earth, are
treasured up as the heirloom and palladium of the human race. It is
impossible, therefore, for any but the most sordid minds to look back
towards the venerable fathers of literature without a deep thrill of
filial reverence and love, conjoined with the generous impulse and
yearning desire to enlarge and add fresh brightness to the halo which
encircles their names. They were not, what since too many have been,
the instruments and panders to the pleasures of worldlings. Conscious
of the holy mission wherewith, according to their creed, the father of
gods and men had intrusted them, they stood forward as the apostles of
truth, encircled by the majesty which a sense of divine inspiration
must impart. They felt a harmony within their souls which, in
manifesting itself, sought the aid of harmonious language; and hence
the precepts of wisdom, distilling from their lips like honey from the
honeycomb, moulded themselves naturally into verse, at whose sound the
fountains of the great deep of knowledge were broken up, and the
windows of heaven opened, and a deluge of philosophy and science and
intellectual delight poured forth upon the amazed world.
In what age or province of Greece arose the first minister of this
poetical revelation, it is not now possible to decide. The art of
writing, however, which the Egyptian king regarded as the enemy of
memory, had not passed the Ægæan. The songs men heard were wafted on
the wings of music from tongue to tongue, and, by degrees, the
professors of this marvellous art, by which the wisdom and the glory
of the past were embalmed in the sweets of verse, embodied themselves
into a distinct order called Aoidoi or Singers.[974] The life of these
men in the remote ages of antiquity is little known to us. Wanderers,
however, for the most part they were, in some respects not unlike the
Jongleurs and Troubadours of the middle ages, though occupying a
higher station and guided by a higher aim. Their first and ostensible
object was, doubtless, to delight; but it is of great importance to
inspire men with a delight in lofty and ennobling conceptions,—to
withdraw them for a moment from pursuits sordid or brutalising or
unmanly, to the contemplation of heroic acts,—of honour, of
patriotism, of friendship,—of the great and solid advantages accruing
from peace and commerce, and the experience of travel and adversity.
Footnote 974:
Cf. Wolf. Proleg. in Hom. p. 73. 93. sqq.
What were the rewards they obtained it is easy to conjecture. They
consisted, principally, in the rays of joy reflected back upon them by
a thousand happy countenances at once. Gain they neither would nor
could regard. He who renders multitudes wise and happy must be happy
and wise himself; and wisdom scorns to measure its gifts against gold.
The truly wise and great man, therefore, if fortune have originally
befriended him, will shower his benefactions, as God his rain,
liberally and without distinction upon all; and if necessity compel
him to receive some return, his moderation will content itself with
the least possible amount. Embraced within the circle of refinement
which they themselves had created, however, they gradually became
secularised, though we must be careful to distinguish them from their
successors of a later age. The prodigious admiration which they and
their songs excited may be learned from those passages in Homer where
Phemios and Demodocos are introduced, and from that animated dialogue
of Plato, in which the rhapsodist Ion describes his office and his
audience. It has been justly remarked, that if this man, a mere actor,
could hurry into whatever channel he pleased the affections of a whole
theatre, melt them into tears, fire them with indignation, or clothe
their countenances with the smiles of joy, much more would the poets
themselves work upon their passions by an art far nearer nature.
Care must, no doubt, be taken not to confound the Rhapsodists with the
Aoidoi who preceded them, though it be certain that the manners and
condition of the later race may serve to throw considerable light on
those of the earlier. Both have recently much occupied the attention
of the learned; and Wolff in particular deserves credit for his
defence of the Rhapsodists, into which, however, he was chiefly led by
the requirements of his celebrated theory. They were certainly, at
first, a remarkable order of men, whom it would be injurious to
confound with their frivolous representatives in the age of Plato and
Xenophon. Nevertheless, the above distinguished scholar is perhaps
inclined to exaggerate their merits, since to them, in his opinion, we
owe it that the great Homeric poems have come down to us. But this is
taking for granted the matter in dispute between him and his
opponents, who maintain that the author of the Iliad and Odyssey
possessed both the knowledge and the materials for writing. He, with
reason however, assumes that both theatrical and oratorical action
found a way opened for them by the rhapsodic art, though its
professors were neither actors nor orators, but men exercising an
office connected with a peculiar state of society, and no longer
existing in modern times.
It has often been supposed, grounding the opinion on a false
interpretation of the word _rhapsodist_, that the members of this
fraternity were mere compilers or patchers up of poems from fragments
pilfered out of various authors. And, to augment the absurdity, the
practice of a recent age has been attributed to remote antiquity,
when, as some imagine, the great rhapsodists like a modern lecturer,
carried about with them pictures of the subject they were upon, and
pointed out to the audience with a stick[975] the various characters
or incidents they might be describing. Another error much insisted on
by Wolff, is the supposition that the Homeric poems alone were chanted
by the older Rhapsodists, which no doubt is contrary to the testimony
of antiquity and to common sense. For, as might naturally be
concluded, not only the songs of Hesiod[976] and the whole epic race
were thus publicly sung, but those likewise of the lyric and iambic
poets, and the very laws of the state when the legislator happened to
have composed them in verse. It must nevertheless be remarked, (though
of this Wolff takes no notice,) that so much did recitations of
Homer’s works predominate over all others, that Rhapsodists and
Homerists were often regarded as synonymous terms;[977] and even in
later ages, when at any rate the art of writing was not unknown,
Demetrius Phalereus introduced upon the stage a class of reciters,
who, down to the days of Athenæus, enjoyed the name of Homerists.
Still, as I have observed above, the works of other good poets were at
times recited, as Hesiod, Archilochos, Mimnermos, and Phocylides. Nay,
the Rhapsodist Mnasion, as Lysanias relates, used to recite the
Iambics of Simonides; Cleomenes, the Purifications of Empedocles, and
Hegesius the comedian, the Histories of Herodotus; that is, some
portions of them I presume. Certain authors delivered their own
productions in this way,[978] as Xenophanes, who composed both epics,
elegies and iambics.[979]
Footnote 975:
Anim. ad Athen. xii. p. 371. Cf. Suid. v. Ῥαψῳδοί. t. ii. p. 678.
Etym. Mag. 703. 32. Aristoph. Concionat. 674.
Footnote 976:
Ῥαψῳδὸν δὲ, καλῶς Ἰλίαδα καὶ Ὀδυσσεῖαν ἢ τι τῶν Ἡσωδείων διατιθέντα,
τάχ᾽ ἂν ἡμεῖς οἱ γέροντες ἥδιστα ἀκούσαντες νικᾷν ἂν φαῖμεν
πάμπολο.—Plat. de Legg. ii. t. vii. p. 243. Bekk. Again: Ἅμα δὲ
ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι ἔν τε ἄλλοις ποιηταῖς διατρίβειν πολλοῖς κᾀγαθοῖς
καὶ δὴ καὶ μάλιστα ἐν Ὁμήρῳ, κ. τ. λ. Ion. Plat. Opp. t. ii. p. 172.
Footnote 977:
Ὅτι δ᾽ ἐκαλοῦντο οἱ ῥαψῳδοὶ καὶ Ὁμηρισταὶ Ἀριστοκλῆς εἴρηκε, κ. τ.
λ.—Athen. xiv. 12.
Footnote 978:
Athen. xiv. 12.
Footnote 979:
Diog. Laert. ix. 18.
It has with reason been observed that although the name of the
rhapsodic art would seem to have been invented posterior to Homer, the
thing itself existed long before, and was held in greater honour than
at any subsequent period. In fact, the poets of those times were
themselves Rhapsodists, and for many ages the only ones, if it be true
that Hesiod[980] was the first who reduced the chanting of other men’s
poems into an art. Afterwards, from the age of Terpander the Lesbian
(Olymp. 34) down to Cynæthos of Chios (Olymp. 69) supposed to have
been the author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and a man of
distinguished genius, the Rhapsodists sometimes chanted the poems of
others, sometimes their own, and occasionally perhaps interpolated new
verses into the golden relics of the past, as our modern actors often
foist their one-legged jokes into the stage text of Shakespeare. There
appears, however, to be no foundation for the notion, that nearly
every one of these chanters was likewise a clever poet, which no
ancient writer, I believe, asserts, and which the assertions of fifty
would not render credible, though the probability is, that of those
numerous rhapsodists some were themselves poets, and others desirous,
without the genius, of being thought such; so that it is quite as
likely that their vanity frequently laid claim to the works of others,
where detection could be escaped, as that others were suffered to rob
them of their just fame.
Footnote 980:
Ῥαψωδῆσαι φησὶ πρῶτον τὸν Ἡσιοδὸν Νικοκλῆς.—Schol. Pind. Nem. ii. 1.
Cf. Dissen. ad loc. Wolf. Proleg. p. 96. sqq.
They who contend for the flourishing of the system of castes in
Greece, would probably maintain that the Rhapsodists constituted from
the first _a clan_, as the Homeridæ are said to have been in
Chios.[981] Among the few arts which commanded the undivided time and
study of numerous professors in those ages, that of the Aoidos or
Poet, was certainly one, and that, too, the most honoured and revered.
Doubtless their characters were pure and noble, to overcome the envy
which superior abilities usually inspire. For whether at home or
abroad, in their native cities no less than in the public assemblies,
and at the festive boards of kings, they were regarded as dear to gods
and venerable to men. The Rhapsodists likewise enjoyed the same
estimation and led the same kind of life until other studies and other
manners, with that most debasing of all passions, the love of gain,
brought contempt on their profession and pursuits.[982]
Footnote 981:
Schol. Pind. Nem. ii. 1. Etym. Mag. 623. 50.
Footnote 982:
Payne Knight, Proleg. in Hom. § 13. 28.
In the Homeric poems themselves we discover abundant proofs of the
high honour in which the professors of the poetical art were held by
their countrymen. They fulfilled in Greece[983] the office performed
among the Hebrews by the Schools of the Prophets,[984] or the solitary
possessors of the vaticinatory power who revealed to their countrymen
the will of heaven, and taught by what practices it might be
propitiated. Some institution of this kind probably existed, as I have
already observed, from the very dawn of civilisation which it
principally created. Most princes, like Agamemnon, Alcinoüs and
Odysseus, retained in their palaces a man at once their chaplain and
their laureate, who, when guests foreign or domestic assembled at
their board, might administer instruction and delight, by chanting the
praises of the gods, the exploits or greatness of their ancestors, or
even by delivering precepts in morals or the useful arts. To a poet,
also, as to the holiest of guardians, kings entrusted the care of
their wives and families,[985] when departing on distant expeditions;
and so great was the veneration paid to their character, that we find
Clytemnæstra banishing the poet before she dares to become the
paramour of Ægisthos.
Footnote 983:
Athen. i. 16.
Footnote 984:
Cf. Sigon. de Rep. Hebræorum v. 9. Godwin, Moses et Aaron, i. 6.
Footnote 985:
But the δόμων προφῆται in Æschylus (Agam. 377 Klausen,) were
household prophets, who not only disclosed the secrets of the future
and interpreted dreams, but acted also the part of counsellors in
present emergencies, and treasured up the records of the past.
Apollo is called the Prophet of Zeus, because he receives oracles
from him.—Eum. 19. 618. So Amphiaraos is denominated a great
prophet.—Sept. c. Theb. 611.
See the comment of Klausen, Agam. p. 143. seq.-Notice of the
household interpreters of dreams δόμων ὀνειρόμαντες and again κριταὶ
τῶν ὀνειράτων (Choep. 36. 39), is found in several parts of
Æschylus, who loved to furnish traits of these old superstitions. In
the Persians we find Atossa speaking of the τῶν ἐνυπνίων κριτὴς
(226) as a person of supernatural powers.
But those men of great original genius whose fame spread rapidly,
and who probably found superior enjoyment in the independence of a
wandering life, not content with the patronage of a single prince,
or the admiration of a single people, moved perpetually from land to
land, enhancing at once their glory and experience. We in fact
discover in Homer, Pindar, and other original poets proofs that the
flowers from which they collected the honey of their melodies grew
not all on one spot. Odysseus was a type of the bard who sang his
adventures, and looking still further back we find the Thracian
Thamyris, whom the Muses were said to have punished for his vanity,
penetrating into the obscurest parts of Peloponnesos, protected by
the sanctity of his character and the reverence due to his
profession.[986]
With respect to Homer, both ancient tradition and the form and spirit
of his poems, require us to consider him in this light, though there
is no ground for supposing him with Payne Knight to have celebrated
the different heroes of Greece for the purpose of ingratiating himself
with their descendants.
Footnote 986:
Iliad β. 590. sqq. Payne Knight, Proleg. § 74.
Those writers who imagine the works of Homer to have been composed
fortuitously by a club of poets, all actuated by a blind instinct to
produce a number of parts which, when completed, should fit as well
together as the several members of a statue, are necessarily desirous
to establish two points: first, that the Aoidoi recited their works
from memory, and that because, secondly, the art of writing was
unknown. By far too much ingenuity has already been expended on this
question to allow it to be any longer tempting from its novelty. Wolff
and Heyne have obtained all the credit they sought by their visionary
hypothesis, and the echoes of their scepticism are not yet silenced in
the academies and universities. The argument, derived from the
practice of the Rhapsodists, of repeating from memory, is attended by
two inconveniences: first, it cannot be shown that the order arose
before the art of writing was common; second, these recitations were
equally made from memory, not only in the age of Pericles, but down to
the latest period of their flourishing. It may, therefore, without the
slightest risk to the argument, be granted the academic sceptics that
the Rhapsodists recited from memory, even when we know with certainty
that they learned the poems from written copies.
To render more credible the notion that the art of writing in the age
of Homer was not yet known, great stress is laid on the powers of
memory in certain individuals, though from these nothing can in
reality be inferred, except, that when necessary, men can certainly
remember a great deal. It matters little, however, for my present
purpose, whether the Iliad and Odyssey were written by one man or by a
hundred; the grandeur of the poetry remains, and to it as a great
fountain-head may be traced several principal streams of Hellenic
civilisation.
Plato, indeed, who laboured so assiduously in enlarging the empire and
corroborating the powers of the human understanding, at times
maintained the fancy that little benefit had been conferred on Greece
by her bard. He observes, but in a manner so ironical that it is
difficult to determine his meaning, that if Homer and Hesiod had
possessed the gift of improving their contemporaries in virtue they
would never have been suffered to wander about chanting their poems.
People, he thinks, would have constrained them by benefits to remain
with them, or, not succeeding in this, would have quitted their homes
to attend their footsteps, as in his age many did in the case of the
sophists.[987]
Footnote 987:
De Rep. x. 4. t. ii. 318. Stallb.
At the same time he admits the general opinion to have been that Homer
was the great preceptor of Hellas, who taught the sciences of politics
and ethics, together with the whole discipline and economy of human
life.[988] Perhaps, notwithstanding his great wisdom and his genius,
he looked upon the question from a wrong point of view, regarding
poetry as the rival rather than the precursor of philosophy. The
mission of the former had, however, in his time been in a great
measure accomplished, as far, I mean, as concerned positive teaching;
and he did not consider that as civilisation advances and materialises
nations the curb of poetry is the more required to check their
downward tendencies, and direct their head towards the skies. The
object of poetry is to keep alive in the human breast the love of
whatever is noble and beautiful, to dazzle the worldling from the
worship of gold by showing him something more glorious than anything
that gold can purchase, to accomplish the apotheosis of pure
affection, of virtue, of disinterestedness, of great passions, of
patriotism,—and in Homer all this is effected with a spontaneous
energy, which like the ocean appears equal to bear the whole weight of
humanity clothed with all its attributes upon its breast.
Footnote 988:
De Rep. x. 7. t. ii. 336.
Greece has no poet worthy to be compared with our Shakespeare and our
Milton but Homer, who possesses some advantages over them both.
Shakespeare, buoyant and full of life as was his spirit, felt
evidently the waves of his imagination lapse at times from about him
and leave his mind stranded and bare on the shores of the immeasurable
universe. Melancholy creeps over him, like a black vapour, concealing
the Titanian head wont to tower above the region of the clouds. Even
over Milton’s soul, serene in its fiery brightness as it usually is, I
think I discover something which at times obscures his faith in
himself and human nature, and produces a flagging of the fancy. But in
Homer this never appears. Cheerfully and joyously he pursues his
course with eternal sunshine on his brow, and a heart beating full and
true, as if the life of all the world were within him. There is no end
of his vitality. He seems as if he could never grow old. His strength
is inexhaustible. Equal to whatever may happen, he nowhere seems to be
hurried by his subject, or compelled to strain a nerve to accomplish
what he desires. In himself he appears happy as a god, and only to
sympathise in human suffering from the boundlessness of his charity.
He comes forth as the sun in the morning, full of brightness, showing
all the tears that sprinkle the earth and drying them too, but
shedding none. We call him old, though in reality he is all
youthfulness and love. Every function of life goes on harmoniously in
his frame. He enjoys whatever nature brings within the circle of his
experience. He drinks in with rapture the freshness of dawn,—basks
smilingly in the blaze of noon,—welcomes the stillness of evening—the
solemn grandeur of night. Sleep, too, has for him inexpressible
charms, and on the pleasures we taste among its bowers he has bestowed
every grateful, every endearing epithet. Milton is far more spiritual,
and careers in a course nearer the stars. Shakespeare, in his
metaphysical subtlety and yearning to pierce beyond the grave,
suggests stranger thoughts, and calls up a wilder world of fancies.
But Homer, as if admitted behind the veil, never doubts for a moment.
Habitually, too, his thoughts are of action, of man as he is, of the
virtue of the citizen, of the soldier, of the husband, of the father,
of the son, of the wife. He loved the world and all that it contains.
His eye could detect beauty where the atrabilious sceptic beholds
nothing but deformity.
Hence the universal fame and admiration of his writings. For, wherever
a well-spring of delight exists, the world will discover it and have
recourse to it for ever. The tragic poets who took up his mantle
differed widely from him both in temper and character. The experiment
of civilisation had been tried, and been the cause of less happiness
than at the outset it seemed to promise. A spirit of dissatisfaction
had consequently grown up in society, which, shaken by convulsions
within and assaulted from without by storms, appeared to be fast
resolving into its original elements. Upon the minds of the tragic
poets there accordingly fell a gloomy shadow. They looked backwards
and around them, and were saddened by the view of terrible pictures
which the dark pencil of Fate was constantly filling up. The
inexplicable influence of events upon the inner organisation of man
had caused them too, and their contemporaries equally, to delight in
gloom, in slaughter, in revenge, in exhibitions of suffering,
analogous in many cases to what they beheld their countrymen inflict
upon each other.
Observe the creations of Æschylus:[989] in them, pregnant all with
Miltonic haughtiness, energy, grandeur, we already discover symptoms
of profound discontent with the character of actual existence and an
invincible yearning towards the past. He seemed desirous to haunt the
imaginations of his contemporaries with gigantic phantoms, quarried
out of the wrecks of a vanished ethical system, in which such
greatness found congeniality and sympathy. His ideas seemed to clothe
themselves spontaneously in language of massive structure, like a
Cyclopean wall, such as before or since no man ever used. He projected
himself by the force of meditation into the heroic spheres, conversed
there with mighty shades, acquired among them stern principles of
action, of thought, of belief, of composition; and with these he
sought to inspire the men of his own time. His object seems less to
delight than to overawe, to persuade than to command. His ideas move
along the highest arch of imagination which spans the universe from
pole to pole, or rise out of a sea of darkness which they illuminate
for a moment like lightning flashes in their passage.
Footnote 989:
The plays of this poet, like those of Shakespeare, were, in
succeeding ages, altered for the stage—Quint. Instit. Orat. x. 1.
The orator, Lycurgus, procured a decree, ordering the tragedies of
the three poets to be copied, and statues to be erected in their
honour.—Plut. Vit. x. Orat.
All Æschylus’s more marked characters come before us invested with
marvellous attributes, and their voices awake a thrilling mysterious
echo in the depths of the soul. Prometheus, for example,—who or what
in poetry is like him? Some features of resemblance he may have to the
Satan of “Paradise Lost,” but only in his indomitable energy, in his
unconquerable will; in all other respects he stands differenced from
that “archangel ruined” by qualities the most remarkable. Towards
mankind he appears in the relation of supreme love. For their sake
alone he braves the anger of Zeus, who, in the tempest of vengeance
which he pours upon the naked form of this beneficent god, is
presented to the mind as a tyrannical oppressor. Again, in the
Erinnyes, what mysterious phantoms does he conjure up! The whole
scene, where black and blood-dripping they rise before the fancy in
the shrine of Delphi, is, beyond imagination, awe-inspiring and
sublime. Like Orestes himself, the fancy is haunted, as we read, by an
uneasy consciousness of their presence. They appear like the summits
of the infernal world, thrust up visibly into the world of reality.
They are frightful dreams endued with form and vitality, and walking
abroad to scare us even while waking. Never did faith in visionary
beings equal in strength the faith which he constrains us to have in
these his creations. The scent of blood fills the nostrils as we read.
We pant,—we shudder,—we expect to hear their footsteps on the carpet
behind us. Nevertheless the effect of Æschylus’ poetry is not, like
Byron’s, to humiliate or depress. On the contrary, it imparts to us
its energy as we read. It fills,—it expands,—it aggrandises,—it
elevates the mind.
Sophocles presents us with a wholly different type of genius. His
conceptions, without being gigantic, are still great, and have a
richness and roundness something like the form of woman. To him, as to
Raffaelle, the world appeared pregnant on all sides with beauty. Yet,
there was a vein of pensiveness in his fancy which, running through
all his works, imparts to them a witchery independent of the amount of
intellect displayed. He never, like Æschylus, transports us into the
dim twilight of mythology amidst the nodding ruins of systems and
creeds. However antique may be the subject which he treats, his
invention gives it completeness, and he brings it out fresh, glossy,
distinct, and beautiful as the creations of to-day. Æschylus carries
us back to the past, Sophocles brings the past forward to us. By a
vigorous exertion of genius he breathes life into things dead; melts
away from about them by his warm touch the hoar of antiquity; fills up
the outline; freshens the colours; converts them into contemporary
existencies. All his sympathies, healthy and true, cling to the things
around him: the religion, the form of polity, the climate, the soil of
Attica, invested with the beauty which they assumed in his plastic
vision, satisfied his desires. What he found not in realities he
bestowed upon them. He idealised his contemporaries. His poetry is
sunny as the Ægæan in spring, and a breeze as healthful and refreshing
breathes over it. Like the nightingale, whose music he loved, it comes
to us full of forgotten harmonies, re-awakening all the associations,
all the delights, all the hopes and aspirations of youth. Sweet and
musical, and replete with tenderness, are his marvellous chorusses.
They burst upon the heart like the first note of the cuckoo[990] in
the depths of a forest, curling round the mossy trunks of the
meditative old trees upon the ear.
Footnote 990:
In Greece heard early in the spring.—Sibthorp, in Walp. Mem. i. 75.
And then his female characters, in which above all things he excels.
Not Imogen herself, whose breath like violets perfumes the page of
Shakespeare, rises before us a more exquisite vision than Antigone, in
her maiden purity, her unfathomable tenderness, her holy affection,
filial and fraternal. Even Œdipos, supported and led into the light by
such a daughter, appears glorious as a god, his involuntary stains
worked off by years of suffering, his reverend old age garlanded by
calamity, wreathed with the tendrils and snowy blossoms of a
daughter’s love. And Tecmessa, does she not seem to be Desdemona
ripened into a mother? There is no poet who has pourtrayed a wife of
more unmingled gentleness, or who has better sounded the depths of a
mother’s heart. Her affection expands like an atmosphere round the boy
Eurysaces, menaced at once by treacherous enemies and by his father’s
madness, and casts a pure and bright ray over the sea of blood and
stormy passion and guilt that floats around her. His Dejanira,
likewise, is a character of great beauty; but in the Clytemnæstra and
Electra, in the Chrysothemis and Ismene, he has been less successful.
Among his male characters Œdipos is the masterpiece. Compounded of
ungovernable passion, a powerful will, a resolution invincible by
suffering, extreme in love or hate, he stands before us in heroic
grandeur, and like the sun’s orb dilates as he descends beneath the
horizon. Next to him in originality and beauty are Neoptolemos and
Teucer, youths of the greatest nobleness of soul, who contrast
strikingly with his fox-like Odysseus and the mean-souled imperial
brothers.
To Sophocles succeeds Euripides,[991] whose genius inspired Milton
with the deepest admiration, as it had before inspired Aristotle.
Resembling Sophocles as little as the latter resembles Æschylus, he is
more deeply imbued than either with the tragic spirit, interprets more
unerringly the language of passion and the heart, and unlocks more
surely the hidden springs of pity. In him, however, poetry is less an
instinct than an art. His intellect, lofty, powerful, penetrating,
ranged through the most untrodden paths of nature and philosophy,
grasped at all learning, at all experience, enriched itself with
prodigious stores of reflections, observations, imagery, over which it
possessed the most perfect mastery, to render them subservient to the
purposes of the drama. Other poets learned in effects, may exhibit
action with no less truth and skill; Euripides dares to unveil causes,
to give the wherefore and the why of actions, to descend into the
abysses of the mind and lay bare the curious mechanism, and, so to
say, central fires which produce and ripen our resolutions and our
demeanour.
Footnote 991:
This writer, like most of his poetical contemporaries, used
constantly to wear a tablet and stylus suspended to his
dress.—Athen. xiii. 45. The use in fact of memorandum books was
common.—Sch. Aristoph. Vesp. 529.
Without the stern grandeur or the rich physical imagery of his
predecessors, he could more surely touch the feelings and create an
intense interest in the story of his tragedies. No man, moreover, has
given birth to nobler sentiments. A moral beauty broods over his
scenes; he elevates,—he enlarges,—he purifies the affections. Truths
of greatest importance make themselves wings of melody in his verse,
and fly across the gulf of two thousand years from him to us. Above
all things, he may almost be said to have discovered the inexhaustible
mine of love, whence he drew the gold that fashioned the divine image
of Alcestis, the noblest mixture of earth’s mould that ever bore the
name of woman. It is true this image is but dimly beheld. Perhaps no
genius, not even Shakespeare’s, could have filled up the outline of
unearthly beauty which Euripides dared to draw. It embodies all the
imagination ever conceived of love. Pure as the celestial Artemis,
impassioned to perfect disinterestedness, all devotion as a wife, all
tenderness as a mother,—content to die, yet jealous of posthumous
love,—sacrificing everything for her husband’s life, yet haunted by
the fear that death might snap the golden links of affection, she
issues forth like a celestial vision to take her farewell of the sun.
Euripides might well be proud of this creation. Not Andromache, not
Nausicaa, not even the far-famed consort of Odysseus can exceed in
truth and beauty his conception of Alcestis. Yet this is the poet whom
Aristophanes had the bad taste to overwhelm with unceasing ridicule,
and whom numerous critics, borrowing their canons from him, have
rashly pronounced languid and insipid.
Moving on a level below this is the character of Electra in the
Orestes. In the Alcestis we have rather the results than the
developement of inexpressible love, which
“raised a mortal to the skies.”
But Electra’s affection unfolds itself before us. There she watches
beside her brother’s bed, contending with the inexpiable guilt of
matricide, sharing his remorse but comforting him, herself oppressed,
yet courageously bearing up for his sake against the worst
“ills that flesh is heir to.”
With the most supreme delicacy is Polyxena conceived; and generally,
whatever may be said of Euripides’ aversion for the sex, it may be
affirmed that no poet has more ably or more nobly painted the female
character.
Passing next to comedy, of which Aristophanes must be regarded as the
representative, we have a department of literature peculiar to Greece,
for its comedy resembles that of no other country. It has never,
perhaps, been fairly characterised. They who take part with the poet
against the philosopher exaggerate his merits: the admirers of
Socrates, in revenge for the unjust death of that great man, generally
undervalue them. Let us endeavour to be just. Aristophanes was a poet
of vast genius, quick to perceive, and powerful to paint the
imperfections, vices, follies, weaknesses, miseries of man in society.
He was greedy, too, of reputation, in the acquisition of which he
spared neither men nor institutions. The youthful, the gay, the
thoughtless, reckoning laughter and amusement among the real wants of
life, (as to the weak and frivolous perhaps they are,) he undertook to
build his fame on easing the human character of those moral excrements
which pass off in grinning and mirth. There is, in fact, a load of
small malignity and mischief in most mental constitutions, which, if
not expelled, might obstruct the healthful play of the faculties.
Mirth is the form it assumes in its exit, and comedy is one of the
means provided by Nature for promoting its discharge.
Aristophanes, who comprehended at least this part of philosophy, found
an abundant harvest of follies in his fellow-citizens. He saw, too,
that of all men they possessed the most inexhaustible good-nature,—to
forgive if they could not profit by the satire which was directed
against themselves. No one could complain of them on this score. Their
risible muscles were at every man’s service who could coin a joke, or
make faces, or draw a caricature or enact one. Athens was, in fact,
the home of laughter: it was the weak side of the national character;
and never, since merry-making was invented, did a more skilful
manufacturer of this autochthonal production exist than Aristophanes.
He could make round things square, or straight crooked; he could
invest the noblest and most sacred things with burlesque and ridicule;
he could convert patriotism into a laughable weakness, genius into
puerility, virtue into a farce. He knew how to make the brave man (as
Lamachos) seem a mere gasconader; the man of genius (as Euripides) a
dealer in rhythmical jingles; the possessor of highest wisdom and most
unsullied integrity a babbling impostor and a thief. Such were his
prodigious powers. Another excellence he had, not unakin to the
former; he could, when it suited his purpose, place the most nefarious
vices on the same level with very harmless foibles, so that both
should appear equally laughable or equally odious.
But the Athenians must have been a base people had these been the
qualities which rendered him popular. They were not: on the contrary,
they formed the great drawback on his reputation. His attack on
Socrates caused the first cast of the Clouds to be hooted off the
stage. But great and crying as were his delinquencies against morals
and philosophy, his genius triumphed, and he became popular in spite
of them; and in spite of them he has continued to be a favourite among
scholars down to the present day. No mean amount of creative power
could have achieved a triumph like this. He possessed, in fact, the
quality, whatever it be, which confers vitality on the offspring of
the mind. Each of his plays, however extravagant its conceptions,
however improbable the plot or wild the scene or fantastic the
characters, still developes a distinct cycle of existences into which
the breath of everlasting life has been breathed. To every individual
whom he brings upon the stage has been assigned a distinct type of
character, a marked individuality, a moral and intellectual
physiognomy as peculiar to himself as his mask. No man exhibits
greater variety in a small compass. When he is working out a character
every word tells, and his ease is infinite. Nothing appears to have
proceeded from him in a hurry. Like the wind, which now rises in
gusts, now sinks to a whisper, but never suggests the idea of
weakness, Aristophanes may trifle, but always because he desires to
trifle.
Moreover, however barren the subject may be, however rugged, bleak,
intractable, he pours over it the dews of poetry, and clothes it
magically with flowers and verdure. Look at the comedies of the Frogs
and the Birds. By whom but Aristophanes could they have been rendered
tolerable? And yet what marvellous effects grow out of them in his
hands! How completely is the imagination detached from the common
everyday world, and sent drifting down the dreamy intoxicating streams
of poetry! Not in the island of Prospero or Philoctetes, not in the
savage-encircled nest of Robinson Crusoe, not in the most visionary
vale that opens before us its serene bosom in the Arabian Nights, do
we breathe more at large, or more fresh and wholesome air, than among
the fogs and fens of Acheron, or the eternal forests of the Hoopoo
king.
With an art, in which Shakespeare was no mean proficient, he opens up
a more culpable source of interest in the frequent satire of vices,
condemned as commonly as they are practised. He unveils the mysteries
of iniquity with a fearless and by no means an unreluctant hand. No
abyss of wickedness was too dark for his daring muse. He ventured
fearlessly upon themes which few since or before have touched on,
despising contemporary envy and vindictiveness and the stern
condemnation of posterity. To be plain, he evidently shared in the
worst corruptions of his age, and, like many other satirists, availed
himself joyfully of the mask of satire as an apology for entertaining
his own imagination with the description of them. No one with the
least clearsightedness or candour can fail to perceive and acknowledge
the depraved moral character of this comic writer. Only less filthy
than Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and common
sewers of the world, over which, by consummate art and the matchless
magic of his style, he contrives unhappily to cast a kind of delusive
halo, and to breathe a fragrance which should never be found but where
virtue is.
Upon the subject of his attack on Socrates his defenders must grant
one of two things—that he libelled him ignorantly, or that he
exhibited a degree of wickedness capable, under other circumstances,
of rising to the enormity of Judas Iscariot. Socrates, both for genius
and for virtue, stands at the head of the pagan world. He whom Plato
admired must have stood on a higher level than Plato,—that is, have
occupied the apex of mere humanity: and in that position we find him
in the Gorgias, the Republic, the Euthyphron, and the Phædon. Many
charlatans, since the days of Aristophanes, have endeavoured to puff
upward at him the smoke of their ignorance or their envy; and from
those who tread the mire with them have for a moment hidden the all
but divine serenity that smiles on humankind from that lofty and
immovable basis where the homage of a world has placed him; but the
next breeze has cleared away the stinking vapours, and left both him
and them where they were,—the one on the highest, the others on the
lowest step of the ladder which connects human nature with the skies.
Upon the dramatic poets whose fragments only remain, it is in this
place unnecessary to dwell. I therefore pass to the historians and
orators, who, no less vividly than her poets, reflect the genius of
Greece. The first age of prose composition, there as elsewhere,
exhibited the natural characteristics of dawning art—indecisiveness
and timidity. Herodotus, properly speaking, was her earliest
historian, and even he still walks within the gigantic shadow of epic
fable which stretched far over the civilised and cultivated ages of
Greece, as doth that of Memnon at dawn over the Theban plains. His
character as a writer is very remarkable. He narrates like a prophet.
His language everywhere bears the impress and image of the
supernatural world wrought into its very substance. He had formed to
himself a poetical standard of human character and human action, which
accordingly in his work develope themselves in poetical forms. Long
and profound meditation had spread out the past before him like a map,
on which he could trace every fluctuation in the stream of events with
something like the skill of a diviner. Men, past or present, may be
interpreted by meditation, if we comprehend the science of human
nature. Herodotus understood much of this science. Indeed his chief
greatness lies in his wisdom.
Ordinary readers, who are always wiser than their dead instructors,
discovering him to be frankly superstitious, to have faith in oracles,
in dreams, in prodigies, to chronicle many trivial actions, many
trivial remarks, feel or affect for him a species of contempt. But
they know very little of what is contained in that vast treasury of
epic events. Little do they suspect with how many great statesmen,
generals and heroic kings the eloquent Halicarnassian could render
them familiar. In his pages alone, perhaps, do we view in his true
proportions that man of men, Themistocles, who overtops by a head and
shoulders all the other statesmen of the ancient world. There, too,
may we best discover the character of his contemporaries, those
extraordinary personages who connect the heroic with the historical
period, and constitute the steps by which we descend from the heights
of mythos and fable to the stern level of realities. Such an epoch
required an historian of peculiar character. In him were to be united
the power to comprehend poetical motives to action, and the solemn
eloquence fittingly to describe deeds springing from such a source.
Both were found in Herodotus. He beheld Providence leading man as it
were into the light from the wilderness of mythological times, still
invested with many of his heroic habits and his forehead beaming with
visionary splendours, but prepared to doff them one by one, and in
their stead to substitute the iron theory and practice of
civilisation.
Thucydides, a few years only younger than Herodotus, found himself
placed in the midst of events the most extraordinary, produced by a
system of civilisation prematurely decaying. Greece had not been
suffered to grow wise and great according to the laws which usually
regulate the ripening of states. She had been scorched into
fruit-bearing by the fiery conflicts of the Median war; and her
strength thus brought into play, and found to be great beyond
calculation, was immediately by ambitious statesmen seized upon,
parcelled out into lots which were directed against each other, and
thus exhausted in petty struggles. In Greece we have an example of a
state whose energies, turned inwards, corroded themselves by
concentration; affording a contrast with Rome whose energies, worked
outward and were gradually weakened and lost by expansion. The genius
of the people begot corresponding historians. Rome, had its
perspicuous ornate, diffuse, haughty and sublime Livy; Athens her
Thucydides full of poetry indeed, and haughtier and more sublime, but
condensed as an oracle, and as an oracle obscure.
Few have measured the greatness of this man. Ordinary critics missing
the ostentatious display of what is termed philosophy, appear to
imagine that Thucydides is not a philosophical historian, reserving
this praise for Gibbon, Hume, or Voltaire. But each of these great
writers would have contemned the praise of such persons. Thucydides in
historical writing stands above rivalry or comparison. The political
atmosphere in which he lived, dusky with thunderclouds and continual
storms, his eye could penetrate through, and discover all the very
extraordinary figures that moved beneath it. Calmly, from heights of
speculation never trodden before, he contemplated the various groups
of generals and statesmen dispersed over his horizon, pierced through
every disguise into their characters, detected their motives,
unravelled their plots, gave their secret maxims a tongue, weighed and
described their actions with an impartial sagacity which among
historians belongs to him alone. In this consists his philosophy. The
society, whose developement he studied, was torn by two antagonist
principles—aristocracy and democracy, whose struggles, undying in free
states, were then more fierce than at any other period in the history
of the world. To enable his countrymen and posterity to comprehend the
whole chain of events, he opened up a long vista into the past, to the
point at which those adversaries appeared upon the scene, and threw a
broad light upon all their movements down to the time when Providence
removed him from his post. His conception of an historian’s duty,
somewhat different from that now entertained, was adopted by all
antiquity, in which every succeeding writer bore testimony to his
superiority by imitating him. He thought it not enough to narrate and
describe, but, throwing open the council chamber and stilling the
tumultuous agora, he brings the living statesman or demagogue upon the
stage, developing in our hearing his views, his conceptions of
surrounding circumstances and characters, his projects, his means for
accomplishing them. That the speeches found in his history were
actually in that form delivered, I will by no means affirm. He
probably obtained but the substance from report, and himself clothed
it in those vivid expressions which two thousand years have not
stripped of their freshness. Nevertheless, the more trifling the
amount of what he owed to the relations of others, the greater must
appear his genius, his unerring sense of fitness, his dramatic power
of projecting himself successively into a whole gallery of characters,
and truly interpreting the opinions, maxims, feelings of each; for no
one pretends that he has ever misrepresented a single individual. And
if those speeches be examined on the score of eloquence, whether of
thought or language, it will I think be found, that in almost every
excellence they may rank with those of Demosthenes. In each a peculiar
economy is observed in the management of the arguments, in the
sentiments, in the opinions, in the logical tone, in the
manifestations of individuality which diffuse themselves over the
whole and give a colour to it.
The defects—for such there are—resolve themselves into a certain
magisterial air, indicating a consciousness of superiority, sure, more
or less, to offend in all cases, and a certain imperspicuity of style
arising principally from the loose manner in which the drapery of
language is flung over his ideas, which is chiefly observable in the
orations, his narrative for the most part being free from this
imperfection. Besides, whatever be the series of facts he relates,
their importance appears to be enhanced by his manner of handling
them. He casts aside, as unworthy both of himself and the reader,
whatever is of inferior moment. These, in fact, the mere chaff of
human affairs, only cling round the grain of action to conceal it, and
must be blown aside by the reader if the historian neglect to do it.
The circumstances of the times conferred upon his subject all the
interest and the gloom of tragedy. But it thus suited him the better.
His genius delighted in terrible pictures: battles, plagues,
earthquakes, general massacres, the storming of cities, the
annihilation of great armies. His fancy vividly realised all,—the
plague-tumbril rumbling, choked with dead, towards the sepulchral
suburbs,—the streets of Corcyra streaming alternately with democratic
and aristocratic blood,—the expected slaughter of Mitylene,—the
reality at Melos,—two thousand Helots cut off by the perfidy of
Sparta,—the butchery at Platæa,—at Skione,—in Sicily! Through all
these scenes we are precipitated forward, shuddering, compassionating,
detesting by turns. But we are neither overwhelmed nor inspired with
disgust for human nature. Our sympathies cling closer and closer to
the historian, who spares no villany, gratifies no malice, tramples on
no noble principle, succumbs to no temptation of partiality. Faithful
to his trust he deals forth truth to all, to none the slightest
flattery. Not even for his country will he lie. It was she, in fact,
with her heroic ethics and grandeur of sentiment, that had taught him
his high principles, and he repaid her by recording all her errors,
all her wrongs, all her imperfections: in which he acted like a great
and a wise man. He would have sacrificed for her his life,—he would
not sacrifice his conscience.
To him succeeds Xenophon, a writer whom it is difficult to
characterise. There was in the temper of his mind something
parasitical, which led him to lean on others for support,—on Socrates,
on Cyrus, on Agesilaos. Incapable of acting in a republic the part of
a good citizen, he would have been that rare thing—a virtuous
courtier. From this the tone of his writings may be conjectured.
Almost everywhere we discover a degree of gentleness, sweetness,
modesty, which steals imperceptibly into the heart, and creates the
impression that he was a man highly amiable and upright. His piety,
likewise, causes itself to be felt. He never mentions the gods but
with due reverence, exhibits a strong reliance upon Providence, and,
according to his best apprehensions, justifies its ways to men with
earnest solicitude. The style of his composition, necessarily
harmonising with the qualities of his mind, is full of suavity,
polished elegance, gentlemanliness, bonhomie, the very characteristics
of a popular writer. Readers of moderate understanding can everywhere
perceive his drift, can accompany him without feeling out of breath.
He is communicative, sensible, rational, indulges in no cloudy
flights, never dives out of sight in the ocean of speculation.
Xenophon, however, misunderstood himself when he conceived that it was
for him to continue the history of Thucydides. It was as if Andrea del
Sarto had undertaken to complete a picture left in parts unfinished by
Michael Angelo. He had neither the penetrating sagacity necessary to
comprehend the internal plan of the picture, the vivifying energy to
preserve the intense tragedy of the action, nor the colours to
harmonise with what he found painted. Still, considered by himself, he
has great merits. Several scenes in his history, the trial, for
example, of the generals, the death of Theramenes, the battles on the
Hellespont, exhibit a force of conception and a scope and flexibility
of style uncommon in any literature; and the Anabasis, without
comparison his greatest work, reads like a chronicle of the most
chivalrous knight-errantry. The attempt, however flagitious on the
part of Cyrus, had the merit of extreme boldness. It was the model
expedition which disclosed the secret of Asia to Alexander, and showed
with how little danger its vast empires might be shattered to pieces.
Xenophon who, young and adventurous, accompanied the Persian prince
and the heroic mercenaries in his pay, contemplated with delight the
physical aspect of the East, its luxurious population, its roving
tribes, with the triumphs of his disciplined and warlike countrymen
over innumerable barbarian hosts. This we discover from the interest
and animation of his narrative, in which stern realities exceed in
grandeur and wildness the creations of romance. But it is equally
clear that he did not fully comprehend the moral of the scene. For,
otherwise, he could never, with these facts before him, have
endeavoured by his Cyropædia, to recommend to his countrymen those
institutions which rendered Persia, with all its wealth, a constant
prey to the small republics of Greece.
Of the other writings of Xenophon little need be said: they are the
parsley and the rue of Greek literature, bordering and adorning its
entrance, and therefore beheld of all. But most of these have their
beauty. Even in the hunting treatise, amid the breeding of dogs, and
nets, and knives, and boar-spears, and the slaughter of animals, we
catch glimpses of better things,—of glades where the hare frolics by
moonlight, and grassy uplands, dewy and fragrant, where does, poetical
as she of Rylstone, lead forth their fawns at break of day. The
treatises on the states of Athens and Sparta have, I trust, been
falsely attributed to this able and accomplished writer. They are
contemptible productions, conceived in the spirit of a servile
flatterer of the Dorians, and of a satirist, equally servile and
stupid, of the greater and infinitely more intellectual Ionic race.
I pass over the historians known to us only by a few scanty fragments,
that I may at once come to the orators, the peculiar ornament and
pride of Greece, whose greatest statesmen were equally great as
speakers, more especially at Athens, where, as an art, eloquence was
most assiduously cultivated, and achieved its greatest triumphs.
Tradition attributes to Themistocles, to Pericles, to Alcibiades
consummate skill in guiding the currents of human sympathy, and a
sense of their glory lingered on the high places of society like
sunshine on the Alps long after they had quitted the world. But as
they did not augment the stores of their country’s literature, we can
have nothing to speak of them here. The orators whose fragments time
has been unable to destroy are however sufficient, if not to satiate
our thirst of admiration, at least to show, by the grandeur of their
proportions, how great and glorious Attic eloquence, when entire, must
have been. More than any other department of literature it is the
growth of patience and toil. A man may be born with the instincts of
eloquence,—fancy, constitutional fire, vehemence,—but unless these
instincts be broken in and trained by consummate art, nature will in
vain have bestowed her gifts. These truths were early understood at
Athens. It was perceived that without eloquence political distinction
was unattainable, and therefore all who aspired to
“wield at will that fierce democracy,”
subjected themselves to a course of laborious study, to which our more
phlegmatic natures would not submit.
The results we may, in part, still contemplate in that body of
Athenian oratory, which to the author and the statesman is in itself a
library. Every legitimate form of eloquence is there beheld. In
Antiphon and Andocides it appears in rough simplicity, employing
contrivance and art, but employing them awkwardly. Lysias makes
considerable advances beyond them, clothes his style with grace,
constructs his narrative with extraordinary skill, and moves the
passions by considerable pathos. Isocrates it is common with the
moderns, who echo one another, to underrate: their delicate ears,
offended by his too nicely balanced periods, his antitheses, his
monotonous cadences, refuse to relish that stately harmony, and
majestic flow of language, which recommend the thoughts of this “old
man eloquent,” whose greatest panegyric is pronounced by Plato[992] in
the Phædros. In Isæos we have an argumentative, able pleader; in
Deinarchos a vigorous accuser; in Demades the power of splendid
improvisation; in Lycurgus noble sentiments clothed in poetical
language, haughty patriotism, the rough virtues of a stoic; in
Æschines an union of magnificent style, thoughts full of weight,
admirable arrangement, warmth, vivacity, wit. Yet Demosthenes soars
far above Æschines,—far above all. On him nature had bestowed every
quality which constitutes an ingredient of eloquence,—originality,
love of labour, a clear head, a warm heart, a judgment all but
unerring, with an impetuous vehemence perfectly irresistible.
Footnote 992:
Opp. t. i. p. 105. seq.—He is said to have received a thousand
drachmas for each of his pupils.—Dem. cont. Lacrit. § 11.
A very extraordinary impression is created by the study of this
writer. He seems never to put forth all his strength. You see him,
indeed, bear down every thing before him, overwhelming the arguments
and the gold of Philip, crushing his rivals, annihilating his enemies;
but the persuasion rests with you that he could have done more. You
discover amid the waves and foam of his terrible eloquence indications
that that vast ocean had never been stirred to the bottom, that
occasion had never called forth all its latent powers of destruction.
He measures himself with his antagonist, and is secure of victory. He
presents a front bristling with the deadliest points of logic, like
the spears of the Macedonian phalanx, and wherever he moves he is
invincible. Nevertheless he appears to advance nothing for the sake of
effect, to be in search of none of the beauties of style, but rather
to avoid them. He is neither draped, nor painted, nor adorned; but a
naked colossus whose sublimity springs from the perfection and
greatness of its proportions.
Other orators persuade, Demosthenes enforces conviction. They who
listen to him have no choice,—they must believe. Without offending the
reader’s pride, he makes him ashamed to hesitate. He reminds one of
the Nile at the cataracts, where, confined by rocks within too narrow
limits, it pours resistlestly along, swelling, deep, with scattered
whirlpools and foam scarcely visible on its vast surface, seemingly
calm at a short distance, but, to those who look near, agitated,
angry, full of unstemmable currents and boiling motion. He had
profoundly studied human nature, chiefly, of course, as it developes
itself in free states, and, better than any man, knew by what motives
it may, in spite of corruption and degeneracy, be impelled to
strenuous action, though but for a brief space. His language, flashing
through the moral gloom around him, called forth bright reflections
from whatever was brilliant or polished, and kindled the fragments of
patriotic emotions into a flame. If genius could regenerate, could
pour the blood of youth into the veins of age, could substitute
loftiness of sentiment, heroic daring, disinterested love of country,
religious faith, spirituality, for sensual self-indulgence, for sordid
avarice, for a base distrust in Providence, Demosthenes had renewed
the youth of Athens. The spirit of the old democratic constitution
breathes through all his periods. He stands upon the last defence of
the republican world, when all else had been carried, the
representative of a noble but perished race, fighting gallantly,
though in vain, to preserve that fragment sacred from the foot of the
spoiler. The passion and the power of democracy seem concentrated in
him. He unites in his character all the richest gifts of nature under
the guidance of the most consummate art, and, doubtless, Hume was
right when he said that, of all human productions, his works approach
the nearest to perfection.
Beyond this point it is irksome to proceed in our view of Grecian
literature, which, after the battle of Cheronæa, was overshadowed by
despotism and dwindled gradually into insignificance. Not that genius
wholly and suddenly disappeared. The soil of Hellenic intellect was
not entirely exhausted, but the fruit it bore was comparatively
insipid. A courtly stamp was set upon every thing. Men no longer
obeyed their genuine impulses. It was dangerous generally, and always
profitless to be frank and manly. Instead of addressing themselves to
the healthy natural sympathies of the people, writers servilely
laboured by conceit and flattery to wring reluctant patronage from
princes. The spirit of affectation, accordingly, for the first time
made its appearance. Men tortured their ingenuity to invent smart
things. Enthusiasm and passion and earnestness, characteristics all of
popular writers, are never fashionable among courtiers, who consider
sincerity vulgar, and hypocrisy a virtue. In the later Greek writers,
therefore, who all wrote for some court or other, we discover the
usual frigidity and extravagance which invariably deform the
literature of such states. Along with these faults, others also are
found far more pernicious: the inculcation of selfishness, gross
sensuality, base maxims, a depraved taste. Man in the savage state is
a garden in which noxious weeds and the most beautiful flowers and
useful plants grow together; civilised and free, he is the same garden
cleared, as far as possible, of its weeds; but, when verging a second
time into barbarism, the weeds again become luxuriant, and entirely
choke or conceal the flowers. And thus too it is in literature. In the
literatures of Greece, Rome, and modern Italy we can now contemplate
the complete process; in our own, a part only, how great a part—it is
not here my business to inquire.