GREEK LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

Of all the literatures which have contributed to that of England,

the Greek is by far the first and most important. The study of Greek

literature is the indispensable introduction to the study of European

literary history. Whether we review the literature of England, of Italy,

of France, or of Germany, it is at Greece that we shall ultimately

arrive. Take our English epic, _Paradise Lost_. It is a commonplace that

it derives much inspiration from Dante’s _Divine Comedy_. But, when we

arrive at the _Divine Comedy_, we are assured that it would never have

taken such shape but for Virgil’s _Aeneid_. And, when we come to Virgil’s

_Aeneid_, it is a fact known to the veriest tiro that the _Aeneid_ is a

copy, and, in a sense, a plagiarism, of Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.

The pedigree is self-evident and undeniable. Practically it is avowed at

every step. Look elsewhere. Pope and Shenstone wrote “pastorals,” after

the fashion introduced into English by Spenser. But Spenser himself had

been led to this form of composition by the Italian Sannazaro and the

Latin Virgil. And, when we reach Virgil, we find that he is a liberal

borrower, in matter and manner alike, sometimes even in the very phrase,

from the Greek of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. It is the same with

literary criticism. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_, like Roscommon’s _Essay

on Translated Verse_, is derived from Boileau’s French _Art Poétique_.

But Boileau is an echo of the Latin Horace and his _De Arte Poetica_,

while Horace is himself a borrower from Greeks of Alexandria, and

ultimately from Aristotle of Athens. And so it is throughout. Often,

especially in these later days, our stars of English literature shine

with a light reflected directly from Greek constellations. No less often

they shine with a light transmitted through several media, but ultimately

issuing from the suns of Greece.

Pre-eminent by far among the literatures to which we owe a debt stands

this body of eternally great creators, who, by the clear beauty of their

language, their luminous apprehension, and their simple but magnificent

originality, surpass in the aggregate those whom any other nation can

assemble. It is no paradox, but a simple historical fact, that the old

English writers have had less influence in moulding our modern literature

than have Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Demosthenes. “We are all

Greeks,” says Shelley, in the preface to his _Hellas_. Whether we will

or no, our literature and philosophy, our canons of taste, our ideals of

art, are all, in a sense, Greek.

* * * * *

Greek literature, unlike Latin, and unlike those of modern Europe, was

mainly, if not wholly, original. What we have been able to borrow or to

find ready-made seems to have developed itself spontaneously in the

wonderful genius of Greece. Latin literature has been called—and not

without some justice—one vast plagiarism from Greek. But Greek itself

is guiltless of plagiarism. Its thoughts, like its exquisite clearness

and restraint of style, are almost entirely its own. With unlettered

barbarians to north and west of them, with flowery, bombastic, or mystic

orientals on the Asiaward side, the Greeks must be credited with a

marvellous gift of their own, the instinct for sound judgement and sure

taste.

But they possessed more than taste and judgement. They had inventiveness.

We may reflect for a moment upon the various forms and modes of

literature which we possess and practise in verse and prose. Of verse

there are the epic, lyric, elegiac, satiric, dramatic, didactic,

pastoral, epigrammatic, philosophic varieties. In prose there are

history, oratory, philosophy, biography, criticism, fiction. To us all

these forms and species, with their appropriate language, metre and

tone, are taken for granted, as if they were the necessary outcome of

some natural order of things. They are, no doubt, founded in nature.

Nevertheless, we should remember that they must have had a beginning of

their differentiation, that they must have been invented somewhere. And

we discover that each of them is to be found arising in recognizable

shape on the soil of ancient Greece. It is easy nowadays for us to

imitate existing forms, to build with the architecture of the drama

of Shakespeare and the epic of Milton, to copy the lyrical metres of

Gray, Shelley, and Tennyson, to adopt the satirical machinery of Pope

and Dryden. But these differentiations in mode of expression represent

something deeper, some distinction evolved by the human mind between

compositions of one purpose and compositions of another. It was the

Greeks who first convincingly and systematically illustrated that

distinction, and who found for each subject of thought its appropriate

vehicle of expression. More modern times have evolved many modifications

of detail in metre or rhyme, and have essayed many novelties in the way

of narrative. But they have never added an entirely new form of poetry

or prose to the _répertoire_ of the Greeks. Tennyson does not write _In

Memoriam_ in the metre and language of _Paradise Lost_. Shelley’s _Ode

to a Skylark_ does not employ the diction and rhythm of Pope’s _Essay

on Man_. It is recognized that the feeling and its vehicle would be

incongruous. But how does this come to be recognized? A world is quite

conceivable in which there might have been developed but one form of

literature and one ideal of expression. In such a world the incongruity

would not be felt. The early Hellenes made their own literary beginnings

upon almost a clear field, and it is one of their imperishable glories

that they succeeded in realizing the subtle relations between language

and thought or feeling, and in expressing these latter in all the variety

of extant literary forms. For heroic deeds and lofty incident they

developed the epic verse; for the sweets and bitters of love, and for

other passions and ardours, they built the lyric stanza; for the plaints

of mourning they created the elegiac; they did this gradually, no doubt,

and in the main unconsciously, but with all the more perfect result. If

we inherit what Greece has created, we have no right to assume that all

our happy varieties of literary form are things of course, which would

somehow have come to any nation.

* * * * *

The history of Greek literature should be a study of years. Nevertheless

it is not without profit to take the greater names and the more prominent

types, to show their order of succession, to say something of their range

and scope, to note the essentials of their style, and thence to derive

some clearer idea of their influence on what we read to-day in our own

English tongue.

The earliest Greek books which we now possess are Homer’s _Iliad_ and

_Odyssey_. But these are much too polished and perfect works to have been

the very first that Greeks ever composed. Indeed we know that before

Homer’s time there were minstrels, who sang the “glories” of heroes, very

much after the manner in which the bards sang in Wales or Scotland, or

the gleemen in Anglo-Saxon England. It must also be assumed that popular

songs of a religious kind were in existence. Yet all these earliest

efforts at literary creation have vanished; we possess no material for

definite information concerning them. For us Greek literature begins

with “Homer.” The question as to who Homer was cannot be answered. Some

critics contend that he is a mere title, and that the compositions which

go by his name are patchworks, made up of a series of narratives sung

by wandering bards called “rhapsodists.” Homêros, they say, is but a

fictitious title under which to string all these separate compositions

together into one so-called epic. Others, going less far, say that there

was indeed a veritable Homer, that he composed a poem on the _Wrath of

Achilles_, and that this poem has been enlarged by other hands, which

turned the whole into the _Iliad_, or poem on the “Siege of Troy”. Even

if this be true, we know nothing of the original Homer, when or where

he lived. To discuss the question at any length is beyond our present

province. Perhaps we may believe, with great masters of poetry like

Goethe and Schiller, that a “Homer” wrote the poem of the _Iliad_, but

that it has since been added to, tampered with, reconstructed. We may

also believe that some one other poet wrote a corresponding portion of

the _Odyssey_. These two original poets were of nearly, though not quite,

the same period. They were inspired with much the same literary ideals,

and were almost equal, though by no means identical, in genius. They

may be supposed to have appeared in a specially fertile epoch, like the

great Elizabethans, or like the Italian poets of the first Renaissance.

Their artistic principles would be much the same; they would live in

much the same environment; they would see the world, the gods, mankind,

through much the same moral temperament. Let us grant that their work

has undergone large interference and contamination. Yet it is hard to

think that a motley crowd of rhapsodists could ever possess such a lofty

average of genius as pervades the whole body of these inimitable poems.

Both works were, beyond reasonable doubt, in complete existence before

800 B.C. Twenty-seven centuries ago the Greek genius had reached thus

high a point.

The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are to be read in many a translation. The

_Iliad_ is the poem of Ilium or Troy. It deals with events during the

siege of that town by the confederated Achaeans. It narrates the doings

and sayings of the Grecian heroes, of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Ulysses,

Diomede, Menelaus, outside Troy, and of the Trojans, King Priam, Hector

or Paris within the city, where is also the traitress Helen. It narrates

the counsels, quarrels, and battles of the gods, as they arise from

partisanship during the siege. The poem is filled with prowess of battle,

till it ends with the death of Hector, champion of Troy. The narrative

is rapid and vigorous, full of valorous and exciting exploits of men

interwoven with the friendly or unfriendly actions of gods. Descriptions

are many, but always brief, and everywhere inimitably fresh and luminous.

The whole purpose of the poem is to tell a story, and to tell it with

clearness and simplicity, yet with fire and force. When it is embellished

with ornaments of simile or other figure, it is because that device best

brings home the picture. There is no idle lavishing of ornament for mere

ornament’s sake.

The _Odyssey_ is the poem of Odysseus, the wandering Ulysses. He, the

king of the little island of Ithaca, after being for ten years absent at

the siege of Troy, starts homeward in his ship to his wife, Penelope. But

on the journey he meets with adventures, strange, terrible, or happy.

He is storm-tossed and delayed by the anger of offended gods. He nearly

meets his death from the one-eyed cannibal monster Polyphemus; he nearly

loses his crew among the Lotus-eaters; he is detained for seven years in

the island of the seductive Calypso; his comrades are turned into swine

by Circe the enchantress; he is wrecked between Scylla and Charybdis.

He at last arrives home, only to find Penelope at the mercy of a rabble

calling themselves her suitors. He slays them, and reveals himself to his

wife—and so a happy ending. In this poem, as in the _Iliad_, composed

nearly three thousand years ago, there is already achieved a perfection

of literary art which we moderns find ourselves for ever aiming at and

for ever missing. For this there is other reason than the natural genius

of the Greek. The poets who wrote these two stories looked out upon the

world with a frank, unclouded gaze, for which, perhaps, we are now too

sophisticated. They therefore tell their tale with such simple directness

that it might seem told by a grown-up child; but meanwhile with such

brilliant clearness, with such firm outline, that it no less appears

the work of a consummate artist. There is, it is true, no psychological

probing in these books. There is no subtle moralizing, no pondering of

any kind of deep question. Nowhere does there obtrude itself a desire to

be clever, rhetorical, dazzling. Yet no one can read the _Iliad_ without

seeing those warriors face to face, as they were, in their physical

strength and simplicity of character; nor can he read the _Odyssey_

without feeling that he is with Ulysses on his raft, sailing through the

deep, blue Mediterranean, that the salt breeze is blowing on his face,

that the world is young and fresh, and that a man’s part is to perform

that which lies nearest to his hand.

What effect the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ have upon the intelligent

reader may be judged by their preeminence among poems of all times and

all places. What an effect they have had on our literature may be judged

by the number of translations, many in prose, and many better known in

verse, from the hands of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Derby, Morris, Way. It

may be judged by the countless allusions to the “tale of Troy divine”

which are strewn through every book of the last three millennia; by our

everyday familiarity with the names of Hector and Achilles, Helen of Troy

and Paris, Diomede and Ulysses, Circe and Penelope, Polyphemus and the

Lotus-eaters. On reading Chapman’s Homer, Keats felt like an astronomer

“when a new planet swims into his ken.” The same experience has been

felt by all who recognize, as Keats did, “the principle of beauty in all

things.” But little notion of those poems can be gathered at second-hand.

Of its similes we may here quote one, not because it is in any way the

most beautiful, but because it has been translated by a master in the

art, Tennyson. Nothing in English has ever been hit upon to give the

majestic, sonorous roll of the Greek hexameter, but Tennyson has, at

least, preserved the frank simplicity of his original:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,

Fixed by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

Next to Homer may come, by no means in importance, but in date, the poet

Hesiod. He, too, uses the hexameter line, but with a different tone and

movement, and for quite another purpose. He is our first example of

“didactic” verse—the verse which is intended to instruct. Hesiod, who may

be dated about the year 700 B.C., composed two poems of some dimensions,

the one called the _Theogony_ or _Pedigree of the Gods_, the other known

as the _Works and Days_. The latter is a collection of versified rules

of agriculture mixed with proverbial wisdom. It is, in fact, a sort

of “Farmer’s Annual” of Greece combined with the proverbial wisdom of

“Poor Richard.” Practical farming and practical morals go together. It

would almost certainly have been written in prose, but for the simple

reason that prose literature had not yet been invented. All literary

composition begins with verse. As a poem, there is little to be said for

the _Works and Days_, except that, like all things early Greek, it is

entirely unpretentious and goes straight to the point. Didactic verse

has grown common since Hesiod’s day, although happily it is now seldom

used for agricultural purposes. Tusser’s _Five Hundred Points of Good

Husbandry_ is one of the earliest results of the revival of Greek studies

in England in the Elizabethan time, and, though it cannot count for much

in literature, it is our first example of a species of work which took a

more moralizing shape in Dyer’s _Fleece_ and many later didactics.

Of much more value is the next kind of poetry which arose among the

Greeks, a kind which has been called “personal,” inasmuch as it is

prompted by the writer’s individual feelings and emotions, and has

reference to himself, his hopes, griefs, loves, and other sentiments.

The epic poetry of Homer had been purely objective, dealing with

incidents, things, and men outside the poet. The author makes no

revelation of himself; he does not speak in the first person. But what

is known as “lyric” and “elegiac” poetry is the outcome of a man’s own

inner experience, and is only valuable in proportion as it expresses

powerfully or touchingly a real or imagined passion of the writer,

which the world at large can also recognize for its own. The poetry of

_Lycidas_, _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, is “elegiac”; the poetry of songs,

such as those of Herrick and Burns, is “lyric.” “Elegiac” properly means

“adapted to mourning,” but the elegy, with its couplet rhythm varied from

the hexameter, yet with a plaintive dignity all its own, was used for

other feelings than those of grief. It was used for praise, exhortation,

reflection, love; for anything “subjective,” or springing from the mood

of the writer. We need not enumerate the Greeks who at various dates

wrote poetry of this personal description. After the year 700 B.C. there

were many and excellent lyrists of the kind. At Lacedaemon the poet

Tyrtaeus composed marching songs, which acted upon the Spartans as the

_Marseillaise_ and _Die Wacht am Rhein_ act upon nations in modern days.

Archilochus of Paros, soured by his own failings and misfortunes, wrote

often in bitterness, like Burns. He is styled an “iambic” writer from a

new form of composition which he employed, and he became the first great

name in satire. In Lesbos, a fertile, luxurious, and cultured island,

we meet with the foremost name in the poetry of passion, the famous

Sappho, the first and greatest of women in literature. It is Sappho who

could paint, better than poet has ever painted since, the agonizing

of love. Nor was she alone. In the same island she had her school of

followers, and, separately from these, the poet Alcaeus poured forth his

fiery thoughts in “words that burn.” But it is Sappho who, like George

Sand, wrote from the “real blood of her heart and the real flame of her

thought” things which have been the despair of imitator or translator.

Unhappily, very little of her work is extant now, even in fragments; but

what there is, is “more golden than gold.” Her metres are as nobly simple

as in one of Herrick’s songs; her words are simple also. Yet, just as

Dante could make a mighty verse out of the noun and verb, by choosing

for his noun and verb the absolutely truest and most home-coming, so the

simplicity of Sappho is only a deceptive covering for the most consummate

art. Often as our lyrists have tried to catch something of her sacred

fire, never has one quite attained to her irresistible pathos. Perhaps

he who has approached nearest is Burns. Sappho is untranslatable. All

absolutely best words in any language must be so. The nearest equivalent

in English may be sought and found for the best word in the Greek, but in

the special quality of its music or its associations it can never be the

same.

The names of Pindar and Simonides are of a later date. Before them comes

another, who sang to the lyre those gemlike songs of love, and joy, and

wine, which the cavalier poets of the English seventeenth century made

their ideal. This was Anacreon of Teos. “Anacreontics” is the name given

to those polished cameo-like little poems which imitators have essayed

upon Anacreon’s themes. Cowley’s translations into English verse are

known to literature, and readers familiar with the works of Thomas Moore

will remember his loose youthful version of a few true and many spurious

lyrics of the Teian bard. It is to Anacreon that we may look for the

prototype of those graceful trifles called _vers de société_, and of

those songs of love or gaiety which Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and

Waller have developed in such exquisite examples.

All this personal poetry was meant to be sung to the accompaniment of

lyre or flute. Had it been primarily meant to be read, it might possibly,

even with Greek creators, have been less simple and direct, more

artificial.

There was also another class of poetry which was sung to the same

accompaniment. Early Greece found many occasions for festivities, and

at religious holidays, public rejoicings, and public thanksgivings,

choruses sang while moving in procession or while dancing round the

altars. Hymns were chanted to the gods, triumphal odes were chanted in

honour of men. When literature turned to these—or when these became

literature—there arose in particular two most famous poets, Simonides

and Pindar, to compose such public odes, very much after the manner in

which a modern laureate might compose an ode of installation or national

victory, or a dirge upon a national loss. Compositions written in this

spirit are seldom of the highest rank of literature. They lack the

saving grace of inspiration. Pindar is strong, noble, imaginative. His

odes were, no doubt, splendid compositions for chanting and musical

purposes. To read them is to be conscious of a stateliness and dignity

and an “eagle flight” which powerfully affect the student. But, full as

they are of great imagery and diction, they are beyond doubt apt to be

artificial and perplexed in structure; they are too often obscure, too

often deliberately learned in allusion. To be its best, poetry must be

written from the promptings of the poet’s heart, and Pindar too often

wrote to order, for payment, and not from inward compulsion. No exact,

or very near, parallel to Pindar can be found. He has never been even

tolerably well translated. This has not been for want of admirers. Gray,

who imitated him in the _Progress of Poesy_, has been said by Mason

(erroneously enough) to possess Pindar’s fire: Cowley’s tombstone calls

him, without much justification, the English Pindar, and at all times

down to the present writers have been led to emulate the soaring Pindaric

ode. Whatever his defects, it is certain that over all modern lyric

poets, even over those who could not always follow his meaning, Pindar

has exercised the sway of a master and imperial spirit.

* * * * *

Among the kinds of poetry chiefly affected by the earlier Greeks must

also be included the “gnomic” or “sententious” verse which goes under

the names of Theognis and Phocylides. These writers both lived in the

sixth century B.C., and both composed versified maxims or precepts of

conduct and worldly wisdom. After times came to credit to those great

originals any verses of this character which were current in the elegiac

or the hexameter metre, and such verses played very much the same part

in Greek mouths as is played by the Proverbs of Solomon or by proverbial

philosophy of unknown authorship in the mouths of Englishmen. At a later

date in the iambic metre the comic poet Menander introduced into his

plays a large number of maxims, which gained wide vogue and which caused

many more of the same species to be fathered upon him. Of the various

wise saws thus current in Greece a great number were translated or

adapted by Latin writers, and have so passed into the general possession

of the European world.

* * * * *

Between the years 500 and 400 B.C. there arose in Athens that which is

the special poetic glory of that city—the drama, embracing both the drama

of tragedy, as wrought by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the

drama of comedy, as built by Aristophanes, and later, in a different form

and spirit, by Menander.

The Attic drama arose on Grecian ground. At one time choruses danced

round the altar of the wine-god Dionysus (or Bacchus), and chanted songs

in his honour. The chorus had its leader, the Coryphaeus. In time it

became the fashion for the Coryphaeus to personate the god, or some

character whom story connected with him. He recited a speech, or related

some legend, in which the wine-god was concerned. It naturally followed

that he was next raised upon a low dais, and distinguished from the rest

of the chorus. The dais later became the dramatic stage. Subsequently

another member of the chorus was told off to converse with him in rough

dialogue, the theme being still the history of Bacchus. So far, then, we

have a chorus which dances and sings, and two actors supporting crude

dramatic parts. It was from these simple beginnings that there grew to

perfection in Athens, as suddenly as the Shakespearean perfection arose

from the old miracle-plays and “moralities” in England, noble dramas like

those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The open sward had become a theatre,

the acting art, the dialogue poetry. Drama had been raised to an art of

the most absolute literary completeness. It must, however, be observed

that the tragedy which grew up in this way was religious in its origin.

Until the end it—theoretically at least—remained so. Its subject-matter

and laws were, therefore, limited. The stage was at the same time a

pulpit for moral and religious teaching. The theatre was, moreover,

national. Here are some important elements of artistic difference. Those

who read Shakespeare and then turn to Athenian tragedies are puzzled.

They do not understand those Attic creations. They think them rather

cold, with somewhat slender plot, containing few surprises. Italians

and Frenchmen can understand them; the average Englishman cannot. The

poetry is often admirable, but the action appears strangely simple, and

for the most part over obvious. The very name “tragedy” seems sometimes

misapplied. But by “tragedy” the Greeks did not necessarily mean a play

which ends in death and disaster. Such an end was, indeed, usual, and

hence the modern meaning of the term. But the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus

ends happily, as do the _Alcestis_ of Euripides and the _Philoctêtes_

of Sophocles. The Greeks meant rather the working out of some great and

powerful situation affording occasion for sensations of pity and fear.

Here was “the luxury of grief.” The spectators knew that there would

be some climax in the drama; but whether it would issue in good or

evil depended on the poet; they only knew that their feelings would be

powerfully worked upon by great poetry greatly delivered. For the rest,

they required no startling ingenuity of plot or variety of incident.

The three great dramatists in artistic sequence are Aeschylus, Sophocles,

Euripides. These were all alive together, but Aeschylus was old when

Euripides was young. The appearance of all these in one epoch is exactly

paralleled by the cluster of superlative dramatists in the Elizabethan

age or in the France of Louis XIV. Of Sophocles it has been said that he

represented men as they ought to be, and of Euripides that he represented

them as they were. The dictum is hardly true, and, if it were, it must

be noted that, whereas to “hold the mirror up to nature” is as much the

function of Greek tragedy as of English, it is no function of Greek drama

to be a literal copy of literal everyday human experience. In Aeschylus

all is in the grand style of an awe-inspiring simplicity. Take his

_Prometheus Bound_. We have a majestic Titan figure bound to a desolate

rock, there to remain in punishment for an offence against the law of

Zeus. He had bestowed fire and other boons on mortal men. Therefore Zeus

pinioned him on Caucasus for tens of thousands of years. In one way,

and one only, could he gain his freedom—by disclosing to Zeus a certain

secret of fate. But Prometheus would not repent of having exercised his

benevolent freewill against the decree of Heaven. He gloried in his

action; he refused to deliver up the secret. Now during the whole play

the figure of Prometheus does not move: he is fixed fast. There is no

action on his part, nothing but speech. Different gods, demigods, and

a mortal visit him, condole with him, advise him, or threaten him. He

remains firm to the end, the spectacle of an utterly resolute heart

rebelling against fate.

It is not hard to recognize in English literature some of the characters

to which this Prometheus has served as prototype. There is Milton’s

Satan, who is distinctly modelled on the Titan. Byron acknowledges that

all his rebellious spirits, Cain, Manfred, and their like, are echoes

of the same character. Shelley wrote a _Prometheus Unbound_ for sequel.

Keats’s _Hyperion_ shows the same influence. Swinburne’s _Atalanta in

Calydon_ is throughout inspired by the conception of Aeschylus.

Ancient drama has much attracted the modern poet. The _Agamemnon_ of

Aeschylus has been translated by Browning, far more roughly—not to say

grotesquely—in style than it deserves, but with the Greek spirit in no

small measure retained. The same writer has translated the _Alcestis_ of

Euripides in the work known as _Balaustion’s Adventure_.

But to the English stage Greek tragedies are not suited. Our theatre is

not religious, nor national. But in France and Italy Greek plays have

found a more congenial soil. Corneille and Racine in France, Alfieri in

Italy, have sought to mould their dramas upon Greek lines, though, truth

to tell, they much more closely suggest the rhetorical constructions of

the Latins. The only deliberate attempt to compose in English directly

on the Grecian model is Milton’s _Samson Agonistes_, a work in which

admirable poetry does not atone for a certain coldness and formality

intolerable in drama, whether meant for Greece or for England. Yet

inasmuch as the Italian drama was largely instrumental in developing the

English from its crude and vulgar antecedents, and as Italian drama was

in its turn evoked by the dramatic examples of Greece, we can even here,

despite all unlikenesses, distinctly affiliate the main principles of our

own stage-pieces to those of ancient Athens. We cannot, indeed, maintain

that without Athens we should have had no drama; we can only assert

that our greatest drama, as we have it, in its poetical dignity and its

technical architecture, would hardly have been. It might have been a

prose drama, and one of very different conception and ideals. But it is

what it is because it took from Greece that which suited its purpose,

while it left to Greece those elements which belong to so different a

theatre.

It has been described how Greek tragic drama arose from the choruses

singing round the altar of Dionysus. Greek comedy springs from the same

source. There were two sides to a Greek festival, as there are two sides

to Christmas Day. The serious part of the festivity developed serious

poetry and serious action. The light, sportive, and satirical part

developed humorous verse and humorous action. It is easy to see how both

dramatic kinds would originate from these two different aspects of the

feast. From beginnings as rude as those of tragedy was developed the

comedy of Aristophanes or of Menander, which in its turn, begat that of

Plautus and Terence at Rome, and thence of Shakespeare’s predecessors in

England and of Molière in France. Even the comic opera of to-day bears a

wonderfully close resemblance to plays of Aristophanes, with whom occur

almost the same bizarre situations and humours as in Gilbert’s very

modern eccentricities.

Comedy, like tragedy, had its chorus, chanting appropriate odes during

the intervals of acting. And be it noted that the Greek drama, whether

tragic or comic, was literary. It bears to be read as much as to be

acted; it is a work of conscientious art. In tragedy the writing is pure

poetry. In comedy it is humour and wit, biting, sparkling, often coarse

and very personal, but always full of life. There was some defence for

personality. Comedy, like tragedy, served to give various lessons to

the Athenians. Greece possessed no newspapers, and in their place the

comic stage served even more than now to criticize fads, to chastise

political and private misdoings. So long as it was what is called the

“Old Comedy” of Aristophanes it availed itself only too fully of these

licences. But when its attacks on politics or private persons became

intolerable, its wings were clipped by law, and in the “New Comedy” of

Menander we find another tone, the tone of Molière or of Ben Jonson,

the treatment of social types, the comedy of domestic intrigue. Of the

whims of the “Old Comedy” the following may serve as a specimen. In

the _Birds_ of Aristophanes two enterprising Athenians persuade the

birds to build a city in the clouds—“Cloud-cuckoo-town” it is called—by

which the ungrateful gods are to be cut off from men, and so forced to

come to terms. This is the central idea. Twenty-four persons, equipped

as different birds, form the chorus, and give the name to the piece.

The central conception, however, is but a peg on which to hang attacks

upon the follies of the day, and particularly follies in contemporary

politics. Neither parties nor men are spared. Nevertheless the piece is

always comedy; it cultivates “the laughable”; it is never mere diatribe.

* * * * *

One other kind of ancient poetry, and a delightful kind as we see it

in Greece, is the pastoral idyll of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. In

English literature the word “pastoral” at once suggests poor triviality,

the rather mawkish and always artificial eclogues of Pope or the

_Shepheard’s Calender_ of Spenser. But, though the conception of these

works was ultimately borrowed from Greek through the Latin medium of

Virgil, or the Italian medium of Sannazaro, they lack precisely those

elements which make the Greek pastoral idyll a thing of beauty and a

joy for ever. When Theocritus, about 270 B.C., wrote in Alexandria or

elsewhere his “Idylls” or (“little pictures”), he was portraying a life

among Sicilian or Coan shepherds which possessed a large proportion

of truth and naturalness. At least it is of real shepherds that he

writes, idealizing, perhaps, their Arcadian environment of sunshine and

simplicity, but nevertheless presenting a life easily conceivable among

entirely possible rustics. He imaged a rural scene, placed in it a

befitting action or situation, and called his work “a little picture.”

But when Virgil imitated him at Rome, the Corydons and Damoetases whom

he introduces are hardly shepherds of reality. Their talk tends to be

artificial and literary. Shepherds did not pipe and contend in alternate

minstrelsy on the Italian farms as Greek shepherds had done, however

rudely, in Cos or Sicily. Moreover Virgil wrote with an _arrière pensée_.

He was thinking of the society of his time, and more or less representing

that society under the guise of obviously theatrical shepherds. In

Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ we no longer recognize any pretence at

reality. The idea of merry witty shepherds piping in sylvan scenes of

sunlit Sicily is natural enough; but the notion of the smock-frocked

rustic of rainy Britain vying in song with another smock-frocked rustic

concerning his Amaryllis or his Chloe is not a little ludicrous.

Especially is this so when we know that Colin Clout, Cuddie, Hobbinol,

and the other swains, are talking moral wisdom, and are nothing but

Spenser’s friends or contemporary celebrities with shepherds’ crooks for

poetic “properties.”

Distinguished, however, from pastoral poetry pure and simple, as seen in

Pope and Spenser, there is a more important form of creation by these

Alexandrian poets, which finds its way into English literature. It is

from Theocritus and his school that Milton’s _Lycidas_ is drawn, and it

is from _Lycidas_ that we get Shelley’s _Adonais_ and Matthew Arnold’s

_Thyrsis_. Here are two quite unimportant passages, the comparison

of which will show at once how closely a great English poet may

occasionally copy an ancient. Says Theocritus, as translated by Calverley:

The voice of Thyrsis: Etna’s Thyrsis I.

Where were ye, Nymphs, oh where, while Daphnis pined?

In fair Peneus or in Pindus’ glens?

For great Anapus’ stream was not your haunt,

Nor Etna’s cliff, nor Acis’ sacred rill.

Says Milton:

Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

Closed o’er the head of your loved Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep,

Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.

Greek literature is also rich in verse “epigram” in the original sense

of the word. In modern times we have come to associate with the epigram

the notion of a pithy composition containing a neat and witty point, and

particularly a “sting in the tail.” This description seldom suits the

Greek type, especially in its earlier days, but is derived rather from

the custom of the epigrammatists of Rome. An “epigram” was originally

a composition to be inscribed upon a monument, votive offering, or the

like. That it should be brief was an obvious requirement, and it was

natural that it should try to excel mere commonplace. But wit and “point”

of a biting kind were alien to the first conception. A Simonides or

other early poet wrote a couplet or a quatrain which might be pathetic,

eulogistic, or even almost simply descriptive, and this was an “epigram”

if actually intended as, or proposed as fit for, an inscription. In

later times the composition of such pieces was a poetic exercise, the

occasion being imaginary, and the tendency to impart point and wit

naturally increased. Very many charming little cameo-poems of this kind,

touching upon most of the elements of human life, are to be found in

what is known as the _Greek Anthology_, some of the best being of the

Graeco-Roman age and written by Romans as well as Greeks throughout the

Greek world. Our own epigram, whatever may be its change of character,

is derived through French and Latin channels—particularly through

Martial—from the Greek invention. It is probable also that the Italian,

and thence the English, sonnet owes much to the pattern set in the Greek

epigram.

* * * * *

In the regions of prose we can hardly be so definite. In history,

oratory, philosophy, we still return again and again to the Greeks for

inspiration, but the inspiration is chiefly one of spirit, not of outward

form or special thoughts.

Herodotus, who began to flourish about 450 B.C., and who writes

concerning the Persian invasion of Greece, and, by way of preface,

tells of Lydia, Babylon, Egypt, Scythia, is still known as the “Father

of history.” His undying charm is his style, the style of a delightful

story-teller. Clear and direct as all the best Greek writing is, there

is something so fresh, so frank, so suave, about Herodotus, that,

even if he tells falsehoods knowingly—as some critics say, but as we

need not believe—we cannot grow virtuously indignant with him. He is

both uncritical and shrewd—shrewd where the knowledge of his times

guides him, uncritical where they were ignorant. His stronger-minded

contemporary Thucydides is the very pattern of an historian. His function

is to tell the history of the long protracted Peloponnesian war, and

he tells it inimitably. The graphic terseness of his account is only

equalled by his severe impartiality. If he tells you of a battle, he

describes luminously its main features, how it went, who won it, and what

the consequences were. He does not attempt to minimize or explain away

an Athenian defeat or crime because he is an Athenian. If a political

party commits an error, he tells us so, and tells us how. It is scarcely

possible to find out precisely his own political views. If he describes

the terrible plague of Athens or the terrible fall before Syracuse, he

describes it with moving pathos. But he does not overdo his part. The

pathos is in the distinct simplicity of the picture, not worked up by

labour of ambitious words. It is perhaps enough warrant of his excellence

that he grew in the admiration of Macaulay with every year of Macaulay’s

maturing judgement.

In oratory the great name of Demosthenes stands pre-eminent. Volumes of

his speeches are in our hands, political and forensic speeches equally.

The word “Philippics” has become typical for invective. That Demosthenes

is the prince of orators everybody knows. But why? We may imagine the

crude aspirant to oratory reading a speech of Demosthenes in amazement,

and asking “Where are the flashings of rhetoric? Where the dazzling

flights of imagination? Where the magnificent bursts of diction?” The

highest art is to conceal art, and Demosthenes would have been no

perfect artist if he had allowed the novice to perceive exactly wherein

his perfection lay. He is the perfect orator just because he can be

graphic, cogent, pathetic, anything he will, without all those rhetorical

tropes, purple patches, bouquets of flowery diction, which weaker men

are driven to use. His language is like a Greek statue, instinct with a

life diffused through every part, but showing no straining at effect,

accentuating nothing beyond its value as a persuasive or moving force.

His metaphors and similes are few; often his words are even homely;

but there is a directness, a “home-coming,” about his diction and

his periods, a dexterity about his arrangement, a noble fervour and

simplicity.

In philosophy the Greeks have been the teachers of the civilized world.

Two only of their great masters need be considered here. It is said that

every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. This means

that there are two chief types of mind which really think, and of those

one is akin to the mind of Plato, the other akin to that of Aristotle.

Plato is the suggestive, but inconclusive, imaginative, transcendental

philosopher. Aristotle is the matter-of-fact, logical, analytical. The

style is like the men. The style of Plato is rich with poetical colour,

that of Aristotle is hard and thin, prose of the prose. Between them

these two cover nearly all the ground of speculative thinking, and

modern thought can never emancipate itself from them. For centuries in

the Middle Ages the philosophy of Aristotle was almost a religion of

civilized Europe, and it is the fact that even now students of morals

and politics find themselves constantly returning to Aristotle. The

Stagirite, as he was called because of his birth at Stagira, lived before

the days of experimental science. Yet he virtually anticipated much of

modern scientific results. He was nearly an evolutionist. Plato, on the

other hand, has had his votaries. He, too, was a religion in Renaissance

Italy. Whether we can always follow him or not, he is a stimulating

influence, and he has left his mark in many places where one would hardly

look for it. We should perhaps scarcely light on Wordsworth’s beautiful

_Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ as an echo of Plato. Yet all its

fancy concerning “a sleep and a forgetting,” and the previous existence

of the soul, is pure Plato. Whether Wordsworth was conscious of it or

not, his mind had been pervaded by the Platonic influence. Nor was it

much otherwise with Shelley. Of direct and appreciable bearing upon

literature since his day, is the fact that Plato is our first model

of the prose dialogue or imaginary conversation. He did not indeed

absolutely invent this form of writing, but the comparatively crude work

which preceded him is lost, and it is Plato who stands to Berkeley or

Landor as their prototype and exemplar. Centuries later Lucian followed

in his steps, though with a somewhat different purpose, combining, as he

declared, the philosophical dialogue with the spirit of Attic comedy.

Plato’s dialogues are always serious in intention, whatever humour or

lightness of touch he may display; Lucian’s are but partially serious,

the humour, which tends to satire, being the predominant element.

A work of Plato to which the world owes much in the way of imitation

is his _Ideal Commonwealth_ or _Republic_, from which are derived in

succession the hints for the _Civitas Dei_ or _City of God_ of St.

Augustine, the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More, the _New Atlantis_ of Bacon,

and various minor efforts in the theoretical construction of an ideal

polity.

* * * * *

Here we must cease to speak of Greek literature in classical Greece. The

subject is inexhaustible.

Yet before we come to illustrate in some detail the effect of all this

wealth of original thought and splendid style on English, we must mention

two famous writers in the later or “post-classical” period of Greek

literature. These introduced new forms of prose writing which have had

many imitators in every European country. They are Lucian and Plutarch.

Lucian wrote in Syria and in Athens during the later part of the second

century of our era. He composed what we should call “articles,” in the

form of dialogue and essays, nearly all of them of a satirically humorous

character, but nearly all possessed of sound common sense and practical

purpose. Lucian is the precursor of Swift, Voltaire, and Heine. Of Swift

he is the predecessor in more ways than one. Lucian supplies us with

the first instance of ironical fiction. His _True History_ is composed

in the same ironical vein, and with precisely the same assumption of

seriousness, as Swift’s _Gulliver’s Travels_. It is to Lucian that Swift

owes the hint for such a work, and, after all, the hint was in this case

a great part of the genius. The width of Lucian’s range may be recognized

from the fact that both Swift and Sterne have been called the “English

Lucian.”

If Herodotus is the “Father of History,” Plutarch (first century A.D.)

is the father of biography. Strictly speaking neither is the originator

of the form of literature in question; nevertheless each is to be judged

rather by the influence of his example than by absolute invention of a

literary species. Besides the biographies there exists much other work of

Plutarch in the nature of moral essays and “articles” on historical or

antiquarian subjects, and this work was liberally drawn upon by essayists

after the Revival of Learning, in particular by Montaigne and Bacon.

Nevertheless his chief contribution to the development of literature was

in his “Parallel Lives,” a series of biographies and character-studies,

in which a distinguished Greek and a distinguished Roman were studied in

comparison, pair by pair. To Shakespeare the Lives were known through

North’s translation, and, in _Coriolanus_ and the other Roman plays, they

supplied not only his conception of antiquity and ancient character, but

also the great bulk of the matter which he dramatized. The genesis of

modern sketches of the kind represented in Macaulay’s _Chatham_, _Lord

Clive_, or _Warren Hastings_, can be distinctly traced to similar short

studies in the Greek of Plutarch.

* * * * *

A very prolific department of literature, and one which has served as a

rich source of inspiration, imitation, and allusion in all subsequent

times, was that of the fable. In this domain the name of “Aesop” is

supreme. Whether there was ever an historical person bearing precisely

this name has been questioned. The tradition which places him in Rhodes

as a slave in the middle of the sixth century B.C. cannot be implicitly

trusted; but it is difficult to understand how the special name of

“Aesopus” can have come to attach itself to a series of beast-stories,

unless some individual who bore it, or of whom it was a sobriquet, had

been distinguished for his invention, or at least for his promulgation,

of such satirical narratives. It is indeed almost certain that a large

number of “fables of Aesop” originally came from India and the East; yet

it is in Greece that Europe first makes acquaintance with those fables

which are still the best known, and which most constantly appear in the

existing collections or selections. All educated or even sophisticated

Greeks were supposed to know “Aesop.” At a later time (in the third

century A.D.) the Graeco-Roman Babrius versified such fables as were

known to him, and he again was copied into Latin verse by Avianus.

The Indian fables of Pilpay were not circulated in Europe till five

centuries later than Babrius, nor did they ever gain such wide currency.

It was primarily along the Greek channel that there was derived, if

not all the matter, at least the inspiration, for the fables in French

by La Fontaine, and the English fables by Gay, together with all the

collections which have been printed, or which were current before the

days of printing, and which have become part of the _répertoire_ of

childhood and a fund of reference for proverbs and for all classes of

writers.

* * * * *

Of other kinds of writing which appear already in ancient Greece may be

briefly mentioned:

(1) Character-sketches, first produced by Theophrastus (about 320 B.C.),

and imitated by La Bruyère (_Characters_) in France, and in England in

such works as Hall’s _Characterismes of Virtues and Vices_, Overbury’s

_Characters or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons_,

and best in Earle’s _Microcosmography_.

(2) Essays in rhetoric, literary criticism, and _belles lettres_, such as

the _Rhetoric_ and _Poetics_ of Aristotle, the latter of which exerted

so profound an effect upon the verse, and particularly the dramatic

verse, of the French, and thence upon that of the English so-called

“classical” school; the essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (25 B.C.)

upon the style of the Attic orators; and the treatise _On Sublimity_

by Longinus, a writer who cannot be identified, but who wrote in the

flourishing times of the Roman imperial epoch; (3) the works in grammar

and dictionary-making, which range from the textual criticism and comment

of great Alexandrians, like Aristophanes of Byzantium (200 B.C.), to

the school grammar of Dionysius Thrax and the lexicons of the early

centuries A.D.; (4) geographies and descriptive guidebooks, the former

particularly represented by Strabo, about the beginning of the Christian

era, and the latter by Pausanias (in the second century A.D.); (5)

Miscellanies, antiquarian or literary, such as the famous _Pundits at

the Dinner-Table_ of Athenaeus (end of second century A.D.); (6) letters

(_i.e._, fictitious epistles), such as those of Alciphron (second century

A.D.); (7) _romances_, of which the extant examples are mostly much later

than the classical period, those of Longus and Heliodorus dating from

the latter part of the fourth century A.D.

* * * * *

We have now cursorily surveyed the course of Greek literary history.

We have shown that it comprised all the forms of literature now known

to us; that in this respect at least we can claim no originality. We

have incidentally alluded to some of our debts, though that part of the

subject remains to be dealt with more fully. The question which now

arises is—what is there distinctive about this Greek literature as a

whole, to make it possess such a precious and perpetual salt and savour?

We may reply that, to begin with, the Greek writers were

characteristically possessed of one prime literary virtue—lucidity,

whether in their picturing of scenes or in their expression of a thought.

And they expressed clearly because they saw clearly. Besides being lucid,

they were restrained. For the most part they went directly to their

point, and did not suffer themselves to be drawn away from the point by

irrelevant attractions. They knew, as Lowell puts it, how much writing

to leave in the ink-pot. There is so much “not to say.” They shrank

from overdoing. Floweriness, extravagance, bombast, irrelevance, these

were an abomination to classical Greek taste. The Greeks proper did not

fail to recognize fustian when they saw it. They were a critical, and a

self-critical, people. What we see in the purity of their sculpture and

architecture, we may see in their literature. A word or phrase must have

a rational and artistic purpose, or it must not be there.

Again, they were eminently sane men, those Greeks. They looked out on the

world with eyes like those of their Goddess of Wisdom, the imperturbable

eyes of unabashed intelligence. What they saw they saw frankly: they knew

facts from fancies, and recognized facts when they met them. They were

mentally a healthy people, not constitutionally given to moodiness and

mysticisms and impossible aspirations. They took meanwhile a wholesome

delight in living, and in the boons of physical life.

This whole way of looking at things has received a name of its own. It

is styled “Hellenism.” The Greeks called their country “Hellas,” and

themselves “Hellenes.” Hence this name, which means so much. Hellenic

thought means direct and fresh, if not always profound, thought; Hellenic

art means art of consummate simplicity, art of clear principle. Hellenic

style means in literature a perfect directness and lucidity, with just so

much of the figurative as will flash light upon the sense.

This is what is meant by “Classical” Hellenism. True, no scholar would

dare to say that even in the classical age every Greek who has left us a

book or a fragment was always as perfect as Greek principles and ideals

were perfect. Homer sometimes nods. We may find palpable blemishes not

a few. But we must judge a national literature as a whole; and when, as

with the Greek, a literature can show so large a proportion which is

flawless, when it is so obviously informed with one and the same artistic

spirit, so manifestly controlled by the same canons of taste, then we may

use our general terms with more confidence than we can usually feel in

generalizing of whole peoples and their histories.

In later times, when Greece was no longer free, when cultured Greeks

had been scattered into Asia Minor, Syria, and to Alexandria, when

literature became mere reading, then Greek art and letters lost their

prime virtue. Oratory declined, as poetry had done. Greek writing became

more oriental, more “Asian” in its artificiality. In classical Greek the

ornamentation was not compassed for its own sake. It grew spontaneously

out of the subject and helped the subject. But when Greek literature

became “unclassical,” when it became artificial, mere imitation and

make-believe, when it was not the outcome of a national spirit, but

was forced in the hotbeds of literary coteries and court-favour,

then ornamentation was first and foremost; poems and speeches were

composed in order to bring in fine things. Rhetoric grew bombastic and

poetry finical; or, as it is commonly expressed, literature became

“Asiatic” instead of “Attic.” This literature in general is sometimes

called “Hellenistic,” rather than “Hellenic”; but that term should be

appropriated to other purposes. Its headquarters being at Alexandria, the

title “Alexandrian” has come to be virtually a term of disparagement in

literature.

* * * * *

When therefore we speak of the influence of Greek literature on English,

we include not merely a fund of classical history and of mythology, not

merely a long list of Greek words and Greek allusions, not even merely

an inheritance of all the great forms of poetry and prose writing, but

also that way of looking at things and that style of putting things which

we call Hellenic. We mean not only so many similes, metaphors and figures

of speech, but a whole scope of thinking and style.

We might, indeed, in some rough way, gauge the influence of Greece by

the mere titles of English books or compositions bearing such Greek

names as _Utopia_, _Arcadia_, _Comus_, _Pindaric Odes_, _Endymion_,

_Hellas_, _Prometheus Unbound_, _Hellenics_, _Life and Death of Jason_,

_The Lotus-Eaters_. We might gauge it in some measure by the allusions

scattered up and down from Chaucer to Tennyson, allusions to Homer and

his Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector, his Circe and all the beings of his

mythology, to Greek history, to Plato and Aristotle. We might gauge

it in a measure by terms like Parnassus, Clio, Helicon, Academe, and

similar references to the literary haunts and divinities of Greece. We

might further take the Greek words which now form part of our English

vocabulary.

But the subject requires more methodical treatment, and perhaps some

little retrospect. Meanwhile we may well assert with Shelley:

But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Based on the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity;

Her citizens, imperial spirits,

Rule the present from the past,

On all this world of men inherits

Their seal is set.

As the same poet says in his preface to _Hellas_, “We are all Greeks.”

* * * * *

It now remains to examine at what times, in what ways, and to what

extent, our own English literature has been influenced by models so rich

and virile. The points of contact have been numerous; the influence which

has been felt has not always been felt in the same respects. At one time

we merely borrowed some of the matter of Greek writing, some of its

stories of mythology and history, some of its figures and similes, some

fragments of its philosophy. At another time we have copied some of its

forms of production, such as the epic form of Homer, the Pindaric Ode,

the idyll of Theocritus. At another time we have borrowed its literary

criticism, and either garbled and misapplied it, like Pope, or rightly

assimilated it, like Matthew Arnold. It is possible also to adopt its

matter, its form, its Hellenic principles of criticism, all together; and

that is what so many of the best writers of to-day are, consciously or

unconsciously, labouring to do.

We have, in fact, grown more and more dependent on Greece with every

generation of our literature since the days of Chaucer. This may appear

a paradox, but it is no more than the truth. Antecedently one might

suppose that, with the progress of what is called civilization, and

with the expansion of knowledge, the literature of the ancient Greeks

must now have been left far behind, as a thing of remarkable interest,

no doubt, but a thing which has performed its practical function, a

nourishment which has been sucked dry. Yet the very contrary is the

case. In verse Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, William

Morris, in prose Newman, Froude, Ruskin, whatever may be their points

of difference, or even of contrast, nevertheless agree in this, that

they have all saturated themselves with Greek and the things of Greece,

with its ideas, phrases, and stories, till their work is in greater or

less measure dominated by what they have thence derived. A Greek scholar

realizes this obvious fact at once, and with gladness. A reader to whom

Greek literature has been a sealed book little thinks how many of the

felicitous expressions which especially captivate him in his poets of the

present age are conscious or unconscious echoes, paraphrases, or mere

translations, of things written more than a score of centuries ago in

pagan Athens or the Isles of Greece.

* * * * *

Let us take a brief preliminary survey.

* * * * *

To Chaucer there filtered through from Greece, by way of writers in Latin

or Italian, crude notions of Greek mythology or Homeric stories. Of the

style and form and historical perspective of Greek literature he had no

manner of conception. To him Agamemnon and Ulysses were knights with

squires; Troy was besieged as Paris might be. His debt to Greece amounts

to little more than a jumble of fables at second hand.

By Spenser’s day our English writers are beginning to realize how rich a

store lies to their hand in the books of that Greek which men of Western

Europe have once more begun to study. They learn some little of the

tongue, and they borrow unsparingly its stories and its similes. But of

the lesson of its style, its restrained art, they have still learned

almost nothing. They are caring for little beyond the solids which it

affords. The _Faerie Queene_ is crammed with classical allusion, and

with similitudes traceable to Homer and other Greeks; but hardly a

vestige appears as yet of the Greek literary spirit of clear simplicity,

self-restraint, severity of taste. The extravagance and tastelessness

which so often tire and irritate the reader of the _Faerie Queene_ are

altogether alien from Hellenic art.

Pass onward for some generations, till we come to the days of Pope and

Addison. The study of Greek is more careful and more widely spread, its

history and mythology have dropped into truer perspective and proportion.

Greek life, Greek thought, are somewhat better comprehended, though still

far from well. Much that the Greeks have written has now become general

property. Better still, criticism is alert. The principles of the Greeks

have passed, in a garbled form, it is true, through Rome to France,

from France to England. The English have awakened to the fact that what

deserves to be said at all deserves to be said concisely and precisely.

So far, so good. Perhaps we do not profoundly admire the spirit of the

literature of the age of Pope and Addison. But we must perforce admire

its great advance in polish of expression. As literature, it may fail

from want of ideas, from thinness of its substance. In that respect it

departs as far from the Greek ideal as it approaches near the Greek

ideal in skill of execution. The aim of Greek literature is to express

thought or feeling perfectly. But there must be a real thought or a real

feeling to express. And this spontaneousness or compelling sincerity the

school of Pope and Addison did not, in the main, possess. Yet it did

invaluable work. It furnished a later generation, which had ideas and was

not ashamed of feelings, with an improved conception of expression. The

“Classical” school these writers have been called, but classical they

distinctly are not, for to be classical is to express matter of sterling

worth in a style for ever fresh. To utter brilliantly a nothing, an

artificiality, or a commonplace, is not classical.

The Queen Anne and early Georgian school, then, so far as Greek

literature is concerned, owe to it sundry healthy principles of style,

not yet properly assimilated; they owe many allusions, better ordered

and digested than in Spenser or Chaucer; but of its higher thoughts and

deeper imaginings they exhibit little influence.

Let that century expire, and come to the generation of Wordsworth,

Shelley, Keats, and Byron. In them we meet with rich ideas in plenty, and

with abundance of exquisite expression. Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron

had studied Greek; Shelley read it all his life. Keats, who knew no Greek

at first hand, but who had innate in him that part of the Greek spirit

which, as he puts it, “loves the principle of beauty in all things,”

had steeped himself in Greek legend; he revelled in Greek mythology; he

assimilated the Greek view of nature and at least the passion of Greek

life. All the literature of this period is shot through and through

with the colour of Greek myths, Greek philosophy in its widest sense,

Greek ideas. It shows an advance upon the age of Pope; for now once

more the matter is made of the first account, although the manner is

duly cultivated to form its fitting embodiment. Expression is fashioned

to great beauty in Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and often in Wordsworth.

But the matter is of the first moment. A great advance is this upon the

perfectly uttered proprieties of Pope. Yet still the age of Shelley was

less Greek than the following “Victorian” age. The magnificent outbursts

of the “spontaneous” and “romantic” schools of the beginning of last

century too often ended in extravagance of fancy and riot of imagination.

The transcendental rhapsodizings of Shelley and the sensuous revellings

of Keats lack the sanity and self-repression which we associate with

the name of Hellas. But the aim of the last age has been to secure the

perfect union of sane, clear, yet unhackneyed thought with sane, clear,

yet unhackneyed phrase. This was the aim of Tennyson, as of Matthew

Arnold. Even Browning aims at this ideal in his most perfect moments.

Now, if what has been said of the ages of Chaucer, Spenser, Pope,

Shelley, and Tennyson respectively is true, it is anything but a paradox

to assert that, generation after generation since Chaucer’s day, we have

been passing more and more under the domination of Greek thoughts and

Greek literary principles, and that we are groping forward to a literary

ideal which turns out to have been the ideal of ancient Greece.

* * * * *

The full influence of Greece, then, was not felt all at once, nor in the

same way and in the same respects.

Early English literature never came into direct contact with Greek

books. Our old writers knew no Greek, for it is only since what is known

as the “Revival of Learning” that the borrowing, whether of thought or

style, has been at first hand. Nevertheless the debt was there, though

the fathers of our literature were not conscious of it. Even King Alfred

drew from Greek sources, though he knew no more of Greek than of baking

cakes. When there was not a man from one end of England to the other who

could properly read a Greek book, the men of England were nevertheless

deriving, in a mutilated form no doubt, but still deriving, philosophy

and ideas from that ancient Greece which to them was shrouded in the

darkness of distance and of a tongue unknown. We may endeavour to see how

this came to pass.

In the first place, if our earliest writers could not read Greek, they

could read Latin. If they could not read Homer, they could read Virgil;

if not Sappho and Pindar, they could read Horace. The Latin literature

was with them, in a considerable measure. It is true that in the Dark

Ages many of the best works of Latin literature lay concealed, and

that others were deliberately neglected. The taste of readers in those

ages ran rather in favour of the later and inferior Latin authors.

Nevertheless, Latin literature of considerable extent they did study and

assimilate; and what was this Latin literature, speaking generally, but

an avowed imitation or copy of Greek models? The Roman Virgil copies

the Greek Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus. The Roman Horace copies

Sappho, Pindar, Archilochus, Anacreon. The Roman Plautus and Terence

are practically plagiaries of the Greek Menander and his like. Latin

literature is, in a very large degree, Greek literature borrowed, adapted

to inferior taste, played upon like studies with variations.

When Rome became the mistress of the world, it aspired to greater glory

than mere conquest can ever impart, to the glory of culture and the arts.

It found these perfected in Greece, and it became the pupil and imitator

of that country, just as England has at various times become the pupil of

Italy or France. It would hardly be too much to say of Latin literature,

as of Roman art, that most of what is vital and perennial in it comes

from Greece, while its faults and shortcomings are chiefly its own. Those

who possess Latin literature possess a body of Greek thought and Greek

material, but lacking the sure Greek taste and the soul of spontaneity.

Our English writers down to Chaucer were in this position. Even their

Latin reading was unsatisfactory enough, but, so far as they practised

it, they were drinking of Greek waters rendered turbid by Roman handling

and adulteration.

King Alfred knew Latin enough to translate Boethius. The monks and

scholars, who, till Chaucer’s time, were the only writers, kept alive the

reading of Latin literature. But, so far as the Greek was concerned at

first hand, there was but one poorly equipped scholar here and another

there in all the West of Europe. So little was it known that, even in

Wyclif’s day, it was necessary for that reformer in translating the New

Testament to render from the Latin Vulgate, the Greek original being

veritably “all Greek” to him. Chaucer, again, writes indeed of Greeks

at Thebes and Troy, and refers to Aristotle and Greek authors; but his

acquaintance with these is all at second hand, through Roman poets like

Ovid and Statius, or even at third or fourth hand, through the literature

of Frenchmen or Italians, who themselves derived from writers in Latin

and not from the Greek originals.

This, then, is the first period and manner of Greek influence, an

influence indirect and roundabout, exerted through the medium of Latin

literature, in which the style and spirit of Greece had already been

corrupted or destroyed.

* * * * *

The second manner of influence was still more roundabout. It came through

the Saracens and Moors. When the Saracen power had reached its zenith and

one caliph sat in state at Bagdad and another at Cordova, the Saracens

felt what the Romans had felt, that, after all, it is culture and arts

which give a nation nobility. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries in

particular the Saracen kingdom in Spain flourished mightily in culture

and learning. Early in the ninth century a caliph of Bagdad showed

himself one of the most devoted fosterers of literature that the world

has ever known. His Court was thronged with men of letters and learning;

he lavished honours on them; he collected books from every source, and

especially from Greece. When he dictated terms of peace to the Greek

Emperor Michael he demanded as tribute a collection of Greek authors.

Works of the Greeks on rhetoric and philosophy were particularly prized,

translated, and commented on. But the learning of Bagdad meant also the

learning of the Moors in Spain. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the

science of the Moors was sought by many western students who were not

Moslems; and thus from Bagdad, round by way of Spain, there percolated

to Italy, France, and England some knowledge of what classical Greece

had thought and written. In particular, Averrhoes, a Saracen, translated

Aristotle into Arabic; from the Arabic a Latin version was made. This

version passed into general use, and the Aristotelean philosophy, which

dominated, not to say tyrannized, over Europe for centuries, owes its

access to Western Europe to the followers of Mohammed.

Thus far, until the Renaissance dawned in Italy, we find in Western

Europe no acquaintance with Greek literature at first hand, but only

so much knowledge of its contents as could be gathered from the Latin

writers, who had recast it or plagiarized it, or from the Saracen

writers, who had translated it in parts.

* * * * *

At last, however, the influence was to become direct. And first on Italy.

As the Turks entered Europe, and gradually overran the empire of Greece,

Greeks of learning made their way westward to Venice, Ravenna, Padua,

Florence, Rome. After the year 1300, or thereabouts, during the great

age of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, we find writers of Italy beginning

to acquire some knowledge of Greek, and some insight into the rich

literary stores which that language contained. Boccaccio learned the

language from a native Greek; Petrarch took lessons from the same. One

Italian here, and another there, essayed translations and imitations of

Greek authors. In 1453 Constantinople, the capital of the Greek empire,

fell into the hands of the Turks, and Greece no longer existed. As a

result, crowds of cultured Greeks streamed into Italy with books and

manuscripts, prepared to teach for love or money, or from mere ardour

and pride of patriotism. The Court of Cosmo de’ Medici at Florence was

readily opened to them, and all Italy was agog to learn whatever they

could bring. The libraries of Rome and Florence were enriched with Greek

manuscripts; and when, soon after, the printing press of Aldus at Venice

was established, Homer or Aeschylus passed in the original into many

hands, while translations of them came into many more. Greek teachers

like Chalcondylas, Argyropoulos, and Lascaris have left their names to

fame in Rome and Padua and Florence. The Revival of Learning had filled

all Italy, and “learning” meant little but the literature of Greece; it

became regular, almost inevitable, that the Italian man of letters should

know Greek, and should steep himself in the writings of the Grecians.

From Italy the study spread to France and England. Grocyn and Linacre at

Oxford, Erasmus and Cheke at Cambridge, worked zealously to establish it

against that opposition which always attends the disturbance of sluggish

methods and musty privilege. The study was opposed by the “Trojans,” and

it was perhaps natural that these should cry out, in an ancient phrase,

“Beware of the Greeks, lest they make you a heretic”; for already it was

recognized that the revival of Greek learning meant the stimulation of

all clear, and therefore progressive, intellectual activities.

By about the year 1550—that is to say, just in time for Spenser,

Shakespeare, Bacon, and their kindred—it had become usual for the

Universities and the better schools in England to teach the elements

of Greek; and there were not wanting ardent students, in those

pre-examination days, to prosecute the study for themselves, and to find

more than ample reward in the rich intellectual resources which lay

revealed before them.

We have now reached the Elizabethan age of English literature. It is

in this age that there came such an outburst of splendid creation in

every form as the world has seen but once or twice. Sidney, Spenser,

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh—drama, novel, lyrics,

narrative poetry, essay-writing, philosophy, history—all these made new

and magnificent efforts. And why? Not merely because at this epoch was

born a genius like Shakespeare’s, or a lofty intellect like Bacon’s. The

genius must have his opportunity; the intellect must have its materials.

It was because the world was electrified with a current of new thoughts

and new ideas, pervading and furnishing every mind. The “revival of

learning” was something more than that name alone implies. It was also

a renaissance, a “new birth,” both of intellect and art. The spirit

of Greece had breathed life into the dry bones of the valley of the

West-European mind.

The writers of the Elizabethan age flung themselves about in the gardens

and orchards of Greek literature with all the impatient appetite and

reckless gaiety of schoolboys on holiday. They tore at the plots of Greek

epics, plays, and histories; they plucked the similes and metaphors of

Greece to “stick them in their hats,” so to speak; so great was their joy

in the strange fresh atmosphere of this luxuriant newly-opened paradise.

Their scholarly knowledge of Greek as a language was too slight, their

perspective of Greek life and thought too distorted, for them to catch

the artistic style and spirit while they were catching the matter and

the substance. Amazingly rich as Spenser is in imagery and melody,

exhaustless as Shakespeare is in ideas, boundless as he is in capacity

of seeing and feeling, no one will call either Spenser or Shakespeare

a flawless artist, or say that either is free from extravagance or

unevenness. In short, no one will concede to them the Greek spirit,

which tempers imagination with self-restraint and unfailing sanity. The

wide free range of mind they have; the tactful sense of proportion and

seasonableness they too often lack. The influence of Greece, beneficent

and large as it is, remains yet incomplete.

We must not, however, overstate the case. No one doubts that all this

stupendous outburst obtained its chief stimulus and food from Greece.

Nevertheless, when speaking of these Elizabethan times and of the new

Greek studies which were being fostered by the Universities and the

highest schools, let us not picture to ourselves every considerable

writer of that time assiduously studying Greek books in their originals.

That was far from the case. Their scholarship in that way was mostly but

shallow. Shakespeare, we know, learned “little Latin and less Greek.” We

need not claim that, after his college days, Spenser went directly to his

Greek Homer, any more than that Shakespeare went directly to his Greek

Plutarch. What should be understood is that the matter, though not the

manner, of Greek books was now fairly abundant in those writers’ hands.

The Elizabethan age was the age of translations, not always accurate

translations, but generally translations of spirit. Chapman’s Homer and

North’s Plutarch are household words. And, where there existed no English

translation of a Greek book, there was almost certainly one in French

or in Italian. Homer, for instance, translated by Filelfo, had come

within English ken even before England had begun its own direct studies

in Greek. Now, though a translation can do much, there is one thing it

cannot do. It cannot convey the lesson of perfect art in style, least

of all can it do this when the translator allows himself liberties. And

therefore the Elizabethan writers have not yet gathered from the Hellenic

mind its sober aesthetic principles.

Historically considered, the ancient Greeks too often become transformed,

in the respective free translations, into contemporary Italians, or

Englishmen, or Frenchmen. They present themselves to the mind in an

alien dress, physically and mentally. They are, in fact, anachronisms.

Agamemnon and Ulysses, instead of appearing as simple Achaean chiefs,

become transformed into knights in armour, gallants with rapiers, kings

in purple robes and crowns. They quote philosophy, or speak of sciences

and instruments they never knew.

In brief, in the Elizabethan age we have reached this—that the knowledge

of Greek literature is no longer dependent on the Latin copies and

plagiarisms of it, or on such driblets of philosophy as trickle through

from the Saracens of Spain. It is derived, sometimes at first hand, but

mostly from translations directly made in English, French, or Italian,

from the Greek originals. Nor is this all. For among Englishmen who are

training themselves to be the writers of the next generation there are

growing up many to whom Greek itself, in all its nervous plasticity, is

becoming a familiar tongue, and who will use no modern versions at the

risk of distorting their taste and judgement. With this new generation

will come the critical chastening of style which has hitherto been

lacking.

Those who have never studied language as the classical languages are

studied can scarcely hope to understand how vast is the difference

between two educational results; on the one hand, of a painstaking study

of that indescribable harmony of thought and word which constitutes

style, and, on the other, of that superficial perusal of translations

which supplies but coarse notions of the substance, notions as different

from those of the scholar as the commercial plaster cast is different

from the marble originals of Attic sculpture. Since the Shakespearean

time our writers have become more and more scholars in Greek—witness

Milton, Gray, Cowper, Shelley, among the poets—till, in our own days, it

is difficult to meet with an author eminent either in prose or poetry who

has not received a liberal training in the Greek language itself, and

thence acquired a care of expression such as Greek models cannot fail to

impress.

* * * * *

It may now be well to take for illustration one or two of the departments

of literature—not necessarily of the first consequence—in which our debt

to Greek is on the surface.

A striking form of Greek composition was the Pindaric Ode. Our English

poets from Cowley to Swinburne have shown a marked fondness for this

form. Cowley, Congreve, and Gray deliberately affect even the title

_Pindaric Ode_, acknowledging the source of their inspiration and avowing

the imitativeness of their work. The poet Mason speaks of “a Pindar’s

rapture in the lyre of Gray.” Cowley, as has been mentioned already,

is called on his tombstone the “English Pindar.” Pope’s _Ode on St.

Cecilia’s Day_ is meant to be, even if it does not succeed in being,

Pindaric in both shape and spirit. It is full, too, of allusion to things

Greek, to the ship Argo, to the underworld, with Phlegethon and Sisyphus

and Ixion, to the yellow meads of asphodel, to Orpheus and Eurydice.

Dryden’s _Song for St. Cecilia’s Day_ and his _Alexander’s Feast_ are

imitations of Pindar and Simonides. Gray’s _Progress of Poesy_ is of

the same stamp. When he circulated the poem in manuscript, he called it

an “Ode in the Greek manner.” His _Bard_ belongs to the same category.

Meanwhile the words which open the _Progress of Poesy_

Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake,

And give to rapture all thy trembling strings

profess a debt to Aeolis, the country of the lyric Sappho and Alcaeus.

We must add Collins and Shelley to the list of those over whom Pindar

has exercised his charm. Shelley’s _Ode to Liberty_, with its panegyric

stanzas on Athens, is at least as Pindaric as the avowed Pindarics of

Gray or Cowley.

We have already referred to that rather artificial and not very important

form of composition called the “pastoral,” whether it be the “pastoral

idyll” or the “pastoral elegy”—an idealizing picture of the shepherd’s

life, or an idealistic “shepherd’s lament.” We may here briefly revert to

the subject.

Of this class we have in English literature such works as the

_Shepheard’s Calender_ of Spenser, a manifest and avowed imitation of

Virgil through the Italians. As, however, Virgil is but the pupil of

Theocritus in this kind, it is to the Greek Theocritus that we are in

the end brought back. Spenser’s imitation is, indeed, anything but

good. He mixes up “Fair Elisa, queen of shepherds all” with talk of

Parnassus, Helicon, Pan, Cynthia and the nymphs (whom he calls “ladies

of the lake”). Colin Clout, Cuddie, and Hobbinol are found side by side

with Tityrus and invocations to Calliope. Moreover he justly incurs the

reproach of Sir Philip Sidney by his affectation of an archaic language

for his shepherds, a language which never was on land or sea. Says

Sidney, “that same framing of his style to an old rusticke language I

dare not allow; since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin,

nor Sannazaro in Italian, did affect it.” We have also the youthful

_Pastorals_ of Pope, in which the poet begins by announcing his studied

imitation:

Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring,

While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing;

that is to say, the Muses of Theocritus of Sicily. He even appends notes

to show what lines he has especially copied. We meet always the familiar

Greek characters, Daphnis, Strephon, Alexis, Lycidas, and Thyrsis. Like

the pastorals of Spenser, they are purely and confessedly artificial;

they are anachronisms, carelessly mixing modern and antique ideas and

associations. When Theocritus wrote pastorals in ancient and sunny

Sicily he wrote, as we have remarked, of what lay within the range of

conceivable possibility. Pope relegates the pastoral to a fictitious

golden age in a purely fictitious golden land.

No one nowadays is likely to set any high value upon such eclogues as

Pope’s _Pastorals_. Even Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ is rather

talked of than read. Sidney’s _Arcadia_ has had its day. But it is

otherwise with a nobler species of composition which arose out of

pastorals, to wit, the pastoral elegy. Theocritus and his disciples,

Bion and Moschus, all compose poetic laments for a lost shepherd, either

an imaginary Daphnis or a real friend lately dead. To this original

conception we owe certain English poems which we could not spare. They

include the _Lycidas_ of Milton, on the death of his friend King, the

_Adonais_ of Shelley, on the death of Keats, the _Thyrsis_ of Matthew

Arnold, on the death of Clough. The _Daphnaida_ of Spenser was apparently

the first of such elegiac pastorals. Another is his _Astrophel_, “on the

death of the most noble and valorous knight, Sir Philip Sidney.” Dryden,

too, did not disdain to write a pastoral elegy on the death of a supposed

Amyntas, in which he sings his dirge in the good old style of the

Sicilians. A more refined, more distant and subtle development from the

same original is Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. Finally we may take leave of

this rural style with brief mention of the fact that Tennyson’s _Œnone_

is in essence a pastoral idyll, inspired by the second of Theocritus.

We may also turn again to literary criticism. It is a significant thing

that, no sooner had Sir John Cheke studied Greek and become its first

regular professor at Cambridge, than he forthwith published maxims on the

avoidance of bombast and pedantry in style. He had been to the fountain

heads of criticism, to the Greek of Aristotle and Longinus. From that

day down to the days of Matthew Arnold, in “essays in criticism” Greek

principles have everywhere been theoretically worshipped, however much

they may have been violated in practice. Following on the revival of

Greek learning came a rage to discuss the _rationale_ of the poetic

art, as well as to exemplify its various forms. In the Elizabethan

age Puttenham wrote on the _Art of English Poesie_; Sidney composed

a _Defence of Poesie_. Later on Dryden put forth a prose treatise Of

_Dramatic Poesie_, and the Earl of Roscommon an _Essay on Translated

Verse_. Dryden expressly declares that true criticism began with the

Greeks in the _Poetics_ of Aristotle. He says:

Such once were critics; such the happy few

Athens and Rome in better ages knew.

The mighty Stagirite first left the shore,

Spread all his sails, and durst the deep explore;

He steered securely, and discovered far,

Led by the light of the Maeonian star.

Pope followed with an _Essay on Criticism_, Shelley contributed a

critical _Defence of Poetry_; and since that date books, essays, articles

have showered upon us, in one and all of which we are assured with

increasing urgency that the true principles of literary art are the

principles of Athens, the principles of Greek literature at its best.

* * * * *

We may now leave types of literary creation and deal with individual

authors. It would require a whole book for each of the greater names,

if we sought to discover how much of matter or form each owes directly

or indirectly to Greece. Mr. Churton Collins has written one such book

on Tennyson. Here our survey must be but very superficial, as befits an

introduction to the study.

Of Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_, _Daphnaida_, and _Astrophel_

something has been said. It remains to observe that his _Faerie Queene_

is but one mass of scenes, events, and images borrowed from sources in

Italy and Greece, and that the hint for the whole design was suggested by

his studies in Aristotle; for he says, “I labour to pourtraict in Arthur

the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral vertues,

as Aristotle hath devised.” Of the Greek manner, its proportion and

moderation, Spenser has unhappily learned little or nothing.

Shakespeare was, in one sense, no Grecian. Sundry of his Roman plots,

_Coriolanus_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_ for example, he takes from

North’s translation of the Greek Plutarch; a certain amount of Greek

mythology and history reveals itself incidentally; but he owes less to

Greece and more to his own genius acting upon desultory reading, than

other writers of the time or since. Dryden, indeed, in his adaptation of

_Troilus and Cressida_ makes him say:

Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age,

I found not, but created first, the stage;

And if I drained no Greek or Latin store,

’Twas that my own abundance gave me more.

But this is hardly the truth. One immensely important thing Shakespeare

did owe to Greece, through scholars who were his own immediate

predecessors, and that was the general shape and form of the poetic drama.

Milton was an accomplished Greek scholar. It has been already pointed

out that his great epic is descended from Homer, and his _Lycidas_ from

Theocritus. His _Samson Agonistes_ was deliberately built—though not with

complete success—upon the traditional frame-work of Greek tragedies, and

Milton himself leaves it to be judged by those who are “not unacquainted

with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.” His _Ode on the Morning of

the Nativity_ is intended to be Pindaric. But the most palpable advance

made by Milton on his predecessor Spenser is in the chastening of his

style. The principles of that style Milton derived at first hand from

his Hellenic models. He has learned how to use ancient material, how to

adapt ancient thoughts, ancient expressions, how to sink them and imbed

them in his own, not merely how to overlay or fancifully decorate his

own with them. The texture of Milton’s verse is shot through and through

with colours borrowed from the Greek; it would often be quite possible

to resolve a series of his lines into components which are imitations

and quotations. But he has made them all so much a part of himself

that we may often pass by his loans, as we never can those of Spenser,

unconsciously.

Dryden owns himself an obedient follower of the Greeks. His ode _To the

Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, like his _St. Cecilia’s Day_ and his

_Alexander’s Feast_, is Pindaric. His admiration for Pindar was indeed

peculiarly ardent. He speaks of him as “the inimitable Pindar, who

stretches on pinions out of sight, and is carried upward, as it were,

into another world.” Of his literary criticism we have spoken; there was

a time when he conceived the idea of translating Homer, and he did in

fact attempt versions of various writings of Greek poets.

Pope was but an indifferent Greek scholar at first hand; he did indeed

freely translate and recast Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ by the help

of his little Greek and a translation in French, but he never entered

into the spirit of Greek life or penetrated to the precise secret of

Greek style. Nevertheless, he makes great pretensions to follow in the

footsteps of the Greek masters. One thing he did catch—the vigour and

fire of Homer; and Pope’s _Iliad_ is still the English Homer commonly

read in these days, although Chapman had preceded him, and Cowper, Derby,

and Morris have made their more or less faithful renderings since. And

yet the book is far too much Pope to be Homer. Of the _Pastorals_ and

the _Essay on Criticism_ all has been said above that need be said for

our purpose. We have only to add that his burlesque heroics, the _Rape

of the Lock_ and the _Dunciad_, had their prototype in the heroi-comical

poems of Greece, the _Battle of the Frogs and Mice_ and the _Margites_,

compositions which were once ascribed to Homer, and which Pope professed

to have in mind.

Gray was a scholar of rare attainments in both the language and

the literature of Greece. Hence, in no inconsiderable measure, his

self-critical spirit. His aim, as stated by himself, is at “extreme

conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous and musical.” As a poet

he suffered from constitutional shortcomings. He is without profound

imaginings or ecstatic sensibilities; but his beauties are no less

undeniable, although of the sort which are mainly acquired from training.

No one can fail to admire the perfect technique of his stanzas. It is

doubtful, however, whether any but a Greek scholar can perceive the skill

with which he has combined a mosaic of reminiscences of ancient writers

into stanzas of perfect English. His _Progress of Poesy_ and his _Bard_

are plainly modelled on Pindar, but even his most beautiful individual

expressions are sometimes but translations from the Greek. Said the Greek

Phrynichus: “The purple light of love shines on her flushing cheeks.” To

this Gray owes his

O’er her warm cheek and rising bosom move

The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.

Of his enthusiasm for Greece we may judge from a passage in the _Progress

of Poesy_:

Woods, that wave o’er Delphi’s steep,

Isles, that crown the Egaean deep,

Fields, that cool Ilissus laves,

Or where Maeander’s amber waves

In lingering lab’rinths creep;

How do your tuneful echoes languish—

Mute, but to the voice of anguish?

Where each old poetic mountain

Inspiration breath’d around:

Ev’ry shade and hallowed fountain

Murmur’d deep a solemn sound:

Till the sad Nine in Greece’s evil hour,

Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.

Swift’s most popular work, _Gulliver’s Travels_, derives its hint from

Lucian’s _True History_, and all that peculiar vein of humour which

runs through the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_, is,

consciously or unconsciously, the parallel of the characteristic irony of

the same Lucian.

Of Shelley’s debts to Greece one can hardly estimate the amount. Says

he himself: “The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome and modern Italy

and our own country has been to me like external nature, a passion and

an enjoyment.” During his travels in Italy “the Greek tragedies,” says

Mrs. Shelley, “were his most familiar companions in his wanderings, and

the sublime majesty of Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight.”

We find him reading Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Thucydides, Aeschylus,

Plutarch, Plato; he even translates portions of these; he steeps himself

to the lips in the literature of Greece. His own soul and genius were by

nature akin to those of Plato, and his training lent to his genius clear

capacity. Among those of his works which most manifestly bear the Greek

impress are the lyrical drama of _Hellas_—which, he says, was suggested

by the _Persae_ of Aeschylus—and the drama of _Prometheus Unbound_,

which is meant for a sequel to the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus.

Not that his drama of Prometheus is fashioned wholly like the Greek;

its architecture is less simple, its character is more rhetorical, more

ornamented, more metaphysical. But it owes its whole existence to the

fact that Shelley lived so long in a world of Greek literature, a world

very remote from that in which he moved and had his being. His _Adonais_—

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!

O weep for Adonais! though our tears

Thaw not the frost that binds so dear a head!

is an echo of Theocritus, his _Ode to Liberty_ an echo of Pindar, his

_Epipsychidion_ an outcome of Plato. His enthusiasm for Greece may be

gathered from his _Hellas_:

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return;

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn....

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains

Against the morning star;

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep

Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

Keats never learned the Greek language. But he was read, as perhaps never

Englishman was read before, in Greek legend and mythology. He devoured

Lemprière’s _Dictionary_. His greatest poetry—his chief odes, as well as

his _Hyperion_ and _Endymion_—is based on subjects thence acquired. The

manners and characters of Greek divinities pervade his writings. In heart

and soul, in sensuous enjoyment of life, he was himself a pagan Greek.

The life of the ancient world, idealized, was the world of his choice.

Above all he loves the sounds uttered

In Grecian isles

By bards who died content on pleasant sward,

Leaving great verse unto a little clan.

O give me their old vigour!

“Therefore,” says he,

’Tis with full happiness that I

Will trace the story of Endymion.

The very music of the name has gone

Into my being.

Had he studied Greek as language, and Greek as style, he would, we may

believe, have avoided earlier his one great fault, the fault of excess,

extravagance, and riot. What Keats thought of the great Greek writers

whose Greek he could not read, may be gathered from his lines to Homer:

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear, and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas:

and from those _On first looking into Chapman’s Homer_:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been,

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The name of Byron is at once associated with enthusiasm for Greece.

True, it was modern Greece, but the only reason for that warm affection

lay in the fervour of his admiration for the Greece of old. That “land

of lost gods and godlike men” was to him a sacred land. Everyone knows

his outburst touching the “isles of Greece.” But not everyone perceives

how profoundly the mind of Byron had been stirred by the ancient

ideals and influences. Not everyone perceives that his _Manfred_ is an

unmistakable echo of Aeschylus’ _Prometheus_, in the tone and pitch

of its composition, in the firmness of the central character, in his

mental suffering, in the tremendous solitude, in the supernatural of the

surroundings. Yet Byron is not one whom we may quote as typifying any

great direct and salutary effect of Greek upon either his style or his

matter. He is too slipshod in the one and too romantic in the other. But

his ardour for the land of great literature is beyond denying:

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

The Scian and the Teian muse,

The lover’s harp, the lover’s lute,

Have found the fame your shores refuse:

Their place of birth alone is mute

To sounds which echo further west

Than your sires’ “Islands of the Blest.”

And where are they? and where art thou,

My country? On thy voiceless shore

The heroic lay is tuneless now—

The heroic bosom beats no more!

And must thy lyre, so long divine,

Degenerate into hands like mine?

During the last fifty years the study of Greek literature has been set

on a new basis. A collection of ill-digested matter no longer suffices.

Greek is taught more understandingly and more deeply. First comes

a patient observant study of the language; afterwards, in years of

maturity, are estimated the qualities of the thought and of the style;

these are set in clearer lights, and turned to a direct application.

Landor is the first modern in whom this sort of study reveals its

effects. His Greek devotion to classical associations, to ideal beauty,

his Greek aversion to the mysterious, his love for clearness and

purity of outline, appear cold to many a reader. He is too pellucid,

of too delicate a preciseness, they imagine. But Landor does not

displease through these qualities, which are virtues. His coldness is

constitutional. However that may be, his imaginary dialogues, imitated

from Plato, and the poetry of his _Hellenics_, show the Greek influence

in a fuller form than we have met with hitherto. Since Landor’s day

our literature is pervaded with Greek ideals: it aims at Greek style,

and often it attains fairly to its mark. We need not deal with matter

so voluminous as that of Browning, nor with a style so inconsistent.

But Browning’s love of Greek is matter of fame. Has he not translated

the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, the _Alcestis_ and the _Heracles_ of

Euripides? Nor need we deal with the poetry of Swinburne. It is enough

to point out that the _Atalanta in Calydon_ is in spirit intensely Greek,

and that its most famous speech is a translation from Euripides.

From William Morris we have a translation of the _Odyssey_; he has

written the _Life and Death of Jason_ and the _Earthly Paradise_, and

both of these owe almost everything—their matter and the charm of their

manner—to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, to Apollonius, and to the Greek

tragedians.

To two of the best and purest poets of our age Greece has supplied

the very breath of literary life. One is Matthew Arnold, the other is

Tennyson. Matthew Arnold as critic, Matthew Arnold as poet, is equally

Hellenic. He has been charged with “an air of aristocratic selectness

and literary exclusiveness.” The art of Pheidias is open to the same

objection. What really marks the style of Matthew Arnold is his reasoned

simplicity of taste, his cultivated appreciation of the delicate aroma

of words and the poetical atmosphere of thought. Like Tennyson, he has

a true eye for beauty, grace, and congruity of effect. He compasses the

“liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.” It may be that he lacks _abandon_.

He may not feel with the poignancy, or soar with the boldness, of the

greatest creators. But, artistically considered, he is as nearly perfect

as it is given to man to be. His poetic style is, indeed, almost too

perfect for the general. When he says

Or where the _echoing_ oars

Of Argo first

Startled the _unknown_ sea.

he is using the only two adjectives which the place required, and which

it truthfully admits. They are exactly the two epithets which a Greek

might put. Yet, no doubt, the untutored mind asks for something more

assertive, something which will cut more sharply or press more heavily

into the unready imagination. Than _Mycerinus_, than _Sohrab and Rustum_,

than _Philomela_, _Thyrsis_, or _The Strayed Reveller_, one can find

nothing more absolutely Greek in point of execution, though one may know

Greek passages which stir profounder emotional depths.

Tennyson’s debts to classical authors have been treated by Mr. Churton

Collins in a monograph. That critic is right in saying that the knowledge

of a scholar is requisite to appreciate Tennyson fully, however much

he may be appreciated by those who are no scholars. No man has ever

been better read in previous poetry than Tennyson, and no man has known

better how to assimilate what he found, or has possessed a surer tact and

taste in using it. With Tennyson the Greek matter is, as with Milton,

imbedded in his own, not overlaid. Greek forms of verse are moulded to

his purpose. The Greek style, describing what is luminously seen in a few

luminous touches, is ever conspicuous. He neither tries to disguise his

borrowings, nor does he obtrude them. When he says, “for now the noonday

quiet holds the hill,” he is translating Callimachus; when “the charm

of married brows,” Theocritus; when “shadowy thoroughfares of thought,”

Sophocles; when “sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows,”

Homer. His device of making the sound answer to the sense, as in

I heard the water lapping on the crag,

And the long-ripple washing in the reeds,

is a common device of the Greeks. In point of form his _Œnone_ is

modelled on Theocritus; his _Ulysses_ and his _Tithonus_ are framed after

the soliloquies in Greek plays. His _Lotus-eaters_ gets its matter from

Homer, Bion, and Moschus. Everywhere we meet hints and reminiscences

of Simonides, or Pindar, or Theocritus, or Anacreon. But these are all

incorporated, amalgamated in a body of work which is wholly in keeping

with them in taste, in tone, in diction—in short, in style.

This age of ours, to put it briefly, has been an age of stylists, of

artists who work on principles derived from their education in Greek,

and their love, which every scholar feels, of that glorious and undying

literature.