followed the slayer. And he standing before the dead yielded himself up
to Croesus, stretching forth his hands, bidding him slay him over the
body, making mention of his former calamity, and how now he had besides
brought destruction upon the man that had purified him, neither was it
meet that he should live. Croesus hearing has pity on Adrastos, albeit
in so great sorrow of his own, and says to him_: Guest, I have all I
may claim of thee, since thou dost adjudge thyself to death. Not thee I
blame for this ill, save as thou wert the unwilling doer thereof; nay
but some god methinks is the cause, who even aforetime showed me that
which should come to pass.
_Then did Croesus honourably bury his son. But Adrastos the son of
Gordias the son of Midas, even the man that had killed his own
brother, and had killed the son of him that washed away his offence,
after the people had left the tomb and there was silence, deeming in
his own heart that of all men that he knew himself was most calamitous,
slew himself upon the grave._
VII
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC
I
When Alexander the Great invaded India, that pupil of Aristotle
interested himself in questions to the Gymnosophists, or native
philosophers. To the eldest of these Gymnosophists (says Plutarch)
he addressed the following conundrum: _Which is older—the night or
the day?_ The ancient man promptly replied, _The day—by the length of
one day._ When Alexander demanded what he meant by such an answer,
the sage remarked that he always gave that sort of answer to people
who asked that kind of question. I think this must be one of the best
retorts ever made, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it applies
rather exactly to the subject of this essay. The difference between
the Classical and the Romantic! It is indeed an apparently insoluble
problem. Nor can I imagine anything more disheartening or more inimical
to human happiness than blowing upon the embers of a half-extinct
controversy. That, it will be gathered, is not my intention. I merely
intend to let my discourse eddy about a familiar topic, in the hope
that some accretions may be washed away, and at least the true outline
of the subject revealed. We have been trying to build up an impression
of Hellenism as an _Agon_, or Struggle with Barbarism. The material
being so vast, it has been necessary to be somewhat meagrely selective
and illustrative, or else to fritter away the point in details. But the
most general survey would be incomplete, unless we attain some view of
how Greek literature, so much the most important witness left us of the
old Greek spirit, reflects the situation.
The suggestion I have to offer may be helpful or not. But it has two
qualities which should make it worth entertaining, if only for the
moment: it is easily understood, and it is easily tested. My suggestion
is that Classical art is an expression of Hellenism and Romantic art of
Barbarism, so far as Barbarism is capable of expression.
Here I feel the want of something beyond my own instinct in discerning
the Classical from the Romantic. To distinguish them is never perfectly
easy: in the greatest art it is thought to be impossible. In the end
one has to rely upon oneself, for nobody is pleased with a second-hand
or impersonal criticism. If you happen to care for literature, you
will not be content with discussions of it which do not help you to
realize the thing you love. As to the words “Classical” and “Romantic,”
they have become current coin with us, and yet they are coin without
fixed value. Thus when Mr. Shaw attacks the “Romance” which Stevenson
adored, it is clear that they cannot mean the same thing. What, then,
do they mean? It is very hard to find out. You may read that Romance
is the spirit of the Middle Ages, or the spirit of the German forest;
but you find yourself left to your own interpretation of Mediævalism
or Fairyland. As for the “Renaissance of Wonder”—that of course is just
beautiful nonsense.
The clearest words on the matter are Matthew Arnold’s. There is a kind
of justice in this, for Arnold’s criticism was perpetually engaged
in the issue between the Romantic and the Classical. Himself (as his
best poetry shows) a Romantic at heart, he stood in the middle of the
Romantic triumph pleading for the austerities of art. That alone proves
his genius for criticism. It also gives him a special right to be
heard. As I shall seem to be attacking Arnold, it will be better for me
to say now that with his general attitude and temper I am in intimate
sympathy. I am disposed to think that his statement of the Classical
case is the best that has yet been made. In some points I think it is
even too favourable; in others not favourable enough. That is all.
_The forest solitude_, he says in his book “On the Study of Celtic
Literature,” _the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in
romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s
own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something
quite different from the woods, waters and plants of Greek and Latin
poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent
a mistress that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come
into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of
nature; not merely the beauty of nature—that the Greeks and Latins had;
not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism—that the
Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her
fairy charm_. And on the way to this attribution and this denial he
distinguishes four modes of handling nature. _There is the conventional
way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature,
there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of
handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but
with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is
on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek the eye is on
the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical the
eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added._
One need not deny the value of these distinctions. But, admitting them,
must we confess that there is no “natural magic” in the Greeks? Of
your grace listen a little to Homer in prose. _As the numerous nations
of winged birds—wild geese or cranes or long-throated swans—in the
Asian Mead about the runnels of Kaÿster stream make little flights
and flights in the glory of their pinions, alighting with cries which
make the marish ring._ Is there no natural magic in that? Or in this?
_As when torrents running down a mountain into a cañon hurl together
their violent waters from large springs in a deep watercourse, and
the shepherd on far-off mountains hears their thunder?_ Or consider
this. _As when the glare of a blazing fire is seen by sailors out at
sea burning at some lonely shieling high up among the hills._ Again
we read: _They clomb Parnassus, steep forest-clad hill, and soon came
to the windy gullies. The sun was then smiting the fields with his
earliest rays out of the quiet, deep-running river of the world; and
the beaters came to the glade._ A last example: _As when Pandion’s
daughter, the greenwood nightingale, sings beautifully at the start of
spring, perched in a place of leafy trees, with running variable note
she sheds abroad her far-heard song, mourning the end of Itylus_. Is
there no magic in all this?
Still, it is uncritical to attempt to carry the critical judgment by
storm. You will of course admit the glory and intoxication of these
Homeric similes, but you may still feel that Arnold’s distinction is
not finally swept away by them. Something in the lines he quotes—Keats’s
_Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn;_
Shakespeare’s
_On such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage_——
something there may be felt to express a more personal or intimate
relation to nature than anything I have yet quoted from Homer. Shall I
then quote more to show that even this touch Homer has got? _He burned
him with his inlaid arms and heaped a grave-mound over him; and round
it the hill-nymphs planted elms._ Is not that final touch magical
enough? And surely there is intimacy here. _As when the great deep
glooms with silent swell, dimly foreboding the hurrying path of the
piping winds._ And the personal note, is it not audible here? _And now
in a rocky place of lonely hills, at Sipylos, where couch the nymphs
(men say) whose feet are swift on Acheloïos’ banks—there changed to
stone she broods upon the wrongs that gods have wrought her._ And here
are two passages of love, of love in a Romantic setting, if we mean
anything by that at all. _Under them the divine earth sent up sudden
grass and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth thick and soft, upbearing
them from the ground. Thereon they lay, folded in a beautiful golden
cloud that dropped a glimmer of dew._ That is the love of Zeus and
Hera. What follows tells of the desire of Poseidon for Tyro. _She
conceived a love of divine Enîpeus, fairest by far of rivers flowing
over the earth, and haunted the fair waters of Enîpeus. Therefore the
Earth-Embracer and Earth-Shaker made himself like Enîpeus and lay with
her at the outflowings of the eddying river; then a darkling wave rose
mountain-like about them and hung over them, hiding the god and the
mortal woman._ Does not this possess the magical touch?
It is in Homer everywhere. In all his dealings with nature he adds to
his words not merely lightness and brightness, but something magical
as well. If he does not do it, no poet does. Why, Homer’s very “fixed
epithets” are surcharged with magic. Think of his epithets for the dawn
alone—κροκόπεπλος, _saffron-robed_; χρυσόθρονος, _golden-throned_;
ῥοδοδάκτυλος, _rose-fingered_—the Romantic poets have always envied
them. It is impossible to deny the magical, Romantic quality to Homer,
unless you make an admission with which I shall deal in a moment. And
Homer is not alone among Greek poets in the possession of “natural
magic”; one might almost say all the great Greek poets have it.
Almost the loveliest words that Sappho has left us are little broken
fragments of description as imaginatively touched as anything in Keats
or Coleridge. Such are the fragments translated by Rossetti, and the
fragment of the sleepless woman crying to the stars for her lover.
There are the few lines of Alcman, comparing him to “the sea-blue
bird of spring,” which are enough to put him not too far from Sappho
and Coleridge themselves. And Aeschylus in _Prometheus Bound,_ and
Euripides in the _Bacchae_—have they got no feeling for Romantic
nature? Then there is Pindar. Why, Pindar has almost more of it than
any one. Remember the strange splendour like a windy sunset of the
great _Fourth Pythian_ ode, telling of Jason in marvellous lands.
Repeat a line or two: _Coming to the margin of the whitening sea, alone
in the dark he called aloud upon the roaring Master of the Trident; and
he appeared to him anigh at his foot._ Or take this of the new-born
Iamos, whom his mother Euadne “exposed”: _But he was hidden in the rush
and the boundless brake, his delicate body splashed with the yellow and
deep purple glory of pansies_. Is there “natural magic” there, or is
there not?
Two things, perhaps, misled Arnold, both of them just and true. The
first was the feeling of a radical difference somewhere between
Classical and Romantic art. The second was the insignificance in Greek
literature of magic pure and simple, the magic of fairies and witches.
Greek literature deals sparingly in this sort of magic, while it is
part of the stock-in-trade of Romance. It looks as if Arnold were
unconsciously arguing that the Romantic passion for magic professed
ought somehow to make itself felt in descriptions of nature, while the
Greek dislike of magic would disable the Classical poet from seeing
her with the enchanted eyes of the Celt. Now there is an element of
truth in this, though not, I think, a very important element. It may
be suggested that in all true poetry, whether Classical or Romantic,
Greek or Celtic, mere vulgar magic is transmuted into that infinitely
finer and lovelier thing which Arnold, in claiming it for Keats and
Shakespeare, calls “natural magic”; which may be more abundant in
Romantic poetry, but is present just the same in Homer and Pindar.
One is led to this conjecture about the train of Arnold’s thought when
one reads the quotations he has selected to illustrate the special
appeal of Celtic Romance. They mainly come from the _Mabinogion_ in
Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation. Although it seems a pity that
Arnold must draw his shafts from one quiver, and that not his own,
still the _Mabinogion_ is beautiful enough, and the translation so
readable, that it is not clear where he could have found, for people
who have no Welsh or Irish, better illustrations. He quotes the words
of Math to Gwydion when Gwydion wished a wife for his pupil. _“Well,”
says Math, “we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form
a wife for him out of flowers.” So they took the blossoms of the oak,
and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet,
and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that
man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower
Aspect._ It is a famous passage since Arnold quoted it; and if we are
to have magic, let it always be as beautiful as this; for I am far from
denying the beauty of many a magical rite. But magic you see it is,
magic palpable and practical—not the magic of
_And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face;_
which is the true poetical magic and something yet more attractive.
Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic
writer describes the dropping of blood as _faster than the fall of the
dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of
June is at the heaviest._ Well, Homer says, _Gladness fell upon his
spirit like dew upon the ears of ripening corn when there is a rustling
in the fields._ The Celtic passage is the more exquisite, at any rate
than Homer in my prose. But between these two passages who would say
that there is an essential difference? It is not maintained that Homer
writes in this manner as often as a Romantic poet; and that is a
difference worth remarking. But I do assert that he can write so when
he likes, and as well as any.
Now what if this finer poetic magic is really a subtilization of the
crude appeal of practical magic? Something like this Arnold almost
suggests. What if Homer’s and Keats’s magic entrances us in part
because somewhere in us sleeps a memory of miracles wrought in days
when every rock and tree and river was alive with supernatural force?
There is nothing fantastic in such a speculation. If we entertain it,
we may find it illuminating the whole field of this discussion. At
once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic”
mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry
as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine
mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in
obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and
beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural
objects. Its origin is not explicable on any other hypothesis. We
have therefore to consider how it happened that Greek poetry, born (we
must believe) in an atmosphere as redolent of magic as this mythology
implies, came to divest itself of vulgar magic and “Celtic vagueness,”
till it came to appear to a critic like Arnold devoid also of the touch
which he thinks exclusively characteristic of Romance.
It happened, no doubt, as part of that whole reaction to Barbarism
which we call Hellenism. For magic is barbaric. The peoples all
about Hellas believed in it of course, and had magicians practising
it. In Greece itself the belief in magic lingered throughout Greek
history, lingered that is to say in secluded places and among the
many unenlightened. We hear of _Epôdoi_, “Charmers”; of _Goêtes_,
“Groaners”; of _Baskanoi_, who had the evil eye—three varieties of
wizard. There are echoes of a popular credence in the magical to be
heard even in Greek literature, that disdainful and fastidious thing.
In Homer we read that the wound received by Odysseus from the boar of
Parnassus was closed by repeating an incantation over it. There is a
good deal of white magic in the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod. Nearly
half of Aeschylus’ _Choêphoroi_ consists in an invocation or evocation
of the ghost of dead Agamemnon. And so on. In later Hellenistic times
there existed a great body of magical writings, born of the contact
between Greek civilization and Oriental superstition. There must have
been a public for this stuff. Professional miracle-workers were not
uncommon, and some of them won a resounding popularity. The book of
Pausanias, who wrote down what he heard and saw in the greater part of
Greece at the beginning of the second Christian century is strongly
and—to you and me—pleasantly redolent of immemorial customs and beliefs
among the peasantry. Many of these are plainly magical in their nature
or their origin. The priests of Lykaian Zeus, he tells us, used to
bring rain by dipping a branch in a certain stream and shaking it,
sprinkling waterdrops. That, of course, was sheer magic—“making rain”
as an African medicineman would say. A custom of this sort, which has
become a ritual, may be kept up after people have ceased quite to
believe in the doctrine which it assumes as true. That, however, does
not touch the historical significance of the custom, which must have
arisen among people who believed in magic. Besides, the peasants in
Pausanias’ day were clearly very superstitious. His book is the proof
of that. To suppose that in this respect they differed widely from
their ancestors is to suppose something which common sense cries out
against, and what evidence there is refutes.
Hellenism, then, the flower of the Greek spirit, grew in a soil
impregnated with superstition, or, if you do not care for that word,
with a religion containing many elements of magic. Every modern
student of the subject, I fancy, admits that, although some scholars
make more of the magical elements, some less. What no one can deny
is that Hellenism tends to reject magic, and tries to expel it from
human life. Magic was barbaric, and Hellenism was in reaction against
Barbarism. Very likely the reaction went too far; reactions usually
do. Very likely something too much was sacrificed to “Greek sanity.”
But it would be strange ingratitude on our part to forget that it
was this very urgency for the sane, for the rational, which ensured
that our civilization was founded on hard realistic thinking, and
not on a mere drift of emotionality. The task of thinking things out
to their end, even to their bitter end, which was so characteristic
of the Greeks, peculiarly fitted them for their task of laying
intellectual foundations. It is not an English characteristic, and
for that reason we are the more indebted to them. But scarcely less
unjust would it be to suppose that the Greeks sacrificed everything to
the rational. Nothing of the sort. They felt the charm to which the
Celtic imagination yielded itself so utterly. But out of magic could
not be built, they thought, any helpful philosophy or sound method of
art. So their literature, when it deals with this matter and deals
with it at its best, consciously or instinctively aims at drawing from
it its full value for the imagination without for a moment permitting
it to subdue the judgment. Any one reading in turn Mr. Yeats’s _The
Shadowy Waters_ and that part of the _Odyssey_ which deals with the
adventures of Odysseus in magic-haunted lands will see what I mean.
Yeats’s hero yields himself to the charm; Odysseus fights against it.
Which is the wiser is a question I leave to you. But here we have, in
an illustration that is almost an epigram, the difference between the
Celtic or extreme Romantic temper and the Hellenic temper. The Celt
hears the Sirens and follows them; the Greek hears them and unwillingly
sails past.
Or you may say: the Celtic gift is vision, the Hellenic gift is light.
Observe Homer’s dealings with magic. He often finds himself in its
presence, and he deals with it in various ways. He leaves it out, he
veils it, he transforms it. I am unable to see on what real grounds
we can follow one of the most eminent of English scholars in Homer in
dividing off the rest of the Homeric poems from those books of the
_Odyssey_ which tell of Odysseus’ wanderings in unknown lands and
seas. When does magic cease to be magic? Is it magic when Circe in the
Odyssean fairyland changes men into swine, and not magic when Athena in
Ithaca changes Odysseus into a beggar and herself into a bird? However,
what Dr. Leaf has in mind is rather a difference which he feels in the
whole atmosphere of these fairyland books, which the ancients knew
by the title of the _Narrative to Alkinoos_, from the rest of the
_Odyssey_ and from the _Iliad_. The _Narrative_, he thinks, moves in
places which it is hopeless to look for in the map. The geography of
the rest is really to be found on the map, if you only know where to
look for it. I might agree with this and yet hold (as I should) that
the geographical point is deceptive. Odysseus does pass out of known
into unknown lands, but he does not pass out of one atmosphere into
another. There are more miracles and magic in the _Narrative_ than in
the rest of Homer, but the treatment of them is the same. Or, to put it
somewhat differently, Phaeakia is just as real to me as Troy or Ithaca.
And I fancy it was just as real to Homer.
After all, there is really very little overt magic in the _Narrative_,
even if we include the wonder-working of the goddess Circe and
other divine beings, who might be said to perform miracles rather
than practise witchcraft. Of this wonder-working observe how
little is made: just as little as possible. The transformation and
retransformation of Odysseus’ companions is told in a line or two.
Think what the _Kalevala_ or the _Arabian Nights_ would have made
of it. The whole necromantic business of the Descent to Hades in
the eleventh book of the _Odyssey_ is transacted in a few formal,
ritualistic phrases. Originally all that matter must have been steeped
in magic. It is the same with Homer’s treatment of the monstrous.
The Homeric spirit objects to monsters; and so you never notice,
unless you look closely at the text, what horrible creatures the
Sirens were. Scylla and Charybdis are not fully described; much is
left to the reader’s imagination. The Cyclops, it must be allowed, is
different. Homer, you see, _had_ to make him eat Odysseus’ men and
_had_ to put his eye out; the story would not tell otherwise. But
somehow the passage is not so ghastly as one would expect. It is full
of remorseless description—the Cyclops vomits “wine and bits of human
flesh”—and yet despite such “realism” the poet contrives to enfold
our spirits in an air of enchantment—the true poetical enchantment—in
which all things are at once vivid and remote, like a dream freshly
remembered.