this effect, that the contrast of Hellenism and Barbarism appears in
literature as the contrast of Classical and Romantic. Just as Hellene
and Barbarian are correlative terms, so you cannot understand Classical
art without reference to Romance, nor Romantic art in isolation from
the Classics. But again, just as Greek and Barbarian are equally
human, so Classical and Romantic art are alike art. The difference
in the end is a difference of degree or (in another way of putting
it) of tendencies. The great vice of the Barbarian is that he has no
self-restraint. There cannot be art of any kind without restraint, and
the Barbarian _pur sang_, if he exist, must be incapable of art. But it
is not he we are discussing; it is the artistic expression of Barbarism
which we call Romance. Now observe how clearly, within the limits
imposed by art, Romance reveals the bias of the Barbarian temperament.
In literature it comes out in the form of hyperbole or artistic
exaggeration. It will not be denied that Romance indulges a good deal
in that. The Greeks fought shy of it. To deal largely in it was likely
to bring upon the writer the epithet of ψυχρός, “frigid”—a curious
charge to us, who are inclined to look upon exaggeration as natural to
a fiery spirit. They thought it the mere spluttering of a weak nature,
which could not master and direct its inward flame.
Yet the Romantic exaggeration can be very fine. I agree with Arnold in
liking a good deal a passage which he quotes in an abridged form from
the _Mabinogion_. _Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who
was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall.
The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long
enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had
never heard of Mabon. “But there is a race of animals who were formed
before me, and I will be your guide to them.” So the Ousel guides them
to the Stag of Redynvre. The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood
where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then
slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.
“But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which
was formed before I was”; and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.
“When first I came hither,” says the Owl, “the wide valley you see
was a wooded glen. And a race of men came and rooted it up. And there
grew a second wood; and this wood is the third. My wings, are they not
withered stumps?” Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never
heard of Mabon, but he offered to be guide “to where is the oldest
animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of
Gwern Abbey.” The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which
he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span
high._
The popular belief in the great age of certain animals appears in many
lands, and appeared in ancient Greece. It is expressed in an old poem,
attributed to Hesiod, called _The Precepts of Chiron_. _Nine lives of
men grown old lives the cawing crow; four lives of a crow lives the
stag; the raven sees the old age of three stags; but the phoenix lives
as long as nine ravens, as long as ten phoenixes we, the Nymphs with
beautiful hair, daughters of ægis-bearing Zeus._ Compared with the
Celtic passage, the quotation from “Hesiod” is poor and dry and like a
multiplication sum. The Celtic imagination, with its fine frenzy, is
at home in the region of popular fancy, and deals with it effectively;
whereas the Greek method, if employed without art, spoils everything.
You will observe that “Hesiod,” in spite of his vastly greater
moderation (herein at least showing himself Greek), does not really
succeed in being any more convincing to the imagination, while he does
not impress it at all as the Celt impresses it. Employed with the art
of Homer, or indeed of Hesiod at his best, the Greek method should at
once impress the imagination and convince it. If it can do this, it
clearly excels the method of impressing the imagination by a process
akin to stunning it. One ought probably to prefer Hesiod at his dryest
to mere senseless hyperbole even in a passage where a little hyperbole
is in place. There is a future to Hesiod’s style in the hands of an
imaginative artist, while there is no possible artistic future to mere
shrieking. The Celtic method is always committing suicide.
Arnold quotes again from the _Mabinogion_: _Drem, the son of Dremidyd_
(_when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see
it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North
Britain_). Here is what the ancient epic called the _Cypria_ says:
_Climbing the topmost peak he sent his glance through all the Isle
of Pelops son of Tantalos, and soon the glorious hero spied with his
wondrous eyes horse-taming Castor and conquering Polydeukês inside the
hollow oak_. The superiority of the Classical style is now beginning
to assert itself. The exaggeration in the Greek passage is immense,
but it does suspend incredulity for a moment—and the moment in art is
everything—while the Celtic passage pays no attention to verisimilitude
at all, and therefore really misses its effect. (If you think we are
here dealing with magic rather than simple hyperbole, the answer will
be much the same.) What Euripides says about shame we may say about
exaggeration; that there is a good kind and a bad. The good is, so
to speak, intensive; the bad, merely extensive. The excellent method
of hyperbole reflects some large hidden significance of it may be a
little thing or a trifling action. The inartistic hyperbole is just
overstatement—impressing nobody.
Any one who has read even a little of the old Celtic literature must
have been struck by the presence in it of a very large element of
enormous and almost frantic exaggeration. I speak very much under
correction, as I have to work with translations, but no one can be
wrong about so plain a matter. I have indeed heard a man who reads
Irish say that in his opinion some of the exaggeration was merely
humorous; but even this scholar did not deny that the exaggeration
was there, and plenty of it. From the _Táin Bó Cúalnge_ (the chief
document of early Ireland) translated by Professor Joseph Dunn, I take
part of the description of Cuchulain in one of his fits of rage. _He
next made a ruddy bowl of his face and his countenance. He gulped down
one eye into his head so that it would be hard work if a wild crane
succeeded in drawing it out on to the middle of his cheek from the rear
of his skull. Its mate sprang forth till it came out on his cheek, so
that it was the size of a five-fist kettle, and he made a red berry
thereof out in front of his head. His mouth was distorted monstrously
and twisted up to his ears. He drew the cheek from the jaw-bone so
that the interior of his throat was to be seen. His lungs and his
lights stood out so that they fluttered in his mouth and his gullet.
He struck a mad lion’s blow with the upper jaw on its fellow so that
as large as a wether’s fleece of a three year old was each red, fiery
flake which his teeth forced into his mouth from his gullet. There was
heard the loud clap of his heart against his breast like the yelp of a
howling bloodhound or like a lion going among bears. There were seen
the torches of the Badb, and the rain clouds of poison, and the sparks
of glowing-red fire, blazing and flashing in hazes and mists over his
head with the seething of the truly wild wrath that rose up above him.
His hair bristled all over his head like branches of a redthorn thrust
into a gap in a great hedge. Had a king’s apple-tree laden with royal
fruit been shaken around, scarce an apple of them all would have passed
over him to the ground, but rather would an apple have stayed stuck on
each single hair there, for the twisting of the anger which met it as
it rose from his hair above him. The Lon Laith (“Champion’s Light”)
stood out of his forehead, so that it was as long and as thick as a
warrior’s whetstone, so that it was as long as his nose, till he got
furious handling the shields, thrusting out the charioteer, destroying
the hosts. As high, as thick, as strong, as steady, as long as the
sail-tree of some huge prime ship was the straight spout of dark blood
which arose right on high from the very ridge-pole of his crown, so
that a black fog of witchery was made thereof like to the smoke from a
king’s hostel what time the king comes to be ministered to at nightfall
of a winter’s day._
It would be mistaken and dull criticism to blame anything so
characteristic as bad in itself. If such exaggerations are bad, it must
be because the whole class of literature to which they belong is bad.
But any one who should say that would be (not to put too fine a point
upon it) an ass. Still, it would be paradoxical to maintain that the
passage just quoted is in quite the best manner of writing. Cuchulain
reminds one of Achilles, and it is instructive to compare the treatment
of Cuchulain in the _Táin Bó Cúalnge_ with the treatment of Achilles in
the _Iliad_. In one sense the comparison is infinitely unfair. It is
matching what some have thought the greatest poem in the world against
something comparatively rude and primitive. But it is done merely to
illustrate a point of art. In other respects no injustice happens. If
one takes the combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, which is the crowning
episode of the _Táin_, with the combat between Hector and Achilles,
which is perhaps the crowning episode of the _Iliad_, one cannot fail
to see that the advantage in valour, and chivalry, and the essential
pathos of the situation is all on the Irish side. But in the pure art
of the narrative, what a difference! The _Táin_, not without skill,
works through a climax of tremendous feats to an impression of deadly
force and skill in its hero. But it is all considerably overdone, and
at last you are so incredulous of Cuchulain’s intromissions with the
“Gae Bulga” (that mysterious weapon) that you cease to be afraid of
him. What does Homer do? He shows you two lonely figures on the Plain
of Troy; Hector before the Skaian gate, and Achilles far off by the
River Skamandros. And as Hector strengthens his heart for the duel
which must be fatal to one, nearer and nearer, with savage haste, the
sun playing on his armour, comes running Achilles. Nothing happens,
only this silent, tireless running of a man. But it gets on your nerves
just as it got on Hector’s.
Or take that singular description of the Champion’s Light. It so
happens that Achilles also has something of the kind. But what is
grotesque in the case of Cuchulain, in the case of Achilles has a
startling effect of reality. The Trojans have defeated the Achaeans
and come very near the ships in the absence of Achilles from the
battle, when suddenly to the exulting foe the hero shows himself once
more. _Round his head the holy goddess twisted a golden cloud, and lit
therefrom an all-shining flame. And as when a smoke rising from a town
goes up to the sky in a distant isle besieged by fighting men, and all
day the folk contend in hateful battle before their town, but with the
setting of the sun thick flame the bale-fires, and the glare shoots
up on high for the dwellers round to see, so haply they may come in
their ships to ward off ruin—so from Achilles’ head the light went up
to heaven. From the wall to the trench he went, he stood—not mingling
with the Achaeans, for he regarded his mother’s wise behest. There
standing he shouted—and, aloof, Athena called; but among the Trojans
was aroused confusion infinite.... And the charioteers were astonisht
when they saw burning above the head of the great-hearted son of Peleus
the unwearied, awful fire, that the goddess, grey-eyed Athena, made
to burn._ The poet, you see, does not fairly describe the Champion’s
Light, he describes its effect. In the same way the face of Helen is
never described, only the effect she had on the old men of Troy. Such
art is beyond our praising.
It may be complained that I am taking extreme examples—of Hellenic tact
and moderation on the one hand, of Romantic extravagance on the other.
This is admitted, but the process seems justifiable; you must let me
illustrate my point. The argument is that the Romantic style tends to
a more lavish employment of hyperbole than does the Greek. I cannot
imagine any one denying it. Read of some nightmare feat of strength in
a Celtic story, and then read something in Homer (am I giving too much
of Homer?)—something like this: _Aias the son of Telamon was first to
slay a man, smiting him with a ragged stone, that was within the wall
by the battlement, piled huge atop of all, nor might a man with ease
upbear it in both his arms, even in full lustihead of youth—such as men
are now ... but Aias swang and hurled it from on high_. How moderation
tells! How much more really formidable is this Aias than Aeneas when
Virgil (with Roman or Celtic exaggeration) says that he cast “no small
part of a mountain”!
A matter of this delicacy will mock at a rigid handling. There is
no rule to be laid down at all save the rule that is above rules,
the instinct of the artist. The limits of exaggeration—and there is
a sense in which all art is exaggeration—shift with the shifting of
what one may call the horizon of the soul. It is clear, for instance,
that the atmosphere of the Domestic Drama or the Descriptive Poem
is markedly different from that of the Heroic Epic or the Choral
Ode. A _gabe_ appropriate to Oliver or Kapaneus would sound very
strangely on the lips of Holy Willie or Peter Bell; it could only be
mock-heroic or parody. One’s sensitiveness to these atmospheres, then,
the temperament of the reader, his critical taste, the character of
his education—all that and more affect his response to what he reads.
We have had a different experience from the ancients and live, as it
were, in different emotional scenery. Hyperbole counts for more in
our art than it did in theirs. To the device in itself there could be
no possible objection. When one thinks of the superb and intoxicating
hyperboles of Romantic literature from the winding of Roland’s horn to
the _Playboy of the Western World_; when one thinks how largely they
serve to make the style of Shakespeare; the Greeks appear a little
timid in comparison. Perhaps they were, although I cannot believe it
was timidity that ailed them. Only they guarded more strictly against
a danger they felt more keenly than we, into which we have more
frequently fallen.
Art of course must go where its own winds and currents carry it. To
forbid it to be itself because it is not Greek is extreme, though
happily impotent, nonsense. But it will be extraordinarily interesting
to see how modern art is going to save itself from the two extremes of
brutality and sentimentalism—the faults of the Barbarian—with which
it is so manifestly and so painfully struggling. The Greeks solved
that problem, and their solution stands. Meanwhile a student of Greek
may help a little by explaining what the solution is. For it has been
greatly misunderstood.
The secret was half recovered in the Renaissance. Thus in England
Milton learned from the Greeks the value of form for the concentration
of meaning, and that poetry should be not only “sensuous and
passionate” but also “simple.” But the Renaissance had drunk too deep
of the new wine to keep its head quite steady; and this, in turn,
helped to provoke a Puritanic reaction which distrusted the arts, and
therefore differed widely from Greek asceticism, which was itself
a kind of art. The Restoration produced a new orientation of the
English spirit, and a new interpretation of the Classical. Repelled
by the extravagances and the frequently outrageous slovenliness of
decadent Elizabethanism, the age of Dryden, communicating its impulse
to the age of Pope, fell in love with the quietness and temperance of
the ancients, and above all with their accomplishment of form. This
admiration was an excellent and salutary thing for the times. But it
seemed content to gaze on the surface. There arose a poetry which aimed
above all at mere correctness. As if Greek poetry aimed at nothing but
that!
The modern Romantic movement—I mean the new spirit in English
literature which _Lyrical Ballads_ is regarded as initiating—was
largely a revolt against eighteenth-century Classicism. Yet it cannot
fairly be said that the Romantics introduced a juster conception of
Classical art. They started with a prejudice against it, which their
discovery of the Middle Ages merely confirmed. Wordsworth indeed (who
had much of the eighteenth century in him) felt the attraction of
Classical art, but his best work is not in things like _Laodamia_.
Landor is not Greek, any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek. They have
Greek perfection of form, but (except at his rare best Landor) they are
glacial; they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes
Sappho, for example, so different. It has been thought that no English
poet has come nearer than Keats to recapturing the ancient secret. The
_Ode to a Grecian Urn_ nearly does recapture it. But not quite. _Beauty
is Truth, Truth Beauty_ is very Greek; but it is not Greek to forget,
as Keats and his followers have been apt to forget, the second half
of their aphorism. So the Greek poets aimed less directly at beauty
than at the truth of things, which they believed to be beautiful; and
this realism—this effort to realize the world as it is—remains, in
spite of the large element of convention in Greek poetry, the most
characteristic thing about the Greek poetical genius.
In the very midst of the Romantic movement we find Matthew Arnold
pleading for a return to Hellenic standards. The plea had curiously
little effect. If you read _Merope_ immediately after _Atalanta in
Calydon_, you will scarcely wonder at that. Arnold in fact saw only
half the truth. He cries for Greek sanity and absence of caprice; he
does not cry for Greek intensity, Greek realism. He pleads for tact
and moderation—in a word, for that good manners in style which had
seemed so important to the eighteenth century. The doctrine was too
negative for the age. It can hardly be said to inspire the best work
of Arnold himself. Yes, that is just what is wrong with it, it does
not _inspire_; and so, although based on a right instinct, it does
not really lift him above his time. He did not care for Tennyson,
whom he accused of affectation. But he would not have understood the
twentieth century’s objection to Tennyson, that he lacked the courage
of his genius. If he had understood it, he would no doubt have sided
with Tennyson, for Arnold was, after all, mainly “Victorian.” But what
do you suppose Aristophanes would have said about Tennyson? If the
answer is not at once obvious, the reason must be the difficulty that
would arise in getting a Greek of Aristophanes’ time to understand the
Victorian timidities at all.
The present age is said to be extremely in revolt against Victorianism.
Unfortunately one may be in full revolt and yet be only shaking one’s
chains. There is a thing that is fairly clear. The paroxysmal art
of the hour must bring its inevitable reaction. The cry will again
be heard for a return to urbanity and a stricter form, and people
will again call these things Classical, as if this were all the
Classics have to offer. And then in due time will come once more the
counter-swing of the pendulum. Well, perhaps art depends more than we
think upon this ceaseless movement; for all art aims at giving the
effect of life, and life is in movement.
III
Were it not for an original propriety in the distinction, it would be
better not to speak at all of “Classical” and “Romantic.” This seems
clearly to be the fault of modern criticism, which has hidden the
path under so deep a fall of many-coloured leaves, that now one must
spend a deal of time merely in sweeping them up. It is annoying how
inapt are current terms of criticism to express the essence of ancient
literature. I have hinted that it might almost be expressed in the word
“realism,” and at once I am checked by the reflection that realism in
modern speech appears to mean anything you like. How, then, is a man
to avoid being misunderstood? But he has to take the risk; and on the
whole it will be safer for him to grasp this runaway by the hair than
to sow more definitions in a soil already exhausted.
Greek literature is realistic in the sense that it aims at producing
the effect of reality, not by the accumulation of startling
details—which perhaps is what is usually meant in these days by
realism—but by a method of its own. Greek literature is marked by a
unique sincerity, or veracity, or candour, equally foreign to violence
and to sentimentality—a bitter man might say, equally foreign to what
we now call realism and to what we now call idealism. So profound is
this truthfulness that we (who cry out daily for a resolute fidelity to
fact in our writers) have not yet sounded it. It needs a long plummet.
So many of us have come to imagine that the truth of a situation is not
apparent except in flashes of lightning—preferably red lightning—which
the Greeks thought distorting. We think we are candid, and we are not
so very candid. I could never be one of those fanatical champions of
antiquity to whom the modern is merely the enemy. Their position is so
pathetically untenable that one can only with a sigh busy oneself with
something that really matters. But, however modern I may feel, I cannot
get myself to believe that we attain so perfect a truthfulness as the
Greeks. We have written volumes about the “Classical Ideal,” and we
are apt to contrast “Hellenic Idealism” with our uncompromising modern
“Realism” and “Naturalism.” And all the time the Greeks have had a
truer realism than we.
For instance, we have of late almost made a speciality of wounds and
death. You could not say this of any ancient writer. Curiously enough,
you might say it with less impropriety of Homer than of any other.
A warrior, he says, was pierced to the heart by a spear, _and the
throbbing of the heart made also the butt of the spear to quiver_.
That gives you a pretty satisfactory shiver. Menelaos smote Peisandros
_above the root of the nose; and the bones cracked, and his eyes
dropped bloody in the dust of the ground at his feet_. This is how
Peneleos treated Ilioneus. _He wounded him under the eyebrow where the
eye is embedded and forced out the ball, and the spear went clean
through the eye and through the muscle behind, and the wounded man
crouched down, spreading out his hands; but Peneleos drawing his sharp
sword smote his neck in the midst and dashed the head on the ground,
helmet and all; and the heavy spear was still in the eye, and he raised
up the head like a poppy._ I suspect your modern realist of envying
that image of the bloody head stuck “through the eye” on a spear
and looking like a “poppy” or a “poppy-head” on its stalk. Another
unfortunate fighter was hit _down the mouth_ with a spear, which
penetrated _under the brain and broke the white bones; and the teeth
were shaken out and both his eyes were filled with blood, and with a
gape he sent the blood gushing up his mouth and down his nostrils_. The
youngest son of King Priam was wounded by Achilles _beside the navel_,
and so _dropped moaning on his knees_ and _clutched his entrails to him
with his hands_—a passage remembered by Pater.
From it and the others it may be seen that Homer, when he likes, can be
as grisly as Mr. Sassoon. But they are not typical of Homer, still less
of the ancient Greek writers in general. It is not their way to obtrude
details. Their aim is to give you the whole situation, and to give
it truly. Their method is to select the significant, rather than the
merely striking, details. Such a theory and method are best entitled,
on reflection, to the name of realism. Kebriones, the charioteer in
Homer, has his forehead crushed in by a stone, and a terrible battle
is waged over his body. The poet in the heat of his battle thinks for
a moment of the dead man. _But he in the whirling dust-storm lay,
with large limbs largely fallen, forgetful of his horsemanship._ No
insistence here on the ghastly wound. The reader for a breathing space
is rapt from the blood and the horror into quiet spaces of oblivion.
Is not this, just here, the right note to strike—and not the other? It
gives the whole situation—the roaring tumult above, the unheeding body
underneath—not merely one aspect. It is the more real because it is not
simply painful.