Greek Literature and English
[In the essay below, Tucker gives the first place of influence on all European literatures to classical Greek. He ascribes to Greek literature values highly cherished in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English letters: clarity, appreciation for "pure beauty, " and originality.]
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 readymade 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." Hornêros, 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 secondhand. 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 Theognisand 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 grostesquely—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 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 Penëus or in Pindus' glens?
For great Anapus' stream was not your haunt,
Nor Etna's cliff, nor Acis' sacred rill.
Says Milton:
Where where 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.
Herodouts, 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 Herodouts, 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 preeminent. 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 Lucían 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 Lucían and Plutarch. Lucían 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. Lucían 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 sharank 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 framework 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 Latían plains.
Swift's most popular work, Gulliver's Travels, derives its hint from Lucían'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 Lucían.
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.
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