Part 15

Mr. Palgrave has, of course, cited with reference to Sophocles the great chorus in the _Œdipus Coloneus_, but he has omitted to notice that, if Sophocles has not elsewhere given us so elaborate a piece of natural description, innumerable touches in the dramas, and more particularly in the fragments, show that he observed nature almost as minutely as Shakespeare. Nothing could be more vivid than the touches of description in the _Philoctetes_. From Euripides Mr. Palgrave cites nothing, observing that he rarely goes beyond somewhat conventional phrases. Surely Mr. Palgrave must have forgotten the magnificent description of Parnassus, as seen from the plain, in the _Phœnissæ_, the glorious description of a moonlight night, as represented on the tapestry, in the _Ion_, the vivid touches of natural description in the _Bacchæ_, that of the meadow in the _Hippolytus_, and the chorus about Athens in the _Medea_, to say nothing of the charming rural picture in the fragments of the _Phaeton_.[33] To say of Aristophanes that, in his treatment of nature, he rarely goes beyond somewhat common phrases, is to say what is refuted, not merely in the chorus referred to by Mr. Palgrave, but in the _Frogs_ and in the _Birds_. He stands next to Homer in his keen sensibility to the charm of nature. Shelley himself might have written the choruses referred to. In dealing with the Alexandrian poets Mr. Palgrave passes over Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus entirely, and yet the fine picture of Delos given by Callimachus in the Hymn to Delos is one of the gems of ancient description, and Apollonius Rhodius abounds with the most graphic and charming delineations of scenery and natural objects. What a beautiful description of early morning is this!--

ημος δ’ ουρανοθεν χαροπη ὑπολαμπεται ηως εκ περατης ανιουσα, διαγλαυσσουσι δ’ αταρποι, και πεδια δροσοεντα φαεινη λαμπεται αιγλη.

_Argon._ i. 1280-1283.

“What time from heaven the bright glad morn coming up from the East begins to shine, and path and road are all agleam, and the dew-bespangled plains are flashing with the radiant light.”

How vivid too, and with the vividness of modern poetry, are his descriptions of the cave of Hades and its neighbourhood (ii. 729-750), and the Great Syrtis (iv. 1230-1245)! In his selections from the Greek Anthology Mr. Palgrave is much happier; but here again he has many omissions, and among them the most remarkable illustration of Greek nature-painting to be found in that collection--namely, Meleager’s idyll giving an elaborate description of a spring day, which might have been written by Thomson (_Pal. Anthology_, ix. 363). It may be observed in passing that ουρεσιφοιτα κρινα (_Pal. Anth._, v. 144) can hardly mean “lilies that wander over the hills,” but lilies “that haunt the hills,” and that ξουθαι μελισσαι in Theocritus, vii. 142, probably means “buzzing” bees, not “tawny.”

In dealing with the Roman poets Mr. Palgrave is, with one exception, most unsatisfactory. From the poets preceding Lucretius, amply as the fragments would serve his purpose, he gives only one illustration. We should have expected the vivid picture given by Accius in his _Œnomaus_ of the early morning:

“Forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem, Cum e somno in segetem agrestis cornutos cient, Ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent.”

“Perchance before the dawn that heralds the burning rays, what time rustics bring forth the oxen from their sleep into the cornfields, to break up the red dew-spangled soil with the ploughshare, and turn up the clods from the soft soil”;

or the wonderfully graphic description of a sudden storm at sea, in the fragments of the _Dulorestes_ of Pacuvius:

“Profectione læti piscium lasciviam Intuentur, nec tuendi capere satietas potest. Interea prope jam occidente sole inhorrescit mare, Tenebræ conduplicantur, noctisque et nimbum occæcat nigror, Flamma inter nubes coruscat, cælum tonitru contremit, Grando mixta imbri largifico subita præcipitans cadit, Undique omnes venti erumpunt, sævi existunt turbines, Fervit æstu pelagus.”

“Glad at heart when they set out they gaze at the sporting fish, and are never weary of looking at them. Meanwhile, hard upon sunset, the sea ruffles, darkness gathers thick, the blackness of the storm-clouded night hides everything, flame flashes between the clouds, heaven shakes with thunder, hail, mingled with streaming rain, dashes suddenly down, from every quarter all the winds tear forth, wild whirlwinds rise, the sea boils with the seething waters.”

With Lucretius, indeed, he deals fully, and this portion of his work leaves little to be desired. But a reference to the lines to Sirmio and one illustration from the _Peleus and Thetis_ exhaust his examples from Catullus. We should have expected the picture of the stream leaping from the mossy rock into the valley beneath, in the Epistle to Manlius, of the morning chasing away the shadows in the _Attis_, and the lovely flower pictures in the Epithalamia. In dealing with Virgil most of Mr. Palgrave’s citations are practically irrelevant; scarcely any of the passages which best illustrate Virgil’s power of landscape painting being even referred to. “The _Æneid_,” says Mr. Palgrave, “may be briefly dismissed. Natural description can have but little place in an epic.” And yet what are the passages to which any one, who wishes to illustrate the charm and power of Virgil’s pictures of scenery, would naturally turn? Surely to these: the description of the rocky recess which sheltered Æneas’s ships (_Æneid_, i. 159-168), a picture worthy of Salvator; the picture of Ætna (iii. 570-582), which rivals the picture of it given by Pindar, a picture praised so justly by Mr. Palgrave himself; the description of a calm night (iv. 522-527); the wave-buffeted, gull-haunted rock (v. 124-128); and, above all, the scenery at the mouth of the Tiber, bathed in the rays of the morning sun, a picture unexcelled even by Tennyson. Nor even in the _Georgics_ is any reference made to the superb description of a storm in harvest time (i. 216-334), or to the magnificent winter piece (iii. 349-370).

The remarks about the indifference of Propertius to natural scenery are most unjust. What a charming picture is this!--

“Grata domus Nymphis humida Thyniasin, Quam supra nullæ pendebant debita curæ Roscida desertis poma sub arboribus; Et circum irriguo surgebant lilia prato Candida purpureis mixta papaveribus.”

_El._, I. xx. 35-39.

It may be conceded that Ovid is conventional and commonplace in his treatment of nature; but why is Valerius Flaccus, with his bold, vivid touches, left unnoticed? Why does one citation suffice for the many exquisite cameos which ought to have been given from Statius? Another inexplicable omission in Mr. Palgrave’s work is the poem entitled _Rosæ_, attributed to Ausonius--a lovely poem, infinitely more beautiful than the epigram quoted by Mr. Palgrave from the Latin Anthology, and rivalling the fragment given by him from Tiberianus. Most readers would agree with him in his estimate of Claudian, but he might have added the fine description of Olympus in the _De Consulatu Theodori_, 200-210:

“Ut altus Olympi Vertex, qui spatio ventos hiemesque relinquit, Perpetuum nullâ temeratus nube serenum Celsior exsurgit pluviis, auditque ruentes Sub pedibus nimbos, et rauca tonitrua calcat;”

which Goldsmith, by the way, has borrowed and paraphrased in the _Deserted Village_, together with its sublime application:

As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles round its head.

Space does not serve to follow Mr. Palgrave through his chapters on Italian, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon poetry, in all of which his omissions are as remarkable as his citations; so we must content ourselves with making a few remarks on his treatment of the English poets. It is pleasing to see that, guided by Gray, he has done justice to Lydgate, but he has not noticed the distinguishing peculiarity of this poet in his description, his extraordinary sensitive appreciation of colour.

Among the Scotch poets of the fifteenth century a prominent place should have been given to Henryson who is not even mentioned. Mr. Palgrave hurries over the Elizabethan poets with too much expedition, and the poets of the eighteenth century fare even worse. Great injustice is done to Thomson. Why did not Mr. Palgrave, instead of citing what he calls Thomson’s “cold” tropical landscape, for the purpose of contrasting it unfavourably with Tennyson’s picture in _Enoch Arden_, give us instead the Summer morning--

“At first faint gleaming in the dappled East ... Young day pours in apace, And opens all the lawny prospect wide, The dripping rock, the mountain’s misty tops Swell on the sight, and brighten with the dawn, Blue through the dusk the smoking currents shine,”

or

“The clouds that pass, For ever flushing round a summer sky”;

or the rainbow in the _Lines to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_? Dyer may be somewhat prosaic, but he is not a poet to be despatched in a treatise on descriptive poetry, without citation, in a few contemptuous lines: how vivid is his picture of a calm in the tropics!--

“The dewy feather, on the cordage hung, Moves not; the flat sea shines, like yellow gold Fused in the fire”;

or his

“Rocks in ever-wild Posture of falling”;

or the charming landscape in _Grongar Hill_ with such touches as these:

“The windy summit wild and high Roughly rushing on the sky”;

or

“Rushing from the woods the spires Seem from hence ascending fires.”

As Wordsworth said, “Dyer’s beauties are innumerable and of a high order.” It is very surprising that nothing should have been said about Shenstone and the Wartons, about Scott of Amwell, Jago, Crowe and Bowles, all of whom are, in various ways, remarkable as descriptive poets. And certainly Mr. Palgrave does scant justice to Cowper; his touch may be prosaic, but he always had his eye on the object, and his landscape lives. Surely, by the way, Mr. Palgrave is mistaken in supposing that Shelley apparently understood Alastor to mean a “wanderer”; he understood it, as the preface shows, to mean, what it means so often in Greek, “one under the spell of an avenging deity.”

Here we must break off. Mr. Palgrave’s is an important work, and it is the duty, therefore, of a critic to review it seriously, in the hope that, should it reach a second edition, which may be confidently anticipated, Mr. Palgrave may be disposed to do a little more justice to his most interesting subject.

Since this article was written Mr. Palgrave’s lamented death has unhappily rendered all hope of what was anticipated in the last paragraph, vain. But the review has been reprinted, and with some additions, in the hope that it may not be unacceptable as a contribution, however slight and imperfect, to a subject of great interest to lovers of poetry.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: See Bergk, Poet. Lyr. _Carm._ Pop. xxix.]

[Footnote 33: Nauck, _Trag. Græc. Frag._, p. 473.]

AN APPRECIATION OF PROFESSOR PALGRAVE

A familiar figure in literary circles, a fine critic, a graceful and scholarly minor poet, and one whose name will long be held in affectionate remembrance by lovers of English poetry, has passed away in the person of Francis Turner Palgrave. It would be absurd to place him beside Matthew Arnold--to whose genius, to whose characteristic accomplishments, to whose authority and influence, he had no pretension. And yet it may be questioned whether, after Arnold, any other critic of our time contributed so much to educate public taste where, in this country, it most needs such education. If, as a nurse of poets and in poetic achievement, England stands second to no nation in Europe, in no nation in the world has the standard of popular taste been so low, has the insensibility to what is excellent, and the perverse preference of what is mediocre to what is of the first order, been so signally, so deplorably, conspicuous. The generation which produced Wordsworth preferred Moore, and no less a person than the author of _Vanity Fair_ wrote:--“Old daddy Wordsworth may bless his stars if he ever gets high enough in Heaven to black Tommy Moore’s boots.” While the readers of Keats might have been numbered on his fingers, Robert Montgomery’s _Satan_ and _Omnipresence of the Deity_ were going through their twelfth editions. During many years, for ten readers of Browning’s poems there were a hundred thousand for Martin Tupper’s _Proverbial Philosophy_, while the popularity of Mrs. Browning was as a wan shadow to the meridian splendour of Eliza Cook. Whoever will turn to the criticism of current reviews and magazines forty years ago will have no difficulty in understanding the diathesis described by Matthew Arnold as “on the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morality and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence.” Whoever will turn to nine out of the ten Anthologies, most in vogue before 1861, will understand, that the same instinct which in the Dark Ages led man to prefer Sedulius and Avitus to Catullus and Horace, Statius to Virgil, and Hroswitha to Terence, led these editors to analogous selections.

Making every allowance for the co-operation of other causes, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the appearance of the _Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics_ in 1861 initiated an era in popular taste. It remains now incomparably the best selection of its kind in existence. Its distinctive feature is the characteristic which differentiates it from all the anthologies which preceded or have followed it. It was to include nothing which was not first-rate; there was to be no compromise with the second-rate; if its gems varied, as gems do in value, each was to be of the first water. With patient and scrupulous diligence, the whole body of English poetry, from Surrey to Wordsworth, was explored and sifted. After due rejections, each piece in the residue was considered, weighed, tested. And here Mr. Palgrave had assistance, more invaluable than any other anthologist in the world has had--that of the illustrious poet to whom the volume was dedicated. It may be safely said of Tennyson that nature and culture had qualified him for being as great a critic as he was a poet. His taste was probably infallible; his touchstones and standards were derived not merely from the masters who had taught him his own art, but from a wonderfully catholic and sympathetic communion with all that was best in every sphere of influential artistic activity. The consequence is, that a book like the _Golden Treasury_, especially when taken in conjunction with the notes, which form an admirable commentary on the text, may be said to lay something more than the foundation of a sound critical education. What the _Golden Treasury_ is to readers of a maturer age the _Children’s Treasury_ is to younger readers. It is a great pity that such inferior works as many which we could name are allowed, in our schools, to supplant such a work as Palgrave’s. The same exquisite taste and nice discernment mark his other anthologies, his selections from Herrick, and Tennyson, and, though perhaps in a less degree, his _Treasury of English Sacred Poetry_, and his recently published supplement to the _Golden Treasury_. It is probably impossible to over-estimate the salutary influence which these works have exercised.

There is no arguing on matters of taste, and exception might easily be taken, sometimes, to his dicta as a critic. But this at least must be conceded by everybody, that in the best and most comprehensive sense of the term he was a man of classical temper, taste, and culture, and that he had all the insight and discernment, all the instincts and sympathies, which are the result of such qualifications. He had no taint of vulgarity, of charlatanism, of insincerity. He never talked or wrote the cant of the cliques or of the multitude. He understood and clung to what was excellent; he had no toleration for what was common and second rate; he was not of the crowd. He belonged to the same type of men as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, a type peculiar to our old Universities before things took the turn which they are taking now. It will be long before we shall have such critics again, and their loss is incalculable.

As a scholar Palgrave was rather elegant than profound or exact, and, to judge from a series of lectures delivered by him as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, on _Landscape in Classical Poetry_, and afterwards published in a work which is here reviewed, his acquaintance with the Greek and Roman poets was, if scholarly and sympathetic, somewhat superficial. But he was getting old, and perhaps he had lost his memory or his notes. As a poet he was the author of four volumes, the earliest, published in 1864, entitled _Idylls and Songs_, and the latest, published in 1892, _Amenophis; and other Poems_. But his most ambitious effort appeared in 1882, _Visions of England_, written with the laudable purpose of stirring up in the young the spirit of patriotism. His poetry may be described, not inaptly, in the sentence in which Dr. Johnson sums up the characteristics of Addison’s verses:--“Polished and pure, the production of a mind too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence.” Perhaps they served their end in procuring for him the honourable appointment which he filled competently for ten years--that of the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. It may be said of him as was said of Southey, he was a good man and not a bad poet, or of Agricola, _decentior quam sublimior fuit_. But as a critic of Belles Lettres he was excellent.

ANCIENT GREEK AND MODERN LIFE[34]

[Footnote 34: _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius._ By S. H. Butcher, Litt. D., LL.D. London.]

That a second edition of Professor Butcher’s essays on _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_ should have been called for so soon is assuredly a very significant fact. And it is significant in more ways than one. It not only goes far to refute Lord Coleridge’s theory that Greek has lost its hold on modern life, but it furnishes one of the many proofs, which we have recently had, that people are beginning to understand what is now to be expected from classical scholars, if classical scholars are to hold their own in the world of to-day, and that scholars are, in their turn, aware that they no longer constitute an esoteric guild for esoteric studies. The task of the purely philological labourer has been accomplished. During more than four centuries, succeeding schools of literal critics have been toiling to furnish mankind with the means of unlocking the treasures of classical Greece. Till within comparatively recent times, the power of reading the Greek classics with accuracy and ease was an accomplishment beyond the reach of any but specialists. Unless a student was prepared to grapple with the difficulties of unsettled and often unintelligible texts, to make his own grammar--nay, his own dictionary--to choose between conflicting and contradictory interpretations, and, in a word, to possess all that now would be required in a classical editor, it would be impossible for him to read, with any comfort, a chorus of Æschylus or Sophocles, an ode of Pindar, or a speech in Thucydides. But now all these difficulties have vanished. Excellent lexicons, grammars, commentaries, and translations, with settled texts, and editions of the principal Greek classics so satisfactory that practically they leave nothing to be desired, have rendered what was once the monopoly of mere scholars common property. The power of reading Greek with accuracy and comfort is now, indeed, within the reach of any person of average intelligence and industry.

But prescription and tradition are tenacious of their privileges. Greek has so long been regarded as the inheritance of philologists, that they are not prepared to resign what was once their exclusive possession, without a struggle. It is useless to point out to them that, if Greek is to maintain its place in modern education, it can only maintain it by virtue of its connection with the humanities, by virtue of its intrinsic value as the expression of genius and art, and of its historical value as the key to the development and characteristics of the classics of the modern world; by virtue, in fine, of its relation to life, and its relation to History and Criticism. The revival, indeed, of the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ of the Middle Ages would not be an absurder anachronism than it is to draw no distinction between the functions and aims of classical scholarship, when it was, necessarily, confined to philologists and specialists, and its functions and aims at the present day. It has been the obstinate determination on the part of academic bodies not to recognise this distinction, but to preserve Greek as the monopoly of those who approach it only on the side of philological specialism, which has led to its complete dissociation in our scholastic system from what constitutes its chief, almost its sole title to preservation. At Cambridge, for example, it has been expressly excluded from the only School in which the study of Literature has been organized, and an attempt to substitute Modern Languages in its place--for a degree in arts--was only defeated by the intervention of non-resident members of the University. At Oxford a scheme for a “School of Literature,” in which Greek was to have no place, might, not long ago have been carried, and the casting vote of the proctor alone saved the University from this disgrace, and Greek from a crushing blow.[35] But, fortunately for the cause of Greek, there is every indication that a reaction, too strong for academic bodies to resist, is setting in. Scholars are beginning to see that what Socrates did for Philosophy must now be done for Greek, if Greek is to hold its own. Thus, it has preserved, and no doubt may preserve, its esoteric side; but that which constitutes its chief, its real importance--which justifies its retention in modern education--is not what appeals, and can only appeal, in each generation, to a small circle of “specialists”--its philological interest, but what appeals to liberal intelligence, to men as men, to the poet, to the philosopher, to the orator, to the critic. To this end, to what may be described as the vitalization of Greek, all the labours of the late Professor Jowett were directed; and by his means Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle are brought into influential relation with modern life. What he effected for them Professor Jebb has effected for Sophocles, and not only has this unrivalled Greek scholar placed within the reach of any person of average intelligence all that is necessary for the elucidation of the language, art, and philosophy of the Shakespeare of the Athenian stage, but he has not disdained to furnish a popular manual of Homeric study, and a popular elementary guide-book to Greek literature. Professor Lewis Campbell has laboured in the same field and in the same cause. Great also have been the services rendered to the popularization of Greek by Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Ernest Myers, Mr. Walter Leaf, and many other distinguished scholars, all of whom have shown, both by their published works and as lecturers, that the masterpieces of ancient Greece may become as intelligible and influential in the world of to-day as they were more than two thousand years ago.