Part 4

Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable drawings of the Parthenon--for they were done a few years before its disaster--that he could not even copy Phidias’s work before him, without importing the style of the seventeenth-century Frenchman. All these things are true and obvious, and yet the poet, who in translating another, recasts him into his own mould, though he be faithless as a translator, may be far greater as a poet. Ever since I was introduced to Homer by Pope, more than fifty years ago, I have felt that, with all its anachronisms, Pope’s poem is the greatest and best version of the Greek master, and a proper one for those to read who cannot approach the original. No prose translation, however scholarly and accurate, can give the least idea of the swing of the great epic, and so I feel that the influence of Homer through Pope has been wide and lasting and that the very defects of so great a performance have stimulated oft-renewed attempts at reproducing the great masterpiece. Dryden’s Virgil of course led public taste in the same direction, so that we have an age very diverse from Greek in taste, and very incongruous to it, nevertheless dominated, perhaps even more than people then imagined, by Greek classical models.

The case of lyrical poetry is not dissimilar. The poets of the eighteenth century had before them Horace’s versions of Alcæus and Sappho, and the text of Pindar, who was, as Horace had told them, the greatest master of all. But as he was difficult even for Horace to understand, so he was to the eighteenth-century poets but vaguely intelligible. Above all, the very essence of his studied, careful, and learned genius was wholly misunderstood. He was conceived to be a poet beyond the bounds of strict art, drunk with the muse and pouring forth a torrent of splendid thoughts in disregard of all the shackles of metre, which was so obvious in the Æolic school. Thus they strove to imitate his apparent impetuosity, and the supposed irregularities of his metre, and produced many good poems, inspired indeed by the Greek, but wholly foreign to their model. The greatest of them was he who knew the originals far better than the rest, and took the pains to master them with scholarly care. We have in Gray a poet of really Greek temper and spirit, very learned, very fastidious, very strict in form, though that form be rich and various, and to my thinking well worthy of comparison with Simonides or Bacchylides, both in purity of style and splendour of diction.

An excellent American critic (W. L. Phelps) has shown very clearly how Gray, beginning with classical training and making the pseudo-classical Dryden his model, was nevertheless in middle life swept away by the Romantic wave which flooded England and which made him prefer Keltic and national subjects to those derived from Greek and Latin traditions. All this is perfectly true, yet equally true is it, that no change of subject could change or mar the splendid form, the pure diction, the delicate taste which Gray derived from his careful study of the Greek poets, and which is as clear in his “Welsh bard,” as in his “progress of classical poesy.” No English poet had hitherto grasped the real splendour of Pindar, not even Milton, and so the Pindaric odes of lesser men, such as Cowley and Shenstone, have not survived as popular poems, whereas Dryden’s _Ode to St. Cecilia_, and a whole series of Gray’s poems, show clearly the matchless training which Greek poetry affords the modern poet, whatever be his subject or his school.

It is in fact much more important and interesting to point out these indirect influences, than to lay stress on the direct borrowing from the Greek in form and diction. This very conflict or contrast may be exemplified in Byron’s poetry. He was a leading member of the Romantic school or fashion, and yet all his life he loved and honoured the classical perfection of the Greeks, and not infrequently by a stray passage proves how minute his knowledge even of fragments of Greek poetry.[7] The political circumstances of modern Greece in the early nineteenth century, the great struggle of the population against Turkish tyranny--all this gave a romantic foreground to the classical taste fostered by the higher schools and colleges throughout Europe; and so the admiration of the old Greeks in art, politics, and literature was a sort of classical justification for the Romanticists who had sprung from the reaction against the false French classicism of an earlier generation. Byron was first in adding the realities of actual Greece to its interest as a mere frame or imaginary locus for classical poetry. None of the eighteenth-century poets, or even the earlier historians of Greece, showed the smallest curiosity about the actual home of Greek literature, the actual cradle that nursed all this unequalled genius.

Even Grote and Thirlwall, long after the poets had discovered what inspiration was to be derived from the mountains and fiords of Hellas, wrote their immortal histories, without any feeling that they would have gained, by a knowledge of the ground, a new and living flavour. For they had both means and leisure to travel and yet they sought no help outside the books of their libraries. But Byron brought into poetry at least that realism about Greece which made a study of Greek and of Greece at first-hand the desire of poets and of artists. Of Keats, who had not the opportunities, I have spoken. In Shelley, we have that perfect combination of romantic imagination with profound Greek culture that makes him the greatest and probably the most lasting of that galaxy that illumined the early nineteenth century. The least Greek of them all was Wordsworth, and I venture to say that had he studied Greek poetry, it would have taught him the essential differences which separate it from prose--lofty style, select diction, above all, compression within strict bounds and moderate limits--and thus have saved both us and him from the dreariness of his prosaic _Excursion_. Let none of you think that I underrate his poetic work. But in his highest moments it is the glow of Greek splendour, the spiritual lessons of the august Plato that illumine his sober genius, and translate him for the hour into the company of the immortals.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the strong desire to reproduce the Greek masterpieces not only by people who were poets for the occasion, like Lord Derby or Miss Swanwick, but also by the masters who had already proved their greatness to the English world. Robert Browning has given us versions of several plays, the _Agamemnon_, the _Mad Herakles_, the _Alkestis_. In the last, he lays stress rather on the psychological attitude of Euripides, on his character-drawing, than on the lyrical portions, which are not reproduced in lyrical metre. But how easily he could do this he proved to me when I asked him to render a famous ode of the poet in a form approaching the original. Writing to London from Dublin on a Monday, I had his version on Wednesday evening. The original manuscript I have given to an American friend who treasures it; the words appear in my little monograph on Euripides published years ago.

Swinburne and Matthew Arnold have not translated old Greek dramas, but have composed plays after that model. To an intelligent reader who has no knowledge of Greek, I know no better approach than to read the _Atalanta_ or the _Erechtheus_ of Swinburne, or, if he prefer it, the _Merope_ of Arnold, which is not so great a poem as either of the others, but just as faithful a mirror of Greek mind; for the exuberance of Swinburne’s choruses, the unrestrained riot of his ebullitions against the providence of the Gods, may be splendid poetry--they are foreign to the chaste and moderate diction which characterises almost all Greek literature. If there be a great exception, it is in the gloomy grandeur of Æschylus, and accordingly no play has been so often attempted in English as the _Agamemnon_.[8]

When we pass from this large influence of Greek drama to that of the lyric fragments or the idylls and love stories of our modern poets, I am met by an old assertion of the pedants, that the Greeks were wanting in that love and feeling for nature which is the prerogative of the Romantic school. I see no such contrast between Classical and Romantic. Gray, the most classical of our lyric poets, was the first to insist upon the necessity of a poet refreshing his soul with the wild beauties of mountain scenery. If we had more of Sappho, we should find that she too was romantic in that as in every other reasonable sense. The last fragment recovered, which prophesies that her girl friend will shine at Sardis like the moon among the stars in a summer night, paints the splendours of such a night in the glowing colours of a true poet of nature. There is in Theocritus, there is in Apollonius, ample evidence of a delight in the sights, and still more the sounds, of nature, and so the most classical of our modern lyric poets, Tennyson, shows great intimacy with Theocritus, and takes not only his images but still more his tone from that delightful original. Such images as

Sleep that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,

and again,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmurings of innumerable bees,

are, if not translated from Theocritus, certainly suggested by him. A more explicit borrowing from the Greek will be found in the comparison of a strong man’s biceps to the passing of running water over a stone that does not break it:

And bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it.

But in every page of that poet which is not mere familiar home life, I feel in the splendour of his style the very echo of Greek work, and I can well imagine how Euripides would have revelled in the lines,

His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

The influence of Greek comedy is too complicated to be discussed at the close of this discourse. For the greatest of the Greek masters, Aristophanes, has so intensely Attic a quality that we might as well try to imitate the work of Phidias. But his genteel successor Menander has become, through the versions of Plautus and Terence, the father of genteel comedy in Europe. He was extravagantly praised and popular in decadent Greece. I for one cannot hold that his legacy stands high among the priceless treasures bequeathed to us by his nation. But of his influence there can be no question.[9]

It remains for me to say a word to those who ask how far this great poetry of the Greeks was reduced to theory, among a nation who loved to reduce everything to theory. The climax of this tendency is shown in the work of Aristotle, as we shall see in another connection, and Aristotle has either written, or caused to be written, among his multifarious tracts, an essay called the _Poetic_, which is mainly, so far as we have it, an analysis of the meaning of Tragic poetry. There are, no doubt, some very important utterances in this tract, notably the famous definition of tragedy, upon which so many volumes have been written. But, on the whole, I know no poorer and more jejune exposition of a great subject, so much so that I cannot but suspect that it is one of the many outlying researches that he entrusted to his pupils. Here is the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of Aristotle: In the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ Euripides has given us one distinct type in his wonderful gallery of heroines, all facing death for the real or supposed public good, either freely or under the coercion of cowardly or cruel princes. This Iphigenia is a young fresh creature just blooming into life, and she hears the first news of her fate with an outburst of passionate tears, and of supplication against the cruel sentence. Yet presently, when she finds her doom sealed, she resigns herself with the splendid dignity of an inborn gentlewoman, and so adds greatly to the “pity and the terror” of the tragedy.

The author of the _Poetic_ says the character is not consistently drawn, and therefore faulty. What a contemptible judgment! It is only to be matched by the observation of the worthless pedant who tells us in his _scholium_ that the Medea of Euripides had no business to shed tears over her children, as she was a hard and cruel character and about to murder them. So again this Aristotle says that poetry is essentially different from prose, and gives as an example that the work of Herodotus would not cease to be history even were it cast in metrical form. This observation misses the deeper distinction of poetic and prosaic thought, which does not depend on metrical form. There are many passages in Herodotus which despite their prose form are essentially poetry, as we shall see in the next lecture.

These criticisms will, I trust, console you when I add that I have no time left for a full consideration of the _Poetic_. It is not always given to those who do great work to expound how they did it. Even among the Greeks there was a current theory that the poet suffered under that divine madness which we call inspiration, and knew not the full force of what the Muse spoke through his lips. That this inspiration did not dispense with careful preparation, with elaborate metrical perfection, I have already told you. We have but recently learned from the _Persians_ of Timotheus that this metrical perfection may also be used to convey the most ludicrously silly conceits.

Let us therefore take what Time has left us with thankfulness, and not disturb ourselves or mar our enjoyment by the application of barren theories. From Homer to the _Anthology_, you can find great poems and splendid fragments that will exalt you into the higher world reserved for those that can lay aside material cares. There you will enlarge the wealth of your souls; there you will enter upon the heritage left you by those that had attained and taken possession of the ideal to which all our love of beauty tends as its goal. But let me repeat to those who cannot quaff this poetry at the source: take it from the vessels of the English poets that are ready to your hands, not from the laboured prose of the modern scholar. Take Calverley’s Theocritus; take Browning’s Euripides; take Whitelaw’s Sophocles; take Frere’s Aristophanes. Thus may you reach not the real shrine, but, like some proselyte of old, the outer court of the matchless Temple.

III

GREEK PROSE

I suppose the ordinary critic, when reviewing the great subject before us, would hardly think to-day’s title one of sufficient importance to occupy a Boston audience, and yet it ought to be shown that in prose, fully as much as in poetry, the Greeks have been the teachers of civilised Europe. Probably also the subject will have to you this interest, that it is not at all so obvious as that of the last lecture. Everyone knows about the Greek poets; many of them are the household property of the modern world. But the origin and the development of Greek prose is not so generally studied, and its far-reaching influence not so widely understood. Moreover, we know something more of the early stages of its history, and though it also surprises us with its absolute perfection in our earliest authors, and seems to leap from the brain of the god as fully armed as the poetry of Homer, yet we _have_ some traces of earlier efforts; we have some inkling of what went before Herodotus, more than we have of what went before Homer. That is mostly due to the late origin of prose writing among the Greeks. At first, verse form was universal for recording all topics of interest. Even genealogies were composed in hexameters. All the proverbial wisdom of the Seven Sages was in metrical form. Solon, the greatest of these sages, even preaches his politics, and gives us his autobiography, in elegiac metre. We seem to have travelled a long way from the epoch when such a man as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Roosevelt would address the Senate or the people in verse; yet for all that Solon was a lawgiver, probably as great as either of them, and a very modern man, too, far more modern in tone and spirit than Mr. Gladstone. Nor am I sure that Mr. Roosevelt would not enjoy composing his messages to his Senate in verse; still less should I affirm that the German Emperor would not revel in heroic verse, as the proper vehicle for his exhortations to his subjects.

I note this in order to bring home to you the fact that late in Greek spiritual history the greatest men and their audiences remained satisfied with the shackles of metre, as conveying serious teaching in a more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the beginning of society, when there are no written records, men are wont to clothe their legends and tales in that form, as it is a great aid to the memory, and can be easily taught to children, who remember the sound long before they pay attention to the sense. I will not speak of inscriptions in prose, as they are not intended in early days for works of art, any more than the earliest letters, which are mere messages conveyed by writing.

But there _was_ an early attempt made, in the rich society of Ionia, to clothe thought in an artistic form without the shackles of metre, and that was the writing of the philosopher Heracleitus. I will speak of his great and pregnant theory hereafter; what concerns us now is that his obscure aphorisms were intended to strike the reader by their form, as well as their matter.

He had apparently a single predecessor in Pherecydes of Syros. The subjugation of Ionia by the Persians, and especially the fall of Miletus, seem to have put an end to this early picturesque writing and thinking until it woke up as the scientific vehicle of the Greek school of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.

It was in the opposite extreme of the Greek world, the far west, peopled mainly not by Ionians but by Dorians, that literary prose made a new beginning, which no political changes were able to crush, till all Greece fell under foreign domination. The first of these attempts was the composition, at Syracuse, of a treatise teaching citizens how to plead their cases in court. It was a time when revolutions in the state and consequent changes of property, arising from confiscations and exiles, often reversed by a turn of the wheel of fortune, made it vital for every plaintiff or defendant to be able to prove his case to a jury by persuasion. This school, though Doric in origin, passed to Attica, bred there a school of famous pleaders, from Antiphon to Demosthenes, who paid the closest attention to the form of their speeches, and so perfected the eloquence of the bar for all time.

In strong contrast to this school was the eloquence of display, referred to Gorgias as its earliest master, which made elegant composition and splendid delivery an end in itself, and, in the hands of the educators called Sophists, often chose a contemptible or repulsive subject in order to show how even the most trivial cause was capable of glorification by art, just as Teniers makes the pothouse and its drunken boors fit to take their place among the treasures that decorate a great mansion.

In these widely contrasted pursuits of careful speaking, there were several points in common. In both, the subject was either ephemeral or might be trivial; it was the _treatment_ which was the great point of interest and which gave rise to theories and systems. In neither was it the intention to instruct or improve the hearer. In the one, to effect persuasion for the moment, in the other to gain admiration for the moment, was the object of the speaker. In both also, though most carefully composed, was the written word wholly subordinate to the spoken sound. When these studies first arose, there was as yet no reading public, no gathering of books, and studying them at home; but a public vastly fond of talking, and of hearing brilliant talk.

There were other occasions and interests in Greek life, where the _subject_ was of such paramount importance, that for a long time style was regarded with suspicion, as giving a flavour of unreality to the statements of the speaker or writer. One was the narrative of those events that had taken place in past time; the other was the grave deliberation of public men regarding the future of the state, questions of justice and of policy in the treatment of citizens, or in the dealing with neighbouring powers. The earlier leaders of Greece, such as Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles, and the ambitious men who made themselves tyrants, all must have studied the art of persuasion with due care, but it was not for some generations that a professional orator like Demosthenes was intrusted with the charge of public affairs, and that the words orator and politician came to mean the same thing. Yet even here, the tendency in the Greek mind to submit everything to law and training, to turn every kind of human work into an art, was so strong, that no form of prose writing escaped this schooling, and all of it shows a strictness of rhetorical form which seems, at first study of it, artificial, until we come to learn that the highest products of human art are not spontaneous, but the result of careful reflection.

While these various efforts towards spoken eloquence were occupying men, we find that early annalists set down either in rude metrical form, or even in prose, past events, thus laying the foundation for the greatest development of prose. I mean history, not merely as a record of past events, but as an artistic product, on the same level as dramatic poetry or as fresco painting.[10] The earlier attempts are known to us only through names and scraps of writing; we cannot now tell how far Hecatæus and Xanthus the Lydian were historians in the artistic sense; but there is no doubt whatever that in Herodotus the Greeks have given not only to the ancient, but to the modern world, a model of the _art_ of history which has never been excelled. And as if that were not enough, we have in Thucydides another model (one which professes not the charm of artistic narrative, but the strict analysis of positive facts) and in this model, which has imposed itself, or has imposed, on generations of historians, we have another specimen of the use of prose, which is likewise the highest model of the so-called _science_ of history. This latter instance is all the more remarkable because the writer did not, like Herodotus, chose a great world-subject, but a long and dull civil war, in which no gigantic interests were at stake, and yet by his consummate art, by his intense seriousness, little skirmishes in which a few hundreds of men were engaged have become household words in modern life, while elsewhere many a shock of myriads has past into oblivion. Thus the little actions of the Athenian Phormio with his well trained boats against a superior force have given rise to a far larger literature than the great world-battles of Actium or Lepanto in the same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter.