Part 3

Herodotus, 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 Herodotus, 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 pre-eminent. 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 Lucian 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.

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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 Lucian and Plutarch. Lucian 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. Lucian 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 shrank 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.

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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.”

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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.

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Let us take a brief preliminary survey.

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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.