Part 4

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.