Part 5

Pope followed with an _Essay on Criticism_, Shelley contributed a critical _Defence of Poetry_; and since that date books, essays, articles have showered upon us, in one and all of which we are assured with increasing urgency that the true principles of literary art are the principles of Athens, the principles of Greek literature at its best.

* * * * *

We may now leave types of literary creation and deal with individual authors. It would require a whole book for each of the greater names, if we sought to discover how much of matter or form each owes directly or indirectly to Greece. Mr. Churton Collins has written one such book on Tennyson. Here our survey must be but very superficial, as befits an introduction to the study.

Of Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_, _Daphnaida_, and _Astrophel_ something has been said. It remains to observe that his _Faerie Queene_ is but one mass of scenes, events, and images borrowed from sources in Italy and Greece, and that the hint for the whole design was suggested by his studies in Aristotle; for he says, “I labour to pourtraict in Arthur the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.” Of the Greek manner, its proportion and moderation, Spenser has unhappily learned little or nothing.

Shakespeare was, in one sense, no Grecian. Sundry of his Roman plots, _Coriolanus_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_ for example, he takes from North’s translation of the Greek Plutarch; a certain amount of Greek mythology and history reveals itself incidentally; but he owes less to Greece and more to his own genius acting upon desultory reading, than other writers of the time or since. Dryden, indeed, in his adaptation of _Troilus and Cressida_ makes him say:

Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age, I found not, but created first, the stage; And if I drained no Greek or Latin store, ’Twas that my own abundance gave me more.

But this is hardly the truth. One immensely important thing Shakespeare did owe to Greece, through scholars who were his own immediate predecessors, and that was the general shape and form of the poetic drama.

Milton was an accomplished Greek scholar. It has been already pointed out that his great epic is descended from Homer, and his _Lycidas_ from Theocritus. His _Samson Agonistes_ was deliberately built—though not with complete success—upon the traditional frame-work of Greek tragedies, and Milton himself leaves it to be judged by those who are “not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.” His _Ode on the Morning of the Nativity_ is intended to be Pindaric. But the most palpable advance made by Milton on his predecessor Spenser is in the chastening of his style. The principles of that style Milton derived at first hand from his Hellenic models. He has learned how to use ancient material, how to adapt ancient thoughts, ancient expressions, how to sink them and imbed them in his own, not merely how to overlay or fancifully decorate his own with them. The texture of Milton’s verse is shot through and through with colours borrowed from the Greek; it would often be quite possible to resolve a series of his lines into components which are imitations and quotations. But he has made them all so much a part of himself that we may often pass by his loans, as we never can those of Spenser, unconsciously.

Dryden owns himself an obedient follower of the Greeks. His ode _To the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, like his _St. Cecilia’s Day_ and his _Alexander’s Feast_, is Pindaric. His admiration for Pindar was indeed peculiarly ardent. He speaks of him as “the inimitable Pindar, who stretches on pinions out of sight, and is carried upward, as it were, into another world.” Of his literary criticism we have spoken; there was a time when he conceived the idea of translating Homer, and he did in fact attempt versions of various writings of Greek poets.

Pope was but an indifferent Greek scholar at first hand; he did indeed freely translate and recast Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ by the help of his little Greek and a translation in French, but he never entered into the spirit of Greek life or penetrated to the precise secret of Greek style. Nevertheless, he makes great pretensions to follow in the footsteps of the Greek masters. One thing he did catch—the vigour and fire of Homer; and Pope’s _Iliad_ is still the English Homer commonly read in these days, although Chapman had preceded him, and Cowper, Derby, and Morris have made their more or less faithful renderings since. And yet the book is far too much Pope to be Homer. Of the _Pastorals_ and the _Essay on Criticism_ all has been said above that need be said for our purpose. We have only to add that his burlesque heroics, the _Rape of the Lock_ and the _Dunciad_, had their prototype in the heroi-comical poems of Greece, the _Battle of the Frogs and Mice_ and the _Margites_, compositions which were once ascribed to Homer, and which Pope professed to have in mind.

Gray was a scholar of rare attainments in both the language and the literature of Greece. Hence, in no inconsiderable measure, his self-critical spirit. His aim, as stated by himself, is at “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous and musical.” As a poet he suffered from constitutional shortcomings. He is without profound imaginings or ecstatic sensibilities; but his beauties are no less undeniable, although of the sort which are mainly acquired from training. No one can fail to admire the perfect technique of his stanzas. It is doubtful, however, whether any but a Greek scholar can perceive the skill with which he has combined a mosaic of reminiscences of ancient writers into stanzas of perfect English. His _Progress of Poesy_ and his _Bard_ are plainly modelled on Pindar, but even his most beautiful individual expressions are sometimes but translations from the Greek. Said the Greek Phrynichus: “The purple light of love shines on her flushing cheeks.” To this Gray owes his

O’er her warm cheek and rising bosom move The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.

Of his enthusiasm for Greece we may judge from a passage in the _Progress of Poesy_:

Woods, that wave o’er Delphi’s steep, Isles, that crown the Egaean deep, Fields, that cool Ilissus laves, Or where Maeander’s amber waves In lingering lab’rinths creep; How do your tuneful echoes languish— Mute, but to the voice of anguish? Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breath’d around: Ev’ry shade and hallowed fountain Murmur’d deep a solemn sound: Till the sad Nine in Greece’s evil hour, Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.

Swift’s most popular work, _Gulliver’s Travels_, derives its hint from Lucian’s _True History_, and all that peculiar vein of humour which runs through the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_, is, consciously or unconsciously, the parallel of the characteristic irony of the same Lucian.

Of Shelley’s debts to Greece one can hardly estimate the amount. Says he himself: “The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome and modern Italy and our own country has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment.” During his travels in Italy “the Greek tragedies,” says Mrs. Shelley, “were his most familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight.” We find him reading Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Plutarch, Plato; he even translates portions of these; he steeps himself to the lips in the literature of Greece. His own soul and genius were by nature akin to those of Plato, and his training lent to his genius clear capacity. Among those of his works which most manifestly bear the Greek impress are the lyrical drama of _Hellas_—which, he says, was suggested by the _Persae_ of Aeschylus—and the drama of _Prometheus Unbound_, which is meant for a sequel to the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus. Not that his drama of Prometheus is fashioned wholly like the Greek; its architecture is less simple, its character is more rhetorical, more ornamented, more metaphysical. But it owes its whole existence to the fact that Shelley lived so long in a world of Greek literature, a world very remote from that in which he moved and had his being. His _Adonais_—

I weep for Adonais—he is dead! O weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost that binds so dear a head!

is an echo of Theocritus, his _Ode to Liberty_ an echo of Pindar, his _Epipsychidion_ an outcome of Plato. His enthusiasm for Greece may be gathered from his _Hellas_:

The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return; The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn....

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls its fountains Against the morning star; Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

Keats never learned the Greek language. But he was read, as perhaps never Englishman was read before, in Greek legend and mythology. He devoured Lemprière’s _Dictionary_. His greatest poetry—his chief odes, as well as his _Hyperion_ and _Endymion_—is based on subjects thence acquired. The manners and characters of Greek divinities pervade his writings. In heart and soul, in sensuous enjoyment of life, he was himself a pagan Greek. The life of the ancient world, idealized, was the world of his choice. Above all he loves the sounds uttered

In Grecian isles By bards who died content on pleasant sward, Leaving great verse unto a little clan. O give me their old vigour!

“Therefore,” says he,

’Tis with full happiness that I Will trace the story of Endymion. The very music of the name has gone Into my being.

Had he studied Greek as language, and Greek as style, he would, we may believe, have avoided earlier his one great fault, the fault of excess, extravagance, and riot. What Keats thought of the great Greek writers whose Greek he could not read, may be gathered from his lines to Homer:

Standing aloof in giant ignorance, Of thee I hear, and of the Cyclades, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas:

and from those _On first looking into Chapman’s Homer_:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The name of Byron is at once associated with enthusiasm for Greece. True, it was modern Greece, but the only reason for that warm affection lay in the fervour of his admiration for the Greece of old. That “land of lost gods and godlike men” was to him a sacred land. Everyone knows his outburst touching the “isles of Greece.” But not everyone perceives how profoundly the mind of Byron had been stirred by the ancient ideals and influences. Not everyone perceives that his _Manfred_ is an unmistakable echo of Aeschylus’ _Prometheus_, in the tone and pitch of its composition, in the firmness of the central character, in his mental suffering, in the tremendous solitude, in the supernatural of the surroundings. Yet Byron is not one whom we may quote as typifying any great direct and salutary effect of Greek upon either his style or his matter. He is too slipshod in the one and too romantic in the other. But his ardour for the land of great literature is beyond denying:

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set.

The Scian and the Teian muse, The lover’s harp, the lover’s lute, Have found the fame your shores refuse: Their place of birth alone is mute To sounds which echo further west Than your sires’ “Islands of the Blest.”

And where are they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine?

During the last fifty years the study of Greek literature has been set on a new basis. A collection of ill-digested matter no longer suffices. Greek is taught more understandingly and more deeply. First comes a patient observant study of the language; afterwards, in years of maturity, are estimated the qualities of the thought and of the style; these are set in clearer lights, and turned to a direct application. Landor is the first modern in whom this sort of study reveals its effects. His Greek devotion to classical associations, to ideal beauty, his Greek aversion to the mysterious, his love for clearness and purity of outline, appear cold to many a reader. He is too pellucid, of too delicate a preciseness, they imagine. But Landor does not displease through these qualities, which are virtues. His coldness is constitutional. However that may be, his imaginary dialogues, imitated from Plato, and the poetry of his _Hellenics_, show the Greek influence in a fuller form than we have met with hitherto. Since Landor’s day our literature is pervaded with Greek ideals: it aims at Greek style, and often it attains fairly to its mark. We need not deal with matter so voluminous as that of Browning, nor with a style so inconsistent. But Browning’s love of Greek is matter of fame. Has he not translated the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, the _Alcestis_ and the _Heracles_ of Euripides? Nor need we deal with the poetry of Swinburne. It is enough to point out that the _Atalanta in Calydon_ is in spirit intensely Greek, and that its most famous speech is a translation from Euripides.

From William Morris we have a translation of the _Odyssey_; he has written the _Life and Death of Jason_ and the _Earthly Paradise_, and both of these owe almost everything—their matter and the charm of their manner—to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, to Apollonius, and to the Greek tragedians.

To two of the best and purest poets of our age Greece has supplied the very breath of literary life. One is Matthew Arnold, the other is Tennyson. Matthew Arnold as critic, Matthew Arnold as poet, is equally Hellenic. He has been charged with “an air of aristocratic selectness and literary exclusiveness.” The art of Pheidias is open to the same objection. What really marks the style of Matthew Arnold is his reasoned simplicity of taste, his cultivated appreciation of the delicate aroma of words and the poetical atmosphere of thought. Like Tennyson, he has a true eye for beauty, grace, and congruity of effect. He compasses the “liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.” It may be that he lacks _abandon_. He may not feel with the poignancy, or soar with the boldness, of the greatest creators. But, artistically considered, he is as nearly perfect as it is given to man to be. His poetic style is, indeed, almost too perfect for the general. When he says

Or where the _echoing_ oars Of Argo first Startled the _unknown_ sea.

he is using the only two adjectives which the place required, and which it truthfully admits. They are exactly the two epithets which a Greek might put. Yet, no doubt, the untutored mind asks for something more assertive, something which will cut more sharply or press more heavily into the unready imagination. Than _Mycerinus_, than _Sohrab and Rustum_, than _Philomela_, _Thyrsis_, or _The Strayed Reveller_, one can find nothing more absolutely Greek in point of execution, though one may know Greek passages which stir profounder emotional depths.

Tennyson’s debts to classical authors have been treated by Mr. Churton Collins in a monograph. That critic is right in saying that the knowledge of a scholar is requisite to appreciate Tennyson fully, however much he may be appreciated by those who are no scholars. No man has ever been better read in previous poetry than Tennyson, and no man has known better how to assimilate what he found, or has possessed a surer tact and taste in using it. With Tennyson the Greek matter is, as with Milton, imbedded in his own, not overlaid. Greek forms of verse are moulded to his purpose. The Greek style, describing what is luminously seen in a few luminous touches, is ever conspicuous. He neither tries to disguise his borrowings, nor does he obtrude them. When he says, “for now the noonday quiet holds the hill,” he is translating Callimachus; when “the charm of married brows,” Theocritus; when “shadowy thoroughfares of thought,” Sophocles; when “sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows,” Homer. His device of making the sound answer to the sense, as in

I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long-ripple washing in the reeds,

is a common device of the Greeks. In point of form his _Œnone_ is modelled on Theocritus; his _Ulysses_ and his _Tithonus_ are framed after the soliloquies in Greek plays. His _Lotus-eaters_ gets its matter from Homer, Bion, and Moschus. Everywhere we meet hints and reminiscences of Simonides, or Pindar, or Theocritus, or Anacreon. But these are all incorporated, amalgamated in a body of work which is wholly in keeping with them in taste, in tone, in diction—in short, in style.

This age of ours, to put it briefly, has been an age of stylists, of artists who work on principles derived from their education in Greek, and their love, which every scholar feels, of that glorious and undying literature.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF GREEK LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVE. DATE. CHIEF WORKS. SOME INFLUENCES ON FOREIGN TRIBUTARIES TO ENGLISH LITERATURE. SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH WRITERS. Epic Verse HOMER Ninth century, B.C.? ILIAD—martial O´DYSSEY—romantic Imitated by Virgil (_Aenéid_), and thence affecting Dante, Tasso, etc. The _Iliad_ translated by Chapman (Elizabethan), Pope, Cowper, etc. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ is ultimately based on Homer (+ Virgil + Dante). Abundance of characters, similes, etc., incorporated by all our literature. Didactic Verse (Epic metre) HE´SIOD Eighth century, B.C. WORKS AND DAYS—agricultural THEOGONY—pedigree of the Gods Imitated by Virgil (_Georgics_) First model for much (mostly unimportant) didactic work, _e.g._ Tusser’s _Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry_ (Elizabethan), and the verses of Dyer, Green, Darwin, etc. (eighteenth century). Lyric Verse SAPPHO (and Lesbian School) fl. 610 B.C. ODES of love (mostly lost) ANA´CREON fl. 530 B.C. ODES of love and wine Imitated by Catullus and Horace, and thence by Italian and French lyrists. In English the influence was chiefly through Horace: Keynote to many of the Elizabethan and Caroline songs, _e.g._, in Davidson’s _Poetical Rhapsody_, Herrick, Suckling, etc. Moore translates _Odes of Anacreon_ (many spurious). Modern _vers de société_. PINDAR (Simónides, etc.) fl. 470 B.C. ODES of victory (OLYMPIAN, ISTHMIAN, etc.) One of the models of Horace. Deliberately imitated by Italians, _e.g._, Chiabrera. Directly imitated by Cowley (_Pindaric Odes_), Dryden (_Song for St. Cecilia’s Day_, _Alexanders Feast_), Pope (_Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_), Gray (_Progress of Poesy_), etc. Tragic Drama AE´SCHYLUS fl. 490-456 B.C. PLAYS (7 extant, _e.g._ _Agamemnon_, _Prometheus_). SO´PHOCLES fl. 465-405 B.C. PLAYS (7 extant, _e.g._, _Antigone_, _Ajax_). EURI´PIDES fl. 450-406 B.C. PLAYS (17 extant, _e.g._, _Alcéstis_,_Iphigenía_). Imitated on wrong principles by Latin writers, _e.g._, Seneca, from whom false notions of “classical” drama came into France (Corneille and Racine). Effect on English drama mostly so far as that drama was affected by Italian or French influence (pre-Shakespearean and post-Restoration). Attempts at “classical” drama in Milton’s _Samson Agonistes_, Addison’s _Cato_, Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_. Much use of Greek subject-matter and characters, _e.g._, by Shelley (_Prometheus Unbound_), Byron (_Manfred_ and _Cain_, with character of Prometheus). Browning’s _Balaustion’s Adventure_ (= Euripides’ _Alcestis_). Comic Drama ARISTO´PHANES (and _Old_ comedy) fl. 425-385 B.C. PLAYS (11 extant, _e.g._, _Birds_, _Clouds_, _Frogs_), (political and personal). MENA´NDER (and _New_ comedy) fl. 310 B.C. PLAYS of character and manners (fragments extant). Adapted by Plautus and Terence, and thence borrowed by Molière. Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_ from Plautus (_Menaechmi_) from the Greek. Ben Jonson’s comedies of “humours.” English translations from Molière (Dryden, Fielding, etc. ) can be affiliated to Greek. Thence English comedy so far as determined by French, from Goldsmith to modern adaptations. Pastoral Idylls THEO´CRITUS (and his school) fl. 270 B.C. IDYLLS of country life (and pastoral “laments” by his disciples Bion, Moschus). Imitated by Virgil (_Eclogues_), and thence by Sannazaro, etc. Pastorals proper by Spenser (_Shepheard’s Calender_), Drayton, Pope, etc. Mixed with ‘romance’ in Sidney’s _Arcadia_. Pastoral laments in Milton’s _Lycidas_, Shelley’s _Adonais_, Matthew Arnold’s _Thyrsis_. Idylls in Tennyson (_Œnone_). History HERO´DOTUS lived 484-428 B.C. HISTORY (conflict of Asia and Europe). THUCY´DIDES lived 471-400 B.C. HISTORY (of Peloponnesian War) XE´NOPHON lived 430-355 B.C. ANA´BASIS, HELLE´NICA, etc. Models of Latin historians, _e.g._, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus. Theoretically English historians emulated Thucydides. In practice they rather follow the Romans. The influence of the Greek “inventors” of history is everywhere, but does not admit of brief specification. Oratory DEMOS´THENES (and the “Attic canon,” ISOCRATES, etc.) lived 384-322 B.C. SPEECHES (public, _e.g._, _Philippics_, and private). The Roman orators were avowed students of Greek methods. French oratory follows. Influence indirect. _See_ “Conspectus of Latin Literature.” Philosophy PLATO lived 429-347 B.C. DIALOGUES (ethical, politico-ethical, etc.)—_e.g._, _Republic_, _Symposium_. Affects all subsequent philosophy. Platonic thought and terms are an element in all modern English philosophy. The thoughts markedly present in many poets, _e.g._, Shelley, Wordsworth (_Intimations of Immortality_). Plato’s literary method (dialogue) adopted by Berkeley (_Alciphron_), Landor, etc. Plato’s _Republic_ the starting point for ideal commonwealths, _e.g._, More’s _Utopia_, Bacon’s _New Atlantis_. ARISTOTLE lived 384-322 B.C. ETHICS, POLITICS, METAPHYSICS, RHETORIC, etc. Affects all subsequent thought. Aristotelian philosophy was a kind of religion with mediaeval scholars. Its influence at present on the increase. Translated into Arabic (twelfth century) by Averrhoes, thence into Latin. Dominates the thinking of the Middle Ages (“schoolmen”). His literary criticism carried on by Horace, garbled by Boileau. Literary criticism of Aristotle leads to Puttenham’s _Art of English Poesie_, Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_, Dryden’s _Of Dramatic Poesie_, etc. The erroneous “Aristotelian” doctrines of Boileau, etc., dominate English style of the “correct” age (Pope, etc.). Biography and Essays PLUTARCH fl. A.D. 80 PARALLEL LIVES The model for later writers. French translation by Amyot, favourite reading of Montaigne. Starting-point for biographies and biographical essays (_e.g._ of Macaulay). North’s translation of Plutarch’s _Lives_ supplied Shakespeare with subjects and characters (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Antony). MORAL ESSAYS Greatly read after Revival of Learning. Humorous and Satirical Essays LUCIAN fl. A.D. 160 DIALOGUES AND SKETCHES Affecting Rabelais, Voltaire. Effect not reducible to a few words. Swift’s _Gulliver’s Travels_ takes its rise from Lucian’s _True History_. Sterne is sometimes called “the English Lucian.” Fable Aesop Sixth century B.C.? FABLES Passed on from Phaedrus, etc., to all W. Europe. Source of the majority of our fables since Alfred (in Caxton, etc.). Character Sketches Theophrastus fl. 320 B.C. CHARACTERS Imitated by La Bruyère “Characters” of Hall, Overbury, Earle, etc.

SYNOPTICAL VIEW OF RELATIONS OF GREEK LITERATURE WITH ENGLISH.

[Illustration]

II

LATIN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH