I
When Alexander the Great invaded India, that pupil of Aristotle interested himself in questions to the Gymnosophists, or native philosophers. To the eldest of these Gymnosophists (says Plutarch) he addressed the following conundrum: Which is older—the night or the day? The ancient man promptly replied, The day—by the length of one day. When Alexander demanded what he meant by such an answer, the sage remarked that he always gave that sort of answer to people who asked that kind of question. I think this must be one of the best retorts ever made, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it applies rather exactly to the subject of this essay. The difference between the Classical and the Romantic! It is indeed an apparently insoluble problem. Nor can I imagine anything more disheartening or more inimical to human happiness than blowing upon the embers of a half-extinct controversy. That, it will be gathered, is not my intention. I merely intend to let my discourse eddy about a familiar topic, in the hope that some accretions may be washed away, and at least the true outline of the subject revealed. We have been trying to build up an impression of Hellenism as an Agon, or Struggle with Barbarism. The material being so vast, it has been necessary to be somewhat meagrely selective and illustrative, or else to fritter away the point in details. But the most general survey would be incomplete, unless we attain some view of how Greek literature, so much the most important witness left us of the old Greek spirit, reflects the situation.
The suggestion I have to offer may be helpful or not. But it has two qualities which should make it worth entertaining, if only for the moment: it is easily understood, and it is easily tested. My suggestion is that Classical art is an expression of Hellenism and Romantic art of Barbarism, so far as Barbarism is capable of expression.
Here I feel the want of something beyond my own instinct in discerning the Classical from the Romantic. To distinguish them is never perfectly easy: in the greatest art it is thought to be impossible. In the end one has to rely upon oneself, for nobody is pleased with a second-hand or impersonal criticism. If you happen to care for literature, you will not be content with discussions of it which do not help you to realize the thing you love. As to the words “Classical” and “Romantic,” they have become current coin with us, and yet they are coin without fixed value. Thus when Mr. Shaw attacks the “Romance” which Stevenson adored, it is clear that they cannot mean the same thing. What, then, do they mean? It is very hard to find out. You may read that Romance is the spirit of the Middle Ages, or the spirit of the German forest; but you find yourself left to your own interpretation of Mediævalism or Fairyland. As for the “Renaissance of Wonder”—that of course is just beautiful nonsense.
The clearest words on the matter are Matthew Arnold’s. There is a kind of justice in this, for Arnold’s criticism was perpetually engaged in the issue between the Romantic and the Classical. Himself (as his best poetry shows) a Romantic at heart, he stood in the middle of the Romantic triumph pleading for the austerities of art. That alone proves his genius for criticism. It also gives him a special right to be heard. As I shall seem to be attacking Arnold, it will be better for me to say now that with his general attitude and temper I am in intimate sympathy. I am disposed to think that his statement of the Classical case is the best that has yet been made. In some points I think it is even too favourable; in others not favourable enough. That is all.
The forest solitude, he says in his book “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. And [(Note 150)]on the way to this attribution and this denial he distinguishes four modes of handling nature. There is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.
One need not deny the value of these distinctions. But, admitting them, must we confess that there is no “natural magic” in the Greeks? Of your grace listen a little to Homer in prose. As the numerous nations of winged birds—wild geese or cranes or long-throated swans—in the Asian Mead about the runnels of Kaÿster stream make little flights and flights in the glory of their pinions, alighting with cries which make the marish ring. Is there no natural magic in that? Or in this? As when torrents running down a mountain into a cañon hurl together their violent waters from large springs in a deep watercourse, and the shepherd on far-off mountains hears their thunder? Or consider this. As when the glare of a blazing fire is seen by sailors out at sea burning at some lonely shieling high up among the hills. Again we read: They clomb Parnassus, steep forest-clad hill, and soon came to the windy gullies. The sun was then smiting the fields with his earliest rays out of the quiet, deep-running river of the world; and the beaters came to the glade. A last example: As when Pandion’s daughter, the greenwood nightingale, sings beautifully at the start of spring, perched in a place of leafy trees, with running [(Note 151)]variable note she sheds abroad her far-heard song, mourning the end of Itylus. Is there no magic in all this?
Still, it is uncritical to attempt to carry the critical judgment by storm. You will of course admit the glory and intoxication of these Homeric similes, but you may still feel that Arnold’s distinction is not finally swept away by them. Something in the lines he quotes—Keats’s
Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn;
Shakespeare’s
On such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage——
something there may be felt to express a more personal or intimate relation to nature than anything I have yet quoted from Homer. Shall I then quote more to show that even this touch Homer has got? He burned him with his inlaid arms and heaped a grave-mound over him; and round it the hill-nymphs planted elms. Is not that final touch magical enough? And surely there is intimacy here. As when the great deep glooms with silent swell, dimly foreboding the hurrying path of the piping winds. And the personal note, is it not audible here? And now in a rocky place of lonely hills, at Sipylos, where couch the nymphs (men say) whose feet are swift on Acheloïos’ banks—there changed to stone she broods upon the wrongs that gods have wrought her. And here are two passages of love, [(Note 152)]of love in a Romantic setting, if we mean anything by that at all. Under them the divine earth sent up sudden grass and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth thick and soft, upbearing them from the ground. Thereon they lay, folded in a beautiful golden cloud that dropped a glimmer of dew. That is the love of Zeus and Hera. What follows tells of the desire of Poseidon for Tyro. She conceived a love of divine Enîpeus, fairest by far of rivers flowing over the earth, and haunted the fair waters of Enîpeus. Therefore the Earth-Embracer and Earth-Shaker made himself like Enîpeus and lay with her at the outflowings of the eddying river; then a darkling wave rose mountain-like about them and hung over them, hiding the god and the mortal woman. Does not this possess the magical touch?
It is in Homer everywhere. In all his dealings with nature he adds to his words not merely lightness and brightness, but something magical as well. If he does not do it, no poet does. Why, Homer’s very “fixed epithets” are surcharged with magic. Think of his epithets for the dawn alone—κροκόπεπλος, saffron-robed; χρυσόθρονος, golden-throned; ῥοδοδάκτυλος, rose-fingered—the Romantic poets have always envied them. It is impossible to deny the magical, Romantic quality to Homer, unless you make an admission with which I shall deal in a moment. And Homer is not alone among Greek poets in the possession of “natural magic”; one might almost say all the great Greek poets have it. Almost the loveliest words that Sappho has left us are little broken fragments of description as imaginatively touched as anything in Keats or Coleridge. Such are the fragments translated by Rossetti, and the fragment of the sleepless woman crying to the stars [(Note 153)]for her lover. There are the few lines of Alcman, comparing him to “the sea-blue bird of spring,” which are enough to put him not too far from Sappho and Coleridge themselves. And Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, and Euripides in the Bacchae—have they got no feeling for Romantic nature? Then there is Pindar. Why, Pindar has almost more of it than any one. Remember the strange splendour like a windy sunset of the great Fourth Pythian ode, telling of Jason in marvellous lands. Repeat a line or two: Coming to the margin of the whitening sea, alone in the dark he called aloud upon the roaring Master of the Trident; and he appeared to him anigh at his foot. Or take this of the new-born Iamos, whom his mother Euadne “exposed”: But he was hidden in the rush and the boundless brake, his delicate body splashed with the yellow and deep purple glory of pansies. Is there “natural magic” there, or is there not?
Two things, perhaps, misled Arnold, both of them just and true. The first was the feeling of a radical difference somewhere between Classical and Romantic art. The second was the insignificance in Greek literature of magic pure and simple, the magic of fairies and witches. Greek literature deals sparingly in this sort of magic, while it is part of the stock-in-trade of Romance. It looks as if Arnold were unconsciously arguing that the Romantic passion for magic professed ought somehow to make itself felt in descriptions of nature, while the Greek dislike of magic would disable the Classical poet from seeing her with the enchanted eyes of the Celt. Now there is an element of truth in this, though not, I think, a very important element. It may be suggested that in all true poetry, whether Classical or Romantic, Greek or Celtic, mere vulgar magic is transmuted into that infinitely finer and lovelier thing which Arnold, in claiming it for Keats and Shakespeare, calls “natural magic”; which may be more abundant in Romantic poetry, but is present just the same in Homer and Pindar.
One is led to this conjecture about the train of Arnold’s thought when one reads the quotations he has selected to illustrate the special appeal of Celtic Romance. They mainly come from the Mabinogion in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation. Although it seems a pity that Arnold must draw his shafts from one quiver, and that not his own, still the Mabinogion is beautiful enough, and the translation so readable, that it is not clear where he could have found, for people who have no Welsh or Irish, better illustrations. He quotes the words of Math to Gwydion when Gwydion wished a wife for his pupil. “Well,” says Math, “we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.” So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower Aspect. It is a famous passage since Arnold quoted it; and if we are to have magic, let it always be as beautiful as this; for I am far from denying the beauty of many a magical rite. But magic you see it is, magic palpable and practical—not the magic of
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face;
which is the true poetical magic and something yet more attractive.
Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic writer describes the dropping of blood as faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest. Well, Homer says, Gladness fell upon his spirit like dew upon the ears of ripening corn when there is a rustling in the fields. The Celtic passage is the more exquisite, at any rate than Homer in my prose. But between these two passages who would say that there is an essential difference? It is not maintained that Homer writes in this manner as often as a Romantic poet; and that is a difference worth remarking. But I do assert that he can write so when he likes, and as well as any.
Now what if this finer poetic magic is really a subtilization of the crude appeal of practical magic? Something like this Arnold almost suggests. What if Homer’s and Keats’s magic entrances us in part because somewhere in us sleeps a memory of miracles wrought in days when every rock and tree and river was alive with supernatural force? There is nothing fantastic in such a speculation. If we entertain it, we may find it illuminating the whole field of this discussion. At once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic” mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural objects. Its origin is not explicable on any other hypothesis. We have therefore to consider how it happened that Greek poetry, born (we must believe) in an atmosphere as redolent of magic as this mythology implies, came to divest itself of vulgar magic and “Celtic vagueness,” till it came to appear to a critic like Arnold devoid also of the touch which he thinks exclusively characteristic of Romance.
It happened, no doubt, as part of that whole reaction to Barbarism which we call Hellenism. For magic is barbaric. The peoples all about Hellas believed in it of course, and had magicians practising it. In Greece itself the belief in magic lingered throughout Greek history, lingered that is to say in secluded places and among the many unenlightened. We hear of Epôdoi, “Charmers”; of Goêtes, “Groaners”; of Baskanoi, who had the evil eye—three varieties of wizard. There are echoes of a popular credence in the magical to be heard even in Greek literature, that disdainful and fastidious thing. In Homer we read that the wound received by Odysseus from the boar of Parnassus was closed by repeating an incantation over it. There is a good deal of white magic in the Works and Days of Hesiod. Nearly half of Aeschylus’ Choêphoroi consists in an invocation or evocation of the ghost of dead Agamemnon. And so on. In later Hellenistic times there existed a great body of magical writings, born of the contact between Greek civilization and Oriental superstition. There must have been a public for this stuff. Professional miracle-workers were not uncommon, and some of them won a resounding popularity. The book of Pausanias, who wrote down what he heard and saw in the greater part of Greece at the beginning of the second Christian century is strongly and—to you and me—pleasantly redolent of immemorial customs and beliefs among the peasantry. Many of these are plainly magical in their nature or their origin. The priests of Lykaian Zeus, he tells us, used to bring rain by dipping a branch in a certain stream and shaking it, sprinkling waterdrops. That, of course, was sheer magic—“making rain” as an African medicineman would say. A custom of this sort, which has become a ritual, may be kept up after people have ceased quite to believe in the doctrine which it assumes as true. That, however, does not touch the historical significance of the custom, which must have arisen among people who believed in magic. Besides, the peasants in Pausanias’ day were clearly very superstitious. His book is the proof of that. To suppose that in this respect they differed widely from their ancestors is to suppose something which common sense cries out against, and what evidence there is refutes.
Hellenism, then, the flower of the Greek spirit, grew in a soil impregnated with superstition, or, if you do not care for that word, with a religion containing many elements of magic. Every modern student of the subject, I fancy, admits that, although some scholars make more of the magical elements, some less. What no one can deny is that Hellenism tends to reject magic, and tries to expel it from human life. Magic was barbaric, and Hellenism was in reaction against Barbarism. Very likely the reaction went too far; reactions usually do. Very likely something too much was sacrificed to “Greek sanity.” But it would be strange ingratitude on our part to forget that it was this very urgency for the sane, for the rational, which ensured that our civilization was founded on hard realistic thinking, and not on a mere drift of emotionality. The task of thinking things out to their end, even to their bitter end, which was so characteristic of the Greeks, peculiarly fitted them for their task of laying intellectual foundations. It is not an English characteristic, and for that reason we are the more indebted to them. But scarcely less unjust would it be to suppose that the Greeks sacrificed everything to the rational. Nothing of the sort. They felt the charm to which the Celtic imagination yielded itself so utterly. But out of magic could not be built, they thought, any helpful philosophy or sound method of art. So their literature, when it deals with this matter and deals with it at its best, consciously or instinctively aims at drawing from it its full value for the imagination without for a moment permitting it to subdue the judgment. Any one reading in turn Mr. Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters and that part of the Odyssey which deals with the adventures of Odysseus in magic-haunted lands will see what I mean. Yeats’s hero yields himself to the charm; Odysseus fights against it. Which is the wiser is a question I leave to you. But here we have, in an illustration that is almost an epigram, the difference between the Celtic or extreme Romantic temper and the Hellenic temper. The Celt hears the Sirens and follows them; the Greek hears them and unwillingly sails past.
Or you may say: the Celtic gift is vision, the Hellenic gift is light.
Observe Homer’s dealings with magic. He often finds himself in its presence, and he deals with it in various ways. He leaves it out, he veils it, he transforms it. I am unable to see on what real grounds we can follow one of the most eminent of English scholars in Homer in dividing off the rest of the Homeric poems from those books of the Odyssey which tell of Odysseus’ wanderings in unknown lands and seas. When does magic cease to be magic? Is it magic when Circe in the Odyssean fairyland changes men into swine, and not magic when Athena in Ithaca changes Odysseus into a beggar and herself into a bird? However, what Dr. Leaf has in mind is rather a difference which he feels in the whole atmosphere of these fairyland books, which the ancients knew by the title of the Narrative to Alkinoos, from the rest of the Odyssey and from the Iliad. The Narrative, he thinks, moves in places which it is hopeless to look for in the map. The geography of the rest is really to be found on the map, if you only know where to look for it. I might agree with this and yet hold (as I should) that the geographical point is deceptive. Odysseus does pass out of known into unknown lands, but he does not pass out of one atmosphere into another. There are more miracles and magic in the Narrative than in the rest of Homer, but the treatment of them is the same. Or, to put it somewhat differently, Phaeakia is just as real to me as Troy or Ithaca. And I fancy it was just as real to Homer.
After all, there is really very little overt magic in the Narrative, even if we include the wonder-working of the goddess Circe and other divine beings, who might be said to perform miracles rather than practise witchcraft. Of this wonder-working observe how little is made: just as little as possible. The transformation and retransformation of Odysseus’ companions is told in a line or two. Think what the Kalevala or the Arabian Nights would have made of it. The whole necromantic business of the Descent to Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey is transacted in a few formal, ritualistic phrases. Originally all that matter must have been steeped in magic. It is the same with Homer’s treatment of the monstrous. The Homeric spirit objects to monsters; and so you never notice, unless you look closely at the text, what horrible creatures the Sirens were. Scylla and Charybdis are not fully described; much is left to the reader’s imagination. The Cyclops, it must be allowed, is different. Homer, you see, had to make him eat Odysseus’ men and had to put his eye out; the story would not tell otherwise. But somehow the passage is not so ghastly as one would expect. It is full of remorseless description—the Cyclops vomits “wine and bits of human flesh”—and yet despite such “realism” the poet contrives to enfold our spirits in an air of enchantment—the true poetical enchantment—in which all things are at once vivid and remote, like a dream freshly remembered.
Homer of course is a problem, about which it is very hard to say anything that pleases everybody. There are on the one side scholars who think that our Iliad and Odyssey are only the final versions of two traditional poems, which were handled by many poets through a long succession of years. On the other side are those who believe that the two poems are entirely, or substantially, the work of a single early poet, who rose so far above his predecessors as [(Note 161)]to owe little or nothing to them. This makes it difficult to argue a point in Homer with any general acceptance. But no student now seems to deny that Homer—whether we give the name to the one exceptional early poet or (tentatively) to the last of all those who worked on the poems—inherited something of his material. He did not invent the history of Troy, and he had to deal with it as he found it. Now all this traditional matter—for the matter is traditional whether the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves are traditional poems or not—must to all appearance have been saturated in the magical. That is the normal condition of the stuff in which poetry, so far as we can see, everywhere takes its rise. Besides, the mythology of Greece, which it is fair to call the stuff of Greek poetry, is full of magic. The inference is that Homer and the Greek poets in general till the end of the “Classical” period sought to work out of their matter all that savoured of the magical.
I think it was Andrew Lang who first pointed out that Homer clearly avoids telling stories which are “morally objectionable.” Still more certainly we discover that stories which are quite inoffensive in Homer are excessively “objectionable” in other writers. What is the meaning of this? Is it that later generations defiled the golden innocence of Homeric days in their baser imaginations, or that Homer knew the other, more savage and ancient-seeming versions, and would not recount them? For my part I think Homer knew! And I think he knew about the magic also. There are constant transformations, particularly in the Iliad, of gods into human and animal forms. Is that magic or is it not? Surely it is all of a piece with the “shape-shiftings” of wizards, so common in all mythologies; and these are admitted magic. But in the first place these transformations, as we remarked, are treated with a light and veiling hand, and secondly they are confined to the gods. What Homer allows to them he will not allow to mortals. He or his predecessors have erected the distinction between gods and men which forms one of the bases of Greek religion. Nay, you can trace in him, I believe, the beginnings of something more—a reluctance to speak even of the gods as performing these metamorphoses into brutish form. As a rule the Greeks did not mind such tales, or even clung to them from motives which can only be described as “Romantic.” But Homer perhaps softens them down a good deal, and scarcely deserves the censure of Plato, who denounces them who would make a wizard of God. The metamorphoses in Homer are singularly unobtrusive. But why are they there at all? The answer must surely be because they were in the story and could not be left out altogether.
Am I forgetting that Homer was a poet and not a moralist? I think not. I might, with a show of reason, reply that the early Greek poet was a moralist, his aim (as Aristophanes puts it) “to make men better in their cities.” But I prefer to say that Homer’s objection to the monstrous and the grossly magical is really an æsthetic one. Other considerations come in as well, but the æsthetic consideration is found to be in the long run predominant. I once pointed out that many of the similes in Homer turn out, on closer examination, to involve an actual metamorphosis. An actual transformation—say of Athena into a [(Note 163)]shooting-star—imperceptibly passes into a mere comparison. This is one device for reducing the magical element. But there are others. So spake she, says the poet of Helen, when she wondered why her brethren were not to be descried among the Greek host before Troy. So spake she, but them the life-breathing earth was now holding fast in Lacedaemon, there, in their own native land. φυσίζοος αἶα, “life-breathing earth,” as unhappy translators must say, derives half its poetical value as Ruskin saw (in this case at least justly enough) from the ancient belief, very strong in old Greece, that Earth was physically the mother of all life, the dear mother of gods and men. Again, who cannot see the passage before his eyes of physical into poetical magic in the lines where Zeus mourns the coming doom of his son Sarpedon? “When soul and life have left him, send Death and sweet Sleep to carry him until they come to the land of broad Lycia, where his brethren and his kin will make an abiding barrow and pillar for him; for thus we honour the dead.” So Hera spake, and the Father of Gods and men obeyed her counsel; and he let fall blood-drops on the ground, honouring his son, that Patroklos was fated to slay in fruitful Troyland far from his native land. What is Romantic poetry if this is not? And you see how it is produced? By a veiling of the crudely magical.
It is impossible to resist a little more quotation. Father, cries Telemachus to Odysseus, verily a great marvel is this that I behold with mine eyes. Truly, the walls of the chambers, and the fair bases of the pillars, and the roof-beams of fir, and the columns that hold all on high are shining to my sight as if from flaming fire. Doubtless some god is in the house! It [(Note 164)]is in just such a light that we see all the Homeric world. It is not the witch’s firelight, but it is the light in which the true poetical magic works. Unhappy, what curse hath come upon you? In darkness your heads are rolled, and your faces, and your knees beneath you; a moan is enkindled, and cheeks are wet, and blood is on the walls and fair pedestals; ghosts in the doorway, ghosts in the courtyard of them that hasten to the dark world below; the sun hath perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is over you! So cries in the Odyssey the man with second sight. Is it not all very “Celtic”?
In the ancient Hymn to Demeter Persephone is described as playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean and culling flowers—rose and crocus and violet over the soft meadow, and iris and hyacinth and narcissus, which, by the will of Zeus, Earth, favouring Him of the Many Guests, sent up to snare the flower-faced maiden a glittering marvel for all to see with wondering eyes, both gods immortal and mortal men:—from the one root an hundred heads of blossom; very sweet the fragrance of that flower, and the delight of it made laugh wide heaven above, and all the earth, and the salt and surging waters.
If this be not “natural magic,” where shall we find it? And is there not something exquisite in the sense or tact which tells the Greek when to stop before the magic becomes too crude or obvious? The Greek poet knows when to stop, the Romantic not always. Here, in another of the Hymns, the Hymn to Dionysus (VII), is the frank description of a miracle. But soon marvellous things were shown among them. First, over the swift black ship sweet, odorous wine was plashing, and a divine perfume arose; and amaze took hold of all the gazing mariners. Anon, along the topmost edge of the sail a vine laid out its tendrils here and there; thick hung the clusters; and round the mast dark ivy twined, deep in flowers and pleasant with berries, and all the thole-pins were garlanded. For sheer loveliness of fancy it would not be easy to beat that. And how great an effect is gained by temperance! A little more detail and the charm would be dissolved—the ship would be too like a Christmas tree. It is in such wise economies that Greek art is so great. It is just in them that the Romantic is apt to fail. Therein he bewrays his Barbarism.
I will no longer doubt that the reader (who probably did not require the demonstration) is convinced that Greek poetry occasionally attains those very effects of “natural magic” which Arnold denied it. What has happened is merely this: Greek poetry has carried farther than any other a process of refining out some elements in the crude material in which it began. That it may have lost in the process a certain amount of the purest gold I am not denying. I am not pleading the cause of Greek poetry, I am trying to understand it. It is thought by scholars that poetry has everywhere been developed out of a kind of song or chorus, which (to put it gently) is very often magical in character. One at last gets things like some of the Russian folk-songs or the Finnish lays which Lönnrot collected to form the Kalevala. It is a pity the Kalevala has not found an adequate English translator. One may honestly wish that Longfellow had translated it instead of giving us Hiawatha, which is a somewhat close imitation. One may delight in Hiawatha, but one can see in the baldest translation (as it were with half an eye) that Kalevala is fifty times better. If you want magic, and very delightful magic, go there! It seems to me, remembering, that all the chief characters in the Kalevala are sorcerers. In the very first lay you are lost in the forest of enchantment, and you never get out of it. The Kalevala is not the highest kind of poetry of course; it is (as Mrs. Barbauld complained of The Ancient Mariner) too “improbable” for that. But it pleases our taste because it is so desperately “Romantic.”—But you are not going to say that it is as good as the Odyssey?
The truth, of course, is that poetry like the Odyssey and the Iliad and the Agamemnon, just as much as The Divine Comedy and Hamlet, gets beyond these distinctions of Romantic and Classical. I daresay there is as much, in proportion, of this kind of poetry in Greek as even in our own literature. At any rate, there seems to be no doubt that the greatest poetry is not written except on Greek principles. There must be that “fundamental brain-work,” as Rossetti called it, which is the characteristic Greek contribution to art. You may put a less rigid interpretation upon the Hellenic maxims, you may apply them in ever so many new fields, but the essence of them you must keep. The Barbarian may be picturesque enough, but he is not an artist: he loses his head.
It would be enormously interesting to consider how a passage like this—
I was but seven year auld,
When my mither she did dee:
My father married the ae warst woman
The warld did ever see.
For she changed me to the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o’ the tree,
And my sister Masery
To the machrel of the sea.
And every Saturday at noon
The machrel comes to me,
An’ she takes my laily head
An’ lays it on her knee,
And kames it wi’ a siller kame,
And washes it i’ the sea—
which is pure magic, such as you might find in the Kalevala, is transformed into a passage like
“O haud your tongue o’ weeping,” he says,
“Let a’ your follies a-bee;
I’ll show you where the white lilies grow
On the banks o’ Italie”—
which is Romantic poetry at its best—or into
Now Johnnie’s gude bend-bow is broke,
And his gude gray dogs are slain;
And his body lies dead in Durrisdeer;
And his hunting it is done—
which is the Classical style very nearly at its best. But an essay must end after a reasonable time. Besides there is something else I want to say about the Classical and the Romantic.