Greeks & Barbarians

by J. A. K. Thomson

II

Arnold expressed the difference between the Greek and the Celtic or Romantic spirit by the word Titanism. That is a very happy expression, happier even than Arnold knew, unless he knew what we said about the Titans. For Titanism is just Barbarism in heroic proportions. It is the spirit of the Old Kings—the “Strainers,” as Hesiod, etymologizing, calls them—who failed because they would not discipline their strength. With some of Arnold’s language about the Celtic character, and the “failure” in practical affairs of the Celtic race, it is unnecessary now for any one to concern himself, for no one now uses that kind of language. Even if it were justified it would scarcely be relevant, since success in literature depends (as of course Arnold saw) on qualities quite other than those which may be relied upon to give us success in life. It is the Titanism of the Celt, says Arnold, which makes him a failure in the world of affairs, but in compensation gives him the gift of style. We need not accept that way of putting the matter, but I do not think we can fairly deny either the style or the Titanism.

The Greeks had their measure of Titanism also, and very certainly their measure of style. Arnold quotes from Henri Martin a description of the Celt as always ready to react against the despotism of fact. Whereupon the Greek student instantly remembers that this is just what Cleon said about the Athenians. He will also remember that a Corinthian politician said that they seemed to him to be born neither to be quiet themselves nor to let other people be quiet. Any one who fails to notice the unappeasable restlessness of the Greek temperament will miss a great piece of its quality. It comes out in the Greek attitude to Hope, which set ancient hearts beating with a violence which frightened them and extremely surprises us. It comes out in the popular conception of Alexander the Great as one marching on and on in a dream of never-ending victories. It comes out in spite of Arnold. He quotes from Byron:

Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,

Count o’er thy days from anguish free,

And know, whatever thou hast been,

’Tis something better not to be.

He thinks this characteristically Celtic. So perhaps it is. But it is characteristically Greek too. It is a commonplace of Greek poetry. Then he quotes:

What though the field be lost,

All is not lost, the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

Or what is else not to be overcome.

This also he calls Celtic, although he knew his Prometheus Bound, and might have reflected that Milton knew it too. At last Arnold flings up his case, and describes a passage quoted to support his antithesis as, up to a certain point, “Greek in its clear beauty”; and when he wishes to find a name for the Celtic “intoxication of style” goes to a Greek poet for his word and comes back with Pindarism.

That shows how impossible it is to press these critical distinctions. Still one sees what Arnold is driving at, and one may go with him most of the way. It is quite true that Celtic literature is full of Titanism. But it is an error to say that Titanism is strange to Greek art. There is far more of it in Celtic, and in Romantic literature generally, than in classical literature, and this does produce a striking difference between them. But it is only a difference of method and emphasis. Titanism appeals to the Romantic, and he gives himself up to it. The Greek feels the attraction too, but he fights against it, and over Titanism he puts something which he thinks is better.

Thus it is part of the Romantic mood to love a strange and hyperbolical speech. We see the Romantic poet or his hero like a man increased to superhuman proportions and making enormous gestures in a mist. This effect is not beyond the reach of any true poet, and it has been achieved by Aeschylus better perhaps than by any one before or since. We must return to this point. Here we need only remark that the Greeks could manage the poetical hyperbole when they pleased. But it is only the Romantic, or if you like the Celtic poets, who never tire of it. Again, it is a mistake to believe that there is no symbolism in ancient literature. But what there is differs greatly from modern “Symbolism.” Our “Symbolism” employs certain accepted symbols, which allusively and discreetly recombining it sets the spirit dreaming. Ancient art kept its symbols—I do not know if the word be not misapplied—separate and definite. But it had them. The background of the Agamemnon, for instance, is crowded with symbols. It is all lit up by triumphal and ruinous fires with (passing unscathed through it all) the phantasmal beauty of Helen; while students of metre have observed that the heart of the verse beats faster and slower as she comes and goes. This symbolical use of fire, and Helen’s form, of dreams and tempest and purple and much else, is profoundly and intricately studied in the play. But it is not like modern Symbolism, which is often content to gaze ecstatically on the symbol itself, instead of using it dramatically to flood a situation with the light that is hidden in the heart of Time.

So all these differences resolve themselves into a change of attitude, which nevertheless is no small matter. Though not the foundations of life itself, yet man’s reading of life changes; and it is just the play of this inconstant factor upon the fixed bases of the soul which produces that creative ferment from which all art is born.

This may be seen in one matter of peculiar interest in the history of art—the passion of love. One constantly finds it said that Romantic love is a purely mediæval and modern thing. Those who make this statement might reflect that so profound and intimate an emotion is not likely to have been discovered so late in the human story. And it was not. Since there is perhaps a good deal of vagueness in our notions of what Romantic love is, let us take it here to mean the passion whose creed is, in Dryden’s [(Note 172)]phrase, All for Love and the World well Lost. Was such a passion unknown in antiquity? Was not that very phrase of All for Love used of the Greek Cleopatra, who is one of the world’s famous lovers? Did not Medea leave all for love’s sake, and Orpheus, and the shepherd Daphnis, whose legend is the more significant because it appears to be pure folk-story? Have not all poets of Romantic love turned instinctively to Greek mythology as the inexhaustible quarry of their lore? That they treat the myths in their own way is not to be denied. But they would not turn to them at all if they felt that those stories had been moulded by an alien spirit. Then, so far as one can judge from the haplessly scanty fragments of Greek lyrical poetry, the Romantic spirit was strong in that. Sappho and the fine poet Ibykos were wholly given over and enslaved to love; and the great and bitter heart of Archilochus hardly escaped from it with curses. In the Alexandrian era it flowers in poetry anew. One might take perhaps as typical of the extreme Romantic mood the considerable fragment left us of Hermesianax. It is little more than a numbering of famous lovers for pure delight in their names. There is a trifle of childishness in the piece, and a trifle of artificiality, yet it is not without a haunting loveliness like that which clings to the Catalogue of the Women in Homer. It is no accidental kinship. An underground river has burst up again. One finds it flowing unchecked in the Argonautika of Apollonios.

You may have noticed that none of my examples was taken from the greatest period of Greek literature, the Attic age. That also is no accident. For it is then that the hostile spirit most effectively comes in. The capacity for Romantic love was not at any time denied to the Greek nature. But what happened was this: the great age applied, as to the other passions, so to love, its doctrine of Sophrosyne. What was the result? Love became terrible and to be shunned in exact proportion to its power over the soul. And on the Greek soul love had great power; no one ought to be mistaken about that. Of old He has been called a tyrant, says Plato of Eros. It is a famous saying of Plato again that love is a form of madness. Sophocles, we remember, compared it to a wild beast. Such language is habitual with the Attic poets. (It is used, for example, by both Sophocles and Euripides in the famous odes invoking Eros, the one in Antigone, the other in Hippolytus.) It is not at all the language of Romance; it does not say All for Love. Indeed when we consider it more closely, we find that it means the exact opposite of what the extreme Romantic means. The Greek means that he has conquered, the Romantic that he has surrendered. There is, to be sure, in the Romantic theory, examined in cold blood, a certain amount of bravado. A great imaginative passion is rare enough to be more than a nine days’ wonder. Such an objection has no weight in the world of art, but it is extremely in point when we are contrasting the actual conditions of ancient and modern life. It will turn out in the long run that in ancient Greece men felt love as much as we, but felt about it differently. They were for self-mastery, we for ecstasy. They were Greeks, and we are Barbarians.

They were also, one may believe, in this the truer artists. There is nothing more characteristic of the artist than his capacity to bind his emotions to the service of his art.

To be in a passion you good may do,

But no good if a passion is in you

is his thought. The man who said that said also The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. The two sentiments are in fact not incompatible, but it takes an artist to reconcile them. The poor plain modern man always divines something immoral in this attitude. As to that, it is easiest to reply that it all depends. But surely the Greek is the only sound artistic doctrine. No one will write very well who cannot control his inspiration. A platitude no doubt, but a platitude which in these days seems very easily forgotten. The mere emotion is not enough. Tannhäuser has suggested great poetry; he could not have written any, for that would have required moral energy.

It might be thought a subterfuge to leave this topic without a word on a matter which cannot be ignored. I believe a very few words will suffice. But it is as well to make clear a point which has not been observed by those who claim the Greek example as a confirmation of their view that all experiences are permissible to the artist. The point is this. It was not in the artistic portion of the Greek people that the kind of sexual perversity, so often indiscriminately attributed to the Hellenes in general, was most widely prevalent. It was chiefly a Dorian vice, fostered by the Dorian camp-life, though I dare say it was to some extent endemic in the Near East. The Ionians (including the Athenians), who [(Note 175)]inherited nine-tenths of the Hellenic genius, unhesitatingly condemned such practices, even if they themselves were somewhat infected by them. Athenian bourgeois morality was quite sound on that point, as you may see by merely reading Aristophanes. His attitude is really remarkable, and, so far as we can see, there is only one possible explanation: the Athenian people would not tolerate the Dorian sin upon the stage. Yet you know what they did tolerate, and what the comic tradition tolerated. It would take a lot to stop Aristophanes.

Another point may be put in the form of a question. How, on the assumption of Greek perversity, are we to account for the exceptional sanity of Greek thought and sentiment? It does not seem humanly possible that a pathological condition of the body should not result in a morbid state of the mind. Yet I never could hear of anybody who called the Greeks morbid. It is to be surmised that certain passages in Plato have been the chief source of the misconception, or exaggerated impression, which is still perhaps too prevalent. Now with regard to what is called Platonic Love, there are two things which ought not to be forgotten. One is this. The young men with whom Socrates used to talk—who were not, you know, in any proper sense, his disciples—were apt to be members of a tiny minority, among what we should call the upper classes at Athens, who professed what strikes us as a very unnecessary “philolaconism” or cult of things Spartan. Some of these young people certainly practised or trifled with the Dorian offence, and Socrates was willing to discuss the matter with them. He was the more willing to do this because he held a very definite view himself. He condemned the fleshly sin outright, though not perhaps uncompromisingly. But he attached the very highest value to the association of friends, an older and a younger, and he wished this comradeship to be intense enough to merit the name of love. This leads to the second point. You must judge ancient love—I mean this love of man and boy—by its ideal, as you insist on judging Romantic love. So judged, it often appears a fine and noble thing. That it sometimes sank in the mire is no more than can be said of modern love. Do not, at any rate, let us be hypocritical.

It is time to recover the thread of our original argument, which was to this effect, that the contrast of Hellenism and Barbarism appears in literature as the contrast of Classical and Romantic. Just as Hellene and Barbarian are correlative terms, so you cannot understand Classical art without reference to Romance, nor Romantic art in isolation from the Classics. But again, just as Greek and Barbarian are equally human, so Classical and Romantic art are alike art. The difference in the end is a difference of degree or (in another way of putting it) of tendencies. The great vice of the Barbarian is that he has no self-restraint. There cannot be art of any kind without restraint, and the Barbarian pur sang, if he exist, must be incapable of art. But it is not he we are discussing; it is the artistic expression of Barbarism which we call Romance. Now observe how clearly, within the limits imposed by art, Romance reveals the bias of the Barbarian temperament. In literature it comes out in the form of hyperbole or artistic exaggeration. It will not be denied that Romance indulges a good deal in that. The Greeks fought shy of it. To deal largely in it was likely to bring upon the writer the epithet of ψυχρός, “frigid”—a curious charge to us, who are inclined to look upon exaggeration as natural to a fiery spirit. They thought it the mere spluttering of a weak nature, which could not master and direct its inward flame.

Yet the Romantic exaggeration can be very fine. I agree with Arnold in liking a good deal a passage which he quotes in an abridged form from the Mabinogion. Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall. The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon. “But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.” So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre. The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon. “But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was”; and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. “When first I came hither,” says the Owl, “the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men came and rooted it up. And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps?” Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon, but he offered to be guide “to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abbey.” The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.

The popular belief in the great age of certain animals appears in many lands, and appeared in ancient Greece. It is expressed in an old poem, attributed to Hesiod, called The Precepts of Chiron. Nine lives of men grown old lives the cawing crow; four lives of a crow lives the stag; the raven sees the old age of three stags; but the phoenix lives as long as nine ravens, as long as ten phoenixes we, the Nymphs with beautiful hair, daughters of ægis-bearing Zeus. Compared with the Celtic passage, the quotation from “Hesiod” is poor and dry and like a multiplication sum. The Celtic imagination, with its fine frenzy, is at home in the region of popular fancy, and deals with it effectively; whereas the Greek method, if employed without art, spoils everything. You will observe that “Hesiod,” in spite of his vastly greater moderation (herein at least showing himself Greek), does not really succeed in being any more convincing to the imagination, while he does not impress it at all as the Celt impresses it. Employed with the art of Homer, or indeed of Hesiod at his best, the Greek method should at once impress the imagination and convince it. If it can do this, it clearly excels the method of impressing the imagination by a process akin to stunning it. One ought probably to prefer Hesiod at his dryest to mere senseless hyperbole even in a passage where a little hyperbole is in place. There is a future to Hesiod’s style in the hands of an imaginative artist, while there is no possible artistic future to mere shrieking. The Celtic method is always committing suicide.

Arnold quotes again from the Mabinogion: Drem, the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain). Here is what the ancient epic called the Cypria says: Climbing the topmost peak he sent his glance through all the Isle of Pelops son of Tantalos, and soon the glorious hero spied with his wondrous eyes horse-taming Castor and conquering Polydeukês inside the hollow oak. The superiority of the Classical style is now beginning to assert itself. The exaggeration in the Greek passage is immense, but it does suspend incredulity for a moment—and the moment in art is everything—while the Celtic passage pays no attention to verisimilitude at all, and therefore really misses its effect. (If you think we are here dealing with magic rather than simple hyperbole, the answer will be much the same.) What Euripides says about shame we may say about exaggeration; that there is a good kind and a bad. The good is, so to speak, intensive; the bad, merely extensive. The excellent method of hyperbole reflects some large hidden significance of it may be a little thing or a trifling action. The inartistic hyperbole is just overstatement—impressing nobody.

Any one who has read even a little of the old Celtic literature must have been struck by the presence in it of a very large element of enormous and almost frantic exaggeration. I speak very much under correction, as I have to work with translations, but no one can be wrong about so plain a matter. I have indeed heard a man who reads Irish say that in his opinion some of the exaggeration was merely humorous; but even this scholar did not deny that the exaggeration was there, and plenty of it. From the Táin Bó Cúalnge (the chief document of early Ireland) translated by Professor Joseph Dunn, I take part of the description of Cuchulain in one of his fits of rage. He next made a ruddy bowl of his face and his countenance. He gulped down one eye into his head so that it would be hard work if a wild crane succeeded in drawing it out on to the middle of his cheek from the rear of his skull. Its mate sprang forth till it came out on his cheek, so that it was the size of a five-fist kettle, and he made a red berry thereof out in front of his head. His mouth was distorted monstrously and twisted up to his ears. He drew the cheek from the jaw-bone so that the interior of his throat was to be seen. His lungs and his lights stood out so that they fluttered in his mouth and his gullet. He struck a mad lion’s blow with the upper jaw on its fellow so that as large as a wether’s fleece of a three year old was each red, fiery flake which his teeth forced into his mouth from his gullet. There was heard the loud clap of his heart against his breast like the yelp of a howling bloodhound or like a lion going among bears. There were seen the torches of the Badb, and the rain clouds of poison, and the sparks of glowing-red fire, blazing and flashing in hazes and mists over his head with the seething of the truly wild wrath that rose up above him. His hair bristled all over his head like branches of a redthorn thrust into a gap in a great hedge. Had a king’s apple-tree laden with royal fruit been shaken around, scarce an apple of them all would have passed over him to the ground, but rather would an apple have stayed stuck on each single hair there, for the twisting of the anger which met it as it rose from his hair above him. The Lon Laith (“Champion’s Light”) stood out of his forehead, so that it was as long and as thick as a warrior’s whetstone, so that it was as long as his nose, till he got furious handling the shields, thrusting out the charioteer, destroying the hosts. As high, as thick, as strong, as steady, as long as the sail-tree of some huge prime ship was the straight spout of dark blood which arose right on high from the very ridge-pole of his crown, so that a black fog of witchery was made thereof like to the smoke from a king’s hostel what time the king comes to be ministered to at nightfall of a winter’s day.

It would be mistaken and dull criticism to blame anything so characteristic as bad in itself. If such exaggerations are bad, it must be because the whole class of literature to which they belong is bad. But any one who should say that would be (not to put too fine a point upon it) an ass. Still, it would be paradoxical to maintain that the passage just quoted is in quite the best manner of writing. Cuchulain reminds one of Achilles, and it is instructive to compare the treatment of Cuchulain in the Táin Bó Cúalnge with the treatment of Achilles in the Iliad. In one sense the comparison is infinitely unfair. It is matching what some have thought the greatest poem in the world against something comparatively rude and primitive. But it is done merely to illustrate a point of art. In other respects no injustice happens. If one takes the combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, which is the crowning episode of the Táin, with the combat between Hector and Achilles, which is perhaps the crowning episode of the Iliad, one cannot fail to see that the advantage in valour, and chivalry, and the essential pathos of the situation is all on the Irish side. But in the pure art of the narrative, [(Note 182)]what a difference! The Táin, not without skill, works through a climax of tremendous feats to an impression of deadly force and skill in its hero. But it is all considerably overdone, and at last you are so incredulous of Cuchulain’s intromissions with the “Gae Bulga” (that mysterious weapon) that you cease to be afraid of him. What does Homer do? He shows you two lonely figures on the Plain of Troy; Hector before the Skaian gate, and Achilles far off by the River Skamandros. And as Hector strengthens his heart for the duel which must be fatal to one, nearer and nearer, with savage haste, the sun playing on his armour, comes running Achilles. Nothing happens, only this silent, tireless running of a man. But it gets on your nerves just as it got on Hector’s.

Or take that singular description of the Champion’s Light. It so happens that Achilles also has something of the kind. But what is grotesque in the case of Cuchulain, in the case of Achilles has a startling effect of reality. The Trojans have defeated the Achaeans and come very near the ships in the absence of Achilles from the battle, when suddenly to the exulting foe the hero shows himself once more. Round his head the holy goddess twisted a golden cloud, and lit therefrom an all-shining flame. And as when a smoke rising from a town goes up to the sky in a distant isle besieged by fighting men, and all day the folk contend in hateful battle before their town, but with the setting of the sun thick flame the bale-fires, and the glare shoots up on high for the dwellers round to see, so haply they may come in their ships to ward off ruin—so from Achilles’ head the light went up to heaven. From the wall to the trench he went, he stood—not [(Note 183)]mingling with the Achaeans, for he regarded his mother’s wise behest. There standing he shouted—and, aloof, Athena called; but among the Trojans was aroused confusion infinite.... And the charioteers were astonisht when they saw burning above the head of the great-hearted son of Peleus the unwearied, awful fire, that the goddess, grey-eyed Athena, made to burn. The poet, you see, does not fairly describe the Champion’s Light, he describes its effect. In the same way the face of Helen is never described, only the effect she had on the old men of Troy. Such art is beyond our praising.

It may be complained that I am taking extreme examples—of Hellenic tact and moderation on the one hand, of Romantic extravagance on the other. This is admitted, but the process seems justifiable; you must let me illustrate my point. The argument is that the Romantic style tends to a more lavish employment of hyperbole than does the Greek. I cannot imagine any one denying it. Read of some nightmare feat of strength in a Celtic story, and then read something in Homer (am I giving too much of Homer?)—something like this: Aias the son of Telamon was first to slay a man, smiting him with a ragged stone, that was within the wall by the battlement, piled huge atop of all, nor might a man with ease upbear it in both his arms, even in full lustihead of youth—such as men are now ... but Aias swang and hurled it from on high. How moderation tells! How much more really formidable is this Aias than Aeneas when Virgil (with Roman or Celtic exaggeration) says that he cast “no small part of a mountain”!

A matter of this delicacy will mock at a rigid handling. There is no rule to be laid down at all save [(Note 184)]the rule that is above rules, the instinct of the artist. The limits of exaggeration—and there is a sense in which all art is exaggeration—shift with the shifting of what one may call the horizon of the soul. It is clear, for instance, that the atmosphere of the Domestic Drama or the Descriptive Poem is markedly different from that of the Heroic Epic or the Choral Ode. A gabe appropriate to Oliver or Kapaneus would sound very strangely on the lips of Holy Willie or Peter Bell; it could only be mock-heroic or parody. One’s sensitiveness to these atmospheres,
then, the temperament of the reader, his
critical taste, the character of his education—all that and more affect his response to what he reads. We have had a different experience from the ancients and live, as it were, in different emotional scenery. Hyperbole counts for more in our art than it did in theirs. To the device in itself there could be no possible objection. When one thinks of the superb and intoxicating hyperboles of Romantic literature from the winding of Roland’s horn to the Playboy of the Western World; when one thinks how largely they serve to make the style of Shakespeare; the Greeks appear a little timid in comparison. Perhaps they were, although I cannot believe it was timidity that ailed them. Only they guarded more strictly against a danger they felt more keenly than we, into which we have more frequently fallen.

Art of course must go where its own winds and currents carry it. To forbid it to be itself because it is not Greek is extreme, though happily impotent, nonsense. But it will be extraordinarily interesting to see how modern art is going to save itself from the two extremes of brutality and sentimentalism—the faults of the Barbarian—with which it is so manifestly and so painfully struggling. The Greeks solved that problem, and their solution stands. Meanwhile a student of Greek may help a little by explaining what the solution is. For it has been greatly misunderstood.

The secret was half recovered in the Renaissance. Thus in England Milton learned from the Greeks the value of form for the concentration of meaning, and that poetry should be not only “sensuous and passionate” but also “simple.” But the Renaissance had drunk too deep of the new wine to keep its head quite steady; and this, in turn, helped to provoke a Puritanic reaction which distrusted the arts, and therefore differed widely from Greek asceticism, which was itself a kind of art. The Restoration produced a new orientation of the English spirit, and a new interpretation of the Classical. Repelled by the extravagances and the frequently outrageous slovenliness of decadent Elizabethanism, the age of Dryden, communicating its impulse to the age of Pope, fell in love with the quietness and temperance of the ancients, and above all with their accomplishment of form. This admiration was an excellent and salutary thing for the times. But it seemed content to gaze on the surface. There arose a poetry which aimed above all at mere correctness. As if Greek poetry aimed at nothing but that!

The modern Romantic movement—I mean the new spirit in English literature which Lyrical Ballads is regarded as initiating—was largely a revolt against eighteenth-century Classicism. Yet it cannot fairly be said that the Romantics introduced a juster conception of Classical art. They started with a prejudice against it, which their discovery of the Middle Ages merely confirmed. Wordsworth indeed (who had much of the eighteenth century in him) felt the attraction of Classical art, but his best work is not in things like Laodamia. Landor is not Greek, any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek. They have Greek perfection of form, but (except at his rare best Landor) they are glacial; they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho, for example, so different. It has been thought that no English poet has come nearer than Keats to recapturing the ancient secret. The Ode to a Grecian Urn nearly does recapture it. But not quite. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty is very Greek; but it is not Greek to forget, as Keats and his followers have been apt to forget, the second half of their aphorism. So the Greek poets aimed less directly at beauty than at the truth of things, which they believed to be beautiful; and this realism—this effort to realize the world as it is—remains, in spite of the large element of convention in Greek poetry, the most characteristic thing about the Greek poetical genius.

In the very midst of the Romantic movement we find Matthew Arnold pleading for a return to Hellenic standards. The plea had curiously little effect. If you read Merope immediately after Atalanta in Calydon, you will scarcely wonder at that. Arnold in fact saw only half the truth. He cries for Greek sanity and absence of caprice; he does not cry for Greek intensity, Greek realism. He pleads for tact and moderation—in a word, for that good manners in style which had seemed so important to the eighteenth century. The doctrine was too negative for the age. It can hardly be said to inspire the best work of Arnold himself. Yes, that is just what is wrong with it, it does not inspire; and so, although based on a right instinct, it does not really lift him above his time. He did not care for Tennyson, whom he accused of affectation. But he would not have understood the twentieth century’s objection to Tennyson, that he lacked the courage of his genius. If he had understood it, he would no doubt have sided with Tennyson, for Arnold was, after all, mainly “Victorian.” But what do you suppose Aristophanes would have said about Tennyson? If the answer is not at once obvious, the reason must be the difficulty that would arise in getting a Greek of Aristophanes’ time to understand the Victorian timidities at all.

The present age is said to be extremely in revolt against Victorianism. Unfortunately one may be in full revolt and yet be only shaking one’s chains. There is a thing that is fairly clear. The paroxysmal art of the hour must bring its inevitable reaction. The cry will again be heard for a return to urbanity and a stricter form, and people will again call these things Classical, as if this were all the Classics have to offer. And then in due time will come once more the counter-swing of the pendulum. Well, perhaps art depends more than we think upon this ceaseless movement; for all art aims at giving the effect of life, and life is in movement.