The note of ecstasy as a passion for righteousness and social justice is of a high order usually. It was this note in which Greek and Roman poetry, however, was deficient. It is this ecstasy that raises the prophetic portions of the Bible to the high plane they occupy.
Professor Butcher, surely one in sympathy with Greek art, pointed out the weakness of Greek criticism, in that it failed to consider the social state in connection with the work of art. This state of criticism was due to the fact that the poetry of the Greeks showed no deep interest in social justice. Pindar, the greatest lyricist of the Greeks, wrote about athletic contests; athletes were his heroes. The Greeks glorified healthy bodies in their poetry, an exalted feature undoubtedly. Homer wrote about wars, and Achilles remained the type of Greek hero. Æschylus dwelt on the laws of divine retribution for indulgence in crime. Sophocles contemplated the irony of fate. Sappho recorded her love troubles.
The only exception of a work treating of poetry in connection with social justice is Plato's Republic, and he concluded that the poet was unnecessary. Yet he himself is one of the few Greek poets who showed deep interest in social justice.
The first critic who pointed out the connection between poetry and social conditions was the author of On the Sublime, who ends his treatise with a beautiful attack on the love of money which hinders the development of good art. This is the first passage in pagan antiquity to point out the evils of commercialism in connection with art.
None of the Greek poets (except perhaps Aristophanes) thought it worthy of their art to cry out against the social abuses of the time, and to lament the existence of wrong. The Roman satires alone in pagan literature approached, though weakly, the ecstasy for social justice in the prophecies of the Bible. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah rank higher than most of the Greek poems because they show a social consciousness steeped in emotion. Passages like these are Hebraic and not Greek.
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." Isaiah (Ch. 5, v. 8). "They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked: they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge." Jeremiah (Ch. 5, v. 28). "Take away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Amos (Ch. 5, v. 23-24).
Fénelon in a famous passage eloquently proclaimed the superiority of Hebrew poetry to Greek poetry. Heine, a pronounced Hellenist, came to the final conclusion that the Greeks were children and the Hebrews men.
The Hebrew idea of righteousness was a different one from the later Christian notion of consciousness of sin. The latter was really a perversion of the former, and ended rather in social injustices as the history of the medieval ages shows.
The discussion in regard to the merits of poetry with a mission, or poetry that is purely aesthetic, was revived on the occasion of the publication of Untermeyer's book The New Era in American Poetry. His critics made the mistake of thinking that those who want poetry to deal with social ideas are not ready to recognize poems that are beautiful, or convey an emotion, even if there is little intellectual content behind the work. There is no social message in Poe's Raven, for example, but I could not imagine Untermeyer not being moved by that poem, for it digs down into the emotions; it was written out of Poe's tragic life and finds a response in us all. Untermeyer has not been tardy in his appreciation
of poets without a message like Frost and Robinson. In fact Untermeyer ignores quite a number of Revolutionary poets.