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.