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.
III
Were it not for an original propriety in the distinction, it would be better not to speak at all of “Classical” and “Romantic.” This seems clearly to be the fault of modern criticism, which has hidden the path under so deep a fall of many-coloured leaves, that now one must spend a deal of time merely in sweeping them up. It is annoying how inapt are current terms of criticism to express the essence of ancient literature. I have hinted that it might almost be expressed in the word “realism,” and at once I am checked by the reflection that realism in modern speech appears to mean anything you like. How, then, is a man to avoid being misunderstood? But he has to take the risk; and on the whole it will be safer for him to grasp this runaway by the hair than to sow more definitions in a soil already exhausted.
Greek literature is realistic in the sense that it aims at producing the effect of reality, not by the accumulation of startling details—which perhaps is what is usually meant in these days by realism—but by a method of its own. Greek literature is marked by a unique sincerity, or veracity, or candour, equally foreign to violence and to sentimentality—a bitter man might say, equally foreign to what we now call [(Note 189)]realism and to what we now call idealism. So profound is this truthfulness that we (who cry out daily for a resolute fidelity to fact in our writers) have not yet sounded it. It needs a long plummet. So many of us have come to imagine that the truth of a situation is not apparent except in flashes of lightning—preferably red lightning—which the Greeks thought distorting. We think we are candid, and we are not so very candid. I could never be one of those fanatical champions of antiquity to whom the modern is merely the enemy. Their position is so pathetically untenable that one can only with a sigh busy oneself with something that really matters. But, however modern I may feel, I cannot get myself to believe that we attain so perfect a truthfulness as the Greeks. We have written volumes about the “Classical Ideal,” and we are apt to contrast “Hellenic Idealism” with our uncompromising modern “Realism” and “Naturalism.” And all the time the Greeks have had a truer realism than we.