I cannot but quote to you a curious parallel of a man of genius turning a natural defect into a splendid success. When Richard Wagner began to compose operas of the received form, he failed because of his want of facility to produce a sustained melody. He then bethought himself of the use of short phrases instead of sustained songs, and in spite of his original defect he has obtained a very great and deserved popularity. There are, of course, other great qualities in Wagner, especially his novel and splendid use of the orchestra. But the question of melody is always the vital one in music, and no man ever attained the first rank that has left us so few sustained melodies. His Rienzi shows what he could do when he attempted them.
The laws of prose composition, as devised and perfected by Isocrates, are the most subtle and complete ever put into practice by any living man, and though of course some of them are only applicable to the Greek language, and indeed to Attic Greek, the general principles he expounded have been applied by many writers and in many languages.[16] It is well known that Cicero modelled himself on this style and through him it became dominant in Europe. The greatest English example in older days is the Areopagitica of Milton, who though manifestly inspired by Isocrates, is far from possessing his perfect control of language, perfect smoothness of period, perfect clearness of thinking, all of which make up the charm of the great master. Isocrates was the teacher of this great style, not only to pleaders and pamphleteers, but to historians, and he was blamed for making men like Ephorus and Theopompus, his favourite pupils, in writing their once famous works, think more of their diction than of their impartiality or their research. But surely the duty of making history eloquent, such as we have it in Gibbon, is of paramount value. To this I shall not now return. I rather desire to call your attention to the supremacy of a great periodic style even in English, and in these latter days, when brevity, epigram, impatience of style and an affected neglect of form are in high fashion. Among the writers of the 19th century, I take by far the greatest stylist to be John Ruskin, and I consider that far the largest part of his influence arose not from his ideas, which were often fantastic, but from the admirable way in which they were set forth. But he was essentially the master of the long period, for with him you may find a whole page consisting of one grand sentence, in which many clauses are co-ordinated, many lesser ideas balanced, many strands woven into the one great tissue which comes from the writer’s pen as from a loom. And that is the reason why he was a greater stylist than all the Froudes and Newmans and Paters, who either use short sentences, or if they attempt the period, are neither melodious nor clear.
The same law holds good in eloquence, when we can find a master to illustrate it. The two greatest English orators I have heard during the last generation were Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Magee. Both dealt in the long period—the former from constant habit, which was even notable in his ordinary life, and which spoilt his conversation; the other, who was brief and pungent enough in ordinary talk, trained himself upon the model of Chalmers, a great Scotch orator before my day. I have seen Magee’s copy of Chalmers, and have noted how minutely he had dissected and analysed it. But both produced the same wonderful effect by (if I may say so) embarking the audience with them on the billows of great periods, which excited wonder how they would ever come safely to land. The rounding off and concluding of such a period not only with safety but with splendour produced an effect upon their audience unlike anything else that I have experienced. The style of neither, though both knew Greek well, was based directly on Isocrates; but most certainly their speech was based upon the principles he had taught and impressed so well upon Cicero and his like, upon Milton, upon Jeremy Taylor, upon Edmund Burke, all of whom appreciated and practised this supreme prose style.
But if the Greeks here showed the modern world the model of the highest perfection in the prose essay, they would not have been Greeks if they had not also shown us the perfection of easy conversation, of everyday talk, of the play of various styles, and the expression of various characters in the cultivated language of the day. And so Plato in his Dialogues has shown the world an unapproachable example of conversation raised to a high art, which again created a distinct literary form that has never died out.[17]
All these developments are (with the exception of biography) those of the Golden Age of Greek Literature, and are the discovery of great masters who were the glory of that age. But as we shall see frequently in the course of these lectures, the silver age of Greece was almost as fruitful in the creation of models for the imitation of modern Europe. It was only after a great body of splendid authors had lived, that we could expect to find literary criticism assuming an important place. For the literary critic is after all a sort of parasite, who lives on the bodies of greater and more dignified animals. We know that when the library of Alexandria came to be collected, and the sifting of authors and of the texts of authors became necessary, there arose a great school of critical scholars, who purified the received copies, who apportioned the respective value of the texts, and who developed that censorious attitude toward the classical masterpieces which is the bane of the modern world. We still have in the critical essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and still more in the Tract on the Sublime, belonging to the 1st century A.D., excellent models of what is good and useful in this reflexive attitude of a later age, and of second rate ability. The great age of production had been very simple and naïve in criticism; the attitude of Aristophanes, and even of Plato, in judging poets is merely a moral judgment and seems never to take into consideration æsthetic questions. In the Tract on the Sublime we find quite a modern standpoint, and the judgments of this author have had no small effect on the literature of the last century. No less a person than Edmund Burke thought it worth while to translate this tract, and how wide was the author’s sympathy will appear at once from this fact, that he quotes as a signal instance of the sublime the opening of a work far removed in spirit from classical Greek literature—the book of Genesis, in the Greek version.
I need not delay over the many and various Epistles left us by the Greeks, and which you may see collected in one of Didot’s big volumes of Epistolographi Graeci. But I do not think that we can call letter writing a distinct form of literature, and it is very certain that every nation that could use writing materials could hardly fail to adopt it in some form. Nor do I think the letters extant are in any way remarkable, perhaps because most of them are the compilations of men attributing these documents falsely to the great ancients. The letters ascribed to Plato, Isocrates, and others give us nothing additional of literary importance.[18] I will therefore pass from these, as well as from the moral harangues of the later rhetors and sophists of whom Dion Chrysostom is far the most interesting. I wish modern sermons would borrow more from this admirable and little used source, for Dion was a man of the world, a traveller, a sound moral teacher, and gifted with a great taste for the picturesque.
But I cannot conclude without a word about the prose novel of the Greeks, who here also founded a form of literature that has assumed gigantic importance in the modern world. The novel may be regarded as the last legitimate offering, a child born out of due time, as Saint Paul calls himself, but like Saint Paul a greater influence in our modern life than any of his older brethren. It might have been thought that from the modern Comedy of Menander and his rivals to a prose novel in the modern sense was but a small and inevitable step, and yet no branch of Greek literature had less influence upon the rise and development of so kindred a subject. The very frame on which all Menander’s plays were stretched with wearisome iteration, I mean the rehabilitation of a respectable girl, who solely through the neglect or the violence of others, has become a mother without being a wife—such a topic would be wholly repugnant to any Greek novelist we know. For in all the stories we possess the main interest turns upon the preservation of the heroine’s purity through every sort of temptation, and every sort of attempted violence. This was a topic quite strange to Greek sentiment and foreign to Greek literature till it was imported from the East by those who had there learned that sort of love-story. There are indications of it in the romantic episodes of Xenophon’s Cyrus, but the adoption of it as a striking topic is later, and due to Callimachus, whose poem called Acontius and Cydippe was perhaps the first love-story of our modern type offered to the Greek world. A youth and a maiden, whose beauties were described in great detail, meet at a religious ceremony, and fall deeply in love at first sight. The various and commonplace obstacles to their union which are familiar in every modern society—worldly parents, a richer suitor for the maiden, threats of broken hearts and of suicide—these occupy the story, which through many untoward delays ends in a happy marriage.[19] It may cause amazement in this audience that such a plot should ever have been new in literature, especially in that of the Greeks, who had every sort of human experience before them. Yet it was new in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, and made its fortune in that world-weary and artificial society. In all the Greek novels we possess, some such love-story is the necessary thread which glitters through the tissue, so much so that the German pedants edit them under the title Scriptores Erotici Graeci. Yet the relation between the lovers being absolutely pure, any temptations which occur arise from the passions of violent people who create no interest in the reader. By far the best specimen we have, owing to its simplicity and its natural scenery, is the famous Daphnis and Chloe, which has found so many imitators ever since the French of Amyot has made it accessible to modern Europe. We feel indeed that the unknown author was far from possessing the innocence of his characters, or the spontaneous appreciation of the nature he describes. The work is from the time of Decadence in Greek literature, and has the faults of its generation. But for all that it is a beautiful work of art, just as the Idylls of Theocritus are beautiful, just as the Hero and Leander of Musæus is beautiful, just as the Martinmas summer of your woods is beautiful, and all the more beloved because we feel it is but “the gilded halo hovering round decay!”
I said it was our best specimen because of its simplicity, and yet it is not wanting in violent and improbable adventures toward its close. But these are as nothing compared to the adventures of lovers in the other stories of this kind, because there then was a wholly different vein of prose story, which came into fashion with the love-story, and became amalgamated with it, to the great detriment of both—I mean the stories of wild adventures in strange and fabulous lands.
With the wonderful invasion of the East, there were opened to the astonished Greeks new regions of fabulous splendour, of astounding treasure, of amazing nature. So violently was their imagination stimulated by what they saw that they set themselves to construct books of travels beyond the rising sun and beneath the ocean wave, into the homes of monstrous beasts, and still more monstrous men. The schemes of Alexander himself were baulked by his soldiers, who positively refused to embark in his wild dreams of universal conquest, but there was nothing to impede the imagination of the writers of his deeds, who combined the real narrative of his conquests with his quest after the hidden wonders of the East. Hence we have the so-called Life of Alexander, which I consider to have originated shortly after his death, but to have been amplified and glorified by succeeding generations of those that told their stories to delighted audiences. In this Life and Acts we have the starting point of a whole literature of Fabulous Travels, mixed with descriptions not only of odious savages, but of ideal societies that lived hidden away from the vices and troubles of old and decrepit civilisation. But this literature, so popular in the Middle Ages, is outside the pale of Hellenism. It is not only the last child, but the illegitimate child of their once pure and lofty imagination.