A brighter Hellas rears its mountains, from waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep!
II
GREEK POETRY
IN coming before you to-day to treat of the influence of Greek poetry on the modern world, I feel under a special advantage, which is also a disadvantage. Many of you will know that two volumes of my History of Greek Literature are devoted to Greek poetry, and those of you who have read them must already be familiar with my treatment of the authors and their works in detail. To such of you, there can be no difficulty in following the course of the present lecture. But on the other hand, it is hard for me to give to such hearers new material, seeing that I have already done my best in two volumes to satisfy their curiosity. To those that are not familiar with the subject, there is the disadvantage, in hearing a man whose intimacy with the subject is of such long standing, that he may allude to things as obvious which to his audience are not so, being beyond the bounds of their ordinary reading. But I may very possibly be underrating the cultivation of this audience, which is said to be on a very different level from that of any similar audience in England. If so, you, like all competent critics, in contrast to the vulgar and the ignorant, will appreciate the difficulties of my task and will judge it with due allowance for these difficulties.
It is obviously my first duty to-day to put before you the general features of Greek poetry which have made it a model for succeeding ages and nations. Then I shall proceed, with as much detail as time permits, to give instances of the effects, direct or indirect, of Greek poetry on the poetry of English-speaking nations. You will find that the features which are really the most important are not the obvious features, and hardly those which we might name if we spoke hastily, or at random. The chiefest and most remarkable, which permeates every Greek poet from Homer to Theocritus, is that their work is carefully studied, and in no sense the mere spontaneous outpouring of the human heart. “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,” said, as a matter of pride, a very artificial poet. Nothing would seem less worthy of it to a Greek poet. He always despised what we call an untutored genius. We hear talk indeed of divine madness and of the inspiration of the Muses, but so far as we know, they never inspired an ignorant man, and never taught an educated man to violate the traditions of his school. This studied work comes before us in its full artificiality in the Homeric poems. It is more than doubtful whether such a language was ever spoken. It is full of strange forms, and the mixed dialect, sometimes even to us ungrammatical, was the dialect invented or perfected by a school of bards who did not profess to reproduce ordinary speech, but something far higher and better, which only the educated poet could compose. And when I use the term artificial, which has come in modern English to signify something contrasted with natural, and therefore inferior,[4] I must say a word in explanation of my meaning.
It is not the proper province of art to attain to a perfect representation of nature, but a representation of perfect nature. For example, the more the art of sculpture developed in Greece, the more they attained to the representation of a natural but an ideally beautiful figure, such as the Hermes of Praxiteles. So the last triumph of a great actor is to reproduce perfectly human nature in its general features, if not in its ideal features, and so the philosopher exclaims in wonder at the plays of Menander, “O Menander and human life, which of you has copied the other?” But if anyone imagines that art consists merely in photographing vulgar everyday life, he can easily lapse into absurdity. All our habits, so far as they are civilised, depart from mere nature and employ artifice to conceal or improve it. If any of you came here in purely natural attire, imagine the scene! I believe such things were attempted in the wild society of Paris in the heyday of the great Revolution, but even then their attire, though inferior in quantity, was in quality not less artificial than the opinions of the wearers.
It follows from these considerations that Greek poetry was always developed in schools possessing fixed traditions, and following strict laws both in metre and in diction. If any man thought to break loose from these restrictions, and write in a manner wholly free and unchecked, he would get no hearing in Greece. Such a phenomenon, for example, as your Walt Whitman would have been impossible, or at least we should never have heard of it.
It is indeed quite true that this does not exclude the rise of new schools of thought and new modes of expression. When epic poetry was exhausted new sorts of poetry arose; when these proved insufficient there was still further development, but all this is to be accounted for with adherence to law and tradition of some kind. I will take the last and therefore the most obvious case first. We have in Theocritus, the latest bloom of pure Greek poetry, bucolic scenes and pastoral language which were long thought to be the mere echo of the primitive shepherds who fed their flocks in the uplands of Sicily. We know better now. Theocritus was a learned man, full of literary jealousies, who wrote in the sultry atmosphere of the university of Alexandria and at the highly artificial court of the second Ptolemy. He was probably as remote from what we call simple human nature as any modern American could be. But he was a great literary artist, and he felt that while all the other schools of poetry had gradually lost their contact with real life, and were becoming obtrusively artificial and outworn in public estimation, there was still a vein of folk-song, in scenery contrasting utterly with the crowded sandhills of Alexandria, which might, if treated with delicate art, appeal once more to the sympathy of a weary and decadent society. No doubt there were plenty of pedants in Alexandria, who despised this return to homely and common life, with its vulgar passions, just as the great French critics repudiated with scorn the homely scenes and characters in the tragedies of Shakespeare. The experiment nevertheless succeeded, and this thoroughly artificial but artistic representation of the sorrows and joys of illiterate peasants, in lovely metre and with carefully chosen liberties of diction, fascinated the Greek, then the Roman world, and incited the Renaissance to similar, but unsuccessful attempts. It has produced its effects upon English poetry down to the work of Tennyson, who shows more traces of the influence of Theocritus than of the influence of any other Greek poet. The secret of it was that, when other schools became exhausted, Theocritus went back to the people, found among them rude and simple songs which had never yet been adopted by any school or put into artistic form, and raised these from the coarseness of nature into the refinement of a subtle and learned art.
Was not the same process the origin of Greek dramatic poetry, though in an earlier and far less conscious age? Are we not told that tragedy, and comedy too, arose from the rude songs of the people and the rude attempts at acting among simple country folk? The tragedy of Æschylus, nay, even the perfect diction and metre of Aristophanes, are as far removed from popular song as it is possible to conceive, yet these too arose and matured with marvellous quickness from the rude essays of untutored peasants, whose efforts were wholly beneath the attention of civilised society.
We know nothing, alas! of the cradles of the lyric poetry of Archilochus, of Alcæus, of Sappho; we can tell you nothing of the incunabula of that great and varied development which comprised several schools. Over the whole surface of those primeval waters, which cover the world of Greek literature down to the 7th century B.C., we have but the one great solitary beacon, the poetry of Homer, which tells us, like the Nantucket light-ship, that we are far, and yet not far, from the utterances of a literary age:
As the tall ship, that many a dreary year,
Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea,
All thro’ the livelong hours of utter dark
Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave!