What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

But why delay over these desultory allusions mixed with those of other legendary cycles, all grasped by his vast erudition? Consider the Samson Agonistes. Here we have the poet deliberately going back to strictly Greek form and even, in his notable preface to the play, defending dramatic poetry against Puritan objections by appealing to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, “the three tragic poets,” he says, “unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy.” You wonder when you consider that he had Shakespeare before him, whom he mentions elsewhere with admiration. But the same preface tells us clearly why he would not concede to Shakespeare’s tragedy the rank he gives to the Greek masters. He says tragedy had fallen into “low esteem or rather infamy, happening through the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar characters, which by all judicious persons has been counted absurd.” He took therefore exactly the view of Voltaire, who is shocked at the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the drunken porter in Macbeth. Such was also the view of Milton’s great French contemporary Racine, who believed that he had composed his plays in the strictest accordance with the principles of the ancients. And yet the school of Shakespeare might easily have defended themselves by citing the practice of those very masters, whose example they were recommended to follow. In the first place every Greek tragic poet composed a merry afterlude, called from its official chorus of Satyrs, a Satyric drama, and this followed immediately upon their tragedy. Secondly, even in this, the greatest master, Æschylus, does not disdain to bring “vulgar and trivial persons” upon his stage, such as the watchman at the opening of the Agamemnon, and the nurse Kilissa, who intermix comic stuff with the tragic sadness of the play, and even enhance the gloom by the contrast. Of course the tragedy of Euripides, who deliberately sought to bring his stage nearer to our ordinary life, could not but exhibit such passages, as any student of him knows perfectly well.

Taking however Milton’s own view of the nature of Greek tragedy, we have his Samson Agonistes not only constructed on the frame of an Attic play, but in every scene full of reminiscences and allusions showing a minute familiarity with the tragic Three. The opening, with its blind and world-worn hero, seeking for repose, is taken from the opening of the second Œdipus of Sophocles. So is the entry of the chorus, with their surprise at the doleful sight, but presently they assume much the same part as the ocean nymphs in the Prometheus of Æschylus, and it is from these two plays that he has borrowed most freely. In the development there is no doubt that Euripides was his real master. The litigious element, if I may so call it, which was dear to the Athenians; the introduction of an insolent giant; of the treacherous Dalila, who put forth arguments to be refuted by Samson, and so to fill up long scenes in the play—all this is in Euripides’ best manner. So is the irruption of the distracted messenger near the close, who narrates the catastrophe.

But nowhere is the thorough appreciation of the spirit of Greek tragedy, as well as its form, more manifest than in the choruses, and in the lyrical monodies which are the finest features of the play. He tells us in the preface, already quoted, that he did not observe the form of strophe and antistrophe, strictly corresponding, because this implies a musical accompaniment and performance in singing which was foreign to his purpose. Still less would he bind himself to rhyme, a shackle unknown or rather very rare in the poetry of the Greeks. He writes both lyrical complaints of Samson, and the choral odes which are interludes to the action, in irregular rythm, which we can hardly call metre, and which are yet in the strictest sense lofty poetry. These things are not to the taste of the ordinary commentator. Thus Sir Egerton Brydges, in a handsome and indeed learned edition adorned by Turner’s drawings, says at the end of the first chorus: “Though there are magnificent passages in this chorus, I cannot quite reconcile my ear to the rythm, nor to some of the expressions, which are, I confess, too like prose.” It is interesting for you to know that Cicero said nearly the same thing about Pindar. His elaborate metres sounded to the Roman like prose. But to any one who is intimate with Greek choruses, nothing has ever been composed in English which reproduces their effect so perfectly. I need not add that in substance these odes, partly poetic reflections of a general sort, partly in direct sympathy with the action of the play, are exactly the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In one point only we may say that here Milton is deficient—in that lyrical sweetness which marks many of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides, so that we can recite them as independent poems. Probably Milton felt his subject too great and gloomy for such poetical digressions. For when he chose to give us lyrical sweetness, what can exceed his Comus? Nor do I know anything more Greek than the lovely though learned lyrical poetry toward the close of that immortal masque.

I now pass from the father of English classical poetry to later but not more varied manifestations of Greek influence. The most remarkable work in the early eighteenth century, which took all England by storm, was Pope’s translation of the Iliad. Chapman’s was already there, a very meritorious work, and now rated more highly than its successor. But in Pope’s day style was paramount. The Iliad must read as a great English poem, and we have Homer dressed in eighteenth-century costume, just as the boys that played Terence at Westminster played him in wigs, powder, and patches. It is very easy to criticise Pope’s translation. His whole attitude was like that of Watteau in landscape; his epithets were generally wrong, and wrong in principle. “And the conscious swain blesses the useful light” is the conclusion of a simile. Now Homer’s swain was not conscious, nor did he bless the light as useful.[6]

Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable drawings of the Parthenon—for they were done a few years before its disaster—that he could not even copy Phidias’s work before him, without importing the style of the seventeenth-century Frenchman. All these things are true and obvious, and yet the poet, who in translating another, recasts him into his own mould, though he be faithless as a translator, may be far greater as a poet. Ever since I was introduced to Homer by Pope, more than fifty years ago, I have felt that, with all its anachronisms, Pope’s poem is the greatest and best version of the Greek master, and a proper one for those to read who cannot approach the original. No prose translation, however scholarly and accurate, can give the least idea of the swing of the great epic, and so I feel that the influence of Homer through Pope has been wide and lasting and that the very defects of so great a performance have stimulated oft-renewed attempts at reproducing the great masterpiece. Dryden’s Virgil of course led public taste in the same direction, so that we have an age very diverse from Greek in taste, and very incongruous to it, nevertheless dominated, perhaps even more than people then imagined, by Greek classical models.

The case of lyrical poetry is not dissimilar. The poets of the eighteenth century had before them Horace’s versions of Alcæus and Sappho, and the text of Pindar, who was, as Horace had told them, the greatest master of all. But as he was difficult even for Horace to understand, so he was to the eighteenth-century poets but vaguely intelligible. Above all, the very essence of his studied, careful, and learned genius was wholly misunderstood. He was conceived to be a poet beyond the bounds of strict art, drunk with the muse and pouring forth a torrent of splendid thoughts in disregard of all the shackles of metre, which was so obvious in the Æolic school. Thus they strove to imitate his apparent impetuosity, and the supposed irregularities of his metre, and produced many good poems, inspired indeed by the Greek, but wholly foreign to their model. The greatest of them was he who knew the originals far better than the rest, and took the pains to master them with scholarly care. We have in Gray a poet of really Greek temper and spirit, very learned, very fastidious, very strict in form, though that form be rich and various, and to my thinking well worthy of comparison with Simonides or Bacchylides, both in purity of style and splendour of diction.

An excellent American critic (W. L. Phelps) has shown very clearly how Gray, beginning with classical training and making the pseudo-classical Dryden his model, was nevertheless in middle life swept away by the Romantic wave which flooded England and which made him prefer Keltic and national subjects to those derived from Greek and Latin traditions. All this is perfectly true, yet equally true is it, that no change of subject could change or mar the splendid form, the pure diction, the delicate taste which Gray derived from his careful study of the Greek poets, and which is as clear in his “Welsh bard,” as in his “progress of classical poesy.” No English poet had hitherto grasped the real splendour of Pindar, not even Milton, and so the Pindaric odes of lesser men, such as Cowley and Shenstone, have not survived as popular poems, whereas Dryden’s Ode to St. Cecilia, and a whole series of Gray’s poems, show clearly the matchless training which Greek poetry affords the modern poet, whatever be his subject or his school.

It is in fact much more important and interesting to point out these indirect influences, than to lay stress on the direct borrowing from the Greek in form and diction. This very conflict or contrast may be exemplified in Byron’s poetry. He was a leading member of the Romantic school or fashion, and yet all his life he loved and honoured the classical perfection of the Greeks, and not infrequently by a stray passage proves how minute his knowledge even of fragments of Greek poetry.[7] The political circumstances of modern Greece in the early nineteenth century, the great struggle of the population against Turkish tyranny—all this gave a romantic foreground to the classical taste fostered by the higher schools and colleges throughout Europe; and so the admiration of the old Greeks in art, politics, and literature was a sort of classical justification for the Romanticists who had sprung from the reaction against the false French classicism of an earlier generation. Byron was first in adding the realities of actual Greece to its interest as a mere frame or imaginary locus for classical poetry. None of the eighteenth-century poets, or even the earlier historians of Greece, showed the smallest curiosity about the actual home of Greek literature, the actual cradle that nursed all this unequalled genius.

Even Grote and Thirlwall, long after the poets had discovered what inspiration was to be derived from the mountains and fiords of Hellas, wrote their immortal histories, without any feeling that they would have gained, by a knowledge of the ground, a new and living flavour. For they had both means and leisure to travel and yet they sought no help outside the books of their libraries. But Byron brought into poetry at least that realism about Greece which made a study of Greek and of Greece at first-hand the desire of poets and of artists. Of Keats, who had not the opportunities, I have spoken. In Shelley, we have that perfect combination of romantic imagination with profound Greek culture that makes him the greatest and probably the most lasting of that galaxy that illumined the early nineteenth century. The least Greek of them all was Wordsworth, and I venture to say that had he studied Greek poetry, it would have taught him the essential differences which separate it from prose—lofty style, select diction, above all, compression within strict bounds and moderate limits—and thus have saved both us and him from the dreariness of his prosaic Excursion. Let none of you think that I underrate his poetic work. But in his highest moments it is the glow of Greek splendour, the spiritual lessons of the august Plato that illumine his sober genius, and translate him for the hour into the company of the immortals.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the strong desire to reproduce the Greek masterpieces not only by people who were poets for the occasion, like Lord Derby or Miss Swanwick, but also by the masters who had already proved their greatness to the English world. Robert Browning has given us versions of several plays, the Agamemnon, the Mad Herakles, the Alkestis. In the last, he lays stress rather on the psychological attitude of Euripides, on his character-drawing, than on the lyrical portions, which are not reproduced in lyrical metre. But how easily he could do this he proved to me when I asked him to render a famous ode of the poet in a form approaching the original. Writing to London from Dublin on a Monday, I had his version on Wednesday evening. The original manuscript I have given to an American friend who treasures it; the words appear in my little monograph on Euripides published years ago.