Swinburne and Matthew Arnold have not translated old Greek dramas, but have composed plays after that model. To an intelligent reader who has no knowledge of Greek, I know no better approach than to read the Atalanta or the Erechtheus of Swinburne, or, if he prefer it, the Merope of Arnold, which is not so great a poem as either of the others, but just as faithful a mirror of Greek mind; for the exuberance of Swinburne’s choruses, the unrestrained riot of his ebullitions against the providence of the Gods, may be splendid poetry—they are foreign to the chaste and moderate diction which characterises almost all Greek literature. If there be a great exception, it is in the gloomy grandeur of Æschylus, and accordingly no play has been so often attempted in English as the Agamemnon.[8]
When we pass from this large influence of Greek drama to that of the lyric fragments or the idylls and love stories of our modern poets, I am met by an old assertion of the pedants, that the Greeks were wanting in that love and feeling for nature which is the prerogative of the Romantic school. I see no such contrast between Classical and Romantic. Gray, the most classical of our lyric poets, was the first to insist upon the necessity of a poet refreshing his soul with the wild beauties of mountain scenery. If we had more of Sappho, we should find that she too was romantic in that as in every other reasonable sense. The last fragment recovered, which prophesies that her girl friend will shine at Sardis like the moon among the stars in a summer night, paints the splendours of such a night in the glowing colours of a true poet of nature. There is in Theocritus, there is in Apollonius, ample evidence of a delight in the sights, and still more the sounds, of nature, and so the most classical of our modern lyric poets, Tennyson, shows great intimacy with Theocritus, and takes not only his images but still more his tone from that delightful original. Such images as
Sleep that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,
and again,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmurings of innumerable bees,
are, if not translated from Theocritus, certainly suggested by him. A more explicit borrowing from the Greek will be found in the comparison of a strong man’s biceps to the passing of running water over a stone that does not break it:
And bared the knotted column of his throat,
The massive square of his heroic breast,
And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.
But in every page of that poet which is not mere familiar home life, I feel in the splendour of his style the very echo of Greek work, and I can well imagine how Euripides would have revelled in the lines,
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
The influence of Greek comedy is too complicated to be discussed at the close of this discourse. For the greatest of the Greek masters, Aristophanes, has so intensely Attic a quality that we might as well try to imitate the work of Phidias. But his genteel successor Menander has become, through the versions of Plautus and Terence, the father of genteel comedy in Europe. He was extravagantly praised and popular in decadent Greece. I for one cannot hold that his legacy stands high among the priceless treasures bequeathed to us by his nation. But of his influence there can be no question.[9]