Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 2 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

To take a far more serious objection next. It is true that, while gazing intently upon the luminous qualities of the Greek spirit, we are tempted to neglect its sterner and more sombre aspect. Not, indeed, that the shadows are not there, patent to superficial observers, and necessary even to the sublimity of the ideal we admire in its serene beauty; but they are so consistently subordinated to light and lustre that he who merely seeks to seize predominant characteristics may find it difficult to appreciate them duly without missing what is even more essential. A writer on the arts of the Greeks is not bound to take into consideration the defects of their civil and domestic life, the discords and disturbance of their politics, the pains they felt and suffered in common with humanity at large, the incomplete morality of a race defined by no sharp line but that of culture from barbarians. It is rather his duty to note how carefully these things, which even we discern as discords, were excluded by them from the sphere of beauty; since it is precisely this that distinguishes the Greeks most decidedly from the modern nations, who have used pain, perplexity, and apparent failure as subjects for the noblest æsthetic handling. The world-pain of our latter years was felt, as a young man may feel it, by the Greeks of the best age; but their artists did not, like Shakespeare and Michael Angelo, Goethe and Beethoven, make this the substance of their mightiest works. Ancient Hellas contained nothing analogous to Hamlet, or the tombs of the Medici to Faust or the C minor symphony. The desolation of humanity adrift upon a sea of chance and change finds expression here and there in a threnos of Simonides or an epigram of Callimachus. The tragic poets are never tired of dwelling upon destiny, inherent partly in the transmitted doom of ancestors, and partly in the moral character of individuals. The depth of Pindar's soul is stirred by the question that has tried all ages: "Creatures of a day! What are we and what are we not?" Such strains, however, are, as it were, occasional and accidental in Greek poetry. The Greek artist, not having a background of Christian hope and expectation against which he could relieve the trials and afflictions of this life, aimed at keeping them in a strictly subordinate place. He sought to produce a harmony in his work which should correspond to health in the body and to temperance in the soul, to present a picture of human destiny, not darkened by the shadows of the tomb, but luminous beneath the light of day. It was his purpose, as indeed it is of all good craftsmen, not to weaken, but to fortify, not to dispirit and depress, but to exalt and animate. The very imperfect conceptions he had formed of immortality determined the course he pursued. He had no hell to fear, no heaven to hope for. It was in no sense his duty to cast a gloom over the only world he knew by painting it in sombre colors, but rather to assist the freedom of the spirit, and to confirm the energies of men by bringing what is glad and beautiful into prominence. In this way, the Greeks, after their own fashion, asserted that unconquerable faith in the goodness of the universe, and in the dignity of the human race, without which progress would be impossible. Though the life of man may be hard and troublous, though diseases and turbulent passions assail his peace, though the history of nations be but a tale that is told, and the days of heroes but a dream between two sleeps, yet the soul is strong to rise above these vapors of the earth into a clearer atmosphere. The real way of achieving a triumph over chance and of defying fate is to turn to good account all fair and wholesome things beneath the sun, and to maintain for an ideal the beauty, strength, and splendor of the body, mind, and will of man. The mighty may win fame, immortal on the lips of poets and in the marble of the sculptor. The meanest may possess themselves in patience and enjoy. Thus the Greeks adopted for their philosophy of life what Clough described as a "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance" of the world. They practised a genial accommodation of their natures to the facts which must perforce regulate the existence of humanity. To ascertain the conditions of nature, and to adapt themselves thereto by training, was the object of their most serious schemes of education. Later on, when the bloom began to pass from poetry and art, and the vigor of national life declined, this attitude of simple manliness diverged into hedonism and asceticism. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die, said one section of the thinkers. Let us bear all hardness, lest we become the slaves of chance and self, said the other. But neither proposition expressed the full mind of the Greeks of the best age. They clearly saw that, in spite of disaster and disease, life was a good thing for those who maintained the balance of moral and physical health. Without asceticism they strove after well-ordered conduct. Without hedonism they took their frugal share of the delightful things furnished by the boon earth in prodigal abundance. The mental condition of such men, expectant, grateful, and serenely acquiescent, has been well expressed by Goethe in lines like these:

That naught belongs to me I know
Save thoughts that never cease to flow
From founts that cannot perish,
And every fleeting shape of bliss
That kindly fortune lets me kiss
And in my bosom cherish.

It is this mental attitude which I think must be regained by us who seek firm foothold in the far more complicated difficulties of the present age. While it is easy, therefore, to omit the darker shadows from our picture of Greek life, because, although they are there, they are almost swallowed up in brightness, it is not easy to exaggerate the tranquil and manly spirit with which the Greeks faced the evils of the world and rose above them. Owing to this faculty for absorbing all sad things and presenting, through art, only the splendor of accomplished strength and beauty, the Greeks have left for the world a unique treasure of radiant forms in sculpture, of lustrous thoughts in poetry, of calm wisdom in philosophy and history. Their power upon all arts and sciences is the power of a harmonizing and health-giving spirit. This it is which, in spite of their perception of the sterner problems of the world, obliges us to describe their genius as adolescent; for adolescence has of strength and sorrow and reflection so much only as is compatible with beauty. This, again, it is which makes their influence so valuable to us now, who need for our refreshening the contact with unused and youthful forces.

At the same time, while insisting upon the truth of all this, many of the chapters in my two volumes have forced upon our minds what is severe and awful in the genius of the Greeks. The Chthonian deities form a counterpart to the dwellers on Olympus. The voice of the people in the Hesiodic poems rises like the cry of Israel from Pharaoh's brickfields rather than the song-like shout of Salaminian oarsmen. Who, again, in reading the Iliad, has not felt that the glory of Achilles, coruscating like a star new-washed in ocean waves, detaches itself from a background of impenetrable gloom? He blazes in his godlike youth for one moment only above the mists of Styx, the waters of Lethe; and it is due to the triumphant imagination of his poet that the consciousness of impending fate adds lustre to his heroism instead of dooming him to the pathetic pallor of the Scandinavian Balder. When we meet Achilles in Hades, and hear him sigh,

Rather would I in the sun's warmth divine
Serve a poor churl who drags his days in grief,
Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine,

we touch the deepest sorrow of the Greek heart, a sorrow lulled to rest in vain by anodynes of Eleusinian mysteries and Samotracian rites, a sorrow kept manfully in check by resolute wills and burning enthusiasms, but which recurred continually, converting their dream of a future life into a nightmare of unsubstantial ennui. If the story of Achilles involves a dreary insight into the end of merely human activity, that of Odysseus turns immediately upon the troubles of our pilgrimage through life. Exquisitely beautiful as are all the outlines, surface touches, and colors in the Odyssey, as of some Mediterranean landscape crowded with delicate human forms, yet beneath the whole there lies an undertone of sombreness. The energy of the hero is inseparable from endurance.

τέτλαθι δὴ κραδίη· καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ' ἔτλης.

That is the exclamation of no light-hearted youngling, but of one who has sounded all the deeps and shallows of the river of experience. And if we have to speak thus of the heroes, what shall we say about the countless common people following their lords to Troy in the cause of a strange woman, those beautiful dead warriors over whom the Æschylean chorus poured forth the most pathetic of lamentations? To pretend that the Greeks felt not the passion and the pain of human agony and strife would be a paradox implying idiocy in him who put it forth. Still, it were scarcely less feeble to forget that their strength lay in restraining the expression of this feeling and in subduing its vehemence. The wounded heroes on the Æginetan pediment are dying with smiles upon their lips; and this may serve as a symbol for the mode of treatment reserved by the Greek artists for what is dark and terrible.

Enough has been already said while dealing with the dramatists about the profound morality and the stern philosophy of the Greek tragic poets. It is not necessary again to traverse that ground. Yet for a moment we may once more remember here what depths of pity and of pathos lie hidden in the legend of Prometheus, whether we think of him as the divine champion of erring men at war with envious deities, or as personified humanity struggling against the forces of niggardly nature. Prometheus and Epimetheus and Pandora dramatize a legend of life supremely sad—so sad, indeed, that the calm genius of the Greeks regarded it with half-averted eyes, and chose rather to blur its outlines than to define what it contained—enough of sorrow to unman the stoutest. Poets of a Northern race would have brooded over this mythus until it became for them the form of all the anguish and revolt and aspiration of the soul of man. Not so the Greeks. Hesiod leaves the Saga in obscurity. Æschylus employs it to exhibit the spirit unperturbed by menaces of mere brute force, and wisely pliant in the end to unavoidable fate. Subsequent poets and philosophers remember Prometheus together with Orpheus only as the founders of the arts and sciences that make men happy. To eliminate the mysterious and the terrible, to accentuate the joyous and the profitable for humane uses, was the truest instinct of the Greeks. Even the tale of Herakles, who chose the hard paths of life, and ascended at last only through flames to clasp Hebe, eternal youth, upon Olympus, "with joy and bliss in over-measure forever," in spite of its severe lesson of morality, is a poem of beautiful human heroism from which the discordant elements are purged away.

To recover, if that be possible, this "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," and to face the problems of the world in which we live with Greek serenity, concerns us at the present time. Having said thus much, I am brought to touch upon the third topic mentioned at the outset of this chapter. Owing to insufficient exposition, I did not in my first series of Studies of Greek Poets, as originally published, make it clear in what way I thought the Greeks could teach those of us for whom the growth of rationalism and the discoveries of science have tended to remove old landmarks. What we have to win for ourselves is a theory of conduct which shall be human, and which shall be based upon our knowledge of nature. Greek morality was distinguished by precisely these two qualities. In its best forms, moreover, it was not antagonistic to the essence of Christianity, but thoroughly in accord with that which is indestructible in Christian teaching. It therefore contained that vital element we now require.