Such reflections are trite and commonplace. Yet who can resist the force of their truth and pathos?
οὐχ ἁμῖν τὸν Ἔρωτα μόνοις ἔτεχ', ὡς ἐδοκεῦμες,
Νικία, ᾧτινι τοῦτο θεῶν ποκα τέκνον ἔγεντο·
οὐχ ἁμῖν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται ἦμες,
οἳ θνατοὶ πελόμεσθα, τὸ δ' αὔριον οὐκ ἐσορῶμες[144]—
said Theocritus, looking back into the far past, and remembering that the gifts of love and beauty have belonged to men and gods from everlasting. With what redoubled force may we, after the lapse of twenty centuries, echo these words, when we tread the ground he knew and read the songs he sang! His hills stir our vague and yearning admiration, his sea laughs its old laugh of waywardness and glee, his flowers bloom yearly, and fade in the spring, his pine and olive branches overshadow us; we listen to the bleating of his goats, and taste the sweetness of the spring from which he drank; the milk and honey are as fresh upon our lips, the wine in winter by the wood fire, when the winds are loud is just as fragrant; youth is still youth, nor have the dark-eyed maidens lost their charm. Truly οὐχ ἁμῖν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται ἦμες. In this consists the power of Theocritean poetry. It strikes a note which echoes through our hearts by reason of its genuine simplicity and pathos. The thoughts which natural beauty stirs in our minds find their embodiment in his sweet, strong verse; and though since his time the world has grown old, though the gods of Greece have rent their veils and fled with shrieks from their sanctuaries, though in spite of ourselves we turn our faces skyward from the earth, though emaciated saints and martyrs have supplanted Adonis and the Graces, though the cold, damp shades of Calvinism have chilled our marrow and our blood, yet there remain deep down within our souls some primal sympathies with nature, some instincts of the faun or satyr or sylvan, which education has not quite eradicated. "The hand which hath long time held a violet doth not soon forego her perfume, nor the cup from which sweet wine had flowed his fragrance."
I have dwelt long upon the peculiar properties of classical landscape as described by the Greek idyllists, and as they still exist for travellers upon the more sheltered shores of the Mediterranean, because it is necessary to understand them before we can appreciate the truth of Theocritus. Of late years much has been written about the difference between classical and modern ways of regarding landscape. Mr. Ruskin has tried to persuade us that the ancients only cared for the more cultivated parts of nature, for gardens or orchards, from which food or profit or luxurious pleasure might be derived. And in this view there is no doubt some truth. The Greeks and Romans paid far less attention to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of decay. In this they resembled all Southern nations. An Italian of the present day avoids ruinous places and solitudes however splendid. Among the mountains he complains of the brutto paese in which he has to live, and is always longing for town gayeties and the amenities of civilized society.[145] The ancients, again, despised all interests that pretended to rival the paramount interest of civic or military life. Seneca's figurative expression circum flosculos occupatur might be translated literally as applied to a trifler to denote the scorn which thinkers, statesmen, patriots, and generals of Greece and Rome felt for mere rural prettiness; while Quintilian's verdict on Theocritus (whom, however, he allows to be admirabilis in suo genere), musa illa rustica et pastoralis non forum modo verum ipsam etiam urbem reformidat, characterizes the insensibility of urban intellects to a branch of art which we consider of high importance. But it is very easy to overstrain this view, and Mr. Ruskin, perhaps, has laid an undue stress on Homer in his criticism of the classics, whereas it is among the later Greek and Roman poets that the analogy of modern literature would lead us to expect indications of a genuine taste for unadorned nature. These signs the idyllic poets amply supply; but in seeking for them we must be prepared to recognize a very different mode of expression from that which we are used to in the florid poets of the modern age. Conciseness, simplicity, and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art. Moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from a Greek unless it appeared before him in a human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley's Ode to the West Wind gave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions. We who are apt to look for rhapsodies and brilliant outpourings of eloquent fancy can scarcely bring ourselves to recollect what a delicate sense of nature and what profound emotions are implied in the conceptions of Pan and Hyacinthus and Galatea. The misuse which has been made of mythology by modern writers has effaced half its vigor and charm. It is only by returning to the nature which inspired these myths that we can reconstruct their exquisite vitality. Different ages and nations express themselves by different forms of art. Music appears to be dominant in the present period; sculpture ruled among the Greeks, and struck the key-note for all other arts. Even those sentiments which in our mind are most vague, the admiration of sunset skies, or flowers or copsewoods in spring, were expressed by them in the language of definite human form. They sought to externalize and realize as far as possible, not to communicate the inmost feelings and spiritual suggestions arising out of natural objects. Never advancing beyond corporeal conditions, they confined themselves to form, and sacrificed the charm of mystery, which is incompatible with very definite conception. It was on this account that sculpture, the most exactly imitative of the arts, became literally architectonic among the Greeks. And for a precisely similar reason music, which is the most abstract and subjective of the arts, the most evanescent in its material, and the vaguest, assumes the chief rank among modern arts. Sculpture is the poetry of the body, music the language of the soul.
Having once admitted their peculiar mode of feeling Nature, no one can deny that landscape occupies an important place in Greek literature. Every line of Theocritus is vital with a strong passion for natural beauty, incarnated in myths. But even in descriptive poetry he is not deficient. His list of trees and flowers is long, and the epithets with which they are characterized are very exquisite—not, indeed, brilliant with the inbreathed fancy of the North, but so perfectly appropriate as to define the special beauty of the flower or tree selected. In the same way, a whole scene is conveyed in a few words by mere conciseness of delineation, or by the artful introduction of some incident suggesting human emotion. Take for example this picture of the stillness of the night:
ἠνίδε σιγᾷ μὲν πόντος, σιγῶντι δ' ἀῆται·
ἁ δ' ἐμὰ οὐ σιγᾷ στέρνων ἔντοσθεν ἀνία,
ἀλλ' ἐπὶ τήνῳ πᾶσα καταίθομαι, ὅς με τάλαιναν
ἀντὶ γυναικὸς ἔθηκε κακὰν καὶ ἀπάρθενον ἦμεν.[146]
Idyl ii. 38-41.
Or this:
ἀλλὰ τὺ μὲν χαίροισα ποτ' ὠκεανὸν τρέπε πώλους
πότνι', ἐγὼ δ' οἴσω τὸν ἐμὸν πόνον, ὥσπερ ὑπέσταν.
χαῖρε, Σελαναία λιπαρόχροε· χαίρετε δ', ἄλλοι
ἀστέρες, εὐκήλοιο κατ' ἄντυγα Νυκτὸς ὀπαδοί.[147]