This is what is meant by “Classical” Hellenism. True, no scholar would dare to say that even in the classical age every Greek who has left us a book or a fragment was always as perfect as Greek principles and ideals were perfect. Homer sometimes nods. We may find palpable blemishes not a few. But we must judge a national literature as a whole; and when, as with the Greek, a literature can show so large a proportion which is flawless, when it is so obviously informed with one and the same artistic spirit, so manifestly controlled by the same canons of taste, then we may use our general terms with more confidence than we can usually feel in generalizing of whole peoples and their histories.
In later times, when Greece was no longer free, when cultured Greeks had been scattered into Asia Minor, Syria, and to Alexandria, when literature became mere reading, then Greek art and letters lost their prime virtue. Oratory declined, as poetry had done. Greek writing became more oriental, more “Asian” in its artificiality. In classical Greek the ornamentation was not compassed for its own sake. It grew spontaneously out of the subject and helped the subject. But when Greek literature became “unclassical,” when it became artificial, mere imitation and make-believe, when it was not the outcome of a national spirit, but was forced in the hotbeds of literary coteries and court-favour, then ornamentation was first and foremost; poems and speeches were composed in order to bring in fine things. Rhetoric grew bombastic and poetry finical; or, as it is commonly expressed, literature became “Asiatic” instead of “Attic.” This literature in general is sometimes called “Hellenistic,” rather than “Hellenic”; but that term should be appropriated to other purposes. Its headquarters being at Alexandria, the title “Alexandrian” has come to be virtually a term of disparagement in literature.
When therefore we speak of the influence of Greek literature on English, we include not merely a fund of classical history and of mythology, not merely a long list of Greek words and Greek allusions, not even merely an inheritance of all the great forms of poetry and prose writing, but also that way of looking at things and that style of putting things which we call Hellenic. We mean not only so many similes, metaphors and figures of speech, but a whole scope of thinking and style.
We might, indeed, in some rough way, gauge the influence of Greece by the mere titles of English books or compositions bearing such Greek names as Utopia, Arcadia, Comus, Pindaric Odes, Endymion, Hellas, Prometheus Unbound, Hellenics, Life and Death of Jason, The Lotus-Eaters. We might gauge it in some measure by the allusions scattered up and down from Chaucer to Tennyson, allusions to Homer and his Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector, his Circe and all the beings of his mythology, to Greek history, to Plato and Aristotle. We might gauge it in a measure by terms like Parnassus, Clio, Helicon, Academe, and similar references to the literary haunts and divinities of Greece. We might further take the Greek words which now form part of our English vocabulary.
But the subject requires more methodical treatment, and perhaps some little retrospect. Meanwhile we may well assert with Shelley:
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,