But this is hardly the truth. One immensely important thing Shakespeare did owe to Greece, through scholars who were his own immediate predecessors, and that was the general shape and form of the poetic drama.
Milton was an accomplished Greek scholar. It has been already pointed out that his great epic is descended from Homer, and his Lycidas from Theocritus. His Samson Agonistes was deliberately built—though not with complete success—upon the traditional frame-work of Greek tragedies, and Milton himself leaves it to be judged by those who are “not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.” His Ode on the Morning of the Nativity is intended to be Pindaric. But the most palpable advance made by Milton on his predecessor Spenser is in the chastening of his style. The principles of that style Milton derived at first hand from his Hellenic models. He has learned how to use ancient material, how to adapt ancient thoughts, ancient expressions, how to sink them and imbed them in his own, not merely how to overlay or fancifully decorate his own with them. The texture of Milton’s verse is shot through and through with colours borrowed from the Greek; it would often be quite possible to resolve a series of his lines into components which are imitations and quotations. But he has made them all so much a part of himself that we may often pass by his loans, as we never can those of Spenser, unconsciously.
Dryden owns himself an obedient follower of the Greeks. His ode To the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew, like his St. Cecilia’s Day and his Alexander’s Feast, is Pindaric. His admiration for Pindar was indeed peculiarly ardent. He speaks of him as “the inimitable Pindar, who stretches on pinions out of sight, and is carried upward, as it were, into another world.” Of his literary criticism we have spoken; there was a time when he conceived the idea of translating Homer, and he did in fact attempt versions of various writings of Greek poets.
Pope was but an indifferent Greek scholar at first hand; he did indeed freely translate and recast Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by the help of his little Greek and a translation in French, but he never entered into the spirit of Greek life or penetrated to the precise secret of Greek style. Nevertheless, he makes great pretensions to follow in the footsteps of the Greek masters. One thing he did catch—the vigour and fire of Homer; and Pope’s Iliad is still the English Homer commonly read in these days, although Chapman had preceded him, and Cowper, Derby, and Morris have made their more or less faithful renderings since. And yet the book is far too much Pope to be Homer. Of the Pastorals and the Essay on Criticism all has been said above that need be said for our purpose. We have only to add that his burlesque heroics, the Rape of the Lock and the Dunciad, had their prototype in the heroi-comical poems of Greece, the Battle of the Frogs and Mice and the Margites, compositions which were once ascribed to Homer, and which Pope professed to have in mind.
Gray was a scholar of rare attainments in both the language and the literature of Greece. Hence, in no inconsiderable measure, his self-critical spirit. His aim, as stated by himself, is at “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous and musical.” As a poet he suffered from constitutional shortcomings. He is without profound imaginings or ecstatic sensibilities; but his beauties are no less undeniable, although of the sort which are mainly acquired from training. No one can fail to admire the perfect technique of his stanzas. It is doubtful, however, whether any but a Greek scholar can perceive the skill with which he has combined a mosaic of reminiscences of ancient writers into stanzas of perfect English. His Progress of Poesy and his Bard are plainly modelled on Pindar, but even his most beautiful individual expressions are sometimes but translations from the Greek. Said the Greek Phrynichus: “The purple light of love shines on her flushing cheeks.” To this Gray owes his
O’er her warm cheek and rising bosom move
The bloom of young desire and purple light of love.
Of his enthusiasm for Greece we may judge from a passage in the Progress of Poesy:
Woods, that wave o’er Delphi’s steep,
Isles, that crown the Egaean deep,