And where are they? and where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now—
The heroic bosom beats no more!
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?
During the last fifty years the study of Greek literature has been set on a new basis. A collection of ill-digested matter no longer suffices. Greek is taught more understandingly and more deeply. First comes a patient observant study of the language; afterwards, in years of maturity, are estimated the qualities of the thought and of the style; these are set in clearer lights, and turned to a direct application. Landor is the first modern in whom this sort of study reveals its effects. His Greek devotion to classical associations, to ideal beauty, his Greek aversion to the mysterious, his love for clearness and purity of outline, appear cold to many a reader. He is too pellucid, of too delicate a preciseness, they imagine. But Landor does not displease through these qualities, which are virtues. His coldness is constitutional. However that may be, his imaginary dialogues, imitated from Plato, and the poetry of his Hellenics, show the Greek influence in a fuller form than we have met with hitherto. Since Landor’s day our literature is pervaded with Greek ideals: it aims at Greek style, and often it attains fairly to its mark. We need not deal with matter so voluminous as that of Browning, nor with a style so inconsistent. But Browning’s love of Greek is matter of fame. Has he not translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Alcestis and the Heracles of Euripides? Nor need we deal with the poetry of Swinburne. It is enough to point out that the Atalanta in Calydon is in spirit intensely Greek, and that its most famous speech is a translation from Euripides.
From William Morris we have a translation of the Odyssey; he has written the Life and Death of Jason and the Earthly Paradise, and both of these owe almost everything—their matter and the charm of their manner—to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Apollonius, and to the Greek tragedians.
To two of the best and purest poets of our age Greece has supplied the very breath of literary life. One is Matthew Arnold, the other is Tennyson. Matthew Arnold as critic, Matthew Arnold as poet, is equally Hellenic. He has been charged with “an air of aristocratic selectness and literary exclusiveness.” The art of Pheidias is open to the same objection. What really marks the style of Matthew Arnold is his reasoned simplicity of taste, his cultivated appreciation of the delicate aroma of words and the poetical atmosphere of thought. Like Tennyson, he has a true eye for beauty, grace, and congruity of effect. He compasses the “liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.” It may be that he lacks abandon. He may not feel with the poignancy, or soar with the boldness, of the greatest creators. But, artistically considered, he is as nearly perfect as it is given to man to be. His poetic style is, indeed, almost too perfect for the general. When he says
Or where the echoing oars