The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

Greek literature is also rich in verse “epigram” in the original sense of the word. In modern times we have come to associate with the epigram the notion of a pithy composition containing a neat and witty point, and particularly a “sting in the tail.” This description seldom suits the Greek type, especially in its earlier days, but is derived rather from the custom of the epigrammatists of Rome. An “epigram” was originally a composition to be inscribed upon a monument, votive offering, or the like. That it should be brief was an obvious requirement, and it was natural that it should try to excel mere commonplace. But wit and “point” of a biting kind were alien to the first conception. A Simonides or other early poet wrote a couplet or a quatrain which might be pathetic, eulogistic, or even almost simply descriptive, and this was an “epigram” if actually intended as, or proposed as fit for, an inscription. In later times the composition of such pieces was a poetic exercise, the occasion being imaginary, and the tendency to impart point and wit naturally increased. Very many charming little cameo-poems of this kind, touching upon most of the elements of human life, are to be found in what is known as the Greek Anthology, some of the best being of the Graeco-Roman age and written by Romans as well as Greeks throughout the Greek world. Our own epigram, whatever may be its change of character, is derived through French and Latin channels—particularly through Martial—from the Greek invention. It is probable also that the Italian, and thence the English, sonnet owes much to the pattern set in the Greek epigram.

In the regions of prose we can hardly be so definite. In history, oratory, philosophy, we still return again and again to the Greeks for inspiration, but the inspiration is chiefly one of spirit, not of outward form or special thoughts.

Herodotus, who began to flourish about 450 B.C., and who writes concerning the Persian invasion of Greece, and, by way of preface, tells of Lydia, Babylon, Egypt, Scythia, is still known as the “Father of history.” His undying charm is his style, the style of a delightful story-teller. Clear and direct as all the best Greek writing is, there is something so fresh, so frank, so suave, about Herodotus, that, even if he tells falsehoods knowingly—as some critics say, but as we need not believe—we cannot grow virtuously indignant with him. He is both uncritical and shrewd—shrewd where the knowledge of his times guides him, uncritical where they were ignorant. His stronger-minded contemporary Thucydides is the very pattern of an historian. His function is to tell the history of the long protracted Peloponnesian war, and he tells it inimitably. The graphic terseness of his account is only equalled by his severe impartiality. If he tells you of a battle, he describes luminously its main features, how it went, who won it, and what the consequences were. He does not attempt to minimize or explain away an Athenian defeat or crime because he is an Athenian. If a political party commits an error, he tells us so, and tells us how. It is scarcely possible to find out precisely his own political views. If he describes the terrible plague of Athens or the terrible fall before Syracuse, he describes it with moving pathos. But he does not overdo his part. The pathos is in the distinct simplicity of the picture, not worked up by labour of ambitious words. It is perhaps enough warrant of his excellence that he grew in the admiration of Macaulay with every year of Macaulay’s maturing judgement.

In oratory the great name of Demosthenes stands pre-eminent. Volumes of his speeches are in our hands, political and forensic speeches equally. The word “Philippics” has become typical for invective. That Demosthenes is the prince of orators everybody knows. But why? We may imagine the crude aspirant to oratory reading a speech of Demosthenes in amazement, and asking “Where are the flashings of rhetoric? Where the dazzling flights of imagination? Where the magnificent bursts of diction?” The highest art is to conceal art, and Demosthenes would have been no perfect artist if he had allowed the novice to perceive exactly wherein his perfection lay. He is the perfect orator just because he can be graphic, cogent, pathetic, anything he will, without all those rhetorical tropes, purple patches, bouquets of flowery diction, which weaker men are driven to use. His language is like a Greek statue, instinct with a life diffused through every part, but showing no straining at effect, accentuating nothing beyond its value as a persuasive or moving force. His metaphors and similes are few; often his words are even homely; but there is a directness, a “home-coming,” about his diction and his periods, a dexterity about his arrangement, a noble fervour and simplicity.

In philosophy the Greeks have been the teachers of the civilized world. Two only of their great masters need be considered here. It is said that every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. This means that there are two chief types of mind which really think, and of those one is akin to the mind of Plato, the other akin to that of Aristotle. Plato is the suggestive, but inconclusive, imaginative, transcendental philosopher. Aristotle is the matter-of-fact, logical, analytical. The style is like the men. The style of Plato is rich with poetical colour, that of Aristotle is hard and thin, prose of the prose. Between them these two cover nearly all the ground of speculative thinking, and modern thought can never emancipate itself from them. For centuries in the Middle Ages the philosophy of Aristotle was almost a religion of civilized Europe, and it is the fact that even now students of morals and politics find themselves constantly returning to Aristotle. The Stagirite, as he was called because of his birth at Stagira, lived before the days of experimental science. Yet he virtually anticipated much of modern scientific results. He was nearly an evolutionist. Plato, on the other hand, has had his votaries. He, too, was a religion in Renaissance Italy. Whether we can always follow him or not, he is a stimulating influence, and he has left his mark in many places where one would hardly look for it. We should perhaps scarcely light on Wordsworth’s beautiful Ode on the Intimations of Immortality as an echo of Plato. Yet all its fancy concerning “a sleep and a forgetting,” and the previous existence of the soul, is pure Plato. Whether Wordsworth was conscious of it or not, his mind had been pervaded by the Platonic influence. Nor was it much otherwise with Shelley. Of direct and appreciable bearing upon literature since his day, is the fact that Plato is our first model of the prose dialogue or imaginary conversation. He did not indeed absolutely invent this form of writing, but the comparatively crude work which preceded him is lost, and it is Plato who stands to Berkeley or Landor as their prototype and exemplar. Centuries later Lucian followed in his steps, though with a somewhat different purpose, combining, as he declared, the philosophical dialogue with the spirit of Attic comedy. Plato’s dialogues are always serious in intention, whatever humour or lightness of touch he may display; Lucian’s are but partially serious, the humour, which tends to satire, being the predominant element.

A work of Plato to which the world owes much in the way of imitation is his Ideal Commonwealth or Republic, from which are derived in succession the hints for the Civitas Dei or City of God of St. Augustine, the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, the New Atlantis of Bacon, and various minor efforts in the theoretical construction of an ideal polity.

Here we must cease to speak of Greek literature in classical Greece. The subject is inexhaustible.

Yet before we come to illustrate in some detail the effect of all this wealth of original thought and splendid style on English, we must mention two famous writers in the later or “post-classical” period of Greek literature. These introduced new forms of prose writing which have had many imitators in every European country. They are Lucian and Plutarch. Lucian wrote in Syria and in Athens during the later part of the second century of our era. He composed what we should call “articles,” in the form of dialogue and essays, nearly all of them of a satirically humorous character, but nearly all possessed of sound common sense and practical purpose. Lucian is the precursor of Swift, Voltaire, and Heine. Of Swift he is the predecessor in more ways than one. Lucian supplies us with the first instance of ironical fiction. His True History is composed in the same ironical vein, and with precisely the same assumption of seriousness, as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It is to Lucian that Swift owes the hint for such a work, and, after all, the hint was in this case a great part of the genius. The width of Lucian’s range may be recognized from the fact that both Swift and Sterne have been called the “English Lucian.”

If Herodotus is the “Father of History,” Plutarch (first century A.D.) is the father of biography. Strictly speaking neither is the originator of the form of literature in question; nevertheless each is to be judged rather by the influence of his example than by absolute invention of a literary species. Besides the biographies there exists much other work of Plutarch in the nature of moral essays and “articles” on historical or antiquarian subjects, and this work was liberally drawn upon by essayists after the Revival of Learning, in particular by Montaigne and Bacon. Nevertheless his chief contribution to the development of literature was in his “Parallel Lives,” a series of biographies and character-studies, in which a distinguished Greek and a distinguished Roman were studied in comparison, pair by pair. To Shakespeare the Lives were known through North’s translation, and, in Coriolanus and the other Roman plays, they supplied not only his conception of antiquity and ancient character, but also the great bulk of the matter which he dramatized. The genesis of modern sketches of the kind represented in Macaulay’s Chatham, Lord Clive, or Warren Hastings, can be distinctly traced to similar short studies in the Greek of Plutarch.