The thesis of the British belle-lettrists, to which they devote their energies, might be stated thus: British culture includes Greek culture. They are very modern, very English, very sentimental, these British scholars. While the German Doctors use Greek as a stalking-horse for Teutonic psychology, these English gentlemen use it as a dressmaker's model upon which they exhibit home-made English lyrics and British stock morality. The lesson which Browning sees in Alcestis is the same that he gave us in James Lee's Wife. Browning's appeal is always the appeal to robust feeling as the salvation of the world. Gilbert Murray, on the other hand, sheds a sad, clinging, Tennysonian morality over Dionysus. Jowett is happy to announce that Plato is theologically sound, and gives him a ticket-of-leave to walk anywhere in England. Swinburne clings to that belief in sentiment which marks the Victorian era, but Swinburne finds the key to life in unrestraint instead of in restraint.
There is a whole school of limp Grecism in England, which has grown up out of Keats's Grecian Urn, and which is now buttressed with philosophy and adorned with scholarship; and no doubt it does bear some sort of relation to Greece and to Greek life. But this Anglican Grecism has the quality which all modern British art exhibits,—the very quality which the Greeks could not abide,—it is tinged with excess. The Briton likes strong flavors. He likes them in his tea, in his port wine, in his concert-hall songs, in his pictures of home and farm life. He likes something unmistakable, something with a smack that lets you know that the thing has arrived. In his literature he is the same. Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson lay it on thick with sentiment. Keats drips with aromatic poetry, which has a wonder and a beauty of its own—and whose striking quality is excess. The scented, wholesale sweetness of the modern æsthetic school in England goes home to its admirers because it is easy art. Once enjoy a bit of it and you never forget it. It is always the same, the 'old reliable,' the Oxford brand, the true, safe, British, patriotic, moral, noble school of verse; which exhibits the manners and feelings of a gentleman, and has success written in every trait of its physiognomy.
How this school of poetry invaded Greece is part of the history of British expansion in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era the Englishman brought cricket and morning prayers into South Africa. Robert Browning established himself and his carpet-bag in comfortable lodgings on the Acropolis—which he spells with a K to show his intimate acquaintance with recent research. It must be confessed that Robert Browning's view of Greece never pleased, even in England. It was too obviously R. B. over again. It was Pippa and Bishop Blougram with a few pomegranate seeds and unexpected orthographies thrown in. The Encyclopædia Britannica is against it, and suggests, wittily enough, that one can hardly agree with Browning that Heracles got drunk for the purpose of keeping up other people's spirits.
So, also, Edward FitzGerald was never taken seriously by the English; but this was for another reason. His translations are the best transcriptions from the Greek ever done by this British school; but FitzGerald never took himself seriously. I believe that if he had only been ambitious, and had belonged to the academic classes,—like Jowett for instance,—he could have got Oxford behind him, and we should all have been obliged to regard him as a great apostle of Hellenism. But he was a poor-spirited sort of man, and never worked up his lead.
Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, began the serious profession of being a Grecian. He took it up when there was nothing in it, and he developed a little sect of his own, out of which later came Swinburne and Gilbert Murray, each of whom is the true British article. While Swinburne is by far the greater poet, Murray is by far the more important of the two from the ethnological point of view. Murray was the first man to talk boldly about God, and to introduce his name into all Greek myths, using it as a fair translation of any Greek adjective. There is a danger in this boldness. The reader's attention becomes hypnotized with wondering in what manner God is to be introduced into the next verse. The reader becomes so concerned about Mr. Murray's religious obsessions that he forgets the Greek altogether and remembers only Shakespeare's hostess in her distress over the dying Falstaff: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God,—I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.'
Murray and Arnold are twins in ethical endeavor. I think that it was Arnold who first told the British that Greece was noted for melancholy and for longings. He told them that chastity, temperance, nudity, and a wealth of moral rhetoric marked the young man of the Periclean period. Even good old Dean Plumptre has put this young man into his prefaces. Swinburne added the hymeneal note,—the poetic nature-view,—of which the following may serve as an example:—
| And the trees in their season brought forth and were kindled anew |
| By the warmth of the mixture of marriage, the child-bearing dew. |
There is hardly a page in Swinburne's Hellenizing verse that does not blossom with Hymen. The passages would be well suited for use in the public schools of to-day where sex-knowledge in its poetic aspects is beginning to be judiciously introduced.
This contribution of Swinburne's,—the hymeneal touch,—and Murray's discovery that the word God could be introduced with effect anywhere, went like wildfire over England. They are characteristic of the latest phase of Anglo-Grecism.
Gilbert Murray has, in late years, had the field to himself. He stands as the head and front of Greek culture in England. It is he, more than any one else, who is the figure-head of dramatic poetry in England to-day; and, as such, his influence must be met, and, as it were, passed through, by the American student who is studying the Greek classics.