Charles Singer.
The author has to thank Mr. R. W. Livingstone, Dr. E. T. Withington, Prof. A. Platt, and Mr. J. D. Beazley for corrections and suggestions.
LITERATURE
A man walking down Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly to Charing Cross Road passes the Lyric Theatre. If it is the evening, a dramatic performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a tragedy, or some form of comedy. If it is a musical comedy and he enters, he will see elaborate scenery and a play which may open with a prologue and which is partly composed of dialogue between the various characters, partly of songs in various metres sung by a chorus to the accompaniment of an orchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home.
The same imprint, clear or faint, is on all our literary forms, except perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history, biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin, and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost. There are even one or two genres, such as the imaginary speech, which Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found in modern literature. When the curtain rose on Homer, European literature did not exist: long before it falls on the late Byzantines, the lines were laid on which it has moved up to our own day. This is the entire work of a single people, politically weak, numerically small, materially poor—according to the economy of nature which in things of the mind and the spirit gives a germinating power to few. The Greeks are justly admired for individual poems, plays, and pieces of writing; but it was something even greater to have explored the possibilities of literature so far that posterity, while it has developed Greek genres, has not hitherto been able to add to them. This is one part of the Greek Legacy to literature.
Another part are the works themselves. Literature can only be judged by reading it, and certainly it cannot be characterized in a few pages. But a man ignorant of Greek and anxious to estimate its value might form some idea by inquiring the opinions of qualified judges. He would find them unanimous: I suppose it is true that no man of eminence qualified to speak has ever spoken of Greek literature in any tone but one. The first testimony is that of the Romans. It is borne by their literature, starting in translations from Greek, adopting one after another of their genres, permeated through and through (and most of all in the greatest writers) by imitations, reminiscences, influences of Greek, confessing and glorying in the debt. ‘In learning,’ says Cicero, ‘and in every branch of literature, the Greeks are our masters.’[101] A Roman boy should begin his studies with Greek, Quintilian thought, ‘because Latin learning is derived from Greek.’[102] The same note is repeated in the literature of the Renaissance, and re-echoed by the most various voices of our own century.
‘Though one of the Greek tragedians may seem rather greater and more complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading quality. It is marked by grandeur, excellence, sanity, complete humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful intuition (Anschauung). We find these qualities in their surviving lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their philosophers, orators, and historians and, to an equally high degree, in their surviving sculpture.’[103]
‘Beside the great Attic poets, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am absolutely nothing.’[104]