ὁι δ’ ὡς τ’ αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαι
πετρη εφ’ ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,
{hoi d’ hôs t’ aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilai
petrê eph’ hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,}
or
ὁσσον δ’ ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισιν
ἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον,
τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.
[111]
{hosson d’ êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisin
hêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton,
tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.}
It is hard, as the beginnings of Roman poetry show, to devise a metre which is not rough, unmusical, or even grotesque: yet for richness and strength this first metre of Europe has never been rivalled by the Greeks or by any one else. The same natural technical skill appears in more subtle things even than metre or language. Homer is born knowing by some instinct the profound secret of literary art which Aristotle formulated centuries later as the principle of unity of Action. The plot of a play, he writes in the Poetics, ‘should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.... It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be.... Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again the transcendant excellence of Homer appears. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view: while if he had kept it in moderate limits it would have been over-complicated by the variety of incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion.’[112] Once stated, the principle of unity of action becomes a commonplace of literary art. But, as the Annals of Ennius or the Faerie Queen show, it is not obvious until stated, and the poets from whose practice Aristotle made his induction, must have had a rare technical instinct unconsciously to preserve unity of interest through the complications of a long epic or drama. Such achievements were only possible to a people with a natural genius for literary art. In the hands of the Greeks the various elements of literature found their τελος and achieved their natural form, almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to its predestined shape.
This can be illustrated even better from Greek drama. A modern author who wishes to write a play may not find the task easy, but he knows the general form which a drama has to take and the general principles to be followed in writing it. The right length is given him, the division into scenes and acts, the methods of exposition and dialogue, the conception of a dénouement, the law of unity of action, and the rest. The fathers of Greek tragedy had no such help. They had no drama in our sense of the word, but simply a band of fifty persons dressed like satyrs, and dancing round an altar and singing a song. Out of this anything or nothing might have been made. The Greeks, with the instinctive and unerring motions of genius, developed from it the highest and most elaborate of literary forms, and within a hundred years are writing plays which Shelley classes with King Lear, and which Swinburne can call, ‘probably, on the whole, the greatest spiritual work of man’.
In divining the principles of literary art and evolving the various kinds of literature no people can be compared to the Greeks, and probably none can show a mass of work executed with so uniformly high a finish. But when we compare writer with writer we shall find individual artists to rival them. Though the strength of English literature does not lie in technical perfection, Milton, Pope, and Tennyson—to name no others—have in their different ways as firm a grasp of it as any Greek, and it can be learned from French writers, with whom it is the rule rather than the exception, as well as from the Greeks. This is hardly true of another quality of Greek writing, which may be classed with technical finish, though it is in fact something more. It is one of the most characteristic features of Greek; yet on first acquaintance, it is often disconcerting and even distasteful. If a reader new to the classics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Shelley or Tennyson, he came across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae,
ω ξειν’, αγγελλειν Αακεδαιμονιοις ὁτι τηδε
κειμεθα, τοις κεινων ῥημασι πειθομενοι,
[113]
{ô xein’, angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti têde
keimetha, tois keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi,}