ANCIENT ORGANS OF PUBLIC OPINION.[56]
BY PROF. R. C. JEBB.
During several weeks in the early part of this year, the attention of the English public was fixed with intense anxiety on the fortunes of one man, who had undertaken a perilous mission in the service of his country. When the Egyptian difficulty was at its worst, General Gordon had started for Khartoum, to aid the Government, by his personal influence, in the policy of rescuing the garrisons and retiring from the Soudan. The journey, while it reflected fresh honor on him, necessarily imposed a grave responsibility on those who had sanctioned it. Any moment might bring the news of his death. If such news came, it was generally thought and said, the Ministry would fall. In a country with the temperament of England, the mere existence of such a belief set one thinking. A year ago, Gordon’s name, though familiar to the well-informed classes, would not have acted like a spell on the nation. But a popular biography of him which had appeared had given occasion for much writing in the newspapers. A short time had sufficed to make the broad facts of his career known throughout the length and breadth of the land. People knew that he had welded a loose Chinese rabble into an army which saved the reigning dynasty of China; that, alone of Christians, he is named in the prayers of Mecca; that he does not care for personal rewards; that he is fearless of death; and that he trusts in God. To impress these facts on the popular imagination had been the work of a few weeks; to concentrate the force of popular opinion, if he had been sacrificed, would have been the work of a few hours. Seldom, perhaps, has anything illustrated more vividly that great and distinctive condition of modern existence in free countries,—the double power wielded by the newspaper press, at once as the ubiquitous instructor and as the rapid interpreter of a national mind. It was natural at such a time, for one whose pursuits suggested the comparison, to look from the modern to the ancient world, and to attempt some estimate of the interval which separates them in this striking and important respect. In the ancient civilisations, were there any agencies which exercised a power analogous in kind, though not comparable in degree, to that of the modern press? To begin with, we feel at once that the despotic monarchies of the ancient East will not detain us long. For them, national opinion normally meant the opinion of the king. We know the general manner of record which is found graven on stone, in connection with the images or symbols of those monarchs. As doctors seem still to differ a good deal about the precise translation of so many of those texts, it might be rash to quote any, but this is the sort of style which seems to prevail among the royal authors: “He came up with chariots. He said that he was my first cousin. He lied. I impaled him. I am Artakhshatrá. I flayed his uncles, his brothers, and his cousins. I am the king, the son of Daryavush. I crucified two thousand of the principal inhabitants. I am the shining one, the great and the good.” From the monarchical East, we turn with more curiosity to Greece and Rome. There, at least, there was a life of public opinion. Apart from institutions, which are crystallised opinion, were there any living, non-official voices in which this public opinion could be heard?
The Homeric poems are not only the oldest monuments of Greek literature, but also the earliest documents of the Greek race. Out of the twilight of the prehistoric past, a new people, a new type of mind, are suddenly disclosed in a medium of pellucid clearness. Like Athene springing adult and full-armed from the head of Zeus, this new race, when Homer reveals it, has already attained to a mature consciousness of itself, and is already equipped with the aptitudes which are to distinguish it throughout its later history. The genius of the Homeric Greek has essentially the same traits which recur in the ripest age of the Greek republics,—even as Achilles and Ulysses are personal ideals which never lost their hold on the nation. This very fact points the contrast between two aspects of Homeric life—the political, and the social. In Homeric politics, public opinion has no proper place. The king, with his council of nobles and elders, can alone originate or discuss measures. The popular assembly has no active existence. But the framework of Homeric monarchy contains a social life in which public opinion is constantly alert. Its activity, indeed, could scarcely be greater under the freest form of government. And we see that this activity has its spring in distinctive and permanent attributes of the Hellenic race. It arises from quickness of perception and readiness of speech. The Homeric Greek feels keenly, observes shrewdly, and hastens to communicate his thoughts. An undertone of popular comment pervades the Homeric poems, and is rendered more impressive by the dramatic form in which it is usually couched. The average man, who represents public feeling, is expressed by the Greek indefinite pronoun, τις. “Thus would a man speak, with a glance at his neighbor,” is the regular Homeric formula. We hear opinion in the making. This spokesman of popular sentiment is constantly introduced at critical moments: for the sake of brevity we may call him by his Greek name Tis. When the fight is raging over the corpse of Patroclus, Tis remarks to his friends that they will be disgraced for ever if they allow the Trojans to carry off the body;—better die on the spot. Hector, in proposing a truce to Ajax, suggests that they should exchange gifts, and imagines what Tis will say: Tis will approve of it as a graceful courtesy between chivalrous opponents. Menelaus considers that another hero, Antilochus, has beaten him in a chariot race by unfair means; but thinks it necessary to take precautions against Tis imagining that he has brought this complaint in the hope of prevailing by the influence of his rank. This is perhaps one of the most remarkable Homeric compliments to the penetration and to the influence of Tis. When the sounds of music and dancing, as at a marriage feast, are heard in the house of Odysseus in Ithaca, Tis is listening outside; and he blamed Penelope for her fancied hardness of heart, “because she had not had the courage to keep the great house of her gentle lord steadfastly till he should come home.” Tis is not always the mouthpiece of such elevated sentiments. With a frank truth to life and nature, Homer depicts Tis as indulging in an ignoble joy by stabbing the corpse of his once-dreaded foe, Hector, and remarking that he is safer to handle now than when he was burning the ships. In the Odyssey, when the maiden Nausicaa is conducting Odysseus to the city of her father Alcinous, we catch glimpses of a Tis who nearly approaches the character of Mrs. Grundy, with an element of spiteful gossip added. The fidelity with which Tis reflects public opinion is further seen in the circumstance that his solicitude for the rights of man is not strong enough to counteract his natural disposition to exalt over the fallen. Thersites was a commoner who presumed to speak his mind among his betters,—when one of them, Odysseus, dealt him a smart blow on the back, and caused him to resume his seat in tears. Tis laughed for joy, saying in effect that it served Thersites right, and that he probably would not do it again. The Tory sentiment of this passage makes it appropriate to quote the version of it by the late Lord Derby:—
“The Greeks, despite their anger, laughed aloud, And one to other said, ‘Good faith, of all The many works Ulysses well hath done, Wise in the council, foremost in the fight, He ne’er hath done a better, than when now He makes this scurril babbler hold his peace. Methinks his headstrong spirit will not soon Lead him again to vilify the kings.’”
Here it might be said that Tis figures as the earliest authentic example of a being whose existence has sometimes been doubted by British anthropologists, the Conservative working-man. But, if we would be just to Tis in his larger Homeric aspects, we must allow that his sympathies are usually generous, and his utterances often edifying. As to the feeling with which Tis was regarded, Homer has a word for it which is hard to translate: he calls it aidos. This aidos—the sense of reverence or shame—is always relative to a standard of public opinion, i.e. to the opinion formed by the collective sayings of Tis; as, on the other hand, the listening to an inner voice, the obedience to what we call a moral sense, is Homerically called nemesis. And just as Tis is sometimes merely the voice of smug respectability, so aidos is sometimes conventional in a low way. When Diomedes is going by night to spy out the Trojan camp, several heroes offer to go with him, but only one can be chosen. Agamemnon tells him that he must not yield to aidos, and take the man of highest station rather than the man of highest merit: where aidos appears as in direct conflict with nemesis. But more often these two principles are found acting in harmony,—recommending the same course of conduct from two different points of view. There is a signal example of this in the Odyssey, which is also noteworthy on another ground, viz., as the only episode in the Homeric poems which involves a direct and formal appeal from established right of might to the corrective agency of public opinion. The suitors of Penelope have intruded themselves into the house of her absent lord, and are wasting his substance by riotous living. Her son Telemachus convenes the men of Ithaca in public assembly, and calls on them to stop this cruel wrong. He appeals to nemesis, to aidos, and to fear of the gods. “Resent it in your own hearts; and have regard to others, neighboring folk who dwell around,—and tremble ye at the wrath of the gods.” The appeal fails. The public opinion exists, but it has not the power, or the courage, to act.
After the age which gave birth to the great epics, an interval elapses before we again catch the distinct echoes of a popular voice. Our Homeric friend Tis is silent. Or, rather, to be more exact, Tis ceases to speak in his old character, as the nameless representative of the multitude, and begins to speak in a new quality. The individual mind now commences to express itself in forms of poetry which are essentially personal, interpreting the belief and feelings of the poet himself. Tis emerges from the dim crowd, and appears as Tyrtaeus, summoning the Spartans, in stirring elegy, to hear his counsels; or as Sappho, uttering her passion in immortal lyrics; or as Pindar, weaving his thoughts into those magnificent odes which glorify the heroes and the athletes of Greece. It is a capital distinction of classical Greek literature that, when its history is viewed as a whole, we do not find it falling into a series of artificial chapters, determined by imitation of models which were in fashion at this or that epoch. Greek literature is original, not derivative; we trace in it the course of a natural growth; we hear in it the spontaneous utterance of Greek life from generation to generation. The place of Pindar in this development has one aspect of peculiar interest. There is a sense in which he may be said to stand midway between Homeric epos and Athenian drama.[57] His poetical activity belongs to the years which immediately preceded and followed the invasions of Greece by the hosts of Persia. A great danger had drawn the members of the Hellenic family closer together; a signal deliverance had left them animated by the memory of deeds which seemed to attest the legends of Agamemnon and Achilles; warmed by a more vivid faith in those gods who had been present with them through the time of trial; comforted by a new stability of freedom; cheered by a sense of Hellenic energies which could expand securely from the Danube to the Nile, from the Euxine to the Atlantic; exalted in thought and fancy by the desire to embody their joy and hope in the most beautiful forms which language and music, marble, ivory, and gold could furnish for the honor of the gods, and for the delight of men who, through the heroes, claimed a divine descent. The Greek mind, stirred to its centre by the victorious efforts which had repelled the barbarian, could no longer be satisfied by epic narratives of the past. It longed to see the heroes moving; to hear them speaking; to throw back upon their world the vivifying light of contemporary reflection. In a word, the spirit of drama had descended upon Hellas; and already it breathes in Pindar, the poet of the games. Olympia, with its temples, its statues, and its living athletes, corresponded to the essence of Greek drama—action idealised by art and consecrated by religion. Pindar, the last of the great lyric poets, is the lyric exponent of an impulse which received mature expression from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The community which Athenian drama addressed was precisely in the mood which best enables a dramatist to exert political and moral force. There was much in its temper that might remind us of Elizabethan England; but I would venture to illustrate it here by words borrowed from the England of a later time. The greatest plea in the English language for the liberty of the press—or perhaps we should rather say, for the freedom of the mind—belongs to the close of that year which saw the hopes of the Parliamentarians, in their struggle with the Royalists, raised to an assurance of final success by the crushing defeat of Rupert. An enthusiastic confidence in the large destinies opening before the English people already fired the mind of the poet who was to end his days, like Samson
“Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.”