Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (1)

(_a_) SPANISH LITERATURE AND ENGLISH 216
(_b_) GERMAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH 231
(_c_) CELTIC LITERATURE AND ENGLISH 247
(_d_) HEBREW INFLUENCE 253

INDEX 259

SYNOPTICAL TABLES

1. TABLE OF GREEK LITERATURE.
2. VIEW OF RELATIONS WITH GREEK LITERATURE.
3. TABLE OF LATIN LITERATURE.
4. TABLE OF FRENCH LITERATURE.
5. TABLE OF ITALIAN LITERATURE.
6. TABLE OF SPANISH LITERATURE.
7. TABLE OF GERMAN LITERATURE.
8. SOME POINTS IN THE PEDIGREE OF POETRY.
9. SOME POINTS IN THE PEDIGREE OF EPIC VERSE.

ENGLISH LITERATURE

INTRODUCTORY

A just appreciation of any modern European literature is not to be derived from the study of that literature alone. Not one has grown up spontaneously and independently from the soil of the national genius. Some seeds at least have come from elsewhere. Often whole forms of writing have been transplanted bodily. We must particularly recognize these truths when dealing with English literature.

The basis of the English mind is chiefly Teutonic, in some measure Celtic. If the English genius had been left to itself, to develop its spiritual and intellectual creations in its own way, English literature would have been a very different thing in both substance and form. But in reality English literary history is the story of the Teutonic and Celtic tendencies “corrected and clarified,” and the Teutonic and Celtic invention immensely assisted, by influences and ideas flowing in from other sources. There have been large ingraftings from other stocks, either partially kindred or altogether alien—from Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, Spaniards, Germans, as well as from Hebrews and other Orientals.

All sound study is comparative. We must place other literatures beside our own, if we desire to appraise rightly our national genius, its capacities, and its creations. We find our English writers composing their works in certain forms, and giving expression to a certain range of ideas. How came they to employ these particular forms of creation? How did they arrive at these particular ideas? How is it with other nations? Have they built upon the same lines and with the same materials, or how is it with them? Have we borrowed from them, or they from us? If there have been borrowings, when and in what measure did they occur? Looking back over the changes of spirit and form which our poetry, for example, has undergone, we shall encourage altogether false notions of the causes of such changes, unless we see how, every now and then, a shower of new ideas, a stream of new light, has come in from abroad. Most readers know in some vague way that Chaucer avows or betrays his debts to France and Italy; that Shakespeare did not invent his own plots, but borrowed from Italians, from Plautus, from Plutarch, and others; that Milton was steeped in the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics. But we want to know more than this. We want to perceive with some definiteness how far the whole course of English literature has been enriched by tributary streams, and what sort of waters they brought. It would be instructive to draw a diagram of our literary history; to liken it to the course of a river, and to picture its various fountain-heads and tributaries pouring in their several quotas at their several times.

In all modern literatures there is a large proportion which is unoriginal to them. Milton has been mentioned already. Those who read only English works find Milton full of nobility of thought and imagery. Yet, before Milton produced his greater poems, he had read, re-read, and deliberately steeped himself in, the literature of Greece, Rome, modern Italy, and France. Precisely how much of Milton is made up of Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and other predecessors, can only be known to such as have those authors at their finger-ends. Shelley, again, is commonly regarded as one of the most daringly original of English writers. Yet Shelley’s mind was an amalgam of himself, Homer, Euripides, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Calderon, Goethe; and this, once more, is but another way of saying that it had incorporated the genius of generations of Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Italians, and Germans. We cannot therefore arrive at the true genius of Milton or of Shelley, or speak understandingly of their originality, until we have surveyed those other literatures and their relations with our own.

Let us, indeed, claim with a proper national pride that the influence of English literature, of our Shakespeare, our Bacon, our Locke, our Byron, upon foreign writers has been profound. Her debt to modern literature has been repaid by England, and, at least in the influence of Shakespeare, more than repaid. But with that question we are not here concerned.

One prefatory remark has yet to be made. It is that there is no discredit in this literary borrowing. Nations can no more be independent in the art of literature than in other arts. To be independent, to be unaffected by others’ genius, inaccessible to others’ ideas, would be to render our literature as stagnant and as grotesque as the paintings of China and of old Japan. It is a condition of progress in literature as in science, that new inspiration must be continually sought, new conceptions assimilated. One vein is soon worked out; another must be opened. True art is of all the world, and a nation does best in art when it corrects its own peculiar faults and expands its own particular ideas, without meanwhile surrendering itself to a servile imitation of that for which its genius is naturally unfit. And English writers may glory that they have seldom been servile imitators.

I

GREEK LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

Of all the literatures which have contributed to that of England, the Greek is by far the first and most important. The study of Greek literature is the indispensable introduction to the study of European literary history. Whether we review the literature of England, of Italy, of France, or of Germany, it is at Greece that we shall ultimately arrive. Take our English epic, _Paradise Lost_. It is a commonplace that it derives much inspiration from Dante’s _Divine Comedy_. But, when we arrive at the _Divine Comedy_, we are assured that it would never have taken such shape but for Virgil’s _Aeneid_. And, when we come to Virgil’s _Aeneid_, it is a fact known to the veriest tiro that the _Aeneid_ is a copy, and, in a sense, a plagiarism, of Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The pedigree is self-evident and undeniable. Practically it is avowed at every step. Look elsewhere. Pope and Shenstone wrote “pastorals,” after the fashion introduced into English by Spenser. But Spenser himself had been led to this form of composition by the Italian Sannazaro and the Latin Virgil. And, when we reach Virgil, we find that he is a liberal borrower, in matter and manner alike, sometimes even in the very phrase, from the Greek of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. It is the same with literary criticism. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_, like Roscommon’s _Essay on Translated Verse_, is derived from Boileau’s French _Art Poétique_. But Boileau is an echo of the Latin Horace and his _De Arte Poetica_, while Horace is himself a borrower from Greeks of Alexandria, and ultimately from Aristotle of Athens. And so it is throughout. Often, especially in these later days, our stars of English literature shine with a light reflected directly from Greek constellations. No less often they shine with a light transmitted through several media, but ultimately issuing from the suns of Greece.

Pre-eminent by far among the literatures to which we owe a debt stands this body of eternally great creators, who, by the clear beauty of their language, their luminous apprehension, and their simple but magnificent originality, surpass in the aggregate those whom any other nation can assemble. It is no paradox, but a simple historical fact, that the old English writers have had less influence in moulding our modern literature than have Homer and Sophocles, Plato and Demosthenes. “We are all Greeks,” says Shelley, in the preface to his _Hellas_. Whether we will or no, our literature and philosophy, our canons of taste, our ideals of art, are all, in a sense, Greek.

* * * * *

Greek literature, unlike Latin, and unlike those of modern Europe, was mainly, if not wholly, original. What we have been able to borrow or to find ready-made seems to have developed itself spontaneously in the wonderful genius of Greece. Latin literature has been called—and not without some justice—one vast plagiarism from Greek. But Greek itself is guiltless of plagiarism. Its thoughts, like its exquisite clearness and restraint of style, are almost entirely its own. With unlettered barbarians to north and west of them, with flowery, bombastic, or mystic orientals on the Asiaward side, the Greeks must be credited with a marvellous gift of their own, the instinct for sound judgement and sure taste.

But they possessed more than taste and judgement. They had inventiveness. We may reflect for a moment upon the various forms and modes of literature which we possess and practise in verse and prose. Of verse there are the epic, lyric, elegiac, satiric, dramatic, didactic, pastoral, epigrammatic, philosophic varieties. In prose there are history, oratory, philosophy, biography, criticism, fiction. To us all these forms and species, with their appropriate language, metre and tone, are taken for granted, as if they were the necessary outcome of some natural order of things. They are, no doubt, founded in nature. Nevertheless, we should remember that they must have had a beginning of their differentiation, that they must have been invented somewhere. And we discover that each of them is to be found arising in recognizable shape on the soil of ancient Greece. It is easy nowadays for us to imitate existing forms, to build with the architecture of the drama of Shakespeare and the epic of Milton, to copy the lyrical metres of Gray, Shelley, and Tennyson, to adopt the satirical machinery of Pope and Dryden. But these differentiations in mode of expression represent something deeper, some distinction evolved by the human mind between compositions of one purpose and compositions of another. It was the Greeks who first convincingly and systematically illustrated that distinction, and who found for each subject of thought its appropriate vehicle of expression. More modern times have evolved many modifications of detail in metre or rhyme, and have essayed many novelties in the way of narrative. But they have never added an entirely new form of poetry or prose to the _répertoire_ of the Greeks. Tennyson does not write _In Memoriam_ in the metre and language of _Paradise Lost_. Shelley’s _Ode to a Skylark_ does not employ the diction and rhythm of Pope’s _Essay on Man_. It is recognized that the feeling and its vehicle would be incongruous. But how does this come to be recognized? A world is quite conceivable in which there might have been developed but one form of literature and one ideal of expression. In such a world the incongruity would not be felt. The early Hellenes made their own literary beginnings upon almost a clear field, and it is one of their imperishable glories that they succeeded in realizing the subtle relations between language and thought or feeling, and in expressing these latter in all the variety of extant literary forms. For heroic deeds and lofty incident they developed the epic verse; for the sweets and bitters of love, and for other passions and ardours, they built the lyric stanza; for the plaints of mourning they created the elegiac; they did this gradually, no doubt, and in the main unconsciously, but with all the more perfect result. If we inherit what Greece has created, we have no right to assume that all our happy varieties of literary form are things of course, which would somehow have come to any nation.

* * * * *

The history of Greek literature should be a study of years. Nevertheless it is not without profit to take the greater names and the more prominent types, to show their order of succession, to say something of their range and scope, to note the essentials of their style, and thence to derive some clearer idea of their influence on what we read to-day in our own English tongue.

The earliest Greek books which we now possess are Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. But these are much too polished and perfect works to have been the very first that Greeks ever composed. Indeed we know that before Homer’s time there were minstrels, who sang the “glories” of heroes, very much after the manner in which the bards sang in Wales or Scotland, or the gleemen in Anglo-Saxon England. It must also be assumed that popular songs of a religious kind were in existence. Yet all these earliest efforts at literary creation have vanished; we possess no material for definite information concerning them. For us Greek literature begins with “Homer.” The question as to who Homer was cannot be answered. Some critics contend that he is a mere title, and that the compositions which go by his name are patchworks, made up of a series of narratives sung by wandering bards called “rhapsodists.” Homêros, they say, is but a fictitious title under which to string all these separate compositions together into one so-called epic. Others, going less far, say that there was indeed a veritable Homer, that he composed a poem on the _Wrath of Achilles_, and that this poem has been enlarged by other hands, which turned the whole into the _Iliad_, or poem on the “Siege of Troy”. Even if this be true, we know nothing of the original Homer, when or where he lived. To discuss the question at any length is beyond our present province. Perhaps we may believe, with great masters of poetry like Goethe and Schiller, that a “Homer” wrote the poem of the _Iliad_, but that it has since been added to, tampered with, reconstructed. We may also believe that some one other poet wrote a corresponding portion of the _Odyssey_. These two original poets were of nearly, though not quite, the same period. They were inspired with much the same literary ideals, and were almost equal, though by no means identical, in genius. They may be supposed to have appeared in a specially fertile epoch, like the great Elizabethans, or like the Italian poets of the first Renaissance. Their artistic principles would be much the same; they would live in much the same environment; they would see the world, the gods, mankind, through much the same moral temperament. Let us grant that their work has undergone large interference and contamination. Yet it is hard to think that a motley crowd of rhapsodists could ever possess such a lofty average of genius as pervades the whole body of these inimitable poems. Both works were, beyond reasonable doubt, in complete existence before 800 B.C. Twenty-seven centuries ago the Greek genius had reached thus high a point.

The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are to be read in many a translation. The _Iliad_ is the poem of Ilium or Troy. It deals with events during the siege of that town by the confederated Achaeans. It narrates the doings and sayings of the Grecian heroes, of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Ulysses, Diomede, Menelaus, outside Troy, and of the Trojans, King Priam, Hector or Paris within the city, where is also the traitress Helen. It narrates the counsels, quarrels, and battles of the gods, as they arise from partisanship during the siege. The poem is filled with prowess of battle, till it ends with the death of Hector, champion of Troy. The narrative is rapid and vigorous, full of valorous and exciting exploits of men interwoven with the friendly or unfriendly actions of gods. Descriptions are many, but always brief, and everywhere inimitably fresh and luminous. The whole purpose of the poem is to tell a story, and to tell it with clearness and simplicity, yet with fire and force. When it is embellished with ornaments of simile or other figure, it is because that device best brings home the picture. There is no idle lavishing of ornament for mere ornament’s sake.

The _Odyssey_ is the poem of Odysseus, the wandering Ulysses. He, the king of the little island of Ithaca, after being for ten years absent at the siege of Troy, starts homeward in his ship to his wife, Penelope. But on the journey he meets with adventures, strange, terrible, or happy. He is storm-tossed and delayed by the anger of offended gods. He nearly meets his death from the one-eyed cannibal monster Polyphemus; he nearly loses his crew among the Lotus-eaters; he is detained for seven years in the island of the seductive Calypso; his comrades are turned into swine by Circe the enchantress; he is wrecked between Scylla and Charybdis. He at last arrives home, only to find Penelope at the mercy of a rabble calling themselves her suitors. He slays them, and reveals himself to his wife—and so a happy ending. In this poem, as in the _Iliad_, composed nearly three thousand years ago, there is already achieved a perfection of literary art which we moderns find ourselves for ever aiming at and for ever missing. For this there is other reason than the natural genius of the Greek. The poets who wrote these two stories looked out upon the world with a frank, unclouded gaze, for which, perhaps, we are now too sophisticated. They therefore tell their tale with such simple directness that it might seem told by a grown-up child; but meanwhile with such brilliant clearness, with such firm outline, that it no less appears the work of a consummate artist. There is, it is true, no psychological probing in these books. There is no subtle moralizing, no pondering of any kind of deep question. Nowhere does there obtrude itself a desire to be clever, rhetorical, dazzling. Yet no one can read the _Iliad_ without seeing those warriors face to face, as they were, in their physical strength and simplicity of character; nor can he read the _Odyssey_ without feeling that he is with Ulysses on his raft, sailing through the deep, blue Mediterranean, that the salt breeze is blowing on his face, that the world is young and fresh, and that a man’s part is to perform that which lies nearest to his hand.

What effect the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ have upon the intelligent reader may be judged by their preeminence among poems of all times and all places. What an effect they have had on our literature may be judged by the number of translations, many in prose, and many better known in verse, from the hands of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Derby, Morris, Way. It may be judged by the countless allusions to the “tale of Troy divine” which are strewn through every book of the last three millennia; by our everyday familiarity with the names of Hector and Achilles, Helen of Troy and Paris, Diomede and Ulysses, Circe and Penelope, Polyphemus and the Lotus-eaters. On reading Chapman’s Homer, Keats felt like an astronomer “when a new planet swims into his ken.” The same experience has been felt by all who recognize, as Keats did, “the principle of beauty in all things.” But little notion of those poems can be gathered at second-hand. Of its similes we may here quote one, not because it is in any way the most beautiful, but because it has been translated by a master in the art, Tennyson. Nothing in English has ever been hit upon to give the majestic, sonorous roll of the Greek hexameter, but Tennyson has, at least, preserved the frank simplicity of his original:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,
Fixed by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

Next to Homer may come, by no means in importance, but in date, the poet Hesiod. He, too, uses the hexameter line, but with a different tone and movement, and for quite another purpose. He is our first example of “didactic” verse—the verse which is intended to instruct. Hesiod, who may be dated about the year 700 B.C., composed two poems of some dimensions, the one called the _Theogony_ or _Pedigree of the Gods_, the other known as the _Works and Days_. The latter is a collection of versified rules of agriculture mixed with proverbial wisdom. It is, in fact, a sort of “Farmer’s Annual” of Greece combined with the proverbial wisdom of “Poor Richard.” Practical farming and practical morals go together. It would almost certainly have been written in prose, but for the simple reason that prose literature had not yet been invented. All literary composition begins with verse. As a poem, there is little to be said for the _Works and Days_, except that, like all things early Greek, it is entirely unpretentious and goes straight to the point. Didactic verse has grown common since Hesiod’s day, although happily it is now seldom used for agricultural purposes. Tusser’s _Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry_ is one of the earliest results of the revival of Greek studies in England in the Elizabethan time, and, though it cannot count for much in literature, it is our first example of a species of work which took a more moralizing shape in Dyer’s _Fleece_ and many later didactics.

Of much more value is the next kind of poetry which arose among the Greeks, a kind which has been called “personal,” inasmuch as it is prompted by the writer’s individual feelings and emotions, and has reference to himself, his hopes, griefs, loves, and other sentiments. The epic poetry of Homer had been purely objective, dealing with incidents, things, and men outside the poet. The author makes no revelation of himself; he does not speak in the first person. But what is known as “lyric” and “elegiac” poetry is the outcome of a man’s own inner experience, and is only valuable in proportion as it expresses powerfully or touchingly a real or imagined passion of the writer, which the world at large can also recognize for its own. The poetry of _Lycidas_, _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, is “elegiac”; the poetry of songs, such as those of Herrick and Burns, is “lyric.” “Elegiac” properly means “adapted to mourning,” but the elegy, with its couplet rhythm varied from the hexameter, yet with a plaintive dignity all its own, was used for other feelings than those of grief. It was used for praise, exhortation, reflection, love; for anything “subjective,” or springing from the mood of the writer. We need not enumerate the Greeks who at various dates wrote poetry of this personal description. After the year 700 B.C. there were many and excellent lyrists of the kind. At Lacedaemon the poet Tyrtaeus composed marching songs, which acted upon the Spartans as the _Marseillaise_ and _Die Wacht am Rhein_ act upon nations in modern days. Archilochus of Paros, soured by his own failings and misfortunes, wrote often in bitterness, like Burns. He is styled an “iambic” writer from a new form of composition which he employed, and he became the first great name in satire. In Lesbos, a fertile, luxurious, and cultured island, we meet with the foremost name in the poetry of passion, the famous Sappho, the first and greatest of women in literature. It is Sappho who could paint, better than poet has ever painted since, the agonizing of love. Nor was she alone. In the same island she had her school of followers, and, separately from these, the poet Alcaeus poured forth his fiery thoughts in “words that burn.” But it is Sappho who, like George Sand, wrote from the “real blood of her heart and the real flame of her thought” things which have been the despair of imitator or translator. Unhappily, very little of her work is extant now, even in fragments; but what there is, is “more golden than gold.” Her metres are as nobly simple as in one of Herrick’s songs; her words are simple also. Yet, just as Dante could make a mighty verse out of the noun and verb, by choosing for his noun and verb the absolutely truest and most home-coming, so the simplicity of Sappho is only a deceptive covering for the most consummate art. Often as our lyrists have tried to catch something of her sacred fire, never has one quite attained to her irresistible pathos. Perhaps he who has approached nearest is Burns. Sappho is untranslatable. All absolutely best words in any language must be so. The nearest equivalent in English may be sought and found for the best word in the Greek, but in the special quality of its music or its associations it can never be the same.

The names of Pindar and Simonides are of a later date. Before them comes another, who sang to the lyre those gemlike songs of love, and joy, and wine, which the cavalier poets of the English seventeenth century made their ideal. This was Anacreon of Teos. “Anacreontics” is the name given to those polished cameo-like little poems which imitators have essayed upon Anacreon’s themes. Cowley’s translations into English verse are known to literature, and readers familiar with the works of Thomas Moore will remember his loose youthful version of a few true and many spurious lyrics of the Teian bard. It is to Anacreon that we may look for the prototype of those graceful trifles called _vers de société_, and of those songs of love or gaiety which Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller have developed in such exquisite examples.

All this personal poetry was meant to be sung to the accompaniment of lyre or flute. Had it been primarily meant to be read, it might possibly, even with Greek creators, have been less simple and direct, more artificial.

There was also another class of poetry which was sung to the same accompaniment. Early Greece found many occasions for festivities, and at religious holidays, public rejoicings, and public thanksgivings, choruses sang while moving in procession or while dancing round the altars. Hymns were chanted to the gods, triumphal odes were chanted in honour of men. When literature turned to these—or when these became literature—there arose in particular two most famous poets, Simonides and Pindar, to compose such public odes, very much after the manner in which a modern laureate might compose an ode of installation or national victory, or a dirge upon a national loss. Compositions written in this spirit are seldom of the highest rank of literature. They lack the saving grace of inspiration. Pindar is strong, noble, imaginative. His odes were, no doubt, splendid compositions for chanting and musical purposes. To read them is to be conscious of a stateliness and dignity and an “eagle flight” which powerfully affect the student. But, full as they are of great imagery and diction, they are beyond doubt apt to be artificial and perplexed in structure; they are too often obscure, too often deliberately learned in allusion. To be its best, poetry must be written from the promptings of the poet’s heart, and Pindar too often wrote to order, for payment, and not from inward compulsion. No exact, or very near, parallel to Pindar can be found. He has never been even tolerably well translated. This has not been for want of admirers. Gray, who imitated him in the _Progress of Poesy_, has been said by Mason (erroneously enough) to possess Pindar’s fire: Cowley’s tombstone calls him, without much justification, the English Pindar, and at all times down to the present writers have been led to emulate the soaring Pindaric ode. Whatever his defects, it is certain that over all modern lyric poets, even over those who could not always follow his meaning, Pindar has exercised the sway of a master and imperial spirit.

* * * * *

Among the kinds of poetry chiefly affected by the earlier Greeks must also be included the “gnomic” or “sententious” verse which goes under the names of Theognis and Phocylides. These writers both lived in the sixth century B.C., and both composed versified maxims or precepts of conduct and worldly wisdom. After times came to credit to those great originals any verses of this character which were current in the elegiac or the hexameter metre, and such verses played very much the same part in Greek mouths as is played by the Proverbs of Solomon or by proverbial philosophy of unknown authorship in the mouths of Englishmen. At a later date in the iambic metre the comic poet Menander introduced into his plays a large number of maxims, which gained wide vogue and which caused many more of the same species to be fathered upon him. Of the various wise saws thus current in Greece a great number were translated or adapted by Latin writers, and have so passed into the general possession of the European world.

* * * * *

Between the years 500 and 400 B.C. there arose in Athens that which is the special poetic glory of that city—the drama, embracing both the drama of tragedy, as wrought by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the drama of comedy, as built by Aristophanes, and later, in a different form and spirit, by Menander.

The Attic drama arose on Grecian ground. At one time choruses danced round the altar of the wine-god Dionysus (or Bacchus), and chanted songs in his honour. The chorus had its leader, the Coryphaeus. In time it became the fashion for the Coryphaeus to personate the god, or some character whom story connected with him. He recited a speech, or related some legend, in which the wine-god was concerned. It naturally followed that he was next raised upon a low dais, and distinguished from the rest of the chorus. The dais later became the dramatic stage. Subsequently another member of the chorus was told off to converse with him in rough dialogue, the theme being still the history of Bacchus. So far, then, we have a chorus which dances and sings, and two actors supporting crude dramatic parts. It was from these simple beginnings that there grew to perfection in Athens, as suddenly as the Shakespearean perfection arose from the old miracle-plays and “moralities” in England, noble dramas like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The open sward had become a theatre, the acting art, the dialogue poetry. Drama had been raised to an art of the most absolute literary completeness. It must, however, be observed that the tragedy which grew up in this way was religious in its origin. Until the end it—theoretically at least—remained so. Its subject-matter and laws were, therefore, limited. The stage was at the same time a pulpit for moral and religious teaching. The theatre was, moreover, national. Here are some important elements of artistic difference. Those who read Shakespeare and then turn to Athenian tragedies are puzzled. They do not understand those Attic creations. They think them rather cold, with somewhat slender plot, containing few surprises. Italians and Frenchmen can understand them; the average Englishman cannot. The poetry is often admirable, but the action appears strangely simple, and for the most part over obvious. The very name “tragedy” seems sometimes misapplied. But by “tragedy” the Greeks did not necessarily mean a play which ends in death and disaster. Such an end was, indeed, usual, and hence the modern meaning of the term. But the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus ends happily, as do the _Alcestis_ of Euripides and the _Philoctêtes_ of Sophocles. The Greeks meant rather the working out of some great and powerful situation affording occasion for sensations of pity and fear. Here was “the luxury of grief.” The spectators knew that there would be some climax in the drama; but whether it would issue in good or evil depended on the poet; they only knew that their feelings would be powerfully worked upon by great poetry greatly delivered. For the rest, they required no startling ingenuity of plot or variety of incident.

The three great dramatists in artistic sequence are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. These were all alive together, but Aeschylus was old when Euripides was young. The appearance of all these in one epoch is exactly paralleled by the cluster of superlative dramatists in the Elizabethan age or in the France of Louis XIV. Of Sophocles it has been said that he represented men as they ought to be, and of Euripides that he represented them as they were. The dictum is hardly true, and, if it were, it must be noted that, whereas to “hold the mirror up to nature” is as much the function of Greek tragedy as of English, it is no function of Greek drama to be a literal copy of literal everyday human experience. In Aeschylus all is in the grand style of an awe-inspiring simplicity. Take his _Prometheus Bound_. We have a majestic Titan figure bound to a desolate rock, there to remain in punishment for an offence against the law of Zeus. He had bestowed fire and other boons on mortal men. Therefore Zeus pinioned him on Caucasus for tens of thousands of years. In one way, and one only, could he gain his freedom—by disclosing to Zeus a certain secret of fate. But Prometheus would not repent of having exercised his benevolent freewill against the decree of Heaven. He gloried in his action; he refused to deliver up the secret. Now during the whole play the figure of Prometheus does not move: he is fixed fast. There is no action on his part, nothing but speech. Different gods, demigods, and a mortal visit him, condole with him, advise him, or threaten him. He remains firm to the end, the spectacle of an utterly resolute heart rebelling against fate.

It is not hard to recognize in English literature some of the characters to which this Prometheus has served as prototype. There is Milton’s Satan, who is distinctly modelled on the Titan. Byron acknowledges that all his rebellious spirits, Cain, Manfred, and their like, are echoes of the same character. Shelley wrote a _Prometheus Unbound_ for sequel. Keats’s _Hyperion_ shows the same influence. Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_ is throughout inspired by the conception of Aeschylus.

Ancient drama has much attracted the modern poet. The _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus has been translated by Browning, far more roughly—not to say grotesquely—in style than it deserves, but with the Greek spirit in no small measure retained. The same writer has translated the _Alcestis_ of Euripides in the work known as _Balaustion’s Adventure_.

But to the English stage Greek tragedies are not suited. Our theatre is not religious, nor national. But in France and Italy Greek plays have found a more congenial soil. Corneille and Racine in France, Alfieri in Italy, have sought to mould their dramas upon Greek lines, though, truth to tell, they much more closely suggest the rhetorical constructions of the Latins. The only deliberate attempt to compose in English directly on the Grecian model is Milton’s _Samson Agonistes_, a work in which admirable poetry does not atone for a certain coldness and formality intolerable in drama, whether meant for Greece or for England. Yet inasmuch as the Italian drama was largely instrumental in developing the English from its crude and vulgar antecedents, and as Italian drama was in its turn evoked by the dramatic examples of Greece, we can even here, despite all unlikenesses, distinctly affiliate the main principles of our own stage-pieces to those of ancient Athens. We cannot, indeed, maintain that without Athens we should have had no drama; we can only assert that our greatest drama, as we have it, in its poetical dignity and its technical architecture, would hardly have been. It might have been a prose drama, and one of very different conception and ideals. But it is what it is because it took from Greece that which suited its purpose, while it left to Greece those elements which belong to so different a theatre.

It has been described how Greek tragic drama arose from the choruses singing round the altar of Dionysus. Greek comedy springs from the same source. There were two sides to a Greek festival, as there are two sides to Christmas Day. The serious part of the festivity developed serious poetry and serious action. The light, sportive, and satirical part developed humorous verse and humorous action. It is easy to see how both dramatic kinds would originate from these two different aspects of the feast. From beginnings as rude as those of tragedy was developed the comedy of Aristophanes or of Menander, which in its turn, begat that of Plautus and Terence at Rome, and thence of Shakespeare’s predecessors in England and of Molière in France. Even the comic opera of to-day bears a wonderfully close resemblance to plays of Aristophanes, with whom occur almost the same bizarre situations and humours as in Gilbert’s very modern eccentricities.

Comedy, like tragedy, had its chorus, chanting appropriate odes during the intervals of acting. And be it noted that the Greek drama, whether tragic or comic, was literary. It bears to be read as much as to be acted; it is a work of conscientious art. In tragedy the writing is pure poetry. In comedy it is humour and wit, biting, sparkling, often coarse and very personal, but always full of life. There was some defence for personality. Comedy, like tragedy, served to give various lessons to the Athenians. Greece possessed no newspapers, and in their place the comic stage served even more than now to criticize fads, to chastise political and private misdoings. So long as it was what is called the “Old Comedy” of Aristophanes it availed itself only too fully of these licences. But when its attacks on politics or private persons became intolerable, its wings were clipped by law, and in the “New Comedy” of Menander we find another tone, the tone of Molière or of Ben Jonson, the treatment of social types, the comedy of domestic intrigue. Of the whims of the “Old Comedy” the following may serve as a specimen. In the _Birds_ of Aristophanes two enterprising Athenians persuade the birds to build a city in the clouds—“Cloud-cuckoo-town” it is called—by which the ungrateful gods are to be cut off from men, and so forced to come to terms. This is the central idea. Twenty-four persons, equipped as different birds, form the chorus, and give the name to the piece. The central conception, however, is but a peg on which to hang attacks upon the follies of the day, and particularly follies in contemporary politics. Neither parties nor men are spared. Nevertheless the piece is always comedy; it cultivates “the laughable”; it is never mere diatribe.

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One other kind of ancient poetry, and a delightful kind as we see it in Greece, is the pastoral idyll of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. In English literature the word “pastoral” at once suggests poor triviality, the rather mawkish and always artificial eclogues of Pope or the _Shepheard’s Calender_ of Spenser. But, though the conception of these works was ultimately borrowed from Greek through the Latin medium of Virgil, or the Italian medium of Sannazaro, they lack precisely those elements which make the Greek pastoral idyll a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. When Theocritus, about 270 B.C., wrote in Alexandria or elsewhere his “Idylls” or (“little pictures”), he was portraying a life among Sicilian or Coan shepherds which possessed a large proportion of truth and naturalness. At least it is of real shepherds that he writes, idealizing, perhaps, their Arcadian environment of sunshine and simplicity, but nevertheless presenting a life easily conceivable among entirely possible rustics. He imaged a rural scene, placed in it a befitting action or situation, and called his work “a little picture.” But when Virgil imitated him at Rome, the Corydons and Damoetases whom he introduces are hardly shepherds of reality. Their talk tends to be artificial and literary. Shepherds did not pipe and contend in alternate minstrelsy on the Italian farms as Greek shepherds had done, however rudely, in Cos or Sicily. Moreover Virgil wrote with an _arrière pensée_. He was thinking of the society of his time, and more or less representing that society under the guise of obviously theatrical shepherds. In Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ we no longer recognize any pretence at reality. The idea of merry witty shepherds piping in sylvan scenes of sunlit Sicily is natural enough; but the notion of the smock-frocked rustic of rainy Britain vying in song with another smock-frocked rustic concerning his Amaryllis or his Chloe is not a little ludicrous. Especially is this so when we know that Colin Clout, Cuddie, Hobbinol, and the other swains, are talking moral wisdom, and are nothing but Spenser’s friends or contemporary celebrities with shepherds’ crooks for poetic “properties.”

Distinguished, however, from pastoral poetry pure and simple, as seen in Pope and Spenser, there is a more important form of creation by these Alexandrian poets, which finds its way into English literature. It is from Theocritus and his school that Milton’s _Lycidas_ is drawn, and it is from _Lycidas_ that we get Shelley’s _Adonais_ and Matthew Arnold’s _Thyrsis_. Here are two quite unimportant passages, the comparison of which will show at once how closely a great English poet may occasionally copy an ancient. Says Theocritus, as translated by Calverley:

The voice of Thyrsis: Etna’s Thyrsis I.
Where were ye, Nymphs, oh where, while Daphnis pined?
In fair Peneus or in Pindus’ glens?
For great Anapus’ stream was not your haunt,
Nor Etna’s cliff, nor Acis’ sacred rill.

Says Milton:

Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Closed o’er the head of your loved Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.

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.

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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.

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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.

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