Chapter X: Hellenic Literature

From the arts the transition is natural to the literature[970] of Greece, which in the historical period necessarily constituted the principal agent in ripening and stamping their peculiar character upon the fruits of education among the people. Literature is in fact the school-mistress of nations. In it so long as it remains entire, we may contemplate the whole character, intellectual and moral, of the race out of whose passions, yearnings, tastes, and energies it may be said to be fashioned. And this, true of all literature, is especially applicable to that of Greece, which more than any other bears the impress of nationality. Every idea, every image, every maxim, every reflection seems to emanate from one source. Nothing is foreign. Neither the inspiration, nor the spirit which regulated it and moulded it into beauty, borrowed a single impulse from anything existing beyond the circle of Hellenic thought. Greece supplied at once the matrix and the materials, the active power and that delicate sense of beauty and perfection which presided over its organisation and rendered it the delight of mankind.

Footnote 970:

Speaking of the influence of literature on education Plato remarks,
that persons accustomed from their infancy to the loftier and purer
inspirations of the muse will regard with contempt everything mean
or illiberal; whereas they who have always been familiar with low
and vulgar compositions will look upon all other literature as tame
and insipid.—De Legg. vii. t. viii. p. 30.

In characterising this literature many singular notions have been broached. We have been told that its spirit is exclusively masculine, which means, of course, that while it abounds with strength and energy, with sublimity of speculation and impassioned and impetuous impulses, it is wanting in that sweetness, delicacy, grace, and tenderness which confer on the intellectual offspring of some modern nations a feminine aspect. Grecian literature, however, is neither masculine nor feminine, but androgynous like the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. There is no excellence of thought or language, of which, even in its present fragmentary state, it does not offer us some example. There is a predominance, doubtless, of stern grandeur and colossal elevation of thought; but, beside these, we discover frequently modifications of light and airy beauty, infantine purity of sentiment, ease, grace, felicitous negligence, and a dreamy luxury of speculation not to be outdone by the most subtile and fanciful literature existing. If there be a deficiency of any thing, it is of spirituality. The imagination of the Greeks confined itself too rigidly perhaps to this “bank and shoal of time.” Not being able to lift the veil which curtains the realms beyond the grave, it busied itself too little about those things with which the disembodied soul must converse for ever. In most Greek writers there is a visible reluctance to walk amid the forms of Hades. Their fancy will not be conducted beyond the limits of the visible universe, but shudders, rears and reverts its eyes towards the light where alone it finds firm footing for speculation. But on the other hand if it refuse to quit this earthly scene of existence, how glorious is the flood of sunshine and splendour which it pours over it! It is in these walks of literature that we discover truly the freshness and the loveliness of morning. The very clouds that hover over the landscape only add to its majesty, by diversifying the prospect and introducing those shadows and contrasts which the mind delights everywhere to discover.

Poets,[971] it is constantly repeated, commence in every country the mental movement which evolves civilisation out of the chaos of barbarism; but it remains a mystery how and by what they themselves are moved. There may possibly be something more than a figure of speech in the old affirmation that they were inspired of heaven. Their imagination towered to so great a height that it was kindled by the lamps of the firmament, and may be regarded as that fabled Prometheus who applied the flame of science to the human clay. I do not therefore see what objection can be urged against our maintaining the old doctrine that poets partook and partake still, when their minds are pure, of a divine impulse—that to the infant nations of the earth they were teachers commissioned from on high.

Footnote 971:

Cf. Lil. Gyrald. Opp. t. ii. p. 2. “Nihil traditum videbis in
religionibus et mysteriis, nihil in theologiâ et philosophiâ
aliisque bonis artibus à principio fuisse sine poeticâ, ita ut hoc
verè me tibi dicturum existimem, ex omnibus disciplinis unam hanc
divinam extitisse, quasi totius vitæ magistram.”

The condition of the mind in those early ages when poets were the only oracles, it is difficult for men surfeited with the luxuries of a prolific literature to comprehend. Among the Arabs of the desert we may still perhaps discover something similar. Deprived of books, but enjoying much leisure, they eagerly treasure up in their memories the moral distich, the apologue, the tale which instructs while it delights, and thus mentally furnished with a few weapons they are often wiser in deliberation, more persuasive in discourse, more ready in action than persons of education in civilised countries, whose intellectual armoury is so full that in the moment of danger they know not what weapon to choose. Poets, among such a race and under such circumstances, feel that they have a high mission to fulfil; their endeavours are not by polished rhythmical trifles to amuse a few rich and noble persons, but to clothe in befitting language and marry to immortal verse those great central truths, upon which the whole system of the future world of civilisation must revolve. We find them always curiously adapting their revelations to the times. First, the great fundamental truths of religion, the basis of the social structure, are infused into the public mind. Next the rudiments of politics and legislation, the precepts of agriculture, the leading rules of the useful arts, the observances of civil life, and the first faint whispers of the passions and affections are treasured up in their lays. Then, growing bolder by degrees, they aim at subduing the whole empire of knowledge, and impetuously, with numerous charms and allurements, hurry mankind forward in a sort of orgiastic rapture to the very threshold of philosophy.

Among the earliest names in the literary traditions of Hellas are those of Olen, Pamphos, Musæos and Orpheus,[972] who, for their wisdom, are said to be sprung from the gods. They were sacred bards, whose genius obtained for them an ascendency over the minds of their countrymen. Yet all they attempted, perhaps, was to teach the doctrine of prayer, thanksgiving, sacrifice, which, being afterwards misunderstood, caused them to be confounded with those impostors and incantation-mongers, who, in more recent times, granted absolutions and sold indulgences both to individuals and states, with a hardihood worthy of Giovanni di Medici. Musæos, older probably than Orpheus, though sometimes regarded as his disciple, is said by certain traditions to have been a teacher of ethics, who delivered a body of moral precepts in four thousand verses. His country is unknown,—for he is now represented as an Athenian, now as a Thracian,—but his name and the name of Orpheus and Eumolpos are associated with the expiations, orgies, mysteries, celebrated during many ages in honour of Demeter and Dionysos.[973] We must rest content, however, with very imperfect notions of what they were, for, in looking back at these great men, whom we behold on the edge of the horizon, enlarged like the sun at its setting by misty exhalations, but by the same means rendered dim and obscure, we can form no just idea of their character.

Footnote 972:

Plato de Repub. t. ii. p. 113. seq. Stallb.—De Legg. t. vii. p. 243.
Bek. Athen. i. 24. Paus. ix. 27. 2. Diog. Laert. Proœm. iv. 5.

Footnote 973:

Muret. in Plat. Rep. p. 699. seq. Cf. Lil. Gyrald. ii. 5. Wolf.
Proleg. in Homer. p. 51.

These, however, and such as these, were the men who fabricated the first link in that chain of thought and beauty, which, stretching over the gulf of time and fastened to the skies, still holds up the nations of the earth from sinking into barbarism. Literature is degraded when contemplated as an art or as an amusement. It is a paradise, into which the best fruits of the soul, when arrived at their greatest maturity and beauty, are transplanted to bloom in immortal freshness and fragrance. It is the garner wherein the seeds of religion, virtue, morals, national greatness and individual happiness are preserved for the use of humanity. It is a gallery, where the likenesses of all the great and noble souls who have shed light and glory on the earth, are treasured up as the heirloom and palladium of the human race. It is impossible, therefore, for any but the most sordid minds to look back towards the venerable fathers of literature without a deep thrill of filial reverence and love, conjoined with the generous impulse and yearning desire to enlarge and add fresh brightness to the halo which encircles their names. They were not, what since too many have been, the instruments and panders to the pleasures of worldlings. Conscious of the holy mission wherewith, according to their creed, the father of gods and men had intrusted them, they stood forward as the apostles of truth, encircled by the majesty which a sense of divine inspiration must impart. They felt a harmony within their souls which, in manifesting itself, sought the aid of harmonious language; and hence the precepts of wisdom, distilling from their lips like honey from the honeycomb, moulded themselves naturally into verse, at whose sound the fountains of the great deep of knowledge were broken up, and the windows of heaven opened, and a deluge of philosophy and science and intellectual delight poured forth upon the amazed world.

In what age or province of Greece arose the first minister of this poetical revelation, it is not now possible to decide. The art of writing, however, which the Egyptian king regarded as the enemy of memory, had not passed the Ægæan. The songs men heard were wafted on the wings of music from tongue to tongue, and, by degrees, the professors of this marvellous art, by which the wisdom and the glory of the past were embalmed in the sweets of verse, embodied themselves into a distinct order called Aoidoi or Singers.[974] The life of these men in the remote ages of antiquity is little known to us. Wanderers, however, for the most part they were, in some respects not unlike the Jongleurs and Troubadours of the middle ages, though occupying a higher station and guided by a higher aim. Their first and ostensible object was, doubtless, to delight; but it is of great importance to inspire men with a delight in lofty and ennobling conceptions,—to withdraw them for a moment from pursuits sordid or brutalising or unmanly, to the contemplation of heroic acts,—of honour, of patriotism, of friendship,—of the great and solid advantages accruing from peace and commerce, and the experience of travel and adversity.

Footnote 974:

Cf. Wolf. Proleg. in Hom. p. 73. 93. sqq.

What were the rewards they obtained it is easy to conjecture. They consisted, principally, in the rays of joy reflected back upon them by a thousand happy countenances at once. Gain they neither would nor could regard. He who renders multitudes wise and happy must be happy and wise himself; and wisdom scorns to measure its gifts against gold. The truly wise and great man, therefore, if fortune have originally befriended him, will shower his benefactions, as God his rain, liberally and without distinction upon all; and if necessity compel him to receive some return, his moderation will content itself with the least possible amount. Embraced within the circle of refinement which they themselves had created, however, they gradually became secularised, though we must be careful to distinguish them from their successors of a later age. The prodigious admiration which they and their songs excited may be learned from those passages in Homer where Phemios and Demodocos are introduced, and from that animated dialogue of Plato, in which the rhapsodist Ion describes his office and his audience. It has been justly remarked, that if this man, a mere actor, could hurry into whatever channel he pleased the affections of a whole theatre, melt them into tears, fire them with indignation, or clothe their countenances with the smiles of joy, much more would the poets themselves work upon their passions by an art far nearer nature.

Care must, no doubt, be taken not to confound the Rhapsodists with the Aoidoi who preceded them, though it be certain that the manners and condition of the later race may serve to throw considerable light on those of the earlier. Both have recently much occupied the attention of the learned; and Wolff in particular deserves credit for his defence of the Rhapsodists, into which, however, he was chiefly led by the requirements of his celebrated theory. They were certainly, at first, a remarkable order of men, whom it would be injurious to confound with their frivolous representatives in the age of Plato and Xenophon. Nevertheless, the above distinguished scholar is perhaps inclined to exaggerate their merits, since to them, in his opinion, we owe it that the great Homeric poems have come down to us. But this is taking for granted the matter in dispute between him and his opponents, who maintain that the author of the Iliad and Odyssey possessed both the knowledge and the materials for writing. He, with reason however, assumes that both theatrical and oratorical action found a way opened for them by the rhapsodic art, though its professors were neither actors nor orators, but men exercising an office connected with a peculiar state of society, and no longer existing in modern times.

It has often been supposed, grounding the opinion on a false interpretation of the word _rhapsodist_, that the members of this fraternity were mere compilers or patchers up of poems from fragments pilfered out of various authors. And, to augment the absurdity, the practice of a recent age has been attributed to remote antiquity, when, as some imagine, the great rhapsodists like a modern lecturer, carried about with them pictures of the subject they were upon, and pointed out to the audience with a stick[975] the various characters or incidents they might be describing. Another error much insisted on by Wolff, is the supposition that the Homeric poems alone were chanted by the older Rhapsodists, which no doubt is contrary to the testimony of antiquity and to common sense. For, as might naturally be concluded, not only the songs of Hesiod[976] and the whole epic race were thus publicly sung, but those likewise of the lyric and iambic poets, and the very laws of the state when the legislator happened to have composed them in verse. It must nevertheless be remarked, (though of this Wolff takes no notice,) that so much did recitations of Homer’s works predominate over all others, that Rhapsodists and Homerists were often regarded as synonymous terms;[977] and even in later ages, when at any rate the art of writing was not unknown, Demetrius Phalereus introduced upon the stage a class of reciters, who, down to the days of Athenæus, enjoyed the name of Homerists. Still, as I have observed above, the works of other good poets were at times recited, as Hesiod, Archilochos, Mimnermos, and Phocylides. Nay, the Rhapsodist Mnasion, as Lysanias relates, used to recite the Iambics of Simonides; Cleomenes, the Purifications of Empedocles, and Hegesius the comedian, the Histories of Herodotus; that is, some portions of them I presume. Certain authors delivered their own productions in this way,[978] as Xenophanes, who composed both epics, elegies and iambics.[979]

Footnote 975:

Anim. ad Athen. xii. p. 371. Cf. Suid. v. Ῥαψῳδοί. t. ii. p. 678.
Etym. Mag. 703. 32. Aristoph. Concionat. 674.

Footnote 976:

Ῥαψῳδὸν δὲ, καλῶς Ἰλίαδα καὶ Ὀδυσσεῖαν ἢ τι τῶν Ἡσωδείων διατιθέντα,
τάχ᾽ ἂν ἡμεῖς οἱ γέροντες ἥδιστα ἀκούσαντες νικᾷν ἂν φαῖμεν
πάμπολο.—Plat. de Legg. ii. t. vii. p. 243. Bekk. Again: Ἅμα δὲ
ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι ἔν τε ἄλλοις ποιηταῖς διατρίβειν πολλοῖς κᾀγαθοῖς
καὶ δὴ καὶ μάλιστα ἐν Ὁμήρῳ, κ. τ. λ. Ion. Plat. Opp. t. ii. p. 172.

Footnote 977:

Ὅτι δ᾽ ἐκαλοῦντο οἱ ῥαψῳδοὶ καὶ Ὁμηρισταὶ Ἀριστοκλῆς εἴρηκε, κ. τ.
λ.—Athen. xiv. 12.

Footnote 978:

Athen. xiv. 12.

Footnote 979:

Diog. Laert. ix. 18.

It has with reason been observed that although the name of the rhapsodic art would seem to have been invented posterior to Homer, the thing itself existed long before, and was held in greater honour than at any subsequent period. In fact, the poets of those times were themselves Rhapsodists, and for many ages the only ones, if it be true that Hesiod[980] was the first who reduced the chanting of other men’s poems into an art. Afterwards, from the age of Terpander the Lesbian (Olymp. 34) down to Cynæthos of Chios (Olymp. 69) supposed to have been the author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and a man of distinguished genius, the Rhapsodists sometimes chanted the poems of others, sometimes their own, and occasionally perhaps interpolated new verses into the golden relics of the past, as our modern actors often foist their one-legged jokes into the stage text of Shakespeare. There appears, however, to be no foundation for the notion, that nearly every one of these chanters was likewise a clever poet, which no ancient writer, I believe, asserts, and which the assertions of fifty would not render credible, though the probability is, that of those numerous rhapsodists some were themselves poets, and others desirous, without the genius, of being thought such; so that it is quite as likely that their vanity frequently laid claim to the works of others, where detection could be escaped, as that others were suffered to rob them of their just fame.

Footnote 980:

Ῥαψωδῆσαι φησὶ πρῶτον τὸν Ἡσιοδὸν Νικοκλῆς.—Schol. Pind. Nem. ii. 1.
Cf. Dissen. ad loc. Wolf. Proleg. p. 96. sqq.

They who contend for the flourishing of the system of castes in Greece, would probably maintain that the Rhapsodists constituted from the first _a clan_, as the Homeridæ are said to have been in Chios.[981] Among the few arts which commanded the undivided time and study of numerous professors in those ages, that of the Aoidos or Poet, was certainly one, and that, too, the most honoured and revered. Doubtless their characters were pure and noble, to overcome the envy which superior abilities usually inspire. For whether at home or abroad, in their native cities no less than in the public assemblies, and at the festive boards of kings, they were regarded as dear to gods and venerable to men. The Rhapsodists likewise enjoyed the same estimation and led the same kind of life until other studies and other manners, with that most debasing of all passions, the love of gain, brought contempt on their profession and pursuits.[982]

Footnote 981:

Schol. Pind. Nem. ii. 1. Etym. Mag. 623. 50.

Footnote 982:

Payne Knight, Proleg. in Hom. § 13. 28.

In the Homeric poems themselves we discover abundant proofs of the high honour in which the professors of the poetical art were held by their countrymen. They fulfilled in Greece[983] the office performed among the Hebrews by the Schools of the Prophets,[984] or the solitary possessors of the vaticinatory power who revealed to their countrymen the will of heaven, and taught by what practices it might be propitiated. Some institution of this kind probably existed, as I have already observed, from the very dawn of civilisation which it principally created. Most princes, like Agamemnon, Alcinoüs and Odysseus, retained in their palaces a man at once their chaplain and their laureate, who, when guests foreign or domestic assembled at their board, might administer instruction and delight, by chanting the praises of the gods, the exploits or greatness of their ancestors, or even by delivering precepts in morals or the useful arts. To a poet, also, as to the holiest of guardians, kings entrusted the care of their wives and families,[985] when departing on distant expeditions; and so great was the veneration paid to their character, that we find Clytemnæstra banishing the poet before she dares to become the paramour of Ægisthos.

Footnote 983:

Athen. i. 16.

Footnote 984:

Cf. Sigon. de Rep. Hebræorum v. 9. Godwin, Moses et Aaron, i. 6.

Footnote 985:

But the δόμων προφῆται in Æschylus (Agam. 377 Klausen,) were
household prophets, who not only disclosed the secrets of the future
and interpreted dreams, but acted also the part of counsellors in
present emergencies, and treasured up the records of the past.
Apollo is called the Prophet of Zeus, because he receives oracles
from him.—Eum. 19. 618. So Amphiaraos is denominated a great
prophet.—Sept. c. Theb. 611.

See the comment of Klausen, Agam. p. 143. seq.-Notice of the
household interpreters of dreams δόμων ὀνειρόμαντες and again κριταὶ
τῶν ὀνειράτων (Choep. 36. 39), is found in several parts of
Æschylus, who loved to furnish traits of these old superstitions. In
the Persians we find Atossa speaking of the τῶν ἐνυπνίων κριτὴς
(226) as a person of supernatural powers.

But those men of great original genius whose fame spread rapidly, and who probably found superior enjoyment in the independence of a wandering life, not content with the patronage of a single prince, or the admiration of a single people, moved perpetually from land to land, enhancing at once their glory and experience. We in fact discover in Homer, Pindar, and other original poets proofs that the flowers from which they collected the honey of their melodies grew not all on one spot. Odysseus was a type of the bard who sang his adventures, and looking still further back we find the Thracian Thamyris, whom the Muses were said to have punished for his vanity, penetrating into the obscurest parts of Peloponnesos, protected by the sanctity of his character and the reverence due to his profession.[986]

With respect to Homer, both ancient tradition and the form and spirit of his poems, require us to consider him in this light, though there is no ground for supposing him with Payne Knight to have celebrated the different heroes of Greece for the purpose of ingratiating himself with their descendants.

Footnote 986:

Iliad β. 590. sqq. Payne Knight, Proleg. § 74.

Those writers who imagine the works of Homer to have been composed fortuitously by a club of poets, all actuated by a blind instinct to produce a number of parts which, when completed, should fit as well together as the several members of a statue, are necessarily desirous to establish two points: first, that the Aoidoi recited their works from memory, and that because, secondly, the art of writing was unknown. By far too much ingenuity has already been expended on this question to allow it to be any longer tempting from its novelty. Wolff and Heyne have obtained all the credit they sought by their visionary hypothesis, and the echoes of their scepticism are not yet silenced in the academies and universities. The argument, derived from the practice of the Rhapsodists, of repeating from memory, is attended by two inconveniences: first, it cannot be shown that the order arose before the art of writing was common; second, these recitations were equally made from memory, not only in the age of Pericles, but down to the latest period of their flourishing. It may, therefore, without the slightest risk to the argument, be granted the academic sceptics that the Rhapsodists recited from memory, even when we know with certainty that they learned the poems from written copies.

To render more credible the notion that the art of writing in the age of Homer was not yet known, great stress is laid on the powers of memory in certain individuals, though from these nothing can in reality be inferred, except, that when necessary, men can certainly remember a great deal. It matters little, however, for my present purpose, whether the Iliad and Odyssey were written by one man or by a hundred; the grandeur of the poetry remains, and to it as a great fountain-head may be traced several principal streams of Hellenic civilisation.

Plato, indeed, who laboured so assiduously in enlarging the empire and corroborating the powers of the human understanding, at times maintained the fancy that little benefit had been conferred on Greece by her bard. He observes, but in a manner so ironical that it is difficult to determine his meaning, that if Homer and Hesiod had possessed the gift of improving their contemporaries in virtue they would never have been suffered to wander about chanting their poems. People, he thinks, would have constrained them by benefits to remain with them, or, not succeeding in this, would have quitted their homes to attend their footsteps, as in his age many did in the case of the sophists.[987]

Footnote 987:

De Rep. x. 4. t. ii. 318. Stallb.

At the same time he admits the general opinion to have been that Homer was the great preceptor of Hellas, who taught the sciences of politics and ethics, together with the whole discipline and economy of human life.[988] Perhaps, notwithstanding his great wisdom and his genius, he looked upon the question from a wrong point of view, regarding poetry as the rival rather than the precursor of philosophy. The mission of the former had, however, in his time been in a great measure accomplished, as far, I mean, as concerned positive teaching; and he did not consider that as civilisation advances and materialises nations the curb of poetry is the more required to check their downward tendencies, and direct their head towards the skies. The object of poetry is to keep alive in the human breast the love of whatever is noble and beautiful, to dazzle the worldling from the worship of gold by showing him something more glorious than anything that gold can purchase, to accomplish the apotheosis of pure affection, of virtue, of disinterestedness, of great passions, of patriotism,—and in Homer all this is effected with a spontaneous energy, which like the ocean appears equal to bear the whole weight of humanity clothed with all its attributes upon its breast.

Footnote 988:

De Rep. x. 7. t. ii. 336.

Greece has no poet worthy to be compared with our Shakespeare and our Milton but Homer, who possesses some advantages over them both. Shakespeare, buoyant and full of life as was his spirit, felt evidently the waves of his imagination lapse at times from about him and leave his mind stranded and bare on the shores of the immeasurable universe. Melancholy creeps over him, like a black vapour, concealing the Titanian head wont to tower above the region of the clouds. Even over Milton’s soul, serene in its fiery brightness as it usually is, I think I discover something which at times obscures his faith in himself and human nature, and produces a flagging of the fancy. But in Homer this never appears. Cheerfully and joyously he pursues his course with eternal sunshine on his brow, and a heart beating full and true, as if the life of all the world were within him. There is no end of his vitality. He seems as if he could never grow old. His strength is inexhaustible. Equal to whatever may happen, he nowhere seems to be hurried by his subject, or compelled to strain a nerve to accomplish what he desires. In himself he appears happy as a god, and only to sympathise in human suffering from the boundlessness of his charity. He comes forth as the sun in the morning, full of brightness, showing all the tears that sprinkle the earth and drying them too, but shedding none. We call him old, though in reality he is all youthfulness and love. Every function of life goes on harmoniously in his frame. He enjoys whatever nature brings within the circle of his experience. He drinks in with rapture the freshness of dawn,—basks smilingly in the blaze of noon,—welcomes the stillness of evening—the solemn grandeur of night. Sleep, too, has for him inexpressible charms, and on the pleasures we taste among its bowers he has bestowed every grateful, every endearing epithet. Milton is far more spiritual, and careers in a course nearer the stars. Shakespeare, in his metaphysical subtlety and yearning to pierce beyond the grave, suggests stranger thoughts, and calls up a wilder world of fancies. But Homer, as if admitted behind the veil, never doubts for a moment. Habitually, too, his thoughts are of action, of man as he is, of the virtue of the citizen, of the soldier, of the husband, of the father, of the son, of the wife. He loved the world and all that it contains. His eye could detect beauty where the atrabilious sceptic beholds nothing but deformity.

Hence the universal fame and admiration of his writings. For, wherever a well-spring of delight exists, the world will discover it and have recourse to it for ever. The tragic poets who took up his mantle differed widely from him both in temper and character. The experiment of civilisation had been tried, and been the cause of less happiness than at the outset it seemed to promise. A spirit of dissatisfaction had consequently grown up in society, which, shaken by convulsions within and assaulted from without by storms, appeared to be fast resolving into its original elements. Upon the minds of the tragic poets there accordingly fell a gloomy shadow. They looked backwards and around them, and were saddened by the view of terrible pictures which the dark pencil of Fate was constantly filling up. The inexplicable influence of events upon the inner organisation of man had caused them too, and their contemporaries equally, to delight in gloom, in slaughter, in revenge, in exhibitions of suffering, analogous in many cases to what they beheld their countrymen inflict upon each other.

Observe the creations of Æschylus:[989] in them, pregnant all with Miltonic haughtiness, energy, grandeur, we already discover symptoms of profound discontent with the character of actual existence and an invincible yearning towards the past. He seemed desirous to haunt the imaginations of his contemporaries with gigantic phantoms, quarried out of the wrecks of a vanished ethical system, in which such greatness found congeniality and sympathy. His ideas seemed to clothe themselves spontaneously in language of massive structure, like a Cyclopean wall, such as before or since no man ever used. He projected himself by the force of meditation into the heroic spheres, conversed there with mighty shades, acquired among them stern principles of action, of thought, of belief, of composition; and with these he sought to inspire the men of his own time. His object seems less to delight than to overawe, to persuade than to command. His ideas move along the highest arch of imagination which spans the universe from pole to pole, or rise out of a sea of darkness which they illuminate for a moment like lightning flashes in their passage.

Footnote 989:

The plays of this poet, like those of Shakespeare, were, in
succeeding ages, altered for the stage—Quint. Instit. Orat. x. 1.
The orator, Lycurgus, procured a decree, ordering the tragedies of
the three poets to be copied, and statues to be erected in their
honour.—Plut. Vit. x. Orat.

All Æschylus’s more marked characters come before us invested with marvellous attributes, and their voices awake a thrilling mysterious echo in the depths of the soul. Prometheus, for example,—who or what in poetry is like him? Some features of resemblance he may have to the Satan of “Paradise Lost,” but only in his indomitable energy, in his unconquerable will; in all other respects he stands differenced from that “archangel ruined” by qualities the most remarkable. Towards mankind he appears in the relation of supreme love. For their sake alone he braves the anger of Zeus, who, in the tempest of vengeance which he pours upon the naked form of this beneficent god, is presented to the mind as a tyrannical oppressor. Again, in the Erinnyes, what mysterious phantoms does he conjure up! The whole scene, where black and blood-dripping they rise before the fancy in the shrine of Delphi, is, beyond imagination, awe-inspiring and sublime. Like Orestes himself, the fancy is haunted, as we read, by an uneasy consciousness of their presence. They appear like the summits of the infernal world, thrust up visibly into the world of reality. They are frightful dreams endued with form and vitality, and walking abroad to scare us even while waking. Never did faith in visionary beings equal in strength the faith which he constrains us to have in these his creations. The scent of blood fills the nostrils as we read. We pant,—we shudder,—we expect to hear their footsteps on the carpet behind us. Nevertheless the effect of Æschylus’ poetry is not, like Byron’s, to humiliate or depress. On the contrary, it imparts to us its energy as we read. It fills,—it expands,—it aggrandises,—it elevates the mind.

Sophocles presents us with a wholly different type of genius. His conceptions, without being gigantic, are still great, and have a richness and roundness something like the form of woman. To him, as to Raffaelle, the world appeared pregnant on all sides with beauty. Yet, there was a vein of pensiveness in his fancy which, running through all his works, imparts to them a witchery independent of the amount of intellect displayed. He never, like Æschylus, transports us into the dim twilight of mythology amidst the nodding ruins of systems and creeds. However antique may be the subject which he treats, his invention gives it completeness, and he brings it out fresh, glossy, distinct, and beautiful as the creations of to-day. Æschylus carries us back to the past, Sophocles brings the past forward to us. By a vigorous exertion of genius he breathes life into things dead; melts away from about them by his warm touch the hoar of antiquity; fills up the outline; freshens the colours; converts them into contemporary existencies. All his sympathies, healthy and true, cling to the things around him: the religion, the form of polity, the climate, the soil of Attica, invested with the beauty which they assumed in his plastic vision, satisfied his desires. What he found not in realities he bestowed upon them. He idealised his contemporaries. His poetry is sunny as the Ægæan in spring, and a breeze as healthful and refreshing breathes over it. Like the nightingale, whose music he loved, it comes to us full of forgotten harmonies, re-awakening all the associations, all the delights, all the hopes and aspirations of youth. Sweet and musical, and replete with tenderness, are his marvellous chorusses. They burst upon the heart like the first note of the cuckoo[990] in the depths of a forest, curling round the mossy trunks of the meditative old trees upon the ear.

Footnote 990:

In Greece heard early in the spring.—Sibthorp, in Walp. Mem. i. 75.

And then his female characters, in which above all things he excels. Not Imogen herself, whose breath like violets perfumes the page of Shakespeare, rises before us a more exquisite vision than Antigone, in her maiden purity, her unfathomable tenderness, her holy affection, filial and fraternal. Even Œdipos, supported and led into the light by such a daughter, appears glorious as a god, his involuntary stains worked off by years of suffering, his reverend old age garlanded by calamity, wreathed with the tendrils and snowy blossoms of a daughter’s love. And Tecmessa, does she not seem to be Desdemona ripened into a mother? There is no poet who has pourtrayed a wife of more unmingled gentleness, or who has better sounded the depths of a mother’s heart. Her affection expands like an atmosphere round the boy Eurysaces, menaced at once by treacherous enemies and by his father’s madness, and casts a pure and bright ray over the sea of blood and stormy passion and guilt that floats around her. His Dejanira, likewise, is a character of great beauty; but in the Clytemnæstra and Electra, in the Chrysothemis and Ismene, he has been less successful. Among his male characters Œdipos is the masterpiece. Compounded of ungovernable passion, a powerful will, a resolution invincible by suffering, extreme in love or hate, he stands before us in heroic grandeur, and like the sun’s orb dilates as he descends beneath the horizon. Next to him in originality and beauty are Neoptolemos and Teucer, youths of the greatest nobleness of soul, who contrast strikingly with his fox-like Odysseus and the mean-souled imperial brothers.

To Sophocles succeeds Euripides,[991] whose genius inspired Milton with the deepest admiration, as it had before inspired Aristotle. Resembling Sophocles as little as the latter resembles Æschylus, he is more deeply imbued than either with the tragic spirit, interprets more unerringly the language of passion and the heart, and unlocks more surely the hidden springs of pity. In him, however, poetry is less an instinct than an art. His intellect, lofty, powerful, penetrating, ranged through the most untrodden paths of nature and philosophy, grasped at all learning, at all experience, enriched itself with prodigious stores of reflections, observations, imagery, over which it possessed the most perfect mastery, to render them subservient to the purposes of the drama. Other poets learned in effects, may exhibit action with no less truth and skill; Euripides dares to unveil causes, to give the wherefore and the why of actions, to descend into the abysses of the mind and lay bare the curious mechanism, and, so to say, central fires which produce and ripen our resolutions and our demeanour.

Footnote 991:

This writer, like most of his poetical contemporaries, used
constantly to wear a tablet and stylus suspended to his
dress.—Athen. xiii. 45. The use in fact of memorandum books was
common.—Sch. Aristoph. Vesp. 529.

Without the stern grandeur or the rich physical imagery of his predecessors, he could more surely touch the feelings and create an intense interest in the story of his tragedies. No man, moreover, has given birth to nobler sentiments. A moral beauty broods over his scenes; he elevates,—he enlarges,—he purifies the affections. Truths of greatest importance make themselves wings of melody in his verse, and fly across the gulf of two thousand years from him to us. Above all things, he may almost be said to have discovered the inexhaustible mine of love, whence he drew the gold that fashioned the divine image of Alcestis, the noblest mixture of earth’s mould that ever bore the name of woman. It is true this image is but dimly beheld. Perhaps no genius, not even Shakespeare’s, could have filled up the outline of unearthly beauty which Euripides dared to draw. It embodies all the imagination ever conceived of love. Pure as the celestial Artemis, impassioned to perfect disinterestedness, all devotion as a wife, all tenderness as a mother,—content to die, yet jealous of posthumous love,—sacrificing everything for her husband’s life, yet haunted by the fear that death might snap the golden links of affection, she issues forth like a celestial vision to take her farewell of the sun. Euripides might well be proud of this creation. Not Andromache, not Nausicaa, not even the far-famed consort of Odysseus can exceed in truth and beauty his conception of Alcestis. Yet this is the poet whom Aristophanes had the bad taste to overwhelm with unceasing ridicule, and whom numerous critics, borrowing their canons from him, have rashly pronounced languid and insipid.

Moving on a level below this is the character of Electra in the Orestes. In the Alcestis we have rather the results than the developement of inexpressible love, which

“raised a mortal to the skies.”

But Electra’s affection unfolds itself before us. There she watches beside her brother’s bed, contending with the inexpiable guilt of matricide, sharing his remorse but comforting him, herself oppressed, yet courageously bearing up for his sake against the worst

“ills that flesh is heir to.”

With the most supreme delicacy is Polyxena conceived; and generally, whatever may be said of Euripides’ aversion for the sex, it may be affirmed that no poet has more ably or more nobly painted the female character.

Passing next to comedy, of which Aristophanes must be regarded as the representative, we have a department of literature peculiar to Greece, for its comedy resembles that of no other country. It has never, perhaps, been fairly characterised. They who take part with the poet against the philosopher exaggerate his merits: the admirers of Socrates, in revenge for the unjust death of that great man, generally undervalue them. Let us endeavour to be just. Aristophanes was a poet of vast genius, quick to perceive, and powerful to paint the imperfections, vices, follies, weaknesses, miseries of man in society. He was greedy, too, of reputation, in the acquisition of which he spared neither men nor institutions. The youthful, the gay, the thoughtless, reckoning laughter and amusement among the real wants of life, (as to the weak and frivolous perhaps they are,) he undertook to build his fame on easing the human character of those moral excrements which pass off in grinning and mirth. There is, in fact, a load of small malignity and mischief in most mental constitutions, which, if not expelled, might obstruct the healthful play of the faculties. Mirth is the form it assumes in its exit, and comedy is one of the means provided by Nature for promoting its discharge.

Aristophanes, who comprehended at least this part of philosophy, found an abundant harvest of follies in his fellow-citizens. He saw, too, that of all men they possessed the most inexhaustible good-nature,—to forgive if they could not profit by the satire which was directed against themselves. No one could complain of them on this score. Their risible muscles were at every man’s service who could coin a joke, or make faces, or draw a caricature or enact one. Athens was, in fact, the home of laughter: it was the weak side of the national character; and never, since merry-making was invented, did a more skilful manufacturer of this autochthonal production exist than Aristophanes. He could make round things square, or straight crooked; he could invest the noblest and most sacred things with burlesque and ridicule; he could convert patriotism into a laughable weakness, genius into puerility, virtue into a farce. He knew how to make the brave man (as Lamachos) seem a mere gasconader; the man of genius (as Euripides) a dealer in rhythmical jingles; the possessor of highest wisdom and most unsullied integrity a babbling impostor and a thief. Such were his prodigious powers. Another excellence he had, not unakin to the former; he could, when it suited his purpose, place the most nefarious vices on the same level with very harmless foibles, so that both should appear equally laughable or equally odious.

But the Athenians must have been a base people had these been the qualities which rendered him popular. They were not: on the contrary, they formed the great drawback on his reputation. His attack on Socrates caused the first cast of the Clouds to be hooted off the stage. But great and crying as were his delinquencies against morals and philosophy, his genius triumphed, and he became popular in spite of them; and in spite of them he has continued to be a favourite among scholars down to the present day. No mean amount of creative power could have achieved a triumph like this. He possessed, in fact, the quality, whatever it be, which confers vitality on the offspring of the mind. Each of his plays, however extravagant its conceptions, however improbable the plot or wild the scene or fantastic the characters, still developes a distinct cycle of existences into which the breath of everlasting life has been breathed. To every individual whom he brings upon the stage has been assigned a distinct type of character, a marked individuality, a moral and intellectual physiognomy as peculiar to himself as his mask. No man exhibits greater variety in a small compass. When he is working out a character every word tells, and his ease is infinite. Nothing appears to have proceeded from him in a hurry. Like the wind, which now rises in gusts, now sinks to a whisper, but never suggests the idea of weakness, Aristophanes may trifle, but always because he desires to trifle.

Moreover, however barren the subject may be, however rugged, bleak, intractable, he pours over it the dews of poetry, and clothes it magically with flowers and verdure. Look at the comedies of the Frogs and the Birds. By whom but Aristophanes could they have been rendered tolerable? And yet what marvellous effects grow out of them in his hands! How completely is the imagination detached from the common everyday world, and sent drifting down the dreamy intoxicating streams of poetry! Not in the island of Prospero or Philoctetes, not in the savage-encircled nest of Robinson Crusoe, not in the most visionary vale that opens before us its serene bosom in the Arabian Nights, do we breathe more at large, or more fresh and wholesome air, than among the fogs and fens of Acheron, or the eternal forests of the Hoopoo king.

With an art, in which Shakespeare was no mean proficient, he opens up a more culpable source of interest in the frequent satire of vices, condemned as commonly as they are practised. He unveils the mysteries of iniquity with a fearless and by no means an unreluctant hand. No abyss of wickedness was too dark for his daring muse. He ventured fearlessly upon themes which few since or before have touched on, despising contemporary envy and vindictiveness and the stern condemnation of posterity. To be plain, he evidently shared in the worst corruptions of his age, and, like many other satirists, availed himself joyfully of the mask of satire as an apology for entertaining his own imagination with the description of them. No one with the least clearsightedness or candour can fail to perceive and acknowledge the depraved moral character of this comic writer. Only less filthy than Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and common sewers of the world, over which, by consummate art and the matchless magic of his style, he contrives unhappily to cast a kind of delusive halo, and to breathe a fragrance which should never be found but where virtue is.

Upon the subject of his attack on Socrates his defenders must grant one of two things—that he libelled him ignorantly, or that he exhibited a degree of wickedness capable, under other circumstances, of rising to the enormity of Judas Iscariot. Socrates, both for genius and for virtue, stands at the head of the pagan world. He whom Plato admired must have stood on a higher level than Plato,—that is, have occupied the apex of mere humanity: and in that position we find him in the Gorgias, the Republic, the Euthyphron, and the Phædon. Many charlatans, since the days of Aristophanes, have endeavoured to puff upward at him the smoke of their ignorance or their envy; and from those who tread the mire with them have for a moment hidden the all but divine serenity that smiles on humankind from that lofty and immovable basis where the homage of a world has placed him; but the next breeze has cleared away the stinking vapours, and left both him and them where they were,—the one on the highest, the others on the lowest step of the ladder which connects human nature with the skies.

Upon the dramatic poets whose fragments only remain, it is in this place unnecessary to dwell. I therefore pass to the historians and orators, who, no less vividly than her poets, reflect the genius of Greece. The first age of prose composition, there as elsewhere, exhibited the natural characteristics of dawning art—indecisiveness and timidity. Herodotus, properly speaking, was her earliest historian, and even he still walks within the gigantic shadow of epic fable which stretched far over the civilised and cultivated ages of Greece, as doth that of Memnon at dawn over the Theban plains. His character as a writer is very remarkable. He narrates like a prophet. His language everywhere bears the impress and image of the supernatural world wrought into its very substance. He had formed to himself a poetical standard of human character and human action, which accordingly in his work develope themselves in poetical forms. Long and profound meditation had spread out the past before him like a map, on which he could trace every fluctuation in the stream of events with something like the skill of a diviner. Men, past or present, may be interpreted by meditation, if we comprehend the science of human nature. Herodotus understood much of this science. Indeed his chief greatness lies in his wisdom.

Ordinary readers, who are always wiser than their dead instructors, discovering him to be frankly superstitious, to have faith in oracles, in dreams, in prodigies, to chronicle many trivial actions, many trivial remarks, feel or affect for him a species of contempt. But they know very little of what is contained in that vast treasury of epic events. Little do they suspect with how many great statesmen, generals and heroic kings the eloquent Halicarnassian could render them familiar. In his pages alone, perhaps, do we view in his true proportions that man of men, Themistocles, who overtops by a head and shoulders all the other statesmen of the ancient world. There, too, may we best discover the character of his contemporaries, those extraordinary personages who connect the heroic with the historical period, and constitute the steps by which we descend from the heights of mythos and fable to the stern level of realities. Such an epoch required an historian of peculiar character. In him were to be united the power to comprehend poetical motives to action, and the solemn eloquence fittingly to describe deeds springing from such a source. Both were found in Herodotus. He beheld Providence leading man as it were into the light from the wilderness of mythological times, still invested with many of his heroic habits and his forehead beaming with visionary splendours, but prepared to doff them one by one, and in their stead to substitute the iron theory and practice of civilisation.

Thucydides, a few years only younger than Herodotus, found himself placed in the midst of events the most extraordinary, produced by a system of civilisation prematurely decaying. Greece had not been suffered to grow wise and great according to the laws which usually regulate the ripening of states. She had been scorched into fruit-bearing by the fiery conflicts of the Median war; and her strength thus brought into play, and found to be great beyond calculation, was immediately by ambitious statesmen seized upon, parcelled out into lots which were directed against each other, and thus exhausted in petty struggles. In Greece we have an example of a state whose energies, turned inwards, corroded themselves by concentration; affording a contrast with Rome whose energies, worked outward and were gradually weakened and lost by expansion. The genius of the people begot corresponding historians. Rome, had its perspicuous ornate, diffuse, haughty and sublime Livy; Athens her Thucydides full of poetry indeed, and haughtier and more sublime, but condensed as an oracle, and as an oracle obscure.

Few have measured the greatness of this man. Ordinary critics missing the ostentatious display of what is termed philosophy, appear to imagine that Thucydides is not a philosophical historian, reserving this praise for Gibbon, Hume, or Voltaire. But each of these great writers would have contemned the praise of such persons. Thucydides in historical writing stands above rivalry or comparison. The political atmosphere in which he lived, dusky with thunderclouds and continual storms, his eye could penetrate through, and discover all the very extraordinary figures that moved beneath it. Calmly, from heights of speculation never trodden before, he contemplated the various groups of generals and statesmen dispersed over his horizon, pierced through every disguise into their characters, detected their motives, unravelled their plots, gave their secret maxims a tongue, weighed and described their actions with an impartial sagacity which among historians belongs to him alone. In this consists his philosophy. The society, whose developement he studied, was torn by two antagonist principles—aristocracy and democracy, whose struggles, undying in free states, were then more fierce than at any other period in the history of the world. To enable his countrymen and posterity to comprehend the whole chain of events, he opened up a long vista into the past, to the point at which those adversaries appeared upon the scene, and threw a broad light upon all their movements down to the time when Providence removed him from his post. His conception of an historian’s duty, somewhat different from that now entertained, was adopted by all antiquity, in which every succeeding writer bore testimony to his superiority by imitating him. He thought it not enough to narrate and describe, but, throwing open the council chamber and stilling the tumultuous agora, he brings the living statesman or demagogue upon the stage, developing in our hearing his views, his conceptions of surrounding circumstances and characters, his projects, his means for accomplishing them. That the speeches found in his history were actually in that form delivered, I will by no means affirm. He probably obtained but the substance from report, and himself clothed it in those vivid expressions which two thousand years have not stripped of their freshness. Nevertheless, the more trifling the amount of what he owed to the relations of others, the greater must appear his genius, his unerring sense of fitness, his dramatic power of projecting himself successively into a whole gallery of characters, and truly interpreting the opinions, maxims, feelings of each; for no one pretends that he has ever misrepresented a single individual. And if those speeches be examined on the score of eloquence, whether of thought or language, it will I think be found, that in almost every excellence they may rank with those of Demosthenes. In each a peculiar economy is observed in the management of the arguments, in the sentiments, in the opinions, in the logical tone, in the manifestations of individuality which diffuse themselves over the whole and give a colour to it.

The defects—for such there are—resolve themselves into a certain magisterial air, indicating a consciousness of superiority, sure, more or less, to offend in all cases, and a certain imperspicuity of style arising principally from the loose manner in which the drapery of language is flung over his ideas, which is chiefly observable in the orations, his narrative for the most part being free from this imperfection. Besides, whatever be the series of facts he relates, their importance appears to be enhanced by his manner of handling them. He casts aside, as unworthy both of himself and the reader, whatever is of inferior moment. These, in fact, the mere chaff of human affairs, only cling round the grain of action to conceal it, and must be blown aside by the reader if the historian neglect to do it.

The circumstances of the times conferred upon his subject all the interest and the gloom of tragedy. But it thus suited him the better. His genius delighted in terrible pictures: battles, plagues, earthquakes, general massacres, the storming of cities, the annihilation of great armies. His fancy vividly realised all,—the plague-tumbril rumbling, choked with dead, towards the sepulchral suburbs,—the streets of Corcyra streaming alternately with democratic and aristocratic blood,—the expected slaughter of Mitylene,—the reality at Melos,—two thousand Helots cut off by the perfidy of Sparta,—the butchery at Platæa,—at Skione,—in Sicily! Through all these scenes we are precipitated forward, shuddering, compassionating, detesting by turns. But we are neither overwhelmed nor inspired with disgust for human nature. Our sympathies cling closer and closer to the historian, who spares no villany, gratifies no malice, tramples on no noble principle, succumbs to no temptation of partiality. Faithful to his trust he deals forth truth to all, to none the slightest flattery. Not even for his country will he lie. It was she, in fact, with her heroic ethics and grandeur of sentiment, that had taught him his high principles, and he repaid her by recording all her errors, all her wrongs, all her imperfections: in which he acted like a great and a wise man. He would have sacrificed for her his life,—he would not sacrifice his conscience.

To him succeeds Xenophon, a writer whom it is difficult to characterise. There was in the temper of his mind something parasitical, which led him to lean on others for support,—on Socrates, on Cyrus, on Agesilaos. Incapable of acting in a republic the part of a good citizen, he would have been that rare thing—a virtuous courtier. From this the tone of his writings may be conjectured. Almost everywhere we discover a degree of gentleness, sweetness, modesty, which steals imperceptibly into the heart, and creates the impression that he was a man highly amiable and upright. His piety, likewise, causes itself to be felt. He never mentions the gods but with due reverence, exhibits a strong reliance upon Providence, and, according to his best apprehensions, justifies its ways to men with earnest solicitude. The style of his composition, necessarily harmonising with the qualities of his mind, is full of suavity, polished elegance, gentlemanliness, bonhomie, the very characteristics of a popular writer. Readers of moderate understanding can everywhere perceive his drift, can accompany him without feeling out of breath. He is communicative, sensible, rational, indulges in no cloudy flights, never dives out of sight in the ocean of speculation.

Xenophon, however, misunderstood himself when he conceived that it was for him to continue the history of Thucydides. It was as if Andrea del Sarto had undertaken to complete a picture left in parts unfinished by Michael Angelo. He had neither the penetrating sagacity necessary to comprehend the internal plan of the picture, the vivifying energy to preserve the intense tragedy of the action, nor the colours to harmonise with what he found painted. Still, considered by himself, he has great merits. Several scenes in his history, the trial, for example, of the generals, the death of Theramenes, the battles on the Hellespont, exhibit a force of conception and a scope and flexibility of style uncommon in any literature; and the Anabasis, without comparison his greatest work, reads like a chronicle of the most chivalrous knight-errantry. The attempt, however flagitious on the part of Cyrus, had the merit of extreme boldness. It was the model expedition which disclosed the secret of Asia to Alexander, and showed with how little danger its vast empires might be shattered to pieces. Xenophon who, young and adventurous, accompanied the Persian prince and the heroic mercenaries in his pay, contemplated with delight the physical aspect of the East, its luxurious population, its roving tribes, with the triumphs of his disciplined and warlike countrymen over innumerable barbarian hosts. This we discover from the interest and animation of his narrative, in which stern realities exceed in grandeur and wildness the creations of romance. But it is equally clear that he did not fully comprehend the moral of the scene. For, otherwise, he could never, with these facts before him, have endeavoured by his Cyropædia, to recommend to his countrymen those institutions which rendered Persia, with all its wealth, a constant prey to the small republics of Greece.

Of the other writings of Xenophon little need be said: they are the parsley and the rue of Greek literature, bordering and adorning its entrance, and therefore beheld of all. But most of these have their beauty. Even in the hunting treatise, amid the breeding of dogs, and nets, and knives, and boar-spears, and the slaughter of animals, we catch glimpses of better things,—of glades where the hare frolics by moonlight, and grassy uplands, dewy and fragrant, where does, poetical as she of Rylstone, lead forth their fawns at break of day. The treatises on the states of Athens and Sparta have, I trust, been falsely attributed to this able and accomplished writer. They are contemptible productions, conceived in the spirit of a servile flatterer of the Dorians, and of a satirist, equally servile and stupid, of the greater and infinitely more intellectual Ionic race.

I pass over the historians known to us only by a few scanty fragments, that I may at once come to the orators, the peculiar ornament and pride of Greece, whose greatest statesmen were equally great as speakers, more especially at Athens, where, as an art, eloquence was most assiduously cultivated, and achieved its greatest triumphs. Tradition attributes to Themistocles, to Pericles, to Alcibiades consummate skill in guiding the currents of human sympathy, and a sense of their glory lingered on the high places of society like sunshine on the Alps long after they had quitted the world. But as they did not augment the stores of their country’s literature, we can have nothing to speak of them here. The orators whose fragments time has been unable to destroy are however sufficient, if not to satiate our thirst of admiration, at least to show, by the grandeur of their proportions, how great and glorious Attic eloquence, when entire, must have been. More than any other department of literature it is the growth of patience and toil. A man may be born with the instincts of eloquence,—fancy, constitutional fire, vehemence,—but unless these instincts be broken in and trained by consummate art, nature will in vain have bestowed her gifts. These truths were early understood at Athens. It was perceived that without eloquence political distinction was unattainable, and therefore all who aspired to

“wield at will that fierce democracy,”

subjected themselves to a course of laborious study, to which our more phlegmatic natures would not submit.

The results we may, in part, still contemplate in that body of Athenian oratory, which to the author and the statesman is in itself a library. Every legitimate form of eloquence is there beheld. In Antiphon and Andocides it appears in rough simplicity, employing contrivance and art, but employing them awkwardly. Lysias makes considerable advances beyond them, clothes his style with grace, constructs his narrative with extraordinary skill, and moves the passions by considerable pathos. Isocrates it is common with the moderns, who echo one another, to underrate: their delicate ears, offended by his too nicely balanced periods, his antitheses, his monotonous cadences, refuse to relish that stately harmony, and majestic flow of language, which recommend the thoughts of this “old man eloquent,” whose greatest panegyric is pronounced by Plato[992] in the Phædros. In Isæos we have an argumentative, able pleader; in Deinarchos a vigorous accuser; in Demades the power of splendid improvisation; in Lycurgus noble sentiments clothed in poetical language, haughty patriotism, the rough virtues of a stoic; in Æschines an union of magnificent style, thoughts full of weight, admirable arrangement, warmth, vivacity, wit. Yet Demosthenes soars far above Æschines,—far above all. On him nature had bestowed every quality which constitutes an ingredient of eloquence,—originality, love of labour, a clear head, a warm heart, a judgment all but unerring, with an impetuous vehemence perfectly irresistible.

Footnote 992:

Opp. t. i. p. 105. seq.—He is said to have received a thousand
drachmas for each of his pupils.—Dem. cont. Lacrit. § 11.

A very extraordinary impression is created by the study of this writer. He seems never to put forth all his strength. You see him, indeed, bear down every thing before him, overwhelming the arguments and the gold of Philip, crushing his rivals, annihilating his enemies; but the persuasion rests with you that he could have done more. You discover amid the waves and foam of his terrible eloquence indications that that vast ocean had never been stirred to the bottom, that occasion had never called forth all its latent powers of destruction. He measures himself with his antagonist, and is secure of victory. He presents a front bristling with the deadliest points of logic, like the spears of the Macedonian phalanx, and wherever he moves he is invincible. Nevertheless he appears to advance nothing for the sake of effect, to be in search of none of the beauties of style, but rather to avoid them. He is neither draped, nor painted, nor adorned; but a naked colossus whose sublimity springs from the perfection and greatness of its proportions.

Other orators persuade, Demosthenes enforces conviction. They who listen to him have no choice,—they must believe. Without offending the reader’s pride, he makes him ashamed to hesitate. He reminds one of the Nile at the cataracts, where, confined by rocks within too narrow limits, it pours resistlestly along, swelling, deep, with scattered whirlpools and foam scarcely visible on its vast surface, seemingly calm at a short distance, but, to those who look near, agitated, angry, full of unstemmable currents and boiling motion. He had profoundly studied human nature, chiefly, of course, as it developes itself in free states, and, better than any man, knew by what motives it may, in spite of corruption and degeneracy, be impelled to strenuous action, though but for a brief space. His language, flashing through the moral gloom around him, called forth bright reflections from whatever was brilliant or polished, and kindled the fragments of patriotic emotions into a flame. If genius could regenerate, could pour the blood of youth into the veins of age, could substitute loftiness of sentiment, heroic daring, disinterested love of country, religious faith, spirituality, for sensual self-indulgence, for sordid avarice, for a base distrust in Providence, Demosthenes had renewed the youth of Athens. The spirit of the old democratic constitution breathes through all his periods. He stands upon the last defence of the republican world, when all else had been carried, the representative of a noble but perished race, fighting gallantly, though in vain, to preserve that fragment sacred from the foot of the spoiler. The passion and the power of democracy seem concentrated in him. He unites in his character all the richest gifts of nature under the guidance of the most consummate art, and, doubtless, Hume was right when he said that, of all human productions, his works approach the nearest to perfection.

Beyond this point it is irksome to proceed in our view of Grecian literature, which, after the battle of Cheronæa, was overshadowed by despotism and dwindled gradually into insignificance. Not that genius wholly and suddenly disappeared. The soil of Hellenic intellect was not entirely exhausted, but the fruit it bore was comparatively insipid. A courtly stamp was set upon every thing. Men no longer obeyed their genuine impulses. It was dangerous generally, and always profitless to be frank and manly. Instead of addressing themselves to the healthy natural sympathies of the people, writers servilely laboured by conceit and flattery to wring reluctant patronage from princes. The spirit of affectation, accordingly, for the first time made its appearance. Men tortured their ingenuity to invent smart things. Enthusiasm and passion and earnestness, characteristics all of popular writers, are never fashionable among courtiers, who consider sincerity vulgar, and hypocrisy a virtue. In the later Greek writers, therefore, who all wrote for some court or other, we discover the usual frigidity and extravagance which invariably deform the literature of such states. Along with these faults, others also are found far more pernicious: the inculcation of selfishness, gross sensuality, base maxims, a depraved taste. Man in the savage state is a garden in which noxious weeds and the most beautiful flowers and useful plants grow together; civilised and free, he is the same garden cleared, as far as possible, of its weeds; but, when verging a second time into barbarism, the weeds again become luxuriant, and entirely choke or conceal the flowers. And thus too it is in literature. In the literatures of Greece, Rome, and modern Italy we can now contemplate the complete process; in our own, a part only, how great a part—it is not here my business to inquire.