CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE.^ ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE DATE DUE MAn t-?^ MP 3 ^ PRINTED IN U.S.A. DF 77.M24T" """"^>*y Library "liimKliiilia 3 1924 028 243 487 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028243487 By the same Author Alexander's Empire (No. 1 5 Story of the Nations Series) The Art of Conversation (No. 141 Ariel Booklets Series) What Have the Greeks Done For Modem Civilisation? ^be Xowell Xecturee of 1908^09 By John Pentland Mahaffy C.V.O., D.C.L. (Oxon.). etc. Of Trinity College, Dublin G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London ^be fmicftecbocftet press 1909 77 Copyright, 1909 BY J. P. MAHAFFY ^"5-^ TTbe ftnfclierbocftec preas, flew Uort SANCTiE M£MORIi« UXORIS CARRISSIMiE CajUS DULCI CONSORTIO INGENII SUI PRIMITIAS ABHINC JAM ANNOS XL DEDICAVIT NUNC SERUM LABOREM CONSECRAT AUCTOR PREFACE •T^HESE lectures, delivered in Boston at the *■ invitation of the Curator of the Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now published owing to many requests both from those that heard them and from those that did not. They are an attempt to cover the whole field of Greek influence, not only in the various arts in which such influence is generally realised, but also in those departments of thinking in which modems arrogate to themselves an unquestioned superiority. Yet it will be found, even in the following necessarily brief and popular sketch, that, as regards thinking, the Greeks were as su- preme in science as in other departments, and, though they did not discover the powers of steam or electricity, they nevertheless carried out in mechanics works that no modem builder, with all his vaunted control of nature, has yet equalled, and so in other pursuits, not only Greek form, but Greek thought, has been the greatest and the clearest that the world has yet seen. vi Preface And yet I believed that the high honour in which Greek studies were long held had been exchanged for indifference, or even contempt, especially in America, where a hurried education planned for "practical life" was said to be taking the place of the old liberal education intended to breed gentlemen. But I found, during my actual visjt to America, that I had been misled as to the com- pleteness of this degradation of Greek. As is usual, the stranger begins by getting false impres- sions of the country he visits, and can only correct these gradually by detailed experience. There were many symptoms that public opinion in the States is by no means satisfied with the thought of an absolute reign of modem science, or of specialising education at the fancy of the ignorant youth or the more ignorant parent. Even em- ployers in factories are beginning to find out, with that plain good sense which marks the solid core of American society, that young men who receive a liberal education are more intelligent and use - ful as tradesmen or mechanics than those who have mastered only one subject. The intellectual outlook tells even upon the handicraft of the apprentice. There is therefore some prospect that the mistakes of the last generation (possibly due to Preface vii the influence of Harvard and other universities) will be corrected, and that a proper college edu- cation will again replace the bread-and-butter studies in the earlier years of all good courses of training. If such a recovery of sound educa- tion takes place, it is impossible that Greek shall not resume its old importance. We now know far more of Hellenic work than did our fore- fathers. We can vindicate Greek studies in a manner wholly strange to them, had they ever thought a vindication called for. But, on the other hand, the teaching of Greek must be re- formed. It must be made a human and lively study, taught like a modem language by dictation and recitation, as well as by written composition and reading of authors. In many English public schools, there has been a fashion not only of teaching the old languages as if they were indeed dead, but of spoiling the teaching of modem lan- guages by copying this mistake. Much of the prejudice against the learning of Greek has been created by this blunder, and by its radiation into kindred studies. But this also I trust will be mended, and we shall have a more intelligent method of teaching all languages as living vehicles of human expression. Among these, the Greek is far the most perfect. viii Preface If this little book may help toward this great reformation, it will have amply succeeded in its purpose. I must not send it out without thanking my many American friends for their sympathy and encouragement. During my visit, everybody seemed ready to hear what I had to say, and in some of the discussions which were the result, notably at Philadelphia, there seemed to be quite a body of opinion in my favour. Two observa- tions are worth making here before I conclude: The American professors of Greek and Latin have exactly the same experience that we have in Ire- land regarding the abandonment of Greek while professing to retain Latin. Neither there nor in Ireland have" we failed to note the deterioration of Latin teaching, and the conviction grows upon us that a teacher who knows no Greek cannot be a Latin scholar in any real sense. So much for the boasted retaining of Latin while sacrificing Greek. The next observation concerns the now fash- ionable attending of courses in Enghsh Literature. In no case during my visit did I hear a literary conversation spring up among these students of English. They have no doubt admirable professors in Preface IX great numbers, specialists on every English poet and prose writer worth naming. But apparently poetry learnt without labour in the mother tongue is not assimilated or appreciated as is the poetry of classical languages, and from them the delight in literature as such spreads into kindred studies. Wherever I cited the poets, or indeed great prose such as the Bible, among the young people who had studied English as a subject for graduation, I found a strange ignorance of what ought to have been most familiar. I was almost driven to believe the paradox that without a classical edu- cation even the proper appreciation of English literature is unusual. J. P. M. On board S. S. Celtic, January 20, 1909. CONTENTS Preface ...... I. Introductory .... II. Greek Poetry III. Greek Prose .... IV. Greek Art — I: Architecture and Sculpture .... v. Greek Art — II: Painting and Music VI. Science: Grammar — Logic — MathemA' TICS — Medicine ... VII. Politics — Sociology — Law VIII. Higher Thinking, Philosophy, Specu lative and Practical Theology PAGE ii 31 98 125 147 181 213 What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation? INTRODUCTORY A FTER more than half a century spent on the ■»*■ study of old Greek life in its art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science, I gladly adopt this ample and dignified occasion to give a review of what I have learned to this audience, whose in- tellectual standard, and whose sympathy with the work of a student, are recognised throughout the world. It is a great honour for any man from Europe to speak on this platform, but it implies, in consequence, a grave responsibility, and it is impossible to stand before you here without some feeling of awe, for I feel I am addressing not merely this most fastidious audience, or even the larger American public, with whom I gladly claim an old acquaintance through my books, but 2 Introductory the great congregation of the educated classes in many and diverse lands. I do not suppose that any of you will be disposed to dispute the fact (which the very title of these lectures presupposes) — ^that modem civilisation, from various points of view, owes a great debt to the old Greeks. If there be any such sceptic here, I trust he will be converted in the course of my conversation with him from this platform. But even to those who readily admit the fact, explicit proofs of it may not be useless, for they will show you the reasons that have long since persuaded the world of teachers to make Greek essential in a liberal education. Assuming, how- ever, for the present the main fact, I think I shall begin this discourse most profitably by discussing the supposed causes which gave the Greeks this curious pre-eminence. It is perhaps, to use famil- iar words, putting the cart before the horse, but you need hardly be reminded that if in logic we often do not explain a statement until we have es- tablished its truth, in time the order is different. The causes of every great result are hidden in past ages, shrouded by the mists of antiquity, covered with the cloud of oblivion, so that in the present case the consideration of the prehistoric causes of the greatness of the Greek intellect may well Introductory 3 precede the evidence of that greatness, which we gather by the lamp, often dim, of history, if not by the searchHght of archaeological science. Though this subject cannot but prove dull to some of you, I shall do my best to relieve the dul- ness by illustrations or even by digressions into kindred fields of knowledge. I know that there are two considerations which, in the minds of people who are easily satisfied, pass for an adequate account of this extraordi- nary genius of the Greeks. It is usual, especially among those who will not take the trouble to learn Greek, to say that it was really through Rome that the greatness of the Hellenic race was created. Rome conquered the Western world with her roads, her armies, her laws, her language, and im- pressed even on barbarians the culture which she had herself adopted and developed. The Latin races which were in the van of civilisation up to the seventeenth century were the daughters of Rome and had little direct teaching from Greece. All this is perfectly true, but it only moves the problem one step backward. Assuming that the Romans were the carriers of enlightenment to the North and West of Europe, why did they depend so completely on Greek teaching; why did they one and all confess that this was the unique source 4 Introductory of their progress? They came in due time into contact with the culture of Carthage, of Syria, of Egypt. But the splendours of these countries were never to the Romans more than mere curios- ities, whereas Greek culture was the very breath of their intellectual life. Virgil, a very great poet, frames every one of his works on Greek models, and translates even from second-rate Greek work. Horace, a very great artist, prides himself on having made Greek lyrics at home in his country, and Lucretius, whose reputation for originality among modem critics is mainly due to the total loss of the original which he copied, himself claims as his main credit that he had ventured to repro- duce a yet uncopied species of Greek poetry. It is hard to conceive a more complete case made out for the unparalleled influence of Hellenic genius upon proud and. dominant neighbours. I will merely remind you how a fresh wave of Greek influence, coming into Romanised Europe in the fifteenth century, caused such a revolution in literature and art as to be called a new birth (Renascence). Let us turn to a widely different kind of expla- nation, which is wont to be set forth at the opening of most modern histories of Greece, as a vera causa to account for a wonderful and exceptional result. Introductory 5 This theory is the echo of the famous opening of Buckle's great book on CiviHsation, wherein it is asserted that man is the creature of external cir- cumstances and that these determine not only his physical, but his intellectual increase. In particular, the greatness of Egypt and its early victory over the obstacles of nature are attributed to the heat and moisture of the climate ; and so we are told that the temperate airs of the ^gean, the multitude of its islands, its indented coast, its fiords, its broken outlines, and varied scenery — these are such that the people living among them would naturally develop the qualities which have given the primacy in its turn to Greece. Such conclusions are based upon very superficial and inaccurate observation. It was assumed that Egypt had been necessarily an unity, owing to the isolation of its land from neighbours, and to the fact that its great high-road, the Nile, traversed the whole country. We now know this to be false, and that the reduction of Egypt first to two, and then to one state was not accomplished till after ages of separation among its names, and was accomplished not by natural necessity but by the genius of a conqueror. As regards the physical peculiarities of that country, they are all to be found again on the Indus, with its affluents from 6 Introductory far inland Alps bringing down a periodical inunda- tion, with its great delta spreading from Hydera- bad, with its long course through a desert which affords it not a rivulet of increase : yet the peoples of the Indus have never thriven and waxed great like the Egyptians. So far as our evidence leads us, we may assert that had the Egyptians been settled on the Indus, and the population of the Indus on the Nile, the respective parts played by these rivers in civilisation would have been reversed. I am equally convinced that had the Greek race been settled on the Adriatic, with many fiords and islands, and over against Italy, instead of Asia Minor, or on the west coast of Italy, with its headlands and bays, its great and fruitful islands within sight, — ^these circumstances would have been equally favourable to their genius, whereas they were not sufficient to raise the Cor- sicans and Sardinians, perhaps the best situ- ated of all, from a very low level among nations. I will not cite Sicily, drawn from its obscurity by the Greeks, for they were already great in the scale of nations when they transformed that splendid island, long undistinguished under Sikels, Sicans, Phoenicians, into a brilliant province of Hellene- dom. It may perhaps occur to some of you that the special qualities of the race came from its Introductory 7 being a purer branch of the great Aryan stock than its brethren ; that it was pre-eminently Japhet dwelling in the tents of Shem, unalloyed with the dross of lower races, whose animalism has sur- vived in the defects of other Aryan stocks that dwelt among them. But the very opposite seems to be the case. The more we study the Greek language, the more we are impressed with the number of strange roots, which point to a non- Aryan origin. Many of the words in commonest use, such as jSaa-iXev^ and rvpawo^, are not to be explained from Aryan roots, and anyone who has studied such place-names as Tiryns, Assos, and their congeners will fairly conclude that the Greeks were not purer from admixture than the Slavs or the Celts. ^ After all that has been adduced, there- fore, to account for the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, we are compelled to fall back on the ultimate fact — ^which has not been explained — that they possessed a national genius denied to their brethren and their neighbours. It is as yet an ultimate fact that the human race is not pro- 'The recent book of August Pick upon the place-names in Greek lands shows that the great majority are not Greek , and this is particularly the case with Attica, the purest home of culture, showing that even here there survived a large indigenous population. This is the new signification of the Athenian claim to be autochthonous, or native children of the soil. 8 Introductory moted, except in numbers, by heat and moisture. Some have been higher from the earliest moment that we can observe, or infer, their conditions. Others have remained lower in spite of the most favourable circumstances. This is a riddle which no historian has yet solved. But is it stranger, I ask, than the sporadic and unaccountable ap- pearance, in a settled and known society, of indi- vidual genius ? This is the parallel case wherewith I cannot explain, but only vindicate my position. Is it stranger that one nation should emerge into history with exceptional gifts than that there emerges into life, according to no law that we know, individual genius ? If you look back at the family history of those that have made or upset empires, that have added new domains to science, that have created the poetry of the world, you will find no law or reason to explain their sporadic appearance, like that of brilliant meteors across the orderly stars of the sky. They generally come from undistinguished parents; they have undis- tinguished brothers and sisters; they do not transmit their great qualities, save in some rare occasions, as if to show that there is even here no prohibitive law. They may be single, or eldest, or youngest, children, or in the middle of a large family. They need not be noted for physical Introductory 9 health. There was once a posthumous and yet prematurely bom infant, so puny and wretched that, but for the sorrows of the widowed mother, little pains would have been taken to keep it alive, for it was her first bom. Charitable neighbours nursed it with amazing care, and so saved its miserable spark of life from extinction. After a delicate and monotonous youth, the child went to Cambridge ; he was known in later years as Sir Isaac Newton. But if, so long as civilised societies cloak the first beginnings of individual human life in mys- tery, we can only refer the sporadic occurrence of genius to chance, is it any wonder, after the lapse of ages has covered with its mists the childhood of nations, that we should be unable to give any better answer to explain the occurrence of national genius in one race, while its brothers and sisters are not above the vulgar average ? On one thing only I insist : let us not deny a great fact because we cannot explain it. Assuming then as ultimate that one nation may be gifted above the rest with genius, let us consider in what the pre-eminence consists. And here again we shall be aided by the analogy of individual genius. The first and most superficial answer is that genius is original, that it strikes out new lo Introductory ideas, new solutions of problems, new lines of research, while the average man can only learn what others have already" discovered for him. But a deeper and more careful inquiry reveals to us that absolutely new ideas are of the very rarest occurrence; almost the whole work of human genius consists in assimilating what others have thought, in combining what others have imagined separate, in recasting the form of their thought, and so producing what seems a perfectly new thing, and yet is only the old under a new aspect. No instance of this is more signal than that of a great composer in music. The gift of original melody, as it is called, is rare and precious. The possessor of it is justly considered a genius. But no melody could possibly speak to us except a combination of perfectly well known elements. The only originality is in their assimilation and reproduction. If then we admit that the assimilation of what others have done is a most important feature in genius, we can afiSrm not only that the Greeks were gifted with this power, but we can go further and say that they settled in a part of the world eminently suited to suggest new ideas and to afford scope for all the combinations which their genius prompted them to make. I have already ex- Introductory II plained how widely I differ from those who have laid great stress on the characteristics of the coun- try occupied by this race. External nature was the very thing that the Greeks, all through their great history, felt less keenly than we should have expected. Their want of a sense of the picturesque in nature has even been cited as a notable defect. But, though repudiating all this kind of argument, I am quite ready for widely different reasons to lay much weight on the geographical position of Greece. It is an argument which you will not find, I think, in your histories. This people es- tablished their home on the confines of two very diverse civilisations, so that they were able to assimilate ideas from both and to weave them into a fabric of their own. Concerning the influences coming from the south-east, there was never any doubt. All the legends about Cadmus, Danaus, and the like assert the importation of the culture of Phoenicia and of Egypt into Greece. The same thing is said of the empire of Minos of Crete, which is now found to have been a reality, and from which a very early culture passed through the iEgean Islands to the coasts of Greece. Whether the early graphic systems used at Cnossos made their way to Mycenae or Tiryns we have no 1 2 Introductory evidence to determine. Most probably they did, and these may have been the "dire symbols" which Homer mentions as sent with Bellerophon to seal his fate with the Lycian king. But in any case the Phoenician alphabet came in; the use of engraved seals was carried by the same traders from Babylon; the ostrich eggs, the ivory from Africa, the designs on many objects, tell no uncer- tain tale. For all that, the earliest art of Greece — I will not call it Hellenic as yet' — is not Oriental but European, and with features of its own. And this need not be referred to its originality; far more probably was it caused by assimilating another kind of culture, which had features of its own and which can be shown to have had its influence on Mycensan art. This civilisation dwelt in central Europe and came from the north to Greece. It has been called Keltic, it has been called Pelasgian; we find it in tombs, and in raths even as far as Ireland. It was from this source that came the fancy for Baltic amber as an ornament — a. thing as strange in Greece as the ostrich egg. From here too came the shape of early bronze weapons, probably the habit of bury- ing the dead in beehive tombs; actually many of the patterns used for ornament on tools and weapons. And who can tell how much more Introductory 13 filtered in from this source, which the old Greeks called Pelasgian? Thus the Hellenic race was on the verge of two kinds of culture, and created from both that distinct type which ultimately became the most perfect in the world. The genius for assimilating might seem to imply a collateral weakness — ^the danger of absorption or degeneration into the nations whose ideas are adopted and developed. There are cases in the history of man where a conquered race has aban- doned its language and religion and adopted those of its conquerors. There are other cases where the conqueror has been absorbed and the subject race has reasserted itself in spite of dominant lan- guage and legislation intended to secure its ulti- mate absorption. It is one of the salient features of the Hellenic race that, though very receptive of foreign ideas, though always ready to profit by the discoveries of neighbours, it never abandoned its primacy in type, and was never absorbed into any other population, except perhaps in isolated cases and after centuries of separation from the mother stock. The Eretrians whom Darius brought as prisoners to Asia and settled in the rich fields of Babylonia were doubtless in the long run ab- sorbed by the surrounding nationalities, but they were still recognisable when Alexander con- 14 Introductory quered his Empire nearly two hundred years later, and possibly they too may have kept up the affect- ing custom of the people of Posidonia (Pfestum in Italy) at the other extremity of the civilised world, who were indeed, as Strabo tells us, centuries later, barbarised out and out by the Samnites, but who nevertheless still met once a year to lament their fate, and to deplore their loss of Hellenic life. Apart from these few and small exceptions, this race has absolutely refused to be absorbed by any other, however civilised, however dominant, and has remained the same in language and in char- acteristics from the days when Homer composed for the Achaean chiefs, down to this day, when every scholar or student looks upon Athens as the goal of his pilgrimage. The permanence of the Greek language is a great and striking evidence. There was never, I suppose, a generation of Greeks from the 8th century B.C. to the 20th A.D. which did not un- derstand Homer; but if you are disposed to as- cribe this to sentimental causes, then I say that the earliest Attic prose differs from the Attic prose of to-day so little as to afford us an unique example of persistency. Let me state it in this way: Herodotus, if you recalled him from his grave and put a Greek newspaper of to-day into Introductory 15 his hands, would at first find the type novel, but would presently recognise in it his own alphabet. He would then discover a dialect of his Greek, as he heard it at Athens, and though he would doubt- less call it very vulgar, and even barbarised, he would in a day or two read it quite fluently. So far as my knowledge goes, you will find nothing like this in Europe. Turning to persistence of characteristics, it is superfluous for me to expound to you this topic at any length, for in the book which forms the basis of the old acquaintance between you and me, I mean my Social Life in Greece, the main thesis, then, but now no longer, a para- dox, was that, though the classical Greeks did great intellectual and artistic work which their descendants could not attempt to rival, yet the moral features of the Homeric, the .Alcaic, the Pindaric, the Platonic, the Xenophontic, the Demosthenic Greek were much the same as those of our friends who are now laying claim to Macedonia. There is the same cleverness, not without a special delight in overreach- ing an opponent, the same diligence, the same genuine patriotism, but also the same undying jealousy of the success of others, the same want of spirituality in religion, the same Ught esteem 1 6 Introductory for veracity. The models of Phidias and Poly- cletus, of Scopas and Praxiteles, were doubtless to be found in real life ' ; so were the characters of Plato's Dialogues, and in this consisted the gen- ius of their art and their literature, that they apprehended and perpetuated the ideal, while the average man and average society in Greece formed a standard of cultivated society, high, but by no means perfect. I only mention their average qualities in order to emphasise the fact that I do not stand before you a pedant seeing nothing but the greatness of his favourite study, but as a plain man estimating the history of the past in the light of common-sense. Yet this is not easy when we stand face to face with the wonderful performances of this undying race. What have the Greeks not ac- complished on the stage of the world's history since they accepted the heritage of the older and richer civilisations ? First they dominated and so far absorbed the pre-existing population as to feel themselves the only possessors of the country. ' The readers of my Rambles and Studies in Greece will remember how I was once shipwrecked in the very harbour of ^gina, and compelled to seek hospitality in a modest private house. When I saw the woman of the house in the morning, by the light of day, I shouted to my companions that one of the figures of the Parthenon had walked into the room. The splendid type was there in its perfection. Introductory 1 7 Some of them even boasted, and without raising any controversy, that they were indigenous to that soil. Then they spread themselves over all the Mediterranean coast, beginning with Asia Minor, where they collided with the successive empires of Mesopotamia. They went to Italy and Sicily, which became Greek lands, so far as they were civilised, and then they successfully resisted the great effort of the Persian Empire to make them a subject province. Even their Asiatic brethren, who did fall under Persian sway for several generations, never lost their nation- ality, nor could they be said to have resumed it again when the Persian Empire fell under Mace- donian sway. When the Hellenic nationality came to dominate the kingdoms of Macedonia, hither Asia, and Egypt, and even when the Ro- mans supervened, who treated it first with respect, presently with contempt, these arrogant conquerors could never shake off the spiritual domination of Greek literature, Greek philosophy, Greek art, and Greek urbanity. Nay, so imper- ishable was the Greek influence that it caused a new boundary line to be drawn between East and West, and founded on the old Greek Byzan- tium a new capital, where Hellenic refinement and Hellenic art were still to all the ruder Western 1 8 Introductory world the acme of dignity and of splendour. Even when this magnificence had been plundered by barbarous crusaders, and again by less bar- barous Turks, the fugitive handful of learned Greeks, with their immortal heritage of letters, lit up an intellectual flame in Western Europe that has never since been quenched. This last great revival by means of the Greeks is, I think, peculiarly instructive to us to-day. For nothing can show more clearly, or in a larger example, how different is the effect of second-hand or traditional knowledge from that of direct con- tact with the originals. It was no doubt held in the later Roman Empire, and in the early Middle Ages, that all the value of Hellenic culture had passed into Roman Ufe, that Roman law, Roman architecture, Roman organisation were far more perfect than those of their teachers. Even the latest bloom of Greek architecture, that Byzan- tine style which is still Hving in the unapproach- able St. Sophia of Constantinople, had been carried into Italy, France, Germany, and England, where, under the name of decorated Norman, it holds its place of honour in our church architect- ure. St. Mark's at Venice is the richest because it is a decadent example of that Greek style, and so other Latin adaptations of Greek were supposed to Introductory 19 afford all the benefits of the originals ■ nay, in one case — that of the Latin Vulgate — Saint Jerome went so far as to compare his version, with the Greek and Hebrew originals written on each side of it, to Christ crucified between the two thieves. There were Greek statues and Greek temples in plenty to copy. Aristotle, confessedly the great- est and most encyclopedic of Greek philosophers, could be had in a Latin translation and narrowly escaped being canonised as a Latin saint. Was not Virgil far deeper and more artistic than Homer? Was not the Dies ires far grander in sound, as well as in sense, than the trivialities of Horace or Ovid? So the Western world became Latin, and men were content with the echoes of Greek in their Roman culture. But when the real thing came to them again, as it were by accident, mark the sudden and aston- ishing change. It was at once discovered that the Romanised culture of previous centuries had de- generated from the nobler types, that new influ- ences from the north had in architecture and in art altered its purity; that the gloomy splendour of Dante, the mightiest outcome of the Middle Ages, had put out the cheerfulness and light of Greek life, even as Virgil understood them, with a cruel and relentless creed. With the return of Hellenic 20 Introductory serenity, there was no doubt much irreligion and paganism associated, but even to that point a revolt against the spiritual tyranny of the Roman Church cannot be regretted by those who refuse to believe that men can only be kept from crime by threatening them with greater crime — I mean the infliction of eternal torture upon any sen- tient being. The Gothic fane was no doubt the ideal gloom wherein to worship a relentless God and his tortured Christ; the Renaissance palace was a place of light and gladness, wherein men could read with amazement the epic of Homer, the tragedy of .^schylus, the comedy of Aristo- phanes, and learn from them what human culture had once attained. And so Greek studies resumed their place as the noblest part of a liberal education. We got to know and appreciate Greek letters deeply and thoroughly as no Roman had ever known them; we got to analyse and understand Greek logic and philosophy and what is still more subtle, the delicacies of Greek art. We began to add to the treasures unearthed for us by the Renaissance, by probing for buried temples in Greece, and searching the sands of Egypt for new texts. The culture of the nineteenth century may fairly be called a culture that owes its greatness largely to Introductory 21 a thorough appreciation of the unique excellence of classical Greek work. Never was I more im- pressed with this fact than in visiting, three or four years ago, a little collection of old Greek frag- ments gathered from private owners, and ex- hibited by the Burlington Art Club in London. They were small things, bronze statuettes, busts, ornaments, vases, but no intelligent man could avoid the strong and instant conviction that all was essentially patrician art in the highest sense. There was not a plebeian note in the whole exhibition. These things being so, it seemed to men brought up as I have been, that the supremacy of Greek studies, especially for the education of the rising generation, was a fact that no man could contest. Yet, strange to say, within the last twenty years, and possibly due to the reaction of American influences upon Europe, the tide has turned and the great flow of Greek studies is being succeeded by an ebb. Higher education — formerly and in- deed in the truest sense always — ^an aristocratic privilege, is now to be the right of the democracy, which has no time for it, and all of us, poor and rich, workers for our bread and those whose bread is provided, are to pursue the same ends, and 2 2 Introductory attain the same cultivation. Need I add that the domain of modern science is so enlarged as to demand a high place in the instruction of those who will presently earn their living by some of its applications? Thus the program has been en- larged and diversified beyond the capacity of any learner, and we begin to think what can best be sacrificed in order to save the rest. The advo- cates of modern science naturally set themselves against what they are pleased to call the dead languages, and so, as Greek seemed more remote to them, because of its strange alphabet, they have so far prevailed as to get rid, from a vast number of schools, of the study of that language. Even in the universities of Europe there is an irresistible tendency to make it a voluntary subject of study. The innovators, most of whom are ignorant in any proper sense both of Greek and Latin, still profess a great respect for Latin and loudly assert its im- portance even in modem education. But do not be deceived. The day will come shortly when the same attack will be directed against the second "dead language," as they call it, and we shall be expected to throw out another member of our spiritual family to the wolves. For the attack is made in total ignorance of the relative value of the topics assailed. Anyone with the smallest insight Introductory 23 into the matter knows full well that the loss of Latin is as nothing compared to that of Greek. I am not going to argue that question before the present audience. If at least three quarters of the good we get from Latin is because Latin civilisa- tion is based on Greek, is it not infinitely better to study the great original than any copy, however successful ? And this brings us to the point for the sake of which I have made an apparent digression. Quite apart from the scientists (a very plebeian, but expressive, modern term) who pretend that Latin is sufficient for the department of language or the study of grammar, or of ancient history, we hear a great many, both in England and in Amer- ica, who are really fond of higher cultivation, who feel obscurely that it is from Greek that such cultivation comes, and who long to obtain from it what they find lacking in modern refinement. But they strive to do this merely through second- hand sources. They have recourse to English translations and English commentaries and to lectures like the present, in order to fill up the gap which they feel in their own early training. Now I wiU not deny that modern translations are far more faithful than those of more independent imitators, who were not afraid to colour Greek art with hues from their own palette. I will not deny 24 Introductory that the skill of the photographer has reproduced for us the outlines of buildings and statues far more accurately than the best of painters, albeit Turner's conception of Paestum (for example) is truer in its own way than all the photographs ever taken of that temple. But this brings me to state a somewhat subtle truth, of the greatest import in the present context : a great original is generally susceptible of divers interpretations, whereas a copy, however excellent, seldom gives us more than one ; so that, while the former is eminently suggestive, the latter limits our appreciation. The copy of a copy, in law worthless, is so also in matters of art. In each reproduction something is lost, and remember that the more minutely care- ful the copying, the more slavish is the work likely to be. I know that there are such things as copies greater than their originals. That is true of the Gospels in our English Bible; it is also true of those portions of Virgil's Georgics which are trans- lated from Aratus. But these rare exceptions do not invalidate the general truth of the principle I have enounced. And when even Virgil, prob- ably the most competent translator that ever lived, came to deal with a master like Theocritus, how feeble the result! I may safely say that if we had no knowledge of Theocritus save through Introductory 25 Virgil's Eclogues, he would never have ranked as more than a third-rate poet with us. The plain deduction is this : get at the originals at all cost. Do not be satisfied with essays, or dissertations, or commentaries. Go and see the originals, unlock the secrets of the tongue in which they were first presented, and then there will open upon you such a Renaissance as dawned upon the astonied humanists of the 1 5th century. The main use of such a lecture as that which I am now delivering is that you should be discontented with it, and should desire to pass from the illustration, the commentary, the appreciation, to a direct study of the great originals. Such a course may indeed be impracticable for many of you, who in middle life caimot turn aside to the labour of ac- quiring another language; for the mastering of a language is always an arduous task, and all the more so as we advance in years. But if we cannot ourselves learn, this generation ought at least to stimulate and direct the next. For I fear that the present knowledge of Greek in this country is confined to a small minority, while there is still a great majority who have some ambition to be really cultivated. I remember some years ago undertaking to teach a class at Chautauqua the Alcestis of Euripides. The difficulty that con- 26 Introductory fronted me was that a score of Greek texts of the play were not forthcoming, and that even in New York they were not foiond without search and delay. The Greek masterpieces share indeed this quality with other examples of perfect art, that even a copy is well worth having, and so the many excellent translations from the Greek which you have in all your libraries, are by no means to be despised. But if you can attain the originals, and master them, the translations, even if they have helped you in this task, lose all their value. I remember seeing in Mr. Gladstone's library at Hawarden a whole section of his great accomo- dation for books devoted to translations of the Iliad into many languages. There were scores, perhaps hundreds, of versions in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Hindustani, and many other tongues, sent to him by the translators as tributes of esteem for his own Homeric studies. I asked him did he ever open any of them? He said, " No ; all the time I can spare I devote to studying the great originals." But was there ever a clearer demonstration than these myriad translations of the greatness of a literary masterpiece? Even when there are many excel- lent versions already published in their own lan- guage men will not be content with these efforts, Introductory 2 7 but will ever attempt again the fascinating, never ending, never convincing task. You could tell, without knowing any tongue but English, that there are four supreme poems which have exer- cised a fascination over men that never grows old. They are the Iliad of Homer, the Agamemnon of ^schylus, the Inferno of Dante, the Faust of Goethe. Two of these are Greek; but note also that, while we could find in Greek several rivals * which are of hardly less importance and by various poets, there is neither in German nor in Italian any poem that can for one moment compare with the supreme pieces I have named. So pre-eminent are the Greeks in literature. Their other art has not survived save in ruins or fragments. But ask any real specialist, such as the late Mr. Penrose, or Dr. Dorp f eld, what place the best Greek architecture holds in the buildings of the world, and he will tell you that never again can anything equal to the Parthenon at Athens be constructed. The huge temple at Karnak in Egypt, the mar- vellous church of Justinian at Constantinople, the lovely cathedral of Rheims are probably the • The Odyssey of Homer, the two tragedies on CEdipus of Sophocles, the Birds and Frogs of Aristophanes, the Pythian odes of Pindar, not to speak of smaller gems such as the scraps of Sappho and Simonides, the Idylls of Theocritus. 28 Introductory- best specimens of perfection in building which we possess, yet the Parthenon, with its apparent simpUcity, shows a subtle depth of artistic knowledge which justifies us in calling it the finest of earthly buildings. Need I say one word of Greek supremacy in other arts here, seeing that the details must form the subject of subsequent lectures ? The danger I see before this generation is that which came upon the Roman world insensibly and which resulted in a decadence not arrested till it sank into the night of the dark ages. The later empire was content to take Greek art and Greek letters at second hand, and to substitute Latin culture for the models which had educated their greatest masters. But as I have already told you the copy had not the life of the original. So we too, with all our science, with our increase of material knowledge and our restless running to and fro, may sink into an ugly, tame, joyless con- glomeration of societies, for whom new discover- ies supply hosts of new conveniences, but no return to the happiness and the contentment of a simpler age. Our purblind toothless children may have their congenital defects vamped up by science, and without it we should indeed be stranded upon the reefs of despair. But happiness does not lie here, Introductory 29 no, nor in motors, nor in turbines, nor in wireless messages across the globe, nor in daily newspapers full of inextricable fact and falsehood. I cannot believe that the civilised world will remain satisfied with this dark outlook, — ^the monopoly of these factories of material discovery, where furnace and electric light replace the glorious rays of the Sun-God worshipped by the Greeks. There has generally been a great power of recovery in our race at large ; and periods of decay have been followed by periods not only of renascence but of rejuvenescence. At all epochs when the world grew dull and desponding and the times were out of joint, we have the mystical tendency, the incli- nation to brush aside human joys and cares and to fix the mind on the Eternal, on the ineffable delights of communion with the Spirit of the Universe. That this tendency is alive even in modern America, cannot but be obvious to those who have studied the pathology of so-called Christian Science. The other tendency is the humanist, that which seeks to recover for us the joys and beauties of life, enhanced by art and protected by the refinement of a sound education. This was the aspect of human happiness which is most perfectly represented, so far as the world has yet run, by the Greeks, and hence the careful 30 Introductory and minute study of their life must always appeal to those who desire the sesthetic reformation of modem society. Once and again the Greeks have exercised this vast and beneficent influence ; is it vain to hope that even still it is not exhausted, but potent to cure the ills of man ? Peradventure, the prophecy of our great and most Hellenic of poets may yet come true, with a fulfilment wider and deeper than even his large vision could compass : — A brighter Hellas rears its mountains, from waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep ! II GREEK POETRY IN coming before you to-day to treat of the * influence of Greek poetry on the modern world, I feel under a special advantage, which is also a disadvantage. Many of you will know that two volumes of my History of Greek Literature are devoted to Greek poetry, and those of you who have read them must already be familiar with my treatment of the authors and their works in detail. To such of you, there can be no difficulty in follow- ing the course of the present lecture. But on the other hand, it is hard for me to give to such hear- ers new material, seeing that I have already done my best in two volumes to satisfy their curiosity. To those that are not familiar with the subject, there is the disadvantage, in hearing a man whose intimacy with the subject is of such long standing, that he may allude to things as obvious which to his audience are not so, being beyond the bounds of their ordinary reading. But I may very pos- sibly be underrating the cultivation of this audi- 31 32 Greek Poetry ence, which is said to be on a very different level from that of any similar audience in England. If so, you, like all competent critics, in contrast to the vulgar and the ignorant, will appreciate the difficulties of my task and will judge it with due allowance for these difficulties. It is obviously my first duty to-day to put before you the general features of Greek poetry which have made it a model for succeeding ages and nations. Then I shall proceed, with as much detail as time permits, to give instances of the effects, direct or indirect, of Greek poetry on the poetry of English-speaking nations. You will find that the features which are really the most im- portant are not the obvious features, and hardly those which we might name if we spoke hastily, or at random. The chiefest and most remarkable, which permeates every Greek poet from Homer to Theocritus, is that their work is carefully studied, and in no sense the mere spontaneous outpouring of the human heart. ' ' I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," said, as a matter of pride, a very artificial poet. Nothing would seem less worthy of it to a Greek poet. He always despised what we call an untutored genius. We hear talk indeed of divine madness and of the inspiration of the Muses, but so far as we know, they never inspired Greek Poetry 33 an ignorant man, and never taught an educated man to violate the traditions of his school. This studied work comes before us in its full artificiality in the Homeric poems. It is more than doubtful whether such a language was ever spoken. It is full of strange forms, and the mixed dialect, some- times even to us ungrammatical, was the dialect invented or perfected by a school of bards who did not profess to reproduce ordinary speech, but something far higher and better, which only the educated poet could compose. And when I use the term artificial, which has come in modem English to signify something contrasted with natural, and therefore inferior, ^ I must say a word in explanation of my meaning. It is not the proper province of art to attain to a perfect representation of nature, but a representation of perfect nature. For example, the more the art of sculpture developed in Greece, the more they attained to the repre- sentation of a natural but an ideally beautiful figure, such as the Hermes of Praxiteles. So the last triumph of a great actor is to repro- duce perfectly human nature in its general « Of course this common inference may be quite mistaken. Artificial things are often a real and great improvement on nature. 34 Greek Poetry features, if not in its ideal features, and so the philosopher exclaims in wonder at the plays of Menander, "O Menander and human life, which of you has copied the other?" But if anyone imagines that art consists merely in photograph- ing vulgar everyday life, he can easily lapse into absurdity. All our habits, so far as they are civiHsed, depart from mere nature and employ artifice to conceal or improve it. If any of you came here in purely natural attire, imagine the scene! I believe such things were attempted in the wild society of Paris in the heyday of the great Revolution, but even then their attire, though inferior in quantity, was in quality not less artificial than the opinions of the wearers. It follows from these considerations that Greek poetry was always developed in schools possessing fixed traditions, and following strict laws both in metre and in diction. If any man thought to break loose from these restrictions, and write in a manner wholly free and unchecked, he would get no hearing in Greece. Such a phenomenon, for example, as your Walt Whitman would have been impossible, or at least we should never have heard of it. It is indeed quite true that this does not exclude the rise of new schools of thought and new modes Greek Poetry 35 of expression. When epic poetry was exhausted new sorts of poetry arose; when these proved insufficient there was still further development, but all this is to be accounted for with adherence to law and tradition of some kind. I will take the last and therefore the most obvious case first. We have in Theocritus, the latest bloom of pure Greek poetry, bucolic scenes and pastoral lan- guage which were long thought to be the mere echo of the primitive shepherds who fed their flocks in the uplands of Sicily. We know better now. Theocritus was a learned man, full of liter- ary jealousies, who wrote in the sultry atmosphere of the university of Alexandria and at the highly artificial court of the second Ptolemy. He was probably as remote from what we call simple hu- man nature as any modern American could be. But he was a great literary artist, and he felt that while all the other schools of poetry had gradually lost their contact with real life, and were becom- ing obtrusively artificial and outworn in public estimation, there was still a vein of folk-song, in scenery contrasting utterly with the crowded sand- hills of Alexandria, which might, if treated with delicate art, appeal once more to the sympathy of a weary and decadent society. No doubt there were plenty of pedants in Alexandria, who 36 Greek Poetry- despised this return to homely and common life, with its vulgar passions, just as the great French critics repudiated with scorn the homely scenes and characters in the tragedies of Shakespeare. The experiment nevertheless succeeded, and this thoroughly artificial but artistic representation of the sorrows and joys of illiterate peasants, in lovely metre and with carefully chosen liberties of diction, fascinated the Greek, then the Roman world, and incited the Renaissance to similar, but unsuccessful attempts. It has produced its effects upon English poetry down to the work of Tenny- son, who shows more traces of the influence of Theocritus than of the influence of any other Greek poet. The secret of it was that, when other schools became exhausted, Theocritus went back to the people, found among them rude and simple songs which had never yet been adopted by any school or put into artistic form, and raised these from the coarseness of nature into the refinement of a subtle and learned art. Was not the same process the origin of Greek dramatic poetry, though in an earlier and far less conscious age ? Are we not told that tragedy, and comedy too, arose from the rude songs of the people and the rude attempts at acting among simple country folk? The tragedy of uiEschylus, Greek Poetry 37 nay, even the perfect diction and metre of Aristo- phanes, are as far removed from popular song as it is possible to conceive, yet these too arose and matured with marvellous quickness from the rude essays of untutored peasants, whose efforts were wholly beneath the attention of civilised society. We know nothing, alas! of the cradles of the lyric poetry of Archilochus, of Alcaeus, of Sappho ; we can tell you nothing of the incunabula of that great and varied development which comprised several schools. Over the whole surface of those primeval waters, which cover the world of Greek literature down to the 7th century e.g., we have but the one great solitary beacon, the poetry of Homer, which tells us, like the Nantucket light- ship, that we are far, and yet not far, from the utterances of a literary age: As the tall ship, that many a dreary year. Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea. All thro' the livelong hours of utter dark Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave ! But so much the scanty lyric fragments do tell us with a clear voice : these poets were thoroughly and even elaborately artistic, and their very care- ful workmanship, if it did arise from an appeal to the songs of the people, shows the very same fas- 38 Greek Poetry tidious care which we find in Theocritus, to purify their art from the clay or the dross of everyday language. Hence follows as a natural consequence, among a people of genius like the Greeks, a per- fection both in form and in spirit, which we justly call classical and which forms the model for almost all subsequent poetry. There are no vagaries of metre or diction; there are no exaggerations of sentiment. Every civilised man of any epoch, every critic of judgment, who masters the poetry in the original, finds in it models of taste which have not since been excelled and only seldom equalled. I need not delay long over a few apparent or real exceptions, so few that they are only enough for cavil, not for serious criticism. We have recovered recently the Persians of Timotheus, whose musical performances were very popular in his day. The poem is the worst that we know coming from its age and country. But we also know that we should merely regard it as the libretto of a musical performance, such as the libretti of the Italian operas we used to frequent in our youth, in which the text was not of the slightest importance and was generally very bad. The rnusic was the only part of the performance we criticised. So the Persians of Timotheus is Greek Poetry 39 ridiculous as a poem on the great battle of Salamis, but even so is pronounced by the authorities on metre, such as Wilamowitz, to be very careful and polished in that respect. The Mimes of Herondas, another recent discovery, are also bad poetry, but then they are mere versifications of prose pieces, such as those of Sophron were, and meant, I believe, for acting on a cheap stage or for dramatic recitation. They can hardly be called poetry. In much earlier days, there was a good deal of tame moral teaching and proverbial philosophy expressed in verse. But that also was so, because as yet prose had not become an ordinary vehicle of writing, and any man who desired to teach, such as Solon, or Theognis, or Empedocles, must express himself in verse. I will mention but one more feature in which Greek poetry had obviously an advantage over modem art of the same kind. Being almost altogether composed, not for a reading, but a listening public, it was closely associated with other arts, especially those of music and dancing, so as to form an essential part of many great public festivals. It was the soul which animated the frame of every national pageant. If a poet laureate nowadays is asked to celebrate a great public occasion by a poem, he writes an ode or an 40 Greek Poetry elegy, such as Tennyson's ' ' Bury the Great Duke, with a nation's lamentation, " and sends it out to countless readers. The Greek poet, on similar occasions, would have a solemn procession, or a dance, or a scenic display, with appropriate music, to assist him. These environments secured two great qualities, or rather tended to secure them, for we must not assume perfection as a general result in any human product. It secured that the poet would aim at dignity, avoiding all mean and trivial topics. It also secured brevity, avoid- ing discursiveness, which is a fault of much modern poetry. Thus Wordsworth's Excursion would have been intolerable to the poet himself, had he been a Greek, and to come to a more appropriate illustration, the exuberant and unlirctited choruses in Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta — otherwise a splendid -];eflection of Greek tragedy — would not have been tolerated on account of their redundancy, but the poet would have compressed them within such limits as would not put his chorus out of breath, or produce dizziness in his hearers. The production of poetry for local and special public occasions was also a main cause of the use of distinct dialects, which did not become national property till some great work had sanctioned their literary use. Thus the artificial Homeric dialect Greek Poetry 41 became the lingua franca of all epic poets, what- ever their country or their date, down to the end of old Greek history. Doric choral hymns were adopted by the Attic tragedies and put into the interludes of Attic dialogue. Luckily for us the Greeks wrote phonetically and did not conceal their local speech under the cloak of an artificial and false orthography. Thus the poetry of the nation has come to us in various dialects, but never, except with deliberate dramatic aim at vulgarity, * in the mere language of the common people. But I must now abandon these general con- siderations and turn to the task of showing you, in some famous examples, how Greek poetry, possessing the excellence requisite for a high model, acted upon the greatest and best of our own poets, as well as on others in modem Europe. Every one knows that the Greeks have left us three long epic poems — one the epic of war, the second the epic of voyage, the third, that of Apollonius Rhodius, the epic of adventure com- bined with a great love story. There were many other early epic poems composed in imitation of the Iliad and Odyssey, but they have been laid aside and forgotten, most probably because their ' This is probably the case with Hipponax. 42 Greek Poetry material has been worked up by the Greeks into the nobler form of tragedy. For, as you know, the Greeks, who confined themselves to mythical subjects for these tragedies, avoided the Iliad and Odyssey, and utilised what were called the Cyclic poets. It is mere commonplace to tell you that the Iliad and Odyssey have been the un- approachable ideals for all subsequent time. The first and greatest foreign imitator was Virgil, and through his immortal epic, indirectly more even than directly, the world of poets has been swayed. It is nevertheless very remarkable that these two masterpieces, coming complete from the early genius of Greece, as Athena leaped full- armed from the brain of Zeus, appearing, like Melchisedec, without father, mother, or descent, to bless the father of the faithful, should never again have been equalled among men. The best epic of modern Europe since the classi- cal Renaissance is the Paradise Lost of Milton. He has given us ample evidence that he was a great poet, and yet how far below the Iliad and Odyssey does he fall! I need hardly tell you that the controversies which agitated his mind, and the mind of his age, disturbed the serenity of his poetic vision and dictated to him many digressions which are blots on the purity of his golden pages. Greek Poetry 43 But that is not to my mind his greatest defect. The action of the gods which in the Iliad is a mere preamble to the general action of the poem, or an irrelevant episode, and hardly interferes with its thoroughly human character, is in the theological poet far too prominent. It occupies in Milton's poem the forefront, compared to which the episodes in Eden are but a small matter. The tremendous part of the poem is not Paradise lost by man, but heaven lost by the angels that fell. It is the conflict between gods and Titans, as the Greeks would have put it, and not the conflicts or mortal heroes that fascinate us. Another remark obtrudes itself as we pass on. The weakest book in all the Iliad is the Battle of the Gods. It might readily be expunged from the poem without loss. In Milton the Divine wholly outweighs the human in grandeur and is the es- sence of the poem. There is another feature in this epic which disturbs our admiration — ^the great richness and even redundancy of the learned similes. In this Milton seems to have taken as his model the third Greek epic, which is now forgotten, but which had a great vogue in the Renaissance, I mean the Argonautics of ApoUonius. His direct obligations to this poet have been noticed in many places by 44 Greek Poetry the commentators. I have no doubt that a care- ful study would show many more, and it is all the more interesting to reflect how a now forgotten Greek source has had so lasting an influence. The greatest contribution I know from ApoUonius to modem poetry is the famous scene at the opening of Goethe's Faust, where the world- weary philosopher determines to take a cup of poison, but is suddenly recalled to life by the Easter dawn with its Resurrection hymn. You have but to read the scene where Medea, wracked by what she believes a hopeless passion, turns at the end of a night of wakeful agony to the same escape, a cup of poison. But with the dawn and the awakening of human life, the sounds of men react upon her troubled spirit and cause her to put aside her dread resolve. With her also, and with the Greek poet, the conception is fresher and better. It is the youth and health of Medea, the wine of life glowing in her veins which calls her back from suicidal gloom when cheerful sounds of human life illumine the dawn. The effect of the Easter hymn on Faust, beautiful as it is with our Christian associations, does not seem so natural and is therefore on a lesser scale as poetry. But when I have started upon the effects of the Greek epic in moulding the great English epic. Greek Poetry 45 which strives so hard to assume a different tone, with a different subject, I am understating^ the general influence of Greek poetry on Milton. In the days before him we may assume that most of the English poets knew their Greek at second hand, through Latin copies, or through French translations. Ben Jonson indeed, we are as- sured, knew Greek, and Chapman had in his excellent translation made the English world acquainted with Homer's Iliad. It is easy to underrate this second-hand influence and to say that after all it was Latin and not Greek. No- thing would be more misleading. A poet may feel the greatness of another even though he does not comprehend his tongue. Thus Shakespeare, whose drama as a whole was clearly outside of all Hellenic influences of style, as soon as he read in North's translation Plutarch's Lives, saw in them subjects fit for his immortal plays. And not only as to subject, but as to treatment, he adheres so closely to the Greek master of biography that you can feel the profound respect and admiration the playwright had for his work. Thus the Antony and Cleopatra, to cite but one example, adheres point for point to the famous narrative of Plutarch, and adds nothing to his picture. The influence of Plutarch on the ruf- 46 Greek Poetry fians of the French Revolution is not less remark- able, and will, I think, occupy us in another connection. But then these men had for a cent- ury previously been taught by their classical drama to look to the Greeks for lofty principles and ideal characters. Yet for my purpose it is more relevant to cite a modern instance. No one would say for a moment that the Greek tone in Keats was got through Latin or French versions. Yet he seems never to have known Greek enough to read the originals, whose spirit he caught from the echoes of classical dictionaries. But the indirect knowledge of earlier poets, such for example as the stray citation by Shake- speare of the words of Eteocles from Gascoigne's play, are as nothing when we come to Milton, who shows himself transfused not only with Greek epic, but with the Greek drama. And from Milton, as the great master, comes that perfection of poetic style and of metre which has moulded all English poetry from his time onward. Matthew Arnold even speaks of him as standing above all his successors in this unique distinction. But when Arnold compares this excellence with that of Virgil, he should have added that Virgil also owed it to the Greeks. Nor do I find in Virgil's Mneid anything like the familiarity with Greek Greek Poetry 47 tragedy which I find in Milton. Thus the whole situation at the opening of Paradise Lost is not due to Homer, but rather to the Prometheus Vinctus of ^schylus, where the Titan, over- come and chained to Mt. Caucasus by the superior might of Zeus, nevertheless proclaims his un- daunted spirit ; and of course this struggle between gods and Titans, which appears so frequently in Greek mythology, and hence in Greek poetry, is constantly present to Milton, and suggests to him simile and metaphor all through his poem. But why delay over these desultory allusions mixed with those of other legendary cycles, all grasped by his vast erudition? Consider the Samson Agonistes. Here we have the poet deliberately going back to strictly Greek form and even, in his notable preface to the play, de- fending dramatic poetry against Puritan objec- tions by appealing to ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, "the three tragic poets," he says, "unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy." You wonder when you consider that he had Shakespeare be- fore him, whom he mentions elsewhere with admiration. But the same preface tells us clearly why he would not concede to Shakespeare's tragedy the rank he gives to the Greek masters. 48 Greek Poetry He says tragedy had fallen into "low esteem or rather infamy, happening through the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar characters, which by all judicious persons has been counted absurd." He took therefore exactly the view of Voltaire, who is shocked at the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the drunken porter in Macbeth. Such was also the view of Milton's great French contemporary Racine, who believed that he had composed his plays in the strictest accordance with the principles of the ancients. And yet the school of Shakespeare might easily have defended themselves by citing the practice of those very masters, whose example they were recommended to follow. In the first place every Greek tragic poet composed a merry afterlude, called from its official chorus of Satyrs, a Satyric drama, and this followed immediately upon their tragedy. Secondly, even in this, the greatest master, ^schylus, does not disdain to bring "vul- gar and trivial persons" upon his stage, such as the watchman at the opening of the Agamemnon, and the nurse Kilissa, who intermix comic stuff with the tragic sadness of the play, and even en- hance the gloom by the contrast. Of course the tragedy of Euripides, who deliberately sought to I I Greek Poetry 49 bring his stage nearer to our ordinary life, could not but exhibit such passages, as any student of him knows perfectly well. Taking however Milton's own view of the nature of Greek tragedy, we have his Samson Agonistes not only constructed on the frame of an Attic play, but in every scene full of reminiscences and allusions showing a minute familiarity with the tragic Three. The opening, with its blind and world-worn hero, seeking for repose, is taken from the opening of the second (Edipus of Sopho- cles. So is the entry of the chorus, with their surprise at the doleful sight, but presently they assume much the same part as the ocean nymphs in the Prometheus of ^schylus, and it is from these two plays that he has borrowed most freely. In the development there is no doubt that Euripides was his real master. The litigi- ous element, if I may so call it, which was dear to the Athenians ; the introduction of an insolent giant; of the treacherous Dalila, who put forth arguments to be refuted by Samson, and so to fill up long scenes in the play — all this is in Euripides' best manner. So is the irruption of the distracted messenger near the close, who nar- rates the catastrophe. But nowhere is the thorough appreciation of 50 Greek Poetry the spirit of Greek tragedy, as well as its form, more manifest than in the choruses, and in the lyrical monodies which are the finest features of the play. He tells us in the preface, already quoted, that he did not observe the form of strophe and antistrophe, strictly corresponding, because this implies a musical accompaniment and per- formance in singing which was foreign to his purpose. Still less would he bind himself to rhyme, a shackle unknown or rather very rare in the poetry of the Greeks. He writes both lyrical complaints of Samson, and the choral odes which are interludes to the action, in irregular rythm, which we can hardly call metre, and which are yet in the strictest sense lofty poetry. These things are not to the taste of the ordinary com- mentator. Thus Sir Egerton Brydges, in a handsome and indeed learned edition adorned by Turner's drawings, says at the end of the first chorus: " Though there are magnificent passages in this chorus, I cannot quite reconcile my ear to the rythm, nor to some of the expressions, which are, I confess, too like prose." It is interesting for you to know that Cicero said nearly the same thing about Pindar. His elaborate metres sounded to the Roman like prose. But to any one who is intimate with Greek choruses, nothing Greek Poetry 51 has ever been composed in English which re- produces their effect so perfectly. I need not add that in substance these odes, partly poetic reflections of a general sort, partly in direct sympathy with the action of the play, are exactly the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In one point only we may say that here Milton is de- ficient — ^in that lyrical sweetness which marks many of the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides, so that we can recite them as independent poems. Probably Milton felt his subject too great and gloomy for such poetical digressions. For when he chose to give us lyrical sweetness, what can exceed his Comus f Nor do I know anything more Greek than the lovely though learned lyrical poe- try toward the close of that immortal masque. I now pass from the father of English classical poetry to later but not more varied manifestations of Greek influence. The most remarkable work in the early eighteenth century, which took all England by storm, was Pope's translation of the lUad. Chapman's was already there, a very meritorious work, and now rated more highly than its successor. But in Pope's day style was paramount. The Iliad must read as a great English poem, and we have Homer dressed in eighteenth-century costume, just as the boys 52 Greek Poetry that played Terence at Westminster played him in wigs, powder, and patches. It is very easy to criticise Pope's translation. His whole attitude was like that of Watteau in landscape ; his epithets were generally wrong, and wrong in principle. "And the conscious swain blesses the useful light" is the conclusion of a simile. Now Homer's swain was not conscious, nor did he bless the light as useful. ^ Thus we see in Jacques Carrey's now invalu- able drawings of the Parthenon — for they were done a few years before its disaster — that he could not even copy Phidias's work before him, without importing the style of the seventeenth-century Frenchman. All these things are true and obvious, and yet the poet, who in translating another, recasts him into his own mould, though he be faithless as a translator, may be far greater as a poet. Ever since I was introduced to Homer by Pope, more than fifty years ago, I have felt that, with all its anachronisms. Pope's poem is the greatest and best version of the Greek master, and a proper one for those to read who cannot approach the original. No prose translation, however scholarly and accurate, can give the • This remark is from Hare's almost forgotten Guesses at Truth, an excellent book. Greek Poetry 53 least idea of the swing of the great epic, and so I feel that the influence of Homer through Pope has been wide and lasting and that the very defects of so great a performance have stimulated oft-renewed attempts at reproducing the great masterpiece. Dryden's Virgil of course led public taste in the same direction, so that we have an age very diverse from Greek in taste, and very incongruous to it, nevertheless dominated, per- haps even more than people then imagined, by Greek classical models. The case of lyrical poetry is not dissimilar. The poets of the eighteenth century had before them Horace's versions of Alcseus and Sappho, and the text of Pindar, who was, as Horace had told them, the greatest master of all. But as he was difficult even for Horace to understand, so he was to the eighteenth-century poets but vaguely intelligible. Above all, the very essence of his studied, careful, and learned genius was wholly misunderstood. He was conceived to be a poet beyond the bounds of strict art, drunk with the muse and pouring forth a torrent of splendid thoughts in disregard of all the shackles of metre, which was so obvious in the .^olic school. Thus they strove to imitate his apparent impetuosity, and the supposed irregularities of 54 Greek Poetry his metre, and produced many good poems, in- spired indeed by the Greek, but wholly foreign to their model. The greatest of them was he who knew the originals far better than the rest, and took the pains to master them with scholarly care. We have in Gray a poet of really Greek temper and spirit, very learned, very fastidious, very strict in form, though that form be rich and various, ' and to my thinking well worthy of comparison with Simonides or Bacchylides, both in purity of style and splendour of diction. An excellent American critic (W. L. Phelps) has shown very clearly how Gray, beginning with classical training and making the pseudo-classical Dryden his model, was nevertheless in middle life swept away by the Romantic wave which flooded England and which made him prefer Keltic and national subjects to those derived from Greek and Latin traditions. All this is perfectly true, yet equally true is it, that no change of subject could change or mar the splendid form, the pure diction, the delicate taste which Gray derived from his careful study of the Greek poets, and which is as clear in his "Welsh bard," as in his "progress of classical poesy." No English poet had hitherto grasped the real splendour of Pindar, not even Milton, and so the Pindaric odes of Greek Poetry 55 lesser men, such as Cowley and Shenstone, have not survived as popular poems, whereas Dry den's Ode to St. Cecilia, and a whole series of Gray's poems, show clearly the matchless training which Greek poetry affords the modern poet, whatever be his subject or his school. It is in fact much more important and interest- ing to point out these indirect influences, than to lay stress on the direct borrowing from the Greek in form and diction. This very conflict or con- trast may be exemplified in Byron's poetry. He was a leading member of the Romantic school or fashion, and yet all his life he loved and honoured the classical perfection of the Greeks, and not infrequently by a stray passage proves how minute his knowledge even of fragments of Greek poetry. * The political circumstances of modem Greece in the early nineteenth century, the great struggle of the population against Turkish tyranny' — all this gave a romantic fore- ground to the classical taste fostered by the higher schools and colleges throughout Europe ; and so the admiration of the old Greeks in art, politics, and literature was a sort of classical justification ' " Keen were his pangs but keener far to feel He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel" is straight from jEschylus. 56 Greek Poetry for the Romanticists who had sprung from the re- action against the false French classicism of an earlier generation. Byron was first in adding the realities of actual Greece to its interest as a mere frame or imaginary locus for classical poetry. None of the eighteenth-century poets, or even the earlier historians of Greece, showed the smallest curiosity about the actual home of Greek litera- ture, the actual cradle that nursed all this un- equalled genius. Even Grote and Thirlwall, long after the poets had discovered what inspiration was to be derived from the mountains and fiords of Hellas, wrote their immortal histories, without any feeling that they would have gained, by a knowledge of the ground, a new and living flavour. For they had both means and leisure to travel and yet they sought no help outside the books of their libraries. But Byron brought into poetry at least that realism about Greece which made a study of Greek and of Greece at first-hand the desire of poets and of artists. Of Keats, who had not the opportunities, I have spoken. In Shelley, we have that perfect combination of romantic im- agination with profound Greek culture that makes him the greatest and probably the most lasting of that galaxy that illumined the early nineteenth Greek Poetry 57 century. The least Greek of them all was Words- worth, and I venture to say that had he studied Greek poetry, it would have taught him the essential differences which separate it from prose — lofty style, select diction, above all, compression within strict bounds and moderate limits — and thus have saved both us and him from the dreari- ness of his prosaic Excursion. Let none of you think that I underrate his poetic work. But in his highest moments it is the glow of Greek splen- dour, the spiritual lessons of the august Plato that illumine his sober genius, and translate him for the hour into the company of the immortals. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the strong desire to reproduce the Greek masterpieces not only by people who were poets for the occasion, like Lord Derby or Miss Swanwick, but also by the masters who had already proved their greatness to the English world. Robert Browning has given us versions of several plays, the Agamemnon, the Mad Herakles, the Alkestis. In the last, he lays stress rather on the psychological attitude of Euripides, on his character- drawing, than on the lyrical por- tions, which are not reproduced in lyrical metre. But how easily he could do this he proved to me when I asked him to render a famous ode of the 58 Greek Poetry poet in a form approaching the original. Writing to London from DubHn on a Monday, I had his version on Wednesday evening. The original manuscript I have given to an American friend who treasures it; the words appear in my little monograph on Euripides published years ago. Swinburne and Matthew Arnold have not trans- lated old Greek dramas, but have composed plays after that model. To an intelligent reader who has no knowledge of Greek, I know no better approach than to read the Atalanta or the Erech- theus of Swinburne, or, if he prefer it, the Merope of Arnold, which is not so great a poem as either of the others, but just as faithful a mirror of Greek mind; for the exuberance of Swinburne's choruses, the unrestrained riot of his ebullitions against the providence of the Gods, may be splendid poetry — they are foreign to the chaste and moderate diction which characterises almost all Greek lit- erature. If there be a great exception, it is in the gloomy grandeur of ^schylus, and accord- ingly no play has been so often attempted in English as the Agamemnon.^ > I know no translation of the whole seven plays of iEschylus that I can recommend, though there be many ad- mirable versions of the Agamemnon, but among the English Greek Poetry 59 When we pass from this large influence of Greek drama to that of the lyric fragments or the idylls and love stories of our modern poets, I am met by an old assertion of the pedants, that the Greeks were wanting in that love and feeling for nature which is the prerogative of the Romantic school. I see no such contrast between Classical and Romantic. Gray, the most classical of our lyric poets, was the first to insist upon the necessity of a poet refreshing his soul with the wild beauties of mountain scenery. If we had more of Sappho, we should find that she too was romantic in that as in every other reasonable sense. The last fragment recovered, which prophesies that her girl friend will shine at Sardis like the moon among the stars in a summer night, paints the splendours of such a night in the glowing colours of a true poet of nature. There is in Theocritus, there is in ApoUonius, ample evidence of a delight in the sights, and still more the sounds, of nature, and so the most classical of our modem lyric poets, Tennyson, shows great intimacy with Theocritus, and takes not only his images but still more his reproductions of Sophocles let me call your attention to that of Mr. Whitelaw, of most of Euripides to that of Mr. Way. Both of these are eminently the work of scholars who are also poets. 6o Greek Poetry tone from that delightful original. Such images as Sleep that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes, and again, The moan of doves in immemorial elms. And murmurings of innumerable bees, are, if not translated from Theocritus, certainly suggested by him. A more explicit borrowing from the Greek will be found in the comparison of a strong man's biceps to the passing of running water over a stone that does not break it : And bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone. Running too vehemently to break upon it. But in every page of that poet which is not mere familiar home life, I feel in the splendour of his style the very echo of Greek work, and I can well imagine how Euripides would have revelled in the lines, His honour rooted in dishonour stood. And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. The influence of Greek comedy is too com- Greek Poetry 6i plicated to be discussed at the close of this dis- course. For the greatest of the Greek masters, Aristophanes, has so intensely Attic a quality that we might as well try to imitate the work of Phidias. But his genteel successor Menander has become, through the versions of Plautus and Terence, the father of genteel comedy in Europe. He was extravagantly praised and popular in decadent Greece. I for one cannot hold that his legacy stands high among the priceless treasures be- queathed to us by his nation. But of his influence there can be no question. * It remains for me to say a word to those who ask how far this great poetry of the Greeks was reduced to theory, among a nation who loved to reduce everything to theory. The climax of this tendency is shown in the work of Aristotle, as we shall see in another connection, and Aristotle has either written, or caused to be written, among his multifarious tracts, an essay called the Poetic, which is mainly, so far as we have it, an analysis of the meaning of Tragic poetry. There are, no doubt, some very important utterances in this tract, notably the famous definition of tragedy, ' I need hardly add that the brilliant comedies of Aris- tophanes are to be found in the well known books of J. Hookham Frere and of Mr. Rogers, who has quite recently brought out another play. 62 Greek Poetry upon which so many volumes have been written. But, on the whole, I know no poorer and more jejune exposition of a great subject, so much so that I cannot but suspect that it is one of the many- outlying researches that he entrusted to his pu- pils. Here is the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of Aristotle: In the IpMgenia in AuUs Euripides has given us one dis- tinct type in his wonderful gallery of heroines, all facing death for the real or supposed public good, either freely or under the coercion of cowardly or cruel princes. This Iphigenia is a young fresh creature just blooming into life, and she hears the first news of her fate with an outburst of passionate tears, and of supplication against the cruel sentence. Yet presently, when she finds her doom sealed, she resigns herself with the splendid dignity of an inborn gentlewoman, and so adds greatly to the "pity and the terror" of the tragedy. The author of the Poetic says the character is not consistently drawn, and therefore faulty. What a contemptible judgment! It is only to be matched by the observation of the worthless pedant who tells us in his scholium that the Medea of Euripides had no business to shed tears over her children, as she was a hard and cruel character and about to murder them. So again this Aristotle says Greek Poetry 63 that poetry is essentially different from prose, and gives as an example that the work of Herodotus would not cease to be history even were it cast in metrical form. This observation misses the deeper distinction of poetic and prosaic thought, which does not depend on metrical form. There are many passages in Herodotus which despite their prose form are essentially poetry, as we shall see in the next lecture. These criticisms will, I trust, console you when I add that I have no time left for a full consideration of the Poetic. It is not always given to those who do great work to expound how they did it. Even among the Greeks there was a current theory that the poet suffered under that divine madness which we call inspiration, and knew not the full force of what the Muse spoke through his lips. That this in- spiration did not dispense with careful prepara- tion, with elaborate metrical perfection, I have already told you. We have but recently learned from the Persians of Timotheus that this metrical perfection may also be used to convey the most ludicrously silly conceits. Let us therefore take what Time has left us with thankfulness, and not disturb ourselves or mar our enjoyment by the application of 64 Greek Poetry barren theories. From Homer to the Antho- logy, you can find great poems and splendid fragments that will exalt you into the higher world reserved for those that can lay aside material cares. There you will enlarge the wealth of your souls; there you will enter upon the heritage left you by those that had attained and taken possession of the ideal to which all our love of beauty tends as its goal. But let me repeat to those who cannot quaff this poetry at the source : take it from the vessels of the English poets that are ready to your hands, not from the laboured prose of the modern scholar. Take Calverley's Theocritus; take Browning's Etiripides; take Whitelaw's Sophocles ; take Frere's Aristophanes. Thus may you reach not the real shrine, but, like some proselyte of old, the outer court of the matchless Temple. Ill GREEK PROSE I SUPPOSE the ordinary critic, when reviewing the great subject before us, would hardly think to-day's title one of sufficient importance to occupy a Boston audience, and yet it ought to be shown that in prose, fully as much as in poetry, the Greeks have been the teachers of civilised Europe. Probably also the subject will have to you this interest, that it is not at all so obvious as that of the last lecture. Everyone knows about the Greek poets; many of them are the household property of the modern world. But the origin and the development of Greek prose is not so generally studied, and its far-reaching influence not so widely understood. Moreover, we know some- thing more of the early stages of its history, and though it also surprises us with its absolute perfection in our earliest authors, and seems to leap from the brain of the god as fully armed as the poetry of Homer, yet we have some traces of earlier efforts ; we have some inkling of what went 5 65 66 Greek Prose before Herodotus, more than we have of what went before Homer. That is mostly due to the late origin of prose writir^ among the Greeks. At first, verse form was uni ^^ersal for recording all topics of interest. Even genealogies were com- posed in hexameters. All the proverbial wisdom of the Seven Sages was in metrical form. Solon, the greatest of these sages, even preaches his politics, and gives us his autobiography, in elegiac metre. We seem to have travelled a long way from the epoch when such a man as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Roosevelt would address the Senate or the people in verse; yet for all that Solon was a lawgiver, probably as great as either of them, and a very modern man, too, far more modern in tone and spirit than Mr. Gladstone. Nor am I sure that Mr. Roosevelt would not enjoy composing his messages to his Senate in verse; still less should I affirm that the German Emperor would not revel in heroic verse, as the proper vehicle for his ex- hortations to his subjects. I note this in order to bring home to you the fact that late in Greek spiritual history the greatest men and their audiences remained satisfied with the shackles of metre, as conveying serious teach- ing in a more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the beginning of Greek Prose 67 society, when there are no written records, men are wont to clothe their legends and tales in that form, as it is a great aid to the memory, and can be easily taught to children, who remember the sound long before they pay attention to the sense. I will not speak of inscriptions in prose, as they are not intended in early days for works of art, any more than the earliest letters, which are mere messages conveyed by writing. But there was an early attempt made, in the rich society of Ionia, to clothe thought in an artistic form without the shackles of metre, and that was the writing of the philosopher Heracleitus. I will speak of his great and pregnant theory hereafter; what concerns us now is that his ob- scure aphorisms were intended to strike the reader by their form, as well as their matter. He had apparently a single predecessor in Pherecydes of Syros. The subjugation of Ionia by the Persians, and especially the fall of Miletus, seem to have put an end to this early picturesque writing and thinking until it woke up as the scientific vehicle of the Greek school of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. It was in the opposite extreme of the Greek world, the far west, peopled mainly not by lonians but by Dorians, that literary prose made a new 68 Greek Prose beginning, which no political changes were able to crush, till all Greece fell under foreign domination. The first of these attempts was the composition, at Syracuse, of a treatise teaching citizens how to plead their cases in court. It was a time when revolutions in the state and consequent changes of property, arising from confiscations and exiles, often reversed by a turn of the wheel of fortune, made it vital for every plaintiff or defendant to be able to prove his case to a jury by persuasion. This school, though Doric in origin, passed to Attica, bred there a school of famous pleaders, from Antiphon to Demosthenes, who paid the closest attention to the form of their speeches, and so perfected the eloquence of the bar for all time. In strong contrast to this school was the elo- quence of display, referred to Gorgias as its earli- est master, which made elegant composition and splendid delivery an end in itself, and, in the hands of the educators called Sophists, often chose a contemptible or repulsive subject in order to show how even the most trivial cause was capable of glorification by art, just as Teniers makes the pothouse and its drunken boors fit to take their place among the treasures that decorate a great mansion. Greek Prose 69 In these widely contrasted pursuits of careful speaking, there were several points in common. In both, the subject was either ephemeral or might be trivial; it was the treatment which was the great point of interest and which gave rise to theories and systems. In neither was it the intention to instruct or improve the hearer. In the one, to effect persuasion for the moment, in the other to gain admiration for the moment, was the object of the speaker. In both also, though most carefully composed, was the written word wholly subordinate to the spoken sound. When these studies first arose, there was as yet no reading public, no gathering of books, and studying them at home ; but a public vastly fond of talking, and of hearing brilliant talk. There were other occasions and interests in Greek life, where the subject was of such paramount importance, that for a long time style was regarded with suspicion, as giving a flavour of unreality to the statements of the speaker or writer. One was the narrative of those events that had taken place in past time; the other was the grave de- liberation of public men regarding the future of the state, questions of justice and of policy in the treatment of citizens, or in the dealing with neighbouring powers. The earlier leaders of 7o Greek Prose Greece, such as Aristides, Themistocles, Pericles, and the ambitious men who made themselves tyrants, all must have studied the art of persuasion with due care, but it was not for some genera- tions that a professional orator like Demosthenes was intrusted with the charge of public affairs, and that the words orator and politician came to mean the same thing. Yet even here, the tendency in the Greek mind to submit everything to law and training, to turn every kind of human work into an art, was so strong, that no form of prose writing escaped this schooling, and all of it shows a strictness of rhetorical form which seems, at first study of it, artificial, until we come to learn that the highest products of human art are not spon- taneous, but the result of careful reflection. While these various efforts towards spoken elo- quence were occupying men, we find that early annalists set down either in rude metrical form, or even in prose, past events, thus laying the founda- tion for the greatest development of prose. I mean history, not merely as a record of past events, but as an artistic product, on the same level as dramatic poetry or as fresco painting.* The earlier attempts are known to us only ' I say fresco because this is usually occupied with histori- cal scenes. Greek Prose 71 through names and scraps of writing; we can- not now tell how far HecatEeus and Xanthus the Lydian were historians in the artistic sense; but there is no doubt whatever that in Herodotus the Greeks have given not only to the ancient, but to the modem world, a model of the art of history which has never been excelled. And as if that were not enough, we have in Thucydides another model (one which professes not the charm of artistic narrative, but the strict analysis of positive facts) and in this model, which has imposed itself, or has imposed, on generations of historians, we have another specimen of the use of prose, which is likewise the highest model of the so-called science of history. This latter instance is all the more remarkable because the writer did not, like Herodotus, chose a great world-subject, but a long and dull civil war, in which no gigantic interests were at stake, and yet by his consummate art, by his intense seriousness, little skirmishes in which a few hundreds of men were engaged have become household words in modem life, while elsewhere many a shock of myriads has past into oblivion. Thus the little actions of the Athenian Phormio with his well trained boats against a superior force have given rise to a far larger litera- ture than the great world-battles of Actium or 72 Greek Prose Lepanto in the same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter. As I think it easier to impress a modem au- dience with the importance of Greek prose style in this particular branch of its excellence, I shall put it in the foremost place. Nothing strikes a reader of the Poetic of Aristotle (or of the treatise so called) as more incompetent than the illustra- tion the writer uses to show that dramatic poetry is more philosophical than history. He says that the former portrays the general features of human character, as they must naturally develop, whereas history has no object but to narrate the details of what has happened, e. g. what Alcibiades did or suffered. I have already pointed out to you the astounding stupidity with which he has criticised the development of a noble tragic character by a great dramatist — ^the Iphigenia in Aulis of Eu- ripides. His notion of the portraiture of human nature as it ought to develop is one of common- place consistency, excluding all those storms and passions which suddenly supervene and which give to human character all its interest and its variety. I have spoken to you of Aristotle's judgments on tragic characters ; but I am now concerned with his view of history, as a mere narrative of particulars, and I come to consider again his statement that Greek Prose 73 Herodotus if put into metre would nevertheless be only history, and not dramatic poetry. It is a cu- rious thing that we can here refute the critic from historical facts which he should have, nay must have, known. One episode in the history of Herodotus had already become a famous tragedy in the hands of ^schylus, whom we may fairly assert to be a very excellent judge of what was proper for a tragic subject. Another historic episode, the Fall of Miletus, was made the subject of a tragedy by Phrynichus, and if it displeased the Attic audience, who fined the poet, it was not because the subject was failing in tragic interest, but because it possessed too much, for it melted the whole audience into tears, and brought home to them their present misfortunes, as well as their recent blunders in policy, and their craven deser- tion of their kindred in Ionia. The whole essence of prose history, as an art, first comprehended by Herodotus, is to regard the course of human affairs not as a mere catalogue of events but as a great human drama depending on large and eternal principles, wherein the rise and fall of great nations, still more the rise and fall of the great men who sway great nations, afford us the contemplation of "deeds, or series of events of importance and completeness, produc- 74 Greek Prose ing through the excitement of the feelings of pity and terror in the reader the purification of these emotions. " Aristotle adds to this his definition of tragedy that the subject must be sweetened by graces of diction in every part, and this is exactly what the first great historian did, and what every one of his successors is bound to do, if his work is to live as a work of art, and not to be laid by as a mere repertory for learned reference. History as a matter of style is therefore one of the great legacies of the Greeks to mankind. But not only in the style does Herodotus agree with the definition of tragedy in Aristotle. He does so also in his subject. This must be great or dignified, it must have completeness in itself, and it must contain those changes of fortune which are so peculiarly affecting to every reader. The struggle between Persia and Greece, its inception, its varying fortunes, the subjugation of Ionia, the anguish of Greece — all leading to the climax at Salamis and Platea, and the craven flight of Xerxes to his home — ^what greater or more complete subject could a historian choose? And in order to sweeten it with words, there are many pauses in the action, filled with delightful digres- sions, far more various and more restful than the choruses in a Greek tragedy. These, and all the Greek Prose 75 main narrative, and the dramatic dialogues which he composes for his actors, are presented to us in that easy and flowing style which seems natural and obvious, because it is the most perfect art. I do not know whether this admirable simplicity is ever the spontaneous product of human genius. Whenever I have been able to reach the evidence, I have found it the result of great labour and fastidious care. I will give you an instance. There was no one more remarkable in Europe in his generation for pellucid simplicity of style than Ernest Renan. I once saw in a friend's room a proof which Renan had sent him for revision. I was not allowed to study it, but a glance showed me that a thin strip of printed matter, the first draft, had been laid down on a large blue sheet of paper, all the wide margins of which were covered with corrections, alterations, and rehandlings of the printed sentences. There was much erased, much added, much changed more than once. There was perhaps three times as much in the corrections as in the original draft. The result, as we know, was something so easy and natural that it seemed to have flowed without the smallest effort from his pen. But Herodotus is not the only model by whom the Greeks have established a standard for modem writers. He has about him the air of a story-teller. 76 Greek Prose and he repeats many legends and wonders, so that graver and more sceptical generations set him down as a credulous traveller easily deceived by lying reports, if not as a deliberate writer of fiction. So many of these so-called lies or in- ventions have turned out after all to be true or probable (e. g., the tradition that the Etruscans came to Italy from the coast of Asia Minor by sea) that even from this point of view Herodotus has been vindicated by modem research. If you want a model of the other kind of history — ^that which professes to be a sober record of carefully sifted facts, which professes to discard all that is miraculous or legendary, and insist upon testimony, then in the opinion of all the ages you find its perfection in Thucydides. There used to be a general agreement that in contrast to the obviously artistic turn of Herodotus, his successor had exalted history, as far as was possi- ble, to the rank of an exact science. We now know that this view is very far from the truth. Thucydides, as his speeches should always have clearly demonstrated, was an artist just as con- sciously as Herodotus, nay rather a more subtle artist, in that he concealed his art and deluded mankind under the guise of a solemn and dignified person, telling nothing but the unvarnished Greek Prose 77 truth. » For he too felt that the tragedies of human affairs were a fit and noble subject for the contemplation of men; he too felt that the lessons conveyed by the catastrophes in the affairs of brilliant polities and brilliant men are as valuable as those borrowed from legendary story for the tragic stage. The speeches he puts into the mouths of his characters are not those actually delivered, either in language, or probably even in substance. They are rather rhetorical expositions of the political situations, as the historian conceived them, and reflections which he thinks the reader ought to make. He also knows the more modem way of dealing with this side of history. His reflections on the Corcyrean massacre 2 are a famous specimen of this artistic or subjective writing. I have taken pains else- where to show that his picture of the degradation of politics in Greece so far as he represents it to be new and sudden, is false. All the vices which make up his brilliant but lurid sketch were old, well known, and ingrained in the Greek character. 3 ■ The reader can now consult the brilliant and suggestive Thucydides Mythisioricus of Mr. Cornford on this aspect of the historian and his work. ' Book iii., 82-4 3 Cf. for example what Herodotus tells us in his fourth book of the afEairs of Cyrene. 78 Greek Prose But it was part of his artistic scheme to represent the vices of that age, and especially at Athens, culminating in a brutal and wholly unhistorical dialogue with the Melians, as the proper prelude to the great disaster in Sicily and the consequent fall of Athens. Thus choosing a far smaller and poorer subject than Herodotus, treating it also in a far poorer and narrower way, he has by those very restrictions intensified his book, and infused into it such dignity and pathos as to make it artisti- cally worthy of the age of Phidias, of Aristophanes, of Socrates. When we ask whether the diction of this great work is adequate to its artistic conception, the answer is not, I think, far to seek. There are two kinds of diction in Thucydides, a clear, chaste attractive narrative of facts, without ornament, but rising with its subject to a pathetic earnestness, which has seldom been surpassed. This narrative, like the dialogue of tragedy, is interrupted at suitable moments by the pretended speeches of the actors, which by a curious inversion are like the chorus in the play, giving the motives of the action and often the disguised opinions of the writer. These are expressed in obscure and con- torted language, which ancient critics did not hesitate to stigmatise as thoroughly bad style. Greek Prose 79 With models of clearness before him, such as Herodotus, Euripides, Antiphon, this fault is an idiosyncrasy of Thucydides, and yet a defect which has not failed to bring to him certain advantages. For obscurity always produces the impression of profundity, especially when it occurs in a solid and weighty author. Thus the many platitudes in Thucydides' speeches, and the recurrence of obvious ideas, are disguised by contortions of expression, so that the discovery of the meaning is a mental exercise which flatters and thus pleases the reader, if he be curious in such things, still more the commentator, who finds wonderful scope for his often mediocre talent in such labour. This is the quality in Mr. George Meredith who makes his admirers think highly of themselves, while they despise others. * Time fails me to illustrate further, in Xenophon and in Polybius, this artistic conception of a period of human history as a great drama, in which the rise, the splendour, and the fall of great men, great cities, great nations are told us with artistic selection of the details and artistic perfection of style. This was the conception which moved Gibbon to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman > I must refer the audience for details to the chapter on Thucydides in my History of Greek Literature. 8o Greek Prose Empire. He saw around him, at Rome, the gigantic relics of a bygone civiHsation. He felt within him the power of style to present the facts in adequate form; and so we obtained another work of art, in which the presentation of the facts is not less important than the facts themselves. As the Greeks put it over and over again, and as Cicero repeats it, history is a form of eloquence, and that history only will last which possesses the sine qua non of a great or an attractive style. This is what the Greeks have taught us, and what many of us have ignored to our own ruin as per- manent teachers. I will conclude this part of my subject by remind- ing you that in biography, which as the idyll gives a single scene, or as a cameo gives the por- trait of an individual — Plutarch has been the model to all modern biographers. How truly dramatic was his conception and his treatment of individual great lives will come home to you at once when I remind you that Shakespeare found in his Lives subjects for a series of tragedies, and in his diction language which required very little paraphrase. Let us now turn back to the sister developments of eloquence, wherein the writing of history had accomplished such triumphs. These are in Greek Prose 8i brief the eloquence of debate, and the eloquence of display. And the eloquence of debate may either be that of the courts, wherein private in- dividuals, the plaintiff and defendant, are pitted one against the other, or that of the public assembly, where political deliberations are held and in which the orator seeks to persuade the majority to adopt his policy or to reject the policy of a political opponent. Remember that in all these cases the Greeks were equally adverse to extemporaneous effusions. They believed in the artistic arrangement and polished expression of every argument. In the law courts, where litigants had to appear in person, and not by counsel, it was the advocate's duty to compose the client's speech for him beforehand, and probably to in- struct him in its proper delivery. As we never hear of any breaking down in court, of any client un- able to remember or speak out what the advocate had prepared for him, I think it possible that the litigants were allowed to read their speeches. In any case, the composition of these speeches became a well-known and lucrative profession, and was accordingly adopted by the ablest men. The practice had long suggested the theory, and so from early times there were treatises composed, known as Te;