The Legacy of Greece Part 16

?e??? e? s??p??, ?e?ss?? ep? ????pa p??t??, t?ss?? ep????s???s? ?e?? ????ee? ?pp??.[111]

{hosson d' eeroeides aner iden ophthalmoisin hemenos en skopie, leusson epi oinopa ponton, tosson epithroskousi theon hypsechees hippoi.}

[111] _Iliad_, xvi. 428 f.: 'As vultures with crooked talons and curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.'

_Ibid._ v. 770 f.: 'As far as a man's view ranges in the haze, as he sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the G.o.ds.'

It is hard, as the beginnings of Roman poetry show, to devise a metre which is not rough, unmusical, or even grotesque: yet for richness and strength this first metre of Europe has never been rivalled by the Greeks or by any one else. The same natural technical skill appears in more subtle things even than metre or language. Homer is born knowing by some instinct the profound secret of literary art which Aristotle formulated centuries later as the principle of unity of Action. The plot of a play, he writes in the _Poetics_, 'should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.... It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be.... Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again the transcendant excellence of Homer appears. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view: while if he had kept it in moderate limits it would have been over-complicated by the variety of incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion.'[112] Once stated, the principle of unity of action becomes a commonplace of literary art. But, as the _Annals_ of Ennius or the _Faerie Queen_ show, it is not obvious until stated, and the poets from whose practice Aristotle made his induction, must have had a rare technical instinct unconsciously to preserve unity of interest through the complications of a long epic or drama. Such achievements were only possible to a people with a natural genius for literary art. In the hands of the Greeks the various elements of literature found their te??? {telos} and achieved their natural form, almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to its predestined shape.

[112] _Poetics_, c. 23 (tr. Butcher).

This can be ill.u.s.trated even better from Greek drama. A modern author who wishes to write a play may not find the task easy, but he knows the general form which a drama has to take and the general principles to be followed in writing it. The right length is given him, the division into scenes and acts, the methods of exposition and dialogue, the conception of a _denouement_, the law of unity of action, and the rest. The fathers of Greek tragedy had no such help. They had no drama in our sense of the word, but simply a band of fifty persons dressed like satyrs, and dancing round an altar and singing a song. Out of this anything or nothing might have been made. The Greeks, with the instinctive and unerring motions of genius, developed from it the highest and most elaborate of literary forms, and within a hundred years are writing plays which Sh.e.l.ley cla.s.ses with _King Lear_, and which Swinburne can call, 'probably, on the whole, the greatest spiritual work of man'.

In divining the principles of literary art and evolving the various kinds of literature no people can be compared to the Greeks, and probably none can show a ma.s.s of work executed with so uniformly high a finish. But when we compare writer with writer we shall find individual artists to rival them. Though the strength of English literature does not lie in technical perfection, Milton, Pope, and Tennyson--to name no others--have in their different ways as firm a grasp of it as any Greek, and it can be learned from French writers, with whom it is the rule rather than the exception, as well as from the Greeks. This is hardly true of another quality of Greek writing, which may be cla.s.sed with technical finish, though it is in fact something more. It is one of the most characteristic features of Greek; yet on first acquaintance, it is often disconcerting and even distasteful. If a reader new to the cla.s.sics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Sh.e.l.ley or Tennyson, he came across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae,

? ?e??', a??e??e?? ?a?eda??????? ?t? t?de ?e?e?a, t??? ?e???? ??as? pe???e???,[113]

{o xein', angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti tede keimetha, tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi,}

he might see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which is always at its greatest when most simple, and he would have been face to face with a characteristic quality of it.

[113] 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obeying their words.'

The contrast with the usual English manner may be ill.u.s.trated by quoting a famous epigram--Ben Jonson's epitaph on a boy actor:

Weep with me, all you that read This little story; And know, for whom a tear you shed, Death's self is sorry.

'Twas a child that so did thrive In grace and feature, As heaven and nature seemed to strive Which owned the creature.

Years he numbered scarce thirteen When Fates turned cruel, Yet three filled zodiacs had he been The stage's jewel;

And did act (what now we moan) Old men so duly, As sooth the Parcae thought him one, He played so truly.

So, by error, to his fate They all consented; But, viewing him since, alas, too late!

They have repented.

These lines--and they are not the whole of the poem--are enough to ill.u.s.trate the difference between the Greek method and the English, the latter rich and profuse, following the flow of an opulent fancy, the former reticent and restrained, leaving the reader's imagination room and need to play its part. There are materials for half-a-dozen epigrams in Ben Jonson's poem. Had he been Simonides or Plato, he would have stopped after the fourth line and, in the opinion of some critics, by saving his paper he would have improved his poem.

In their theory and in their practice the Greek writers were true to this principle of Economy. Their proverbs proclaim it 'the half is greater than the whole': 'sow with the hand and not with the whole sack.' The great pa.s.sages of their literature ill.u.s.trate it. It is to be found no less in Thucydides' account of the siege of Syracuse and in the close of the _Phaedo_ or the _Republic_ than in the death of Hector or the meeting of Priam and Achilles. The Greek writers may have emotions that would seem to demand vehement and extended expression, topics to inspire a poet and tempt him to amplify them; but resisting the temptation they set the facts down quietly and pa.s.s on practically without comment. The close of the _Phaedo_ exemplifies this restraint.

Plato has just related with severe economy of detail the death of his master. His comment on the event which saddened and confounded his whole life is but this: 'Such, Echecrates, was the death of our friend, the best man, I think, that I have ever known, the wisest too and the most just.'[114]

[114] _Phaedo_, 118 B.

There are n.o.ble examples of reticence and economy in English literature, some of the most conspicuous of which can be traced to cla.s.sical influence; but no one would contend that these qualities are the rule in our great writers. The English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho,

?spe?e, pa?ta fe??? ?sa fa?????? es?eda?' a???, fe?e?? ???, fe?e? a??a, fe?e?? ap? ate?? pa?da,[115]

{Hespere, panta pheron osa phainolis eskedas' auos, phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida,}

[115] fr. 95: 'Star of evening, bringing all things that bright dawn has scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.'

than like Byron,

O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things-- Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent's brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o'er-laboured steer; Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate'er our household G.o.ds protect of dear, Are gathered round us by thy look of rest; Thou bring'st the child too to its mother's breast.

Something may be said in favour of both methods. Amplitude of treatment and fullness of detail enrich the imagination while economy stimulates it. The latter may become jejune, and is safe only in the hands of great writers: the former is apt to provide too rich a feast and to leave the full-fed mind inert. Everything is done for it and nothing left it to do. Economy on the other hand throws the reader on his own resources. It sets the imagination wandering in the fields of infinity. Some readers find this one of the essential delights of literature, though others prefer that the author should take them by the hand and indicate every detail with the precision of the sign-posts at a German _Kurort_.

Economy is the reflection in literature of that s?f??s??? {sophrosyne}, which is the most deeply-rooted of Greek ideals, the most untranslatable of Greek words. But it was helped by an accident. If the art of printing were lost, modern works would contract within narrower limits, and the Greek economy was encouraged by the fact that Fust was not yet born. We, who do not rely on hand-copying for the propagation of our books, naturally write at greater length: and while it loses in conciseness, literature has a compensating gain in amplitude. But the habit of writing for money, which encourages abundant production, and the existence of the printing-press, which makes it easy, expose us to dangers from which the ancients were free. The newspapers are the worst offenders, saying many things which need not be said at all, and saying everything in a superfluous and excessive way. But literature suffers hardly less. The greatest figures of the last fifty years, such as Browning, Meredith, Hardy and Conrad, dilute their pages with unessential, if not inferior, stuff, and produce writing which has not received the _summa ma.n.u.s_. Had their work been less by a half--a modest reduction--it would have been more perfect because more time could have been devoted to it, more powerful because each stroke would have been precise and strong, more telling because these strokes would not have been combined with ineffective blows. This is even truer of lesser men and other forms of literature. It is because the _Agricola_ of Tacitus extends to but thirty pages, that the biography of a Roman civil servant of no great genius will outlive those of far greater men.

The art of omission is the art which English writers most need to learn; the literary _lima_ is their least-handled tool. Both art and tool were perfectly understood and constantly used by the Greeks.

The third mark of Greek Literature, with which I have to deal, is perhaps its most important, certainly its most universal quality. It is truthfulness. The Greeks told no fewer lies than other races, but they had the desire and the power to see the world as it is. By this essential quality they gave Europe the conception of philosophy and science. These we inherit from them alone; Palestine and our German ancestors neither created them, nor show any signs of the temper that creates them, and Rome received her share from Greece.

The word 'Truthfulness' may seem to suggest the realism of some modern writers. But the Greek truthfulness was different. It should be distinguished from the laboured detachment and painful impartiality of such a writer as Flaubert, whose realism conceals him in the same sense as the walls of the engine-room conceal the panting machines within. The Greek Truthfulness is spontaneous, natural, and effortless--the native quality of the artist, who sees, and forgets himself in the vision. Nor has it anything to do with photographic realism. It has not the impersonality of that method or its flat and lifeless effect. A man, and no machine, makes the picture, feeling intensely what he sees, and though this intensity does not distort his vision, we are conscious, as we read, of a human personality, and we feel the electric thrill of life.

Nor is it akin to that type of modern realism, which, like a noxious drug, lays hold on the spirits and depresses the heart--the realism which paints so black a picture of human life, that it affects us physically like days of continued fog, and gives us no more complete and truthful a picture of the world. There is hardly any Greek writer, perhaps none at all, of whom this can be said. Many moderns can faithfully describe what is disagreeable, but their effects are often brutal and always depressing. The gift of portraying suffering and evil with unflinching truth, yet of conveying other feelings than those of mere horror, is reserved for few. Its rarity perhaps explains the rarity of great tragedy, of which it seems to be a condition that it shall truthfully show what is darkest in life, without leaving a final and dominant sense of gloom. The great Greek writers possessed this secret.

They are as sensitive to evil and suffering as any writer and fully as faithful in recording them. But whereas other men are simply depressed or disgusted or appalled, lose their vital forces, and gaze in paralysed fascination, these writers, in virtue of a sense which is more aesthetic than moral, are aware of tremendous issues, see in sordid suffering the agonies of a labouring universe, and feel awe and wonder, not mere disgust and distress, at what human beings suffer and endure. That is why Homer leaves us with another feeling than depression, when he tells how Priam begged his son's body from the man who killed him. 'So Priam entered unseen of them and stood near and clasped with his hands the knees of Achilles and kissed the terrible murderous hands that had slain so many of his sons. But Achilles was amazed at the sight of Priam, and amazed were the rest, and they looked at each other. And Priam entreated and addressed him. "Remember your own father, G.o.dlike Achilles: he is of like years with me, and stands on the hateful road of old age. Perhaps the neighbours round about harry him and there is none to keep misery and ruin from him. Yet when he hears that you are alive, he rejoices and hopes, day in, day out, to see his dear son returning from Troy. But I am utterly wretched, for I begat the best of sons in Troy, and none of them is left. The one I had, who was the stay of Troy and its people, you killed but now as he fought for his country--even Hector. Respect the G.o.ds, Achilles, and pity me, and remember your own father. I am more unhappy than he. I have faced what no other mortal man ever yet faced--to stretch my hand to the face of my sons' slayer."'[116] There is suffering and evil enough here, and there is no attempt to disguise or lessen them. Yet most readers, I think, would read this pa.s.sage with different feelings from those provoked by the close of _Madame Bovary_ or of _Jude the Obscure_. Its truthfulness is neither ugly nor depressing.

[116] _Iliad_, xxiv. 277 f. (with omissions).

Nor again is the Greek truthfulness identical with objectivity. An objective writer tells his story and conveys his impressions, as far as possible, by relating facts without commenting upon them. Dramatists and novelists are compelled by the nature of their art to be objective in this sense of the word (though Fielding and Thackeray in the one field, and Ibsen and Shaw in the other, manage to make their comments with their own lips, not those of their characters). But such a writer would not of necessity be more truthful or impartial than any one else. He can distort truth as thoroughly by selecting certain facts and ignoring others as by making misleading comments. He may be violently one-sided and present only the facts that support his view, thus indirectly putting himself into what he writes quite as fully as a confessed partizan, though less openly. Such a writer is objective, but his objectivity with him is no more than a literary method. Now it is true that the Greeks use this method, telling a story without personal comments, not only in their epics and plays where this method is natural, but also in their histories and elsewhere. Thucydides for instance tells the story of a great war, yet his comments on it are few, and are mainly given in the dramatic and would-be objective form of speeches by leading men of the day. But the Greeks have objectivity in a far more important sense than this. Their objectivity is no literary device but a quality of mind. They have the power of standing aloof from matters in which they are personally interested, and surveying them from outside like impartial spectators, with the keenest interest, but without bias. As the Delphic priestess in the act of prophecy lost her individuality and became the mouthpiece of the G.o.d, so the Greek allowed facts to speak for themselves, became their mouthpiece and banished the intrusive ego. If therefore we call the Greeks objective, all this must be included in our definition of the word.

We shall understand Greek 'truthfulness' best, if, dropping philosophical terms, and forgetting modern meanings, we remember a saying of Anaxagoras, who, when asked for what purpose he was born, replied: 'To contemplate the works of nature.' The disinterested pa.s.sion for contemplating things, which gathered inquiring groups round Socrates to discuss what justice and friends.h.i.+p mean, or whether goodness is knowledge and can be learnt, has its counterpart in literature. The Greeks were fascinated by the spectacle of man and the world, and their fascination is seen not only in their formal philosophy. Of their poets too it may be said that they were born to see the world and human life--not to moralize or to indulge in sentiment or rhetoric or mysticism about it, but to see it. Keats's description of the poetic temperament fits them closely: 'It has no self, it is everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade.... A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, he is continually in, for, and filling some other body.' In such a mood men will write literature that may justly be called truthful. Avoiding the didactic, they will not distort truth to suit personal bias; avoiding rhetoric, they will not sacrifice it to fine phrases; avoiding sentiment and fancy, they will not gratify their own or their hearer's feelings at the expense of truth; avoiding mysticism, they will not move away from facts into a world of emotions.

Their care will be to see things, and their delight will be in the mere vision. They will echo the words of Keats, 'If a sparrow comes before my windows, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel'[117]: they will not treat it as Sh.e.l.ley treats the skylark, or even as Keats and Wordsworth treat the nightingale. Herein is one of the secrets of Greek poetry, for the Greek poets, more than any others, bring us in a manner entirely simple and natural into immediate contact with what they describe, and thus escape the thousand distortions for which epigram, rhetoric, sentiment, fancy, mysticism and romanticism are responsible.

This secret may be called 'directness'. It is the habit of looking straight and steadily at things, and describing them as they are, the very contrary of the habit of didactic comment and of rhetorical or emotional inflation. The 'direct' writer, in the fullest extent that is possible, keeps himself and his feelings in the background. He does not allow the mists which rise from a man's personality to come between him and his subject.

[117] I have taken these quotations of Keats from Bradley, _Oxford Lecture on Poetry_, p. 238.

A few instances of directness will give a better idea of it than many definitions. The epigram quoted a few pages back shows how the Greek writer lets his subject speak instead of expressing his own feelings about it. So does the following epitaph, placed by a father on his son's grave.

??de?et? t?? pa?da pat?? ape???e F???pp??

e??ade t?? p????? e?p?da ????te???.[118]

{Dodekete ton paida pater apetheke Philippos enthade ten pollen elpida Nikotelen.}

[118] Callimachus, _Epigr._ 20: 'His father Philip laid here to rest his twelve-year old son, his high hope, Nicoteles.'

The bereaved father says nothing of his sorrow, or the greatness of his loss, but records his son's name and age and says that he was his father's 'high hope', and so doing gives us everything. Simonides does not express his own feelings about the heroism of the Spartan dead; their grave speaks for them to the pa.s.ser-by. Nor is this a mere literary method, a way of writing which states facts and leaves them to make an impression by their own weight, unaided by comment or explanation. A comparison of Ben Jonson's epigram with the Greek epitaph, will show that directness is much more than this. The fancies with which Jonson closes are pretty; but they are false, for they are really incompatible with deep feeling: the Greek directness never loses from sight the dead child; it sees only that and the father's sorrow.

The following extract deals with a very different subject, but ill.u.s.trates directness equally well. The scene is the Athenian colony of Amphipolis on the Struma; the dramatis personae are the Spartan general Brasidas who wishes to capture it, and the Athenian Thucydides who was then at Thasos, distant half a day's sail from Amphipolis. 'As soon as Thucydides heard the news about Brasidas, he sailed quickly to Amphipolis ... in order to garrison it if possible before it could capitulate, or at any rate to occupy Eion (its seaport). Meanwhile Brasidas, fearing the arrival of the Athenian fleet at Thasos and hearing that Thucydides ... was one of the leading men of the country, did his utmost to get possession of the city before he arrived.... He therefore offered moderate terms.... These terms were accepted, and the city was surrendered to him. On the evening of the same day Thucydides and his s.h.i.+ps sailed into Eion, but not until Brasidas had taken possession of Amphipolis: another night, and he would have seized Eion.'[119] The gist of the story contained in this extract is plain.

The Spartan general Brasidas seized the important town of Amphipolis, and the Athenian general came too late to save it. But who would guess that the Athenian general Thucydides was the historian Thucydides who wrote these words, and that the episode which he here describes with such detachment and neutrality earned him perpetual exile under pain of death, from the country which he pa.s.sionately loved? Thucydides has told the bare facts, objectively, as if they related to some one else, without a comment, without a word of protest, excuse, explanation or regret on the crowning disaster of his life. He writes of himself in the third person. This is not the way in which modern generals write of their mishaps, but it is the Greek way. Thucydides has forgotten himself and his feelings; he sees only the disastrous day when he sailed up the Struma with his s.h.i.+ps and found the gates of Amphipolis closed against him. He ignores himself so far that he does not call it disastrous, though disastrous it was for himself and his country. With the same detachment he speaks of the enslavement of Melos and the tragedy of Syracuse, though he thinks, and makes us feel, that the one was the crowning crime, the other the crowning disaster of his country. He narrates the plain facts and leaves the reader to draw his inferences.

If we did not know that he was an Athenian, we could hardly tell from his history whether he took the side of Athens or Sparta in the war; so entirely are he and his feelings kept in the background. Yet he was an ardent patriot, and he is describing the war in which his country lost supremacy and empire. No historian of the war of 1914-18, whether on the Allied or the German side, is likely to write of it in this way.

[119] _Thuc._ iv. 104, 105, 106 (tr. Jowett, mainly).

The art of Homer has the same quality of detachment. He is a Greek, writing of a ten years' war between Greeks and Asiatics, yet most of his readers sympathize with Hector rather than with Achilles. He himself preferred neither, but saw and felt equally with both; with the hero who fought the losing battle for Troy, and with him who lost his friend, and, intoxicated with sorrow, could see and feel nothing but a pa.s.sion of revenge. It would seem hardly possible to write the close of the 22nd Book of the _Iliad_, where the heroes meet, without taking sides; we, no doubt, should take Hector's side. But Homer stands apart from the quarrel, and sees both men and the feelings of both, writing with the pen of the Recording Angel, not of the Judge. What he or Thucydides thought in each case can only be guessed at. They have presented the facts without comment, and the facts tell their own tale, explain themselves, carry with them the feelings they should evoke, and s.h.i.+ne by their own light, like the phosph.o.r.escence of the sea.

Little thinking is needed to see that the direct, detached, objective temper is the generative principle of the Greek achievement, for it is the parent of science and philosophy, which are the children of a desire to see things in themselves as they are, and not as the seer might wish them to be. The effects of this temper in poetry can be appreciated by a comparison of certain phenomena of our own literature which are absent from Greek. The comparison will indicate, too, what modern writers can learn from the Greeks, and enable us to judge whether the lessons are needed.