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 following the course of the present lecture. But on the other hand, it is hard for me to give to such hearers 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 possibly be underrating the cultivation of this audience, 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 important 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 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, sometimes 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 modern English to signify something contrasted with natural, and therefore inferior,[4] 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 representation of a natural but an ideally beautiful figure, such as the Hermes of Praxiteles. So the last triumph of a great actor is to reproduce perfectly human nature in its general 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 photographing vulgar everyday life, he can easily lapse into absurdity. All our habits, so far as they are civilised, 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 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 language 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 literary 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 human 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 becoming obtrusively artificial and outworn in public estimation, there was still a vein of folk-song, in scenery contrasting utterly with the crowded sandhills 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 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 Tennyson, 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 Æschylus, nay, even the perfect diction and metre of Aristophanes, 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 AlcÆus, 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 B.C., 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:

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 careful workmanship, if it did arise from an appeal to the songs of the people, shows the very same fastidious 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 perfection 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 music was the only part of the performance we criticised. So the Persians of Timotheus is 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 modern 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 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, avoiding 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 unlimited choruses in Mr. Swinburne’s Atalanta—otherwise a splendid reflection 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 became the lingua franca of all epic poets, whatever 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,[5] in the mere language of the common people.

But I must now abandon these general considerations 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 modern 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 combined 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 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 unapproachable 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 classical 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. 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 essence 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 Apollonius. His direct obligations to this poet have been noticed in many places by the commentators. I have no doubt that a careful 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 Apollonius to modern 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, 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 assured, 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. Nothing 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 ruffians of the French Revolution is not less remarkable, and will, I think, occupy us in another connection. But then these men had for a century 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 Shakespeare 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 Æneid anything like the familiarity with Greek 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 Æschylus, where the Titan, overcome and chained to Mt. Caucasus by the superior might of Zeus, nevertheless proclaims his undaunted 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, defending dramatic poetry against Puritan objections by appealing to Æschylus, 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 before 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. 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, Æschylus, does not disdain to bring “vulgar 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 enhance the gloom by the contrast. Of course the tragedy of Euripides, who deliberately sought to 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 Œdipus of Sophocles. 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 Æschylus, 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 litigious 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 narrates the catastrophe.

But nowhere is the thorough appreciation of 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 performance 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 commentator. 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 has ever been composed in English which reproduces 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 rÔle of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In one point only we may say that here Milton is deficient—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? Nor do I know anything more Greek than the lovely though learned lyrical poetry 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 Iliad. 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 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.[6]

Thus we see in Jacques Carrey’s now invaluable 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 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, perhaps 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 AlcÆus 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 Æolic school. Thus they strove to imitate his apparent impetuosity, and the supposed irregularities of his metre, and produced many good poems, inspired 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 lesser men, such as Cowley and Shenstone, have not survived as popular poems, whereas Dryden’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 interesting 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 contrast 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.[7] The political circumstances of modern Greece in the early nineteenth century, the great struggle of the population against Turkish tyranny—all this gave a romantic foreground 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 for the Romanticists who had sprung from the reaction 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 literature, the actual cradle that nursed all this unequalled 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 imagination with profound Greek culture that makes him the greatest and probably the most lasting of that galaxy that illumined the early nineteenth century. The least Greek of them all was Wordsworth, 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 dreariness 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 splendour, 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 portions, 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 poet in a form approaching the original. Writing to London from Dublin 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 translated 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 Erechtheus 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 literature. If there be a great exception, it is in the gloomy grandeur of Æschylus, and accordingly no play has been so often attempted in English as the Agamemnon.[8]

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 Apollonius, ample evidence of a delight in the sights, and still more the sounds, of nature, and so the most classical of our modern lyric poets, Tennyson, shows great intimacy with Theocritus, and takes not only his images but still more his tone from that delightful original. Such images as

and again,

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:

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,

The influence of Greek comedy is too complicated to be discussed at the close of this discourse. 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 bequeathed to us by his nation. But of his influence there can be no question.[9]

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, 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 pupils. Here is the kind of criticism to which I take exception as unworthy of Aristotle: In the Iphigenia in Aulis Euripides has given us one distinct 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 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 inspiration did not dispense with careful preparation, 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 barren theories. From Homer to the Anthology, 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 Euripides; 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.