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 something 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 before Herodotus, more than we have of what went before Homer. That is mostly due to the late origin of prose writing among the Greeks. At first, verse form was universal for recording all topics of interest. Even genealogies were composed 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 exhortations 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 teaching in a more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the beginning of 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 obscure 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 Ionians but by Dorians, that literary prose made a new 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 eloquence of display, referred to Gorgias as its earliest 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.

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 deliberation 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 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 generations 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 spontaneous, but the result of careful reflection.

While these various efforts towards spoken eloquence were occupying men, we find that early annalists set down either in rude metrical form, or even in prose, past events, thus laying the foundation 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.[10] The earlier attempts are known to us only through names and scraps of writing; we cannot now tell how far HecatÆus 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 modern 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 modern 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 literature than the great world-battles of Actium or Lepanto in the same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter.

As I think it easier to impress a modern audience 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 illustration 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 Euripides. His notion of the portraiture of human nature as it ought to develop is one of commonplace 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 Herodotus if put into metre would nevertheless be only history, and not dramatic poetry. It is a curious 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 Æschylus, 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 desertion 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, producing 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 digressions, far more various and more restful than the choruses in a Greek tragedy. These, and all the 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 modern writers. He has about him the air of a story-teller, 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 inventions 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 modern 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 possible, 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 consciously 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 truth.[11] 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 modern way of dealing with this side of history. His reflections on the Corcyrean massacre[12] are a famous specimen of this artistic or subjective writing. I have taken pains elsewhere 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.[13] 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 artistically 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 contorted language, which ancient critics did not hesitate to stigmatise as thoroughly bad style. 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.[14]

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 Empire. He saw around him, at Rome, the gigantic relics of a bygone civilisation. 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 permanent teachers.

I will conclude this part of my subject by reminding you that in biography, which as the idyll gives a single scene, or as a cameo gives the portrait 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 brief the eloquence of debate, and the eloquence of display. And the eloquence of debate may either be that of the courts, wherein private individuals, 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 instruct him in its proper delivery. As we never hear of any breaking down in court, of any client unable 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 t???a?, wherein the subtleties of the art of persuasion were carefully analysed and reduced to rule. The early treatises of this kind are lost, but we feel their results in the remains of Antiphon and IsÆus, and can affirm that they were eminently practical, and thoroughly opposed to the froth and fury of what we call popular eloquence. The use of figures of speech is reduced to a minimum, the so-called flowers of rhetoric are wholly absent. All is tame, severe, temperate, not pretending to influence the passions but to convince the reason. And yet this latter is to be done not by speaking the language of the heart, but by the careful training of the intellect, and the perfection of the delivery.[15] To us moderns these things appear at first hearing to flavour of artificiality; the great bugbear of the modern mind, which contrasts it with the purity and sincerity of nature. The Greeks knew this contrast perfectly, and they met it, not by the folly of leaving nature to follow its own devices, but by making nature the highest artistic product. Thus the court advocates, composing for various clients, studied not only the proper arguments to be urged, but that these arguments must be presented “in character” and so they carefully kept before them the personality of the speaker. In Lysias especially, this expression of character in the speaker is part of his art, which so perfectly apes simplicity that it requires a careful analysis to detect behind the simple utterance of the homely citizen the subtle rhetorician.

This refinement of legal rhetoric seems to me to have been disregarded or abandoned when the pleaders became so celebrated that the fiction of a client speaking for himself was no longer plausible, and when the public that thronged the courts went to hear an oration of Demosthenes or Hypereides delivered by his client. Hence the speeches of Demosthenes are not so various in ethos, and many of them being delivered about his own private affairs, had already taught the public to recognise his great style. In particular, so many of his orations were not court speeches but political harangues that this latter branch of eloquence may be regarded as that in which he best showed his pre-eminence. And there are not a few instances where the ostensible case was only an excuse for promoting or vindicating a great policy. The acme of all this branch of Greek literature is the famous de Corona of Demosthenes, which great lawyers and political orators like Lord Brougham have declared to be the very ne plus ultra of eloquence intended not only to persuade, but also to persuade by all the arts of subtle logic, of brilliant sophistry, of red hot argument. And remember men like Lord Brougham, though infinitely better practical judges of the effect of such a speech than are mere scholars, did not know one tithe of the subtleties of style, which have only been detected by the minute studies, not only of the old Greek critics, but of modern German scholars.

Even in such a mighty speech as this you will notice the very scanty use of ornament. There are none of what we moderns call the flowers of rhetoric; there is no sounding peroration. It is the picture of a grave patriot vindicating his life’s work against the carping of his enemies and the criticism of his opponents. There are indeed passages of gross vituperation, wherein by scathing reflections on his opponent’s previous life, he replies to Æschines’ insinuations about his private character. Nor has the character of Æschines ever recovered from this “raking of his record,” which was probably not at all kept within the limits of the truth. But the restraints which have been usual among modern gentlemen in debate, especially the modern English gentlemen of the last century, were not regarded as essential to the dignity of the highest Greek court oration, and that was probably because the jury was composed of the middle and lower classes who were not shocked by any want of refinement.

Notwithstanding this limitation, there can be no question that in the oratory of debate the Greeks taught the Romans, then through them MediÆval Europe, then after the Renaissance, modern Europe directly, so that even now they are the acknowledged masters in this splendid art. It is all the more astonishing, as we might naturally think that a society without printing and consequently without a great reading public would not have aimed at producing an eloquence which was not only splendid to read when the heat of controversy was allayed, but worthy of study and of analysis by the critics of succeeding generations. Nevertheless, with no better means of publication for readers than manuscript copies, and without any hope of great celebrity, or of great profit as the authors of written speeches, these Greeks produced work which has perfectly stood the test even of new and exacting conditions. In spite of their limited public, the orators had attained to as clear a notion as we have of the importance of appealing to a reading and thinking public which could study their arguments and their style at full leisure, and so, not content with the orations primarily intended for delivery, they also perfected the prose essay, and even the prose dialogue, a very peculiar form of literature, inasmuch as it is the literary stereotyping of an apparently spontaneous conversation.

But when I speak of a reading public, perhaps I should limit it somewhat, and say a public accustomed to hear reading aloud. That is the intermediate stage between a mere audience and the mere readers of books. I am quite accustomed to that intermediate stage in Ireland. You may see there any day groups of people hearing a newspaper or book read out, and if the great body of the public is of this class, then the writer must think not only of what he has to say but how it will sound when read aloud. I take the same principle to have animated the composers of the splendid English Book of Common Prayer. They desired to affect the hearer not only by the sentiment, but by the sound of their Liturgy. Now this is the very step in prose writing which was taken by the Greek students of eloquence, and most notably by Isocrates, the father of the political prose essay in Europe.

There were no doubt accidental or personal causes which conspired to this result at this moment. Isocrates, with great natural gifts for style and for composition, was wholly deficient in voice and in physique for the profession of public speaking, nor had he the extraordinary energy and perseverance shown by Demosthenes in overcoming these defects. So it occurred to him that he might exercise his influence by prose writing in the form of open letters or political pamphlets, where he puts his thoughts into the most polished periods and the most refined language.

I cannot but quote to you a curious parallel of a man of genius turning a natural defect into a splendid success. When Richard Wagner began to compose operas of the received form, he failed because of his want of facility to produce a sustained melody. He then bethought himself of the use of short phrases instead of sustained songs, and in spite of his original defect he has obtained a very great and deserved popularity. There are, of course, other great qualities in Wagner, especially his novel and splendid use of the orchestra. But the question of melody is always the vital one in music, and no man ever attained the first rank that has left us so few sustained melodies. His Rienzi shows what he could do when he attempted them.

The laws of prose composition, as devised and perfected by Isocrates, are the most subtle and complete ever put into practice by any living man, and though of course some of them are only applicable to the Greek language, and indeed to Attic Greek, the general principles he expounded have been applied by many writers and in many languages.[16] It is well known that Cicero modelled himself on this style and through him it became dominant in Europe. The greatest English example in older days is the Areopagitica of Milton, who though manifestly inspired by Isocrates, is far from possessing his perfect control of language, perfect smoothness of period, perfect clearness of thinking, all of which make up the charm of the great master. Isocrates was the teacher of this great style, not only to pleaders and pamphleteers, but to historians, and he was blamed for making men like Ephorus and Theopompus, his favourite pupils, in writing their once famous works, think more of their diction than of their impartiality or their research. But surely the duty of making history eloquent, such as we have it in Gibbon, is of paramount value. To this I shall not now return. I rather desire to call your attention to the supremacy of a great periodic style even in English, and in these latter days, when brevity, epigram, impatience of style and an affected neglect of form are in high fashion. Among the writers of the 19th century, I take by far the greatest stylist to be John Ruskin, and I consider that far the largest part of his influence arose not from his ideas, which were often fantastic, but from the admirable way in which they were set forth. But he was essentially the master of the long period, for with him you may find a whole page consisting of one grand sentence, in which many clauses are co-ordinated, many lesser ideas balanced, many strands woven into the one great tissue which comes from the writer’s pen as from a loom. And that is the reason why he was a greater stylist than all the Froudes and Newmans and Paters, who either use short sentences, or if they attempt the period, are neither melodious nor clear.

The same law holds good in eloquence, when we can find a master to illustrate it. The two greatest English orators I have heard during the last generation were Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Magee. Both dealt in the long period—the former from constant habit, which was even notable in his ordinary life, and which spoilt his conversation; the other, who was brief and pungent enough in ordinary talk, trained himself upon the model of Chalmers, a great Scotch orator before my day. I have seen Magee’s copy of Chalmers, and have noted how minutely he had dissected and analysed it. But both produced the same wonderful effect by (if I may say so) embarking the audience with them on the billows of great periods, which excited wonder how they would ever come safely to land. The rounding off and concluding of such a period not only with safety but with splendour produced an effect upon their audience unlike anything else that I have experienced. The style of neither, though both knew Greek well, was based directly on Isocrates; but most certainly their speech was based upon the principles he had taught and impressed so well upon Cicero and his like, upon Milton, upon Jeremy Taylor, upon Edmund Burke, all of whom appreciated and practised this supreme prose style.

But if the Greeks here showed the modern world the model of the highest perfection in the prose essay, they would not have been Greeks if they had not also shown us the perfection of easy conversation, of everyday talk, of the play of various styles, and the expression of various characters in the cultivated language of the day. And so Plato in his Dialogues has shown the world an unapproachable example of conversation raised to a high art, which again created a distinct literary form that has never died out.[17]

All these developments are (with the exception of biography) those of the Golden Age of Greek Literature, and are the discovery of great masters who were the glory of that age. But as we shall see frequently in the course of these lectures, the silver age of Greece was almost as fruitful in the creation of models for the imitation of modern Europe. It was only after a great body of splendid authors had lived, that we could expect to find literary criticism assuming an important place. For the literary critic is after all a sort of parasite, who lives on the bodies of greater and more dignified animals. We know that when the library of Alexandria came to be collected, and the sifting of authors and of the texts of authors became necessary, there arose a great school of critical scholars, who purified the received copies, who apportioned the respective value of the texts, and who developed that censorious attitude toward the classical masterpieces which is the bane of the modern world. We still have in the critical essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and still more in the Tract on the Sublime, belonging to the 1st century A.D., excellent models of what is good and useful in this reflexive attitude of a later age, and of second rate ability. The great age of production had been very simple and naÏve in criticism; the attitude of Aristophanes, and even of Plato, in judging poets is merely a moral judgment and seems never to take into consideration Æsthetic questions. In the Tract on the Sublime we find quite a modern standpoint, and the judgments of this author have had no small effect on the literature of the last century. No less a person than Edmund Burke thought it worth while to translate this tract, and how wide was the author’s sympathy will appear at once from this fact, that he quotes as a signal instance of the sublime the opening of a work far removed in spirit from classical Greek literature—the book of Genesis, in the Greek version.

I need not delay over the many and various Epistles left us by the Greeks, and which you may see collected in one of Didot’s big volumes of Epistolographi Graeci. But I do not think that we can call letter writing a distinct form of literature, and it is very certain that every nation that could use writing materials could hardly fail to adopt it in some form. Nor do I think the letters extant are in any way remarkable, perhaps because most of them are the compilations of men attributing these documents falsely to the great ancients. The letters ascribed to Plato, Isocrates, and others give us nothing additional of literary importance.[18] I will therefore pass from these, as well as from the moral harangues of the later rhetors and sophists of whom Dion Chrysostom is far the most interesting. I wish modern sermons would borrow more from this admirable and little used source, for Dion was a man of the world, a traveller, a sound moral teacher, and gifted with a great taste for the picturesque.

But I cannot conclude without a word about the prose novel of the Greeks, who here also founded a form of literature that has assumed gigantic importance in the modern world. The novel may be regarded as the last legitimate offering, a child born out of due time, as Saint Paul calls himself, but like Saint Paul a greater influence in our modern life than any of his older brethren. It might have been thought that from the modern Comedy of Menander and his rivals to a prose novel in the modern sense was but a small and inevitable step, and yet no branch of Greek literature had less influence upon the rise and development of so kindred a subject. The very frame on which all Menander’s plays were stretched with wearisome iteration, I mean the rehabilitation of a respectable girl, who solely through the neglect or the violence of others, has become a mother without being a wife—such a topic would be wholly repugnant to any Greek novelist we know. For in all the stories we possess the main interest turns upon the preservation of the heroine’s purity through every sort of temptation, and every sort of attempted violence. This was a topic quite strange to Greek sentiment and foreign to Greek literature till it was imported from the East by those who had there learned that sort of love-story. There are indications of it in the romantic episodes of Xenophon’s Cyrus, but the adoption of it as a striking topic is later, and due to Callimachus, whose poem called Acontius and Cydippe was perhaps the first love-story of our modern type offered to the Greek world. A youth and a maiden, whose beauties were described in great detail, meet at a religious ceremony, and fall deeply in love at first sight. The various and commonplace obstacles to their union which are familiar in every modern society—worldly parents, a richer suitor for the maiden, threats of broken hearts and of suicide—these occupy the story, which through many untoward delays ends in a happy marriage.[19] It may cause amazement in this audience that such a plot should ever have been new in literature, especially in that of the Greeks, who had every sort of human experience before them. Yet it was new in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, and made its fortune in that world-weary and artificial society. In all the Greek novels we possess, some such love-story is the necessary thread which glitters through the tissue, so much so that the German pedants edit them under the title Scriptores Erotici Graeci. Yet the relation between the lovers being absolutely pure, any temptations which occur arise from the passions of violent people who create no interest in the reader. By far the best specimen we have, owing to its simplicity and its natural scenery, is the famous Daphnis and Chloe, which has found so many imitators ever since the French of Amyot has made it accessible to modern Europe. We feel indeed that the unknown author was far from possessing the innocence of his characters, or the spontaneous appreciation of the nature he describes. The work is from the time of Decadence in Greek literature, and has the faults of its generation. But for all that it is a beautiful work of art, just as the Idylls of Theocritus are beautiful, just as the Hero and Leander of MusÆus is beautiful, just as the Martinmas summer of your woods is beautiful, and all the more beloved because we feel it is but “the gilded halo hovering round decay!”

I said it was our best specimen because of its simplicity, and yet it is not wanting in violent and improbable adventures toward its close. But these are as nothing compared to the adventures of lovers in the other stories of this kind, because there then was a wholly different vein of prose story, which came into fashion with the love-story, and became amalgamated with it, to the great detriment of both—I mean the stories of wild adventures in strange and fabulous lands.

With the wonderful invasion of the East, there were opened to the astonished Greeks new regions of fabulous splendour, of astounding treasure, of amazing nature. So violently was their imagination stimulated by what they saw that they set themselves to construct books of travels beyond the rising sun and beneath the ocean wave, into the homes of monstrous beasts, and still more monstrous men. The schemes of Alexander himself were baulked by his soldiers, who positively refused to embark in his wild dreams of universal conquest, but there was nothing to impede the imagination of the writers of his deeds, who combined the real narrative of his conquests with his quest after the hidden wonders of the East. Hence we have the so-called Life of Alexander, which I consider to have originated shortly after his death, but to have been amplified and glorified by succeeding generations of those that told their stories to delighted audiences. In this Life and Acts we have the starting point of a whole literature of Fabulous Travels, mixed with descriptions not only of odious savages, but of ideal societies that lived hidden away from the vices and troubles of old and decrepit civilisation. But this literature, so popular in the Middle Ages, is outside the pale of Hellenism. It is not only the last child, but the illegitimate child of their once pure and lofty imagination.