When Alexander the Great invaded India, that pupil of Aristotle interested himself in questions to the Gymnosophists, or native philosophers. To the eldest of these Gymnosophists (says Plutarch) he addressed the following conundrum: Which is older—the night or the day? The ancient man promptly replied, The day—by the length of one day. When Alexander demanded what he meant by such an answer, the sage remarked that he always gave that sort of answer to people who asked that kind of question. I think this must be one of the best retorts ever made, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it applies rather exactly to the subject of this essay. The difference between the Classical and the Romantic! It is indeed an apparently insoluble problem. Nor can I imagine anything more disheartening or more inimical to human happiness than blowing upon the embers of a half-extinct controversy. That, it will be gathered, is not my intention. I merely intend to let my discourse eddy about a familiar topic, in the hope that some accretions may be washed away, and at least the true outline of the subject revealed. We have been trying to build up an impression of Hellenism as an Agon, or Struggle with Barbarism. The material being so vast, it has been necessary to be somewhat meagrely selective and illustrative, or else to fritter away the point in details. But the most general survey would be incomplete, unless we attain some view of how Greek literature, so much the most important witness left us of the old Greek spirit, reflects the situation.

The suggestion I have to offer may be helpful or not. But it has two qualities which should make it worth entertaining, if only for the moment: it is easily understood, and it is easily tested. My suggestion is that Classical art is an expression of Hellenism and Romantic art of Barbarism, so far as Barbarism is capable of expression.

Here I feel the want of something beyond my own instinct in discerning the Classical from the Romantic. To distinguish them is never perfectly easy: in the greatest art it is thought to be impossible. In the end one has to rely upon oneself, for nobody is pleased with a second-hand or impersonal criticism. If you happen to care for literature, you will not be content with discussions of it which do not help you to realize the thing you love. As to the words “Classical” and “Romantic,” they have become current coin with us, and yet they are coin without fixed value. Thus when Mr. Shaw attacks the “Romance” which Stevenson adored, it is clear that they cannot mean the same thing. What, then, do they mean? It is very hard to find out. You may read that Romance is the spirit of the Middle Ages, or the spirit of the German forest; but you find yourself left to your own interpretation of MediÆvalism or Fairyland. As for the “Renaissance of Wonder”—that of course is just beautiful nonsense.

The clearest words on the matter are Matthew Arnold’s. There is a kind of justice in this, for Arnold’s criticism was perpetually engaged in the issue between the Romantic and the Classical. Himself (as his best poetry shows) a Romantic at heart, he stood in the middle of the Romantic triumph pleading for the austerities of art. That alone proves his genius for criticism. It also gives him a special right to be heard. As I shall seem to be attacking Arnold, it will be better for me to say now that with his general attitude and temper I am in intimate sympathy. I am disposed to think that his statement of the Classical case is the best that has yet been made. In some points I think it is even too favourable; in others not favourable enough. That is all.

The forest solitude, he says in his book “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. And (Note150)on the way to this attribution and this denial he distinguishes four modes of handling nature. There is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.

One need not deny the value of these distinctions. But, admitting them, must we confess that there is no “natural magic” in the Greeks? Of your grace listen a little to Homer in prose. As the numerous nations of winged birds—wild geese or cranes or long-throated swans—in the Asian Mead about the runnels of Kaÿster stream make little flights and flights in the glory of their pinions, alighting with cries which make the marish ring. Is there no natural magic in that? Or in this? As when torrents running down a mountain into a caÑon hurl together their violent waters from large springs in a deep watercourse, and the shepherd on far-off mountains hears their thunder? Or consider this. As when the glare of a blazing fire is seen by sailors out at sea burning at some lonely shieling high up among the hills. Again we read: They clomb Parnassus, steep forest-clad hill, and soon came to the windy gullies. The sun was then smiting the fields with his earliest rays out of the quiet, deep-running river of the world; and the beaters came to the glade. A last example: As when Pandion’s daughter, the greenwood nightingale, sings beautifully at the start of spring, perched in a place of leafy trees, with running (Note151)variable note she sheds abroad her far-heard song, mourning the end of Itylus. Is there no magic in all this?

Still, it is uncritical to attempt to carry the critical judgment by storm. You will of course admit the glory and intoxication of these Homeric similes, but you may still feel that Arnold’s distinction is not finally swept away by them. Something in the lines he quotes—Keats’s

Shakespeare’s

something there may be felt to express a more personal or intimate relation to nature than anything I have yet quoted from Homer. Shall I then quote more to show that even this touch Homer has got? He burned him with his inlaid arms and heaped a grave-mound over him; and round it the hill-nymphs planted elms. Is not that final touch magical enough? And surely there is intimacy here. As when the great deep glooms with silent swell, dimly foreboding the hurrying path of the piping winds. And the personal note, is it not audible here? And now in a rocky place of lonely hills, at Sipylos, where couch the nymphs (men say) whose feet are swift on AcheloÏos’ banks—there changed to stone she broods upon the wrongs that gods have wrought her. And here are two passages of love, (Note152)of love in a Romantic setting, if we mean anything by that at all. Under them the divine earth sent up sudden grass and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth thick and soft, upbearing them from the ground. Thereon they lay, folded in a beautiful golden cloud that dropped a glimmer of dew. That is the love of Zeus and Hera. What follows tells of the desire of Poseidon for Tyro. She conceived a love of divine EnÎpeus, fairest by far of rivers flowing over the earth, and haunted the fair waters of EnÎpeus. Therefore the Earth-Embracer and Earth-Shaker made himself like EnÎpeus and lay with her at the outflowings of the eddying river; then a darkling wave rose mountain-like about them and hung over them, hiding the god and the mortal woman. Does not this possess the magical touch?

It is in Homer everywhere. In all his dealings with nature he adds to his words not merely lightness and brightness, but something magical as well. If he does not do it, no poet does. Why, Homer’s very “fixed epithets” are surcharged with magic. Think of his epithets for the dawn alone—?????pep???, saffron-robed; ???s???????, golden-throned; ??d?d??t????, rose-fingered—the Romantic poets have always envied them. It is impossible to deny the magical, Romantic quality to Homer, unless you make an admission with which I shall deal in a moment. And Homer is not alone among Greek poets in the possession of “natural magic”; one might almost say all the great Greek poets have it. Almost the loveliest words that Sappho has left us are little broken fragments of description as imaginatively touched as anything in Keats or Coleridge. Such are the fragments translated by Rossetti, and the fragment of the sleepless woman crying to the stars (Note153)for her lover. There are the few lines of Alcman, comparing him to “the sea-blue bird of spring,” which are enough to put him not too far from Sappho and Coleridge themselves. And Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, and Euripides in the Bacchae—have they got no feeling for Romantic nature? Then there is Pindar. Why, Pindar has almost more of it than any one. Remember the strange splendour like a windy sunset of the great Fourth Pythian ode, telling of Jason in marvellous lands. Repeat a line or two: Coming to the margin of the whitening sea, alone in the dark he called aloud upon the roaring Master of the Trident; and he appeared to him anigh at his foot. Or take this of the new-born Iamos, whom his mother Euadne “exposed”: But he was hidden in the rush and the boundless brake, his delicate body splashed with the yellow and deep purple glory of pansies. Is there “natural magic” there, or is there not?

Two things, perhaps, misled Arnold, both of them just and true. The first was the feeling of a radical difference somewhere between Classical and Romantic art. The second was the insignificance in Greek literature of magic pure and simple, the magic of fairies and witches. Greek literature deals sparingly in this sort of magic, while it is part of the stock-in-trade of Romance. It looks as if Arnold were unconsciously arguing that the Romantic passion for magic professed ought somehow to make itself felt in descriptions of nature, while the Greek dislike of magic would disable the Classical poet from seeing her with the enchanted eyes of the Celt. Now there is an element of truth in this, though not, I think, a very important element. It may be suggested that in all true poetry, whether Classical or Romantic, Greek or Celtic, mere vulgar magic is transmuted into that infinitely finer and lovelier thing which Arnold, in claiming it for Keats and Shakespeare, calls “natural magic”; which may be more abundant in Romantic poetry, but is present just the same in Homer and Pindar.

One is led to this conjecture about the train of Arnold’s thought when one reads the quotations he has selected to illustrate the special appeal of Celtic Romance. They mainly come from the Mabinogion in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation. Although it seems a pity that Arnold must draw his shafts from one quiver, and that not his own, still the Mabinogion is beautiful enough, and the translation so readable, that it is not clear where he could have found, for people who have no Welsh or Irish, better illustrations. He quotes the words of Math to Gwydion when Gwydion wished a wife for his pupil. “Well,” says Math, “we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.” So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower Aspect. It is a famous passage since Arnold quoted it; and if we are to have magic, let it always be as beautiful as this; for I am far from denying the beauty of many a magical rite. But magic you see it is, magic palpable and practical—not the magic of

(Note155)

which is the true poetical magic and something yet more attractive.

Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic writer describes the dropping of blood as faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest. Well, Homer says, Gladness fell upon his spirit like dew upon the ears of ripening corn when there is a rustling in the fields. The Celtic passage is the more exquisite, at any rate than Homer in my prose. But between these two passages who would say that there is an essential difference? It is not maintained that Homer writes in this manner as often as a Romantic poet; and that is a difference worth remarking. But I do assert that he can write so when he likes, and as well as any.

Now what if this finer poetic magic is really a subtilization of the crude appeal of practical magic? Something like this Arnold almost suggests. What if Homer’s and Keats’s magic entrances us in part because somewhere in us sleeps a memory of miracles wrought in days when every rock and tree and river was alive with supernatural force? There is nothing fantastic in such a speculation. If we entertain it, we may find it illuminating the whole field of this discussion. At once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic” mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural objects. Its origin is not explicable on any other hypothesis. We have therefore to consider how it happened that Greek poetry, born (we must believe) in an atmosphere as redolent of magic as this mythology implies, came to divest itself of vulgar magic and “Celtic vagueness,” till it came to appear to a critic like Arnold devoid also of the touch which he thinks exclusively characteristic of Romance.

It happened, no doubt, as part of that whole reaction to Barbarism which we call Hellenism. For magic is barbaric. The peoples all about Hellas believed in it of course, and had magicians practising it. In Greece itself the belief in magic lingered throughout Greek history, lingered that is to say in secluded places and among the many unenlightened. We hear of EpÔdoi, “Charmers”; of GoÊtes, “Groaners”; of Baskanoi, who had the evil eye—three varieties of wizard. There are echoes of a popular credence in the magical to be heard even in Greek literature, that disdainful and fastidious thing. In Homer we read that the wound received by Odysseus from the boar of Parnassus was closed by repeating an incantation over it. There is a good deal of white magic in the Works and Days of Hesiod. Nearly half of Aeschylus’ ChoÊphoroi consists in an invocation or evocation of the ghost of dead Agamemnon. And so on. In later Hellenistic times there existed a great body of magical writings, born of the contact between Greek civilization and Oriental superstition. There must have been a public for this stuff. Professional miracle-workers were not uncommon, and some of them won a resounding popularity. The book of Pausanias, who wrote down what he heard and saw in the greater part of Greece at the beginning of the second Christian century is strongly and—to you and me—pleasantly redolent of immemorial customs and beliefs among the peasantry. Many of these are plainly magical in their nature or their origin. The priests of Lykaian Zeus, he tells us, used to bring rain by dipping a branch in a certain stream and shaking it, sprinkling waterdrops. That, of course, was sheer magic—“making rain” as an African medicineman would say. A custom of this sort, which has become a ritual, may be kept up after people have ceased quite to believe in the doctrine which it assumes as true. That, however, does not touch the historical significance of the custom, which must have arisen among people who believed in magic. Besides, the peasants in Pausanias’ day were clearly very superstitious. His book is the proof of that. To suppose that in this respect they differed widely from their ancestors is to suppose something which common sense cries out against, and what evidence there is refutes.

Hellenism, then, the flower of the Greek spirit, grew in a soil impregnated with superstition, or, if you do not care for that word, with a religion containing many elements of magic. Every modern student of the subject, I fancy, admits that, although some scholars make more of the magical elements, some less. What no one can deny is that Hellenism tends to reject magic, and tries to expel it from human life. Magic was barbaric, and Hellenism was in reaction against Barbarism. Very likely the reaction went too far; reactions usually do. Very likely something too much was sacrificed to “Greek sanity.” But it would be strange ingratitude on our part to forget that it was this very urgency for the sane, for the rational, which ensured that our civilization was founded on hard realistic thinking, and not on a mere drift of emotionality. The task of thinking things out to their end, even to their bitter end, which was so characteristic of the Greeks, peculiarly fitted them for their task of laying intellectual foundations. It is not an English characteristic, and for that reason we are the more indebted to them. But scarcely less unjust would it be to suppose that the Greeks sacrificed everything to the rational. Nothing of the sort. They felt the charm to which the Celtic imagination yielded itself so utterly. But out of magic could not be built, they thought, any helpful philosophy or sound method of art. So their literature, when it deals with this matter and deals with it at its best, consciously or instinctively aims at drawing from it its full value for the imagination without for a moment permitting it to subdue the judgment. Any one reading in turn Mr. Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters and that part of the Odyssey which deals with the adventures of Odysseus in magic-haunted lands will see what I mean. Yeats’s hero yields himself to the charm; Odysseus fights against it. Which is the wiser is a question I leave to you. But here we have, in an illustration that is almost an epigram, the difference between the Celtic or extreme Romantic temper and the Hellenic temper. The Celt hears the Sirens and follows them; the Greek hears them and unwillingly sails past.

Or you may say: the Celtic gift is vision, the Hellenic gift is light.

Observe Homer’s dealings with magic. He often finds himself in its presence, and he deals with it in various ways. He leaves it out, he veils it, he transforms it. I am unable to see on what real grounds we can follow one of the most eminent of English scholars in Homer in dividing off the rest of the Homeric poems from those books of the Odyssey which tell of Odysseus’ wanderings in unknown lands and seas. When does magic cease to be magic? Is it magic when Circe in the Odyssean fairyland changes men into swine, and not magic when Athena in Ithaca changes Odysseus into a beggar and herself into a bird? However, what Dr. Leaf has in mind is rather a difference which he feels in the whole atmosphere of these fairyland books, which the ancients knew by the title of the Narrative to Alkinoos, from the rest of the Odyssey and from the Iliad. The Narrative, he thinks, moves in places which it is hopeless to look for in the map. The geography of the rest is really to be found on the map, if you only know where to look for it. I might agree with this and yet hold (as I should) that the geographical point is deceptive. Odysseus does pass out of known into unknown lands, but he does not pass out of one atmosphere into another. There are more miracles and magic in the Narrative than in the rest of Homer, but the treatment of them is the same. Or, to put it somewhat differently, Phaeakia is just as real to me as Troy or Ithaca. And I fancy it was just as real to Homer.

After all, there is really very little overt magic in the Narrative, even if we include the wonder-working of the goddess Circe and other divine beings, who might be said to perform miracles rather than practise witchcraft. Of this wonder-working observe how little is made: just as little as possible. The transformation and retransformation of Odysseus’ companions is told in a line or two. Think what the Kalevala or the Arabian Nights would have made of it. The whole necromantic business of the Descent to Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey is transacted in a few formal, ritualistic phrases. Originally all that matter must have been steeped in magic. It is the same with Homer’s treatment of the monstrous. The Homeric spirit objects to monsters; and so you never notice, unless you look closely at the text, what horrible creatures the Sirens were. Scylla and Charybdis are not fully described; much is left to the reader’s imagination. The Cyclops, it must be allowed, is different. Homer, you see, had to make him eat Odysseus’ men and had to put his eye out; the story would not tell otherwise. But somehow the passage is not so ghastly as one would expect. It is full of remorseless description—the Cyclops vomits “wine and bits of human flesh”—and yet despite such “realism” the poet contrives to enfold our spirits in an air of enchantment—the true poetical enchantment—in which all things are at once vivid and remote, like a dream freshly remembered.

Homer of course is a problem, about which it is very hard to say anything that pleases everybody. There are on the one side scholars who think that our Iliad and Odyssey are only the final versions of two traditional poems, which were handled by many poets through a long succession of years. On the other side are those who believe that the two poems are entirely, or substantially, the work of a single early poet, who rose so far above his predecessors as (Note161)to owe little or nothing to them. This makes it difficult to argue a point in Homer with any general acceptance. But no student now seems to deny that Homer—whether we give the name to the one exceptional early poet or (tentatively) to the last of all those who worked on the poems—inherited something of his material. He did not invent the history of Troy, and he had to deal with it as he found it. Now all this traditional matter—for the matter is traditional whether the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves are traditional poems or not—must to all appearance have been saturated in the magical. That is the normal condition of the stuff in which poetry, so far as we can see, everywhere takes its rise. Besides, the mythology of Greece, which it is fair to call the stuff of Greek poetry, is full of magic. The inference is that Homer and the Greek poets in general till the end of the “Classical” period sought to work out of their matter all that savoured of the magical.

I think it was Andrew Lang who first pointed out that Homer clearly avoids telling stories which are “morally objectionable.” Still more certainly we discover that stories which are quite inoffensive in Homer are excessively “objectionable” in other writers. What is the meaning of this? Is it that later generations defiled the golden innocence of Homeric days in their baser imaginations, or that Homer knew the other, more savage and ancient-seeming versions, and would not recount them? For my part I think Homer knew! And I think he knew about the magic also. There are constant transformations, particularly in the Iliad, of gods into human and animal forms. Is that magic or is it not? Surely it is all of a piece with the “shape-shiftings” of wizards, so common in all mythologies; and these are admitted magic. But in the first place these transformations, as we remarked, are treated with a light and veiling hand, and secondly they are confined to the gods. What Homer allows to them he will not allow to mortals. He or his predecessors have erected the distinction between gods and men which forms one of the bases of Greek religion. Nay, you can trace in him, I believe, the beginnings of something more—a reluctance to speak even of the gods as performing these metamorphoses into brutish form. As a rule the Greeks did not mind such tales, or even clung to them from motives which can only be described as “Romantic.” But Homer perhaps softens them down a good deal, and scarcely deserves the censure of Plato, who denounces them who would make a wizard of God. The metamorphoses in Homer are singularly unobtrusive. But why are they there at all? The answer must surely be because they were in the story and could not be left out altogether.

Am I forgetting that Homer was a poet and not a moralist? I think not. I might, with a show of reason, reply that the early Greek poet was a moralist, his aim (as Aristophanes puts it) “to make men better in their cities.” But I prefer to say that Homer’s objection to the monstrous and the grossly magical is really an Æsthetic one. Other considerations come in as well, but the Æsthetic consideration is found to be in the long run predominant. I once pointed out that many of the similes in Homer turn out, on closer examination, to involve an actual metamorphosis. An actual transformation—say of Athena into a (Note163)shooting-star—imperceptibly passes into a mere comparison. This is one device for reducing the magical element. But there are others. So spake she, says the poet of Helen, when she wondered why her brethren were not to be descried among the Greek host before Troy. So spake she, but them the life-breathing earth was now holding fast in Lacedaemon, there, in their own native land. f?s????? a?a, “life-breathing earth,” as unhappy translators must say, derives half its poetical value as Ruskin saw (in this case at least justly enough) from the ancient belief, very strong in old Greece, that Earth was physically the mother of all life, the dear mother of gods and men. Again, who cannot see the passage before his eyes of physical into poetical magic in the lines where Zeus mourns the coming doom of his son Sarpedon? “When soul and life have left him, send Death and sweet Sleep to carry him until they come to the land of broad Lycia, where his brethren and his kin will make an abiding barrow and pillar for him; for thus we honour the dead.” So Hera spake, and the Father of Gods and men obeyed her counsel; and he let fall blood-drops on the ground, honouring his son, that Patroklos was fated to slay in fruitful Troyland far from his native land. What is Romantic poetry if this is not? And you see how it is produced? By a veiling of the crudely magical.

It is impossible to resist a little more quotation. Father, cries Telemachus to Odysseus, verily a great marvel is this that I behold with mine eyes. Truly, the walls of the chambers, and the fair bases of the pillars, and the roof-beams of fir, and the columns that hold all on high are shining to my sight as if from flaming fire. Doubtless some god is in the house! It (Note164)is in just such a light that we see all the Homeric world. It is not the witch’s firelight, but it is the light in which the true poetical magic works. Unhappy, what curse hath come upon you? In darkness your heads are rolled, and your faces, and your knees beneath you; a moan is enkindled, and cheeks are wet, and blood is on the walls and fair pedestals; ghosts in the doorway, ghosts in the courtyard of them that hasten to the dark world below; the sun hath perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is over you! So cries in the Odyssey the man with second sight. Is it not all very “Celtic”?

In the ancient Hymn to Demeter Persephone is described as playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean and culling flowers—rose and crocus and violet over the soft meadow, and iris and hyacinth and narcissus, which, by the will of Zeus, Earth, favouring Him of the Many Guests, sent up to snare the flower-faced maiden a glittering marvel for all to see with wondering eyes, both gods immortal and mortal men:—from the one root an hundred heads of blossom; very sweet the fragrance of that flower, and the delight of it made laugh wide heaven above, and all the earth, and the salt and surging waters.

If this be not “natural magic,” where shall we find it? And is there not something exquisite in the sense or tact which tells the Greek when to stop before the magic becomes too crude or obvious? The Greek poet knows when to stop, the Romantic not always. Here, in another of the Hymns, the Hymn to Dionysus (VII), is the frank description of a miracle. But soon marvellous things were shown among them. First, over the swift black ship sweet, odorous wine was plashing, and a divine perfume arose; and amaze took hold of all the gazing mariners. Anon, along the topmost edge of the sail a vine laid out its tendrils here and there; thick hung the clusters; and round the mast dark ivy twined, deep in flowers and pleasant with berries, and all the thole-pins were garlanded. For sheer loveliness of fancy it would not be easy to beat that. And how great an effect is gained by temperance! A little more detail and the charm would be dissolved—the ship would be too like a Christmas tree. It is in such wise economies that Greek art is so great. It is just in them that the Romantic is apt to fail. Therein he bewrays his Barbarism.

I will no longer doubt that the reader (who probably did not require the demonstration) is convinced that Greek poetry occasionally attains those very effects of “natural magic” which Arnold denied it. What has happened is merely this: Greek poetry has carried farther than any other a process of refining out some elements in the crude material in which it began. That it may have lost in the process a certain amount of the purest gold I am not denying. I am not pleading the cause of Greek poetry, I am trying to understand it. It is thought by scholars that poetry has everywhere been developed out of a kind of song or chorus, which (to put it gently) is very often magical in character. One at last gets things like some of the Russian folk-songs or the Finnish lays which LÖnnrot collected to form the Kalevala. It is a pity the Kalevala has not found an adequate English translator. One may honestly wish that Longfellow had translated it instead of giving us Hiawatha, which is a somewhat close imitation. One may delight in Hiawatha, but one can see in the baldest translation (as it were with half an eye) that Kalevala is fifty times better. If you want magic, and very delightful magic, go there! It seems to me, remembering, that all the chief characters in the Kalevala are sorcerers. In the very first lay you are lost in the forest of enchantment, and you never get out of it. The Kalevala is not the highest kind of poetry of course; it is (as Mrs. Barbauld complained of The Ancient Mariner) too “improbable” for that. But it pleases our taste because it is so desperately “Romantic.”—But you are not going to say that it is as good as the Odyssey?

The truth, of course, is that poetry like the Odyssey and the Iliad and the Agamemnon, just as much as The Divine Comedy and Hamlet, gets beyond these distinctions of Romantic and Classical. I daresay there is as much, in proportion, of this kind of poetry in Greek as even in our own literature. At any rate, there seems to be no doubt that the greatest poetry is not written except on Greek principles. There must be that “fundamental brain-work,” as Rossetti called it, which is the characteristic Greek contribution to art. You may put a less rigid interpretation upon the Hellenic maxims, you may apply them in ever so many new fields, but the essence of them you must keep. The Barbarian may be picturesque enough, but he is not an artist: he loses his head.

It would be enormously interesting to consider how a passage like this—

which is pure magic, such as you might find in the Kalevala, is transformed into a passage like

which is Romantic poetry at its best—or into

which is the Classical style very nearly at its best. But an essay must end after a reasonable time. Besides there is something else I want to say about the Classical and the Romantic. (Note168)

II

Arnold expressed the difference between the Greek and the Celtic or Romantic spirit by the word Titanism. That is a very happy expression, happier even than Arnold knew, unless he knew what we said about the Titans. For Titanism is just Barbarism in heroic proportions. It is the spirit of the Old Kings—the “Strainers,” as Hesiod, etymologizing, calls them—who failed because they would not discipline their strength. With some of Arnold’s language about the Celtic character, and the “failure” in practical affairs of the Celtic race, it is unnecessary now for any one to concern himself, for no one now uses that kind of language. Even if it were justified it would scarcely be relevant, since success in literature depends (as of course Arnold saw) on qualities quite other than those which may be relied upon to give us success in life. It is the Titanism of the Celt, says Arnold, which makes him a failure in the world of affairs, but in compensation gives him the gift of style. We need not accept that way of putting the matter, but I do not think we can fairly deny either the style or the Titanism.

The Greeks had their measure of Titanism also, and very certainly their measure of style. Arnold quotes from Henri Martin a description of the Celt as always ready to react against the despotism of fact. Whereupon the Greek student instantly remembers that this is just what Cleon said about the Athenians. He will also remember that a Corinthian politician said that they seemed to him to be born neither to be quiet themselves nor to let other people be quiet. Any one who fails to notice the unappeasable restlessness of the Greek temperament will miss a great piece of its quality. It comes out in the Greek attitude to Hope, which set ancient hearts beating with a violence which frightened them and extremely surprises us. It comes out in the popular conception of Alexander the Great as one marching on and on in a dream of never-ending victories. It comes out in spite of Arnold. He quotes from Byron:

He thinks this characteristically Celtic. So perhaps it is. But it is characteristically Greek too. It is a commonplace of Greek poetry. Then he quotes:

This also he calls Celtic, although he knew his Prometheus Bound, and might have reflected that Milton knew it too. At last Arnold flings up his case, and describes a passage quoted to support his antithesis as, up to a certain point, “Greek in its clear beauty”; and when he wishes to find a name for the Celtic “intoxication of style” goes to a Greek poet for his word and comes back with Pindarism.

That shows how impossible it is to press these critical distinctions. Still one sees what Arnold is driving at, and one may go with him most of the way. It is quite true that Celtic literature is full of Titanism. But it is an error to say that Titanism is strange to Greek art. There is far more of it in Celtic, and in Romantic literature generally, than in classical literature, and this does produce a striking difference between them. But it is only a difference of method and emphasis. Titanism appeals to the Romantic, and he gives himself up to it. The Greek feels the attraction too, but he fights against it, and over Titanism he puts something which he thinks is better.

Thus it is part of the Romantic mood to love a strange and hyperbolical speech. We see the Romantic poet or his hero like a man increased to superhuman proportions and making enormous gestures in a mist. This effect is not beyond the reach of any true poet, and it has been achieved by Aeschylus better perhaps than by any one before or since. We must return to this point. Here we need only remark that the Greeks could manage the poetical hyperbole when they pleased. But it is only the Romantic, or if you like the Celtic poets, who never tire of it. Again, it is a mistake to believe that there is no symbolism in ancient literature. But what there is differs greatly from modern “Symbolism.” Our “Symbolism” employs certain accepted symbols, which allusively and discreetly recombining it sets the spirit dreaming. Ancient art kept its symbols—I do not know if the word be not misapplied—separate and definite. But it had them. The background of the Agamemnon, for instance, is crowded with symbols. It is all lit up by triumphal and ruinous fires with (passing unscathed through it all) the phantasmal beauty of Helen; while students of metre have observed that the heart of the verse beats faster and slower as she comes and goes. This symbolical use of fire, and Helen’s form, of dreams and tempest and purple and much else, is profoundly and intricately studied in the play. But it is not like modern Symbolism, which is often content to gaze ecstatically on the symbol itself, instead of using it dramatically to flood a situation with the light that is hidden in the heart of Time.

So all these differences resolve themselves into a change of attitude, which nevertheless is no small matter. Though not the foundations of life itself, yet man’s reading of life changes; and it is just the play of this inconstant factor upon the fixed bases of the soul which produces that creative ferment from which all art is born.

This may be seen in one matter of peculiar interest in the history of art—the passion of love. One constantly finds it said that Romantic love is a purely mediÆval and modern thing. Those who make this statement might reflect that so profound and intimate an emotion is not likely to have been discovered so late in the human story. And it was not. Since there is perhaps a good deal of vagueness in our notions of what Romantic love is, let us take it here to mean the passion whose creed is, in Dryden’s (Note172)phrase, All for Love and the World well Lost. Was such a passion unknown in antiquity? Was not that very phrase of All for Love used of the Greek Cleopatra, who is one of the world’s famous lovers? Did not Medea leave all for love’s sake, and Orpheus, and the shepherd Daphnis, whose legend is the more significant because it appears to be pure folk-story? Have not all poets of Romantic love turned instinctively to Greek mythology as the inexhaustible quarry of their lore? That they treat the myths in their own way is not to be denied. But they would not turn to them at all if they felt that those stories had been moulded by an alien spirit. Then, so far as one can judge from the haplessly scanty fragments of Greek lyrical poetry, the Romantic spirit was strong in that. Sappho and the fine poet Ibykos were wholly given over and enslaved to love; and the great and bitter heart of Archilochus hardly escaped from it with curses. In the Alexandrian era it flowers in poetry anew. One might take perhaps as typical of the extreme Romantic mood the considerable fragment left us of Hermesianax. It is little more than a numbering of famous lovers for pure delight in their names. There is a trifle of childishness in the piece, and a trifle of artificiality, yet it is not without a haunting loveliness like that which clings to the Catalogue of the Women in Homer. It is no accidental kinship. An underground river has burst up again. One finds it flowing unchecked in the Argonautika of Apollonios.

You may have noticed that none of my examples was taken from the greatest period of Greek literature, the Attic age. That also is no accident. For it is then that the hostile spirit most effectively comes in. The capacity for Romantic love was not at any time denied to the Greek nature. But what happened was this: the great age applied, as to the other passions, so to love, its doctrine of Sophrosyne. What was the result? Love became terrible and to be shunned in exact proportion to its power over the soul. And on the Greek soul love had great power; no one ought to be mistaken about that. Of old He has been called a tyrant, says Plato of Eros. It is a famous saying of Plato again that love is a form of madness. Sophocles, we remember, compared it to a wild beast. Such language is habitual with the Attic poets. (It is used, for example, by both Sophocles and Euripides in the famous odes invoking Eros, the one in Antigone, the other in Hippolytus.) It is not at all the language of Romance; it does not say All for Love. Indeed when we consider it more closely, we find that it means the exact opposite of what the extreme Romantic means. The Greek means that he has conquered, the Romantic that he has surrendered. There is, to be sure, in the Romantic theory, examined in cold blood, a certain amount of bravado. A great imaginative passion is rare enough to be more than a nine days’ wonder. Such an objection has no weight in the world of art, but it is extremely in point when we are contrasting the actual conditions of ancient and modern life. It will turn out in the long run that in ancient Greece men felt love as much as we, but felt about it differently. They were for self-mastery, we for ecstasy. They were Greeks, and we are Barbarians.

They were also, one may believe, in this the truer artists. There is nothing more characteristic of the artist than his capacity to bind his emotions to the service of his art.

is his thought. The man who said that said also The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. The two sentiments are in fact not incompatible, but it takes an artist to reconcile them. The poor plain modern man always divines something immoral in this attitude. As to that, it is easiest to reply that it all depends. But surely the Greek is the only sound artistic doctrine. No one will write very well who cannot control his inspiration. A platitude no doubt, but a platitude which in these days seems very easily forgotten. The mere emotion is not enough. TannhÄuser has suggested great poetry; he could not have written any, for that would have required moral energy.

It might be thought a subterfuge to leave this topic without a word on a matter which cannot be ignored. I believe a very few words will suffice. But it is as well to make clear a point which has not been observed by those who claim the Greek example as a confirmation of their view that all experiences are permissible to the artist. The point is this. It was not in the artistic portion of the Greek people that the kind of sexual perversity, so often indiscriminately attributed to the Hellenes in general, was most widely prevalent. It was chiefly a Dorian vice, fostered by the Dorian camp-life, though I dare say it was to some extent endemic in the Near East. The Ionians (including the Athenians), who (Note175)inherited nine-tenths of the Hellenic genius, unhesitatingly condemned such practices, even if they themselves were somewhat infected by them. Athenian bourgeois morality was quite sound on that point, as you may see by merely reading Aristophanes. His attitude is really remarkable, and, so far as we can see, there is only one possible explanation: the Athenian people would not tolerate the Dorian sin upon the stage. Yet you know what they did tolerate, and what the comic tradition tolerated. It would take a lot to stop Aristophanes.

Another point may be put in the form of a question. How, on the assumption of Greek perversity, are we to account for the exceptional sanity of Greek thought and sentiment? It does not seem humanly possible that a pathological condition of the body should not result in a morbid state of the mind. Yet I never could hear of anybody who called the Greeks morbid. It is to be surmised that certain passages in Plato have been the chief source of the misconception, or exaggerated impression, which is still perhaps too prevalent. Now with regard to what is called Platonic Love, there are two things which ought not to be forgotten. One is this. The young men with whom Socrates used to talk—who were not, you know, in any proper sense, his disciples—were apt to be members of a tiny minority, among what we should call the upper classes at Athens, who professed what strikes us as a very unnecessary “philolaconism” or cult of things Spartan. Some of these young people certainly practised or trifled with the Dorian offence, and Socrates was willing to discuss the matter with them. He was the more willing to do this because he held a very definite view himself. He condemned the fleshly sin outright, though not perhaps uncompromisingly. But he attached the very highest value to the association of friends, an older and a younger, and he wished this comradeship to be intense enough to merit the name of love. This leads to the second point. You must judge ancient love—I mean this love of man and boy—by its ideal, as you insist on judging Romantic love. So judged, it often appears a fine and noble thing. That it sometimes sank in the mire is no more than can be said of modern love. Do not, at any rate, let us be hypocritical.

It is time to recover the thread of our original argument, which was to this effect, that the contrast of Hellenism and Barbarism appears in literature as the contrast of Classical and Romantic. Just as Hellene and Barbarian are correlative terms, so you cannot understand Classical art without reference to Romance, nor Romantic art in isolation from the Classics. But again, just as Greek and Barbarian are equally human, so Classical and Romantic art are alike art. The difference in the end is a difference of degree or (in another way of putting it) of tendencies. The great vice of the Barbarian is that he has no self-restraint. There cannot be art of any kind without restraint, and the Barbarian pur sang, if he exist, must be incapable of art. But it is not he we are discussing; it is the artistic expression of Barbarism which we call Romance. Now observe how clearly, within the limits imposed by art, Romance reveals the bias of the Barbarian temperament. In literature it comes out in the form of hyperbole or artistic exaggeration. It will not be denied that Romance indulges a good deal in that. The Greeks fought shy of it. To deal largely in it was likely to bring upon the writer the epithet of ??????, “frigid”—a curious charge to us, who are inclined to look upon exaggeration as natural to a fiery spirit. They thought it the mere spluttering of a weak nature, which could not master and direct its inward flame.

Yet the Romantic exaggeration can be very fine. I agree with Arnold in liking a good deal a passage which he quotes in an abridged form from the Mabinogion. Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall. The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon. “But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.” So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre. The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon. “But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was”; and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. “When first I came hither,” says the Owl, “the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men came and rooted it up. And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps?” Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon, but he offered to be guide “to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abbey.” The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.

The popular belief in the great age of certain animals appears in many lands, and appeared in ancient Greece. It is expressed in an old poem, attributed to Hesiod, called The Precepts of Chiron. Nine lives of men grown old lives the cawing crow; four lives of a crow lives the stag; the raven sees the old age of three stags; but the phoenix lives as long as nine ravens, as long as ten phoenixes we, the Nymphs with beautiful hair, daughters of Ægis-bearing Zeus. Compared with the Celtic passage, the quotation from “Hesiod” is poor and dry and like a multiplication sum. The Celtic imagination, with its fine frenzy, is at home in the region of popular fancy, and deals with it effectively; whereas the Greek method, if employed without art, spoils everything. You will observe that “Hesiod,” in spite of his vastly greater moderation (herein at least showing himself Greek), does not really succeed in being any more convincing to the imagination, while he does not impress it at all as the Celt impresses it. Employed with the art of Homer, or indeed of Hesiod at his best, the Greek method should at once impress the imagination and convince it. If it can do this, it clearly excels the method of impressing the imagination by a process akin to stunning it. One ought probably to prefer Hesiod at his dryest to mere senseless hyperbole even in a passage where a little hyperbole is in place. There is a future to Hesiod’s style in the hands of an imaginative artist, while there is no possible artistic future to mere shrieking. The Celtic method is always committing suicide.

Arnold quotes again from the Mabinogion: Drem, the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain). Here is what the ancient epic called the Cypria says: Climbing the topmost peak he sent his glance through all the Isle of Pelops son of Tantalos, and soon the glorious hero spied with his wondrous eyes horse-taming Castor and conquering PolydeukÊs inside the hollow oak. The superiority of the Classical style is now beginning to assert itself. The exaggeration in the Greek passage is immense, but it does suspend incredulity for a moment—and the moment in art is everything—while the Celtic passage pays no attention to verisimilitude at all, and therefore really misses its effect. (If you think we are here dealing with magic rather than simple hyperbole, the answer will be much the same.) What Euripides says about shame we may say about exaggeration; that there is a good kind and a bad. The good is, so to speak, intensive; the bad, merely extensive. The excellent method of hyperbole reflects some large hidden significance of it may be a little thing or a trifling action. The inartistic hyperbole is just overstatement—impressing nobody.

Any one who has read even a little of the old Celtic literature must have been struck by the presence in it of a very large element of enormous and almost frantic exaggeration. I speak very much under correction, as I have to work with translations, but no one can be wrong about so plain a matter. I have indeed heard a man who reads Irish say that in his opinion some of the exaggeration was merely humorous; but even this scholar did not deny that the exaggeration was there, and plenty of it. From the TÁin BÓ CÚalnge (the chief document of early Ireland) translated by Professor Joseph Dunn, I take part of the description of Cuchulain in one of his fits of rage. He next made a ruddy bowl of his face and his countenance. He gulped down one eye into his head so that it would be hard work if a wild crane succeeded in drawing it out on to the middle of his cheek from the rear of his skull. Its mate sprang forth till it came out on his cheek, so that it was the size of a five-fist kettle, and he made a red berry thereof out in front of his head. His mouth was distorted monstrously and twisted up to his ears. He drew the cheek from the jaw-bone so that the interior of his throat was to be seen. His lungs and his lights stood out so that they fluttered in his mouth and his gullet. He struck a mad lion’s blow with the upper jaw on its fellow so that as large as a wether’s fleece of a three year old was each red, fiery flake which his teeth forced into his mouth from his gullet. There was heard the loud clap of his heart against his breast like the yelp of a howling bloodhound or like a lion going among bears. There were seen the torches of the Badb, and the rain clouds of poison, and the sparks of glowing-red fire, blazing and flashing in hazes and mists over his head with the seething of the truly wild wrath that rose up above him. His hair bristled all over his head like branches of a redthorn thrust into a gap in a great hedge. Had a king’s apple-tree laden with royal fruit been shaken around, scarce an apple of them all would have passed over him to the ground, but rather would an apple have stayed stuck on each single hair there, for the twisting of the anger which met it as it rose from his hair above him. The Lon Laith (“Champion’s Light”) stood out of his forehead, so that it was as long and as thick as a warrior’s whetstone, so that it was as long as his nose, till he got furious handling the shields, thrusting out the charioteer, destroying the hosts. As high, as thick, as strong, as steady, as long as the sail-tree of some huge prime ship was the straight spout of dark blood which arose right on high from the very ridge-pole of his crown, so that a black fog of witchery was made thereof like to the smoke from a king’s hostel what time the king comes to be ministered to at nightfall of a winter’s day.

It would be mistaken and dull criticism to blame anything so characteristic as bad in itself. If such exaggerations are bad, it must be because the whole class of literature to which they belong is bad. But any one who should say that would be (not to put too fine a point upon it) an ass. Still, it would be paradoxical to maintain that the passage just quoted is in quite the best manner of writing. Cuchulain reminds one of Achilles, and it is instructive to compare the treatment of Cuchulain in the TÁin BÓ CÚalnge with the treatment of Achilles in the Iliad. In one sense the comparison is infinitely unfair. It is matching what some have thought the greatest poem in the world against something comparatively rude and primitive. But it is done merely to illustrate a point of art. In other respects no injustice happens. If one takes the combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, which is the crowning episode of the TÁin, with the combat between Hector and Achilles, which is perhaps the crowning episode of the Iliad, one cannot fail to see that the advantage in valour, and chivalry, and the essential pathos of the situation is all on the Irish side. But in the pure art of the narrative, (Note182)what a difference! The TÁin, not without skill, works through a climax of tremendous feats to an impression of deadly force and skill in its hero. But it is all considerably overdone, and at last you are so incredulous of Cuchulain’s intromissions with the “Gae Bulga” (that mysterious weapon) that you cease to be afraid of him. What does Homer do? He shows you two lonely figures on the Plain of Troy; Hector before the Skaian gate, and Achilles far off by the River Skamandros. And as Hector strengthens his heart for the duel which must be fatal to one, nearer and nearer, with savage haste, the sun playing on his armour, comes running Achilles. Nothing happens, only this silent, tireless running of a man. But it gets on your nerves just as it got on Hector’s.

Or take that singular description of the Champion’s Light. It so happens that Achilles also has something of the kind. But what is grotesque in the case of Cuchulain, in the case of Achilles has a startling effect of reality. The Trojans have defeated the Achaeans and come very near the ships in the absence of Achilles from the battle, when suddenly to the exulting foe the hero shows himself once more. Round his head the holy goddess twisted a golden cloud, and lit therefrom an all-shining flame. And as when a smoke rising from a town goes up to the sky in a distant isle besieged by fighting men, and all day the folk contend in hateful battle before their town, but with the setting of the sun thick flame the bale-fires, and the glare shoots up on high for the dwellers round to see, so haply they may come in their ships to ward off ruin—so from Achilles’ head the light went up to heaven. From the wall to the trench he went, he stood—not (Note183)mingling with the Achaeans, for he regarded his mother’s wise behest. There standing he shouted—and, aloof, Athena called; but among the Trojans was aroused confusion infinite.... And the charioteers were astonisht when they saw burning above the head of the great-hearted son of Peleus the unwearied, awful fire, that the goddess, grey-eyed Athena, made to burn. The poet, you see, does not fairly describe the Champion’s Light, he describes its effect. In the same way the face of Helen is never described, only the effect she had on the old men of Troy. Such art is beyond our praising.

It may be complained that I am taking extreme examples—of Hellenic tact and moderation on the one hand, of Romantic extravagance on the other. This is admitted, but the process seems justifiable; you must let me illustrate my point. The argument is that the Romantic style tends to a more lavish employment of hyperbole than does the Greek. I cannot imagine any one denying it. Read of some nightmare feat of strength in a Celtic story, and then read something in Homer (am I giving too much of Homer?)—something like this: Aias the son of Telamon was first to slay a man, smiting him with a ragged stone, that was within the wall by the battlement, piled huge atop of all, nor might a man with ease upbear it in both his arms, even in full lustihead of youth—such as men are now ... but Aias swang and hurled it from on high. How moderation tells! How much more really formidable is this Aias than Aeneas when Virgil (with Roman or Celtic exaggeration) says that he cast “no small part of a mountain”!

A matter of this delicacy will mock at a rigid handling. There is no rule to be laid down at all save (Note184)the rule that is above rules, the instinct of the artist. The limits of exaggeration—and there is a sense in which all art is exaggeration—shift with the shifting of what one may call the horizon of the soul. It is clear, for instance, that the atmosphere of the Domestic Drama or the Descriptive Poem is markedly different from that of the Heroic Epic or the Choral Ode. A gabe appropriate to Oliver or Kapaneus would sound very strangely on the lips of Holy Willie or Peter Bell; it could only be mock-heroic or parody. One’s sensitiveness to these atmospheres,
then, the temperament of the reader, his
critical taste, the character of his education—all that and more affect his response to what he reads. We have had a different experience from the ancients and live, as it were, in different emotional scenery. Hyperbole counts for more in our art than it did in theirs. To the device in itself there could be no possible objection. When one thinks of the superb and intoxicating hyperboles of Romantic literature from the winding of Roland’s horn to the Playboy of the Western World; when one thinks how largely they serve to make the style of Shakespeare; the Greeks appear a little timid in comparison. Perhaps they were, although I cannot believe it was timidity that ailed them. Only they guarded more strictly against a danger they felt more keenly than we, into which we have more frequently fallen.

Art of course must go where its own winds and currents carry it. To forbid it to be itself because it is not Greek is extreme, though happily impotent, nonsense. But it will be extraordinarily interesting to see how modern art is going to save itself from the two extremes of brutality and sentimentalism—the faults of the Barbarian—with which it is so manifestly and so painfully struggling. The Greeks solved that problem, and their solution stands. Meanwhile a student of Greek may help a little by explaining what the solution is. For it has been greatly misunderstood.

The secret was half recovered in the Renaissance. Thus in England Milton learned from the Greeks the value of form for the concentration of meaning, and that poetry should be not only “sensuous and passionate” but also “simple.” But the Renaissance had drunk too deep of the new wine to keep its head quite steady; and this, in turn, helped to provoke a Puritanic reaction which distrusted the arts, and therefore differed widely from Greek asceticism, which was itself a kind of art. The Restoration produced a new orientation of the English spirit, and a new interpretation of the Classical. Repelled by the extravagances and the frequently outrageous slovenliness of decadent Elizabethanism, the age of Dryden, communicating its impulse to the age of Pope, fell in love with the quietness and temperance of the ancients, and above all with their accomplishment of form. This admiration was an excellent and salutary thing for the times. But it seemed content to gaze on the surface. There arose a poetry which aimed above all at mere correctness. As if Greek poetry aimed at nothing but that!

The modern Romantic movement—I mean the new spirit in English literature which Lyrical Ballads is regarded as initiating—was largely a revolt against eighteenth-century Classicism. Yet it cannot fairly be said that the Romantics introduced a juster conception of Classical art. They started with a prejudice against it, which their discovery of the Middle Ages merely confirmed. Wordsworth indeed (who had much of the eighteenth century in him) felt the attraction of Classical art, but his best work is not in things like Laodamia. Landor is not Greek, any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek. They have Greek perfection of form, but (except at his rare best Landor) they are glacial; they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho, for example, so different. It has been thought that no English poet has come nearer than Keats to recapturing the ancient secret. The Ode to a Grecian Urn nearly does recapture it. But not quite. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty is very Greek; but it is not Greek to forget, as Keats and his followers have been apt to forget, the second half of their aphorism. So the Greek poets aimed less directly at beauty than at the truth of things, which they believed to be beautiful; and this realism—this effort to realize the world as it is—remains, in spite of the large element of convention in Greek poetry, the most characteristic thing about the Greek poetical genius.

In the very midst of the Romantic movement we find Matthew Arnold pleading for a return to Hellenic standards. The plea had curiously little effect. If you read Merope immediately after Atalanta in Calydon, you will scarcely wonder at that. Arnold in fact saw only half the truth. He cries for Greek sanity and absence of caprice; he does not cry for Greek intensity, Greek realism. He pleads for tact and moderation—in a word, for that good manners in style which had seemed so important to the eighteenth century. The doctrine was too negative for the age. It can hardly be said to inspire the best work of Arnold himself. Yes, that is just what is wrong with it, it does not inspire; and so, although based on a right instinct, it does not really lift him above his time. He did not care for Tennyson, whom he accused of affectation. But he would not have understood the twentieth century’s objection to Tennyson, that he lacked the courage of his genius. If he had understood it, he would no doubt have sided with Tennyson, for Arnold was, after all, mainly “Victorian.” But what do you suppose Aristophanes would have said about Tennyson? If the answer is not at once obvious, the reason must be the difficulty that would arise in getting a Greek of Aristophanes’ time to understand the Victorian timidities at all.

The present age is said to be extremely in revolt against Victorianism. Unfortunately one may be in full revolt and yet be only shaking one’s chains. There is a thing that is fairly clear. The paroxysmal art of the hour must bring its inevitable reaction. The cry will again be heard for a return to urbanity and a stricter form, and people will again call these things Classical, as if this were all the Classics have to offer. And then in due time will come once more the counter-swing of the pendulum. Well, perhaps art depends more than we think upon this ceaseless movement; for all art aims at giving the effect of life, and life is in movement.

III

Were it not for an original propriety in the distinction, it would be better not to speak at all of “Classical” and “Romantic.” This seems clearly to be the fault of modern criticism, which has hidden the path under so deep a fall of many-coloured leaves, that now one must spend a deal of time merely in sweeping them up. It is annoying how inapt are current terms of criticism to express the essence of ancient literature. I have hinted that it might almost be expressed in the word “realism,” and at once I am checked by the reflection that realism in modern speech appears to mean anything you like. How, then, is a man to avoid being misunderstood? But he has to take the risk; and on the whole it will be safer for him to grasp this runaway by the hair than to sow more definitions in a soil already exhausted.

Greek literature is realistic in the sense that it aims at producing the effect of reality, not by the accumulation of startling details—which perhaps is what is usually meant in these days by realism—but by a method of its own. Greek literature is marked by a unique sincerity, or veracity, or candour, equally foreign to violence and to sentimentality—a bitter man might say, equally foreign to what we now call (Note189)realism and to what we now call idealism. So profound is this truthfulness that we (who cry out daily for a resolute fidelity to fact in our writers) have not yet sounded it. It needs a long plummet. So many of us have come to imagine that the truth of a situation is not apparent except in flashes of lightning—preferably red lightning—which the Greeks thought distorting. We think we are candid, and we are not so very candid. I could never be one of those fanatical champions of antiquity to whom the modern is merely the enemy. Their position is so pathetically untenable that one can only with a sigh busy oneself with something that really matters. But, however modern I may feel, I cannot get myself to believe that we attain so perfect a truthfulness as the Greeks. We have written volumes about the “Classical Ideal,” and we are apt to contrast “Hellenic Idealism” with our uncompromising modern “Realism” and “Naturalism.” And all the time the Greeks have had a truer realism than we.

For instance, we have of late almost made a speciality of wounds and death. You could not say this of any ancient writer. Curiously enough, you might say it with less impropriety of Homer than of any other. A warrior, he says, was pierced to the heart by a spear, and the throbbing of the heart made also the butt of the spear to quiver. That gives you a pretty satisfactory shiver. Menelaos smote Peisandros above the root of the nose; and the bones cracked, and his eyes dropped bloody in the dust of the ground at his feet. This is how Peneleos treated Ilioneus. He wounded him under the eyebrow where the eye is embedded and forced out the ball, and the spear went (Note190)clean through the eye and through the muscle behind, and the wounded man crouched down, spreading out his hands; but Peneleos drawing his sharp sword smote his neck in the midst and dashed the head on the ground, helmet and all; and the heavy spear was still in the eye, and he raised up the head like a poppy. I suspect your modern realist of envying that image of the bloody head stuck “through the eye” on a spear and looking like a “poppy” or a “poppy-head” on its stalk. Another unfortunate fighter was hit down the mouth with a spear, which penetrated under the brain and broke the white bones; and the teeth were shaken out and both his eyes were filled with blood, and with a gape he sent the blood gushing up his mouth and down his nostrils. The youngest son of King Priam was wounded by Achilles beside the navel, and so dropped moaning on his knees and clutched his entrails to him with his hands—a passage remembered by Pater.

From it and the others it may be seen that Homer, when he likes, can be as grisly as Mr. Sassoon. But they are not typical of Homer, still less of the ancient Greek writers in general. It is not their way to obtrude details. Their aim is to give you the whole situation, and to give it truly. Their method is to select the significant, rather than the merely striking, details. Such a theory and method are best entitled, on reflection, to the name of realism. Kebriones, the charioteer in Homer, has his forehead crushed in by a stone, and a terrible battle is waged over his body. The poet in the heat of his battle thinks for a moment of the dead man. But he in the whirling dust-storm lay, with large limbs largely fallen, forgetful of his horsemanship. No insistence here on the ghastly wound. (Note191)The reader for a breathing space is rapt from the blood and the horror into quiet spaces of oblivion. Is not this, just here, the right note to strike—and not the other? It gives the whole situation—the roaring tumult above, the unheeding body underneath—not merely one aspect. It is the more real because it is not simply painful.

Contrast, again, the Greek with the mediÆval and the modern attitudes to death. See how many of the passages on death you can recall in writers not ancient are inspired by a grotesque or reflective horror, or ring with a hopeful or hopeless defiance. Think of Villon on death, and Raleigh, and Donne, and Shakespeare’s Claudio, and Hydriotaphia, and Browning, and Swinburne. There is nothing in the great age of Greek literature even remotely comparable to the gorgeous variety of these dreams and invocations. But if the question is of realism (as we are understanding it), if we resolve to see death as it is, neither transformed by hope nor blurred by tears, see if the ancients have not the advantage.

They will disappoint you at first. (But remember you are asking for realism.) Thus when Aristotle in his dry manner says, Death is the most fearful thing; for it is an end, and nothing after it seems to the dead man either good or bad, you may think it a poor attitude to strike. But Aristotle is not striking an attitude at all, he is simply facing a fact. He may be wrong, of course, but that is how death looks to Aristotle, and he is not going to gild the pill either for you or for himself. But if you miss in Aristotle the thrill of the greatest literature, you must feel it in the last words of Socrates to the judges who had condemned him. But now is come the hour of departure, (Note192)for me that have to die, for you that have still to live; but which path leads to a better lot is hidden from all but God. And with that Socrates falls silent, leaving the reader silent too, and a little ashamed perhaps of our importunate hells and heavens.

Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades and speaks of the great honour in which the young hero is held here. Not of death, replies Achilles, speak thou in words of comfort, glorious Odysseus! Rather above ground would I be the hired servant of a man without a lot, whose livelihood is but small, than reign over all the perished dead. The truth as he sees it is what you get from the Greek every time. Odysseus hears it from Achilles, the greatest of the dead. He hears it from ElpÊnor, one of the least. (ElpÊnor got drunk in Circe’s house and, feeling hot, wandered on to the roof, where he fell asleep, and everybody forgot about him. In the morning he was aroused by the noise of people moving about and jumped up, forgetting where he was, and fell backwards from the roof and broke his neck.) Ah, go not and leave me behind unwept and unburied, turning thy back on me, lest I become a vessel of the wrath of gods upon thee; but bury me with all mine armour, and by the margin of the whitening sea heap me a high grave of a man that had no luck, that even after ages may know. This do for me, and on my grave plant the oar with which, alive, I rowed among my comrades. The natural pathos of this must touch everybody. But I wonder if everybody feels how much of its effect is due to an almost harsh avoidance of sentimentality, as in that hidden threat of the pleading ghost. And even that piercing last line about the oar—it may grieve certain readers to know that setting up an (Note193)oar on the grave was merely part of a ritual usually observed in the burial of a dead mariner.

The corpus of Greek inscriptions naturally contains a great many epitaphs. There is not one, belonging to what we think of as the great age of Greece, that has the least grain of smugness or hypocrisy or sentimentality. It must be confessed that these “pagans” could die with a good grace. Here is an inscription, incerti loci, “of uncertain provenience,” but in the Greek of Attica. The tomb of Phrasikleia, “I shall be called a maid for evermore, having won from the gods this name instead of marriage.” I ought to add at once that the original is grave and beautiful poetry. I can only give the sense. One must read the Greek to feel entirely how good Phrasikleia is. At least she is not Little Nell. Some of the most famous epitaphs are by known authors; the most famous of all by Simonides. Over the Tegeans who fell in battle against the Barbarian he wrote: Here lie the men whose valour was the cause that smoke went not up to heaven from broad Tegea burning; who resolved to leave their city flourishing in freedom to their children, and themselves to die among the foremost fighters. All these little poems are beyond translation. The art of them lies in a deliberate bareness or baldness, which ought to be shockingly prosaic (and in English almost inevitably is so), but contrives to be thrilling poetry. The finest of all the epigrams is that on the Three Hundred who fell at Thermopylae. O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, following their instructions. Literally that is what it says. Yet I suppose that even a man who does not know Greek may feel in an instinctive way that it may be extraordinarily good in the original. It is. It is an instance of the famous Laconic brevity, whose virtue it was to cut at once to the heart of things. One other epigram I will add, partly because it also refers to the time of the Persian Wars, partly because the author was said (perhaps rightly) to be Plato. It is on the people of Eretria, a town in Euboea by the seashore, who were carried off into captivity and settled by Darius far away, hopelessly far, “at Arderikka in the Kissian land” beyond the Tigris. We who one day left the deep-voiced swell of the Aegean lie here midmost the Plain of Ecbatana. Good-bye Eretria, our city famous once; good-bye Athens, the neighbour of Eretria; good-bye dear sea. By the side of this mere “pathos” looks almost vulgar. If Plato wrote it, he was certainly a poet; but it is improbable that he did. I notice that Professor Burnet thinks Plato did not write any of the poems attributed to him in the manuscripts. In any case, when people say that Plato was “really a poet” they are thinking of his prose. I cannot help adding the irrelevancy that I wish they would not go on repeating this. He is an incomparably great master of imaginative prose. Is that not enough? He may have been no better at poetry than Ruskin or Carlyle. A poet is a man who writes poems.

Next to death the great test of sincerity is love. There used to be a general opinion that love, as we understand it, did not exist among the ancients at all. That point has been already discussed, but we may consider for a little the treatment of love in the Attic dramatists, who best represent the great period of Athenian development. There is plenty of love in them, only they don’t mention it. “Please (Note195)do not be impatient,” as the Greek orators say, “until you hear what I mean.” Let us take Aeschylus, the earliest of the dramatists, first, and for a play let us take his Agamemnon. The great character is Clytaemnestra. She has allowed herself to become the paramour of a vile and cowardly relation of her husband called Aegisthus, who apparently seduced her out of mere idleness and hatred of King Agamemnon. When her husband returns she treacherously murders him.... What are you going to make of a subject like that? How are you going to make Clytaemnestra, I will not say “sympathetic,” but merely human and tolerable? It seems an insoluble problem. Yet Aeschylus solves it. For one thing, he represents Agamemnon, the nominal hero of the play, as rather wooden, weak and bombastic—not very unlike Julius Caesar, the nominal hero of Shakespeare’s play, where the dramatist had a similar but less difficult problem. The result is that the sympathies of the reader are not too deeply stirred in favour of the victim. Again, Clytaemnestra appears to be really in love with Aegisthus, while her feeling towards her husband is not merely the thirst for revenge or the hate a woman conceives of the man she has wronged; it is a physical abhorrence. She loathes him in her flesh. It is impossible to explain by what miracle of genius we are led to receive this impression, for she speaks nothing but flatteries and cajolery. Yet every speech of hers to him, as he dimly feels, shudders with a secret disgust. These long, glittering, coiling sentences are certainly not politic; they are the expression of a morbid loathing, which has ended by fascinating itself. When the blood of her lord (Note196)bursts over her she rejoices no less than the sown ground in the heaven’s bright gift of rain. Now in the play Agamemnon is rather ineffective, but at any rate he is more a man than the immeasurably contemptible Aegisthus. Is it to be supposed that Clytaemnestra does not know that? Of course she knows, but she does not cease to love Aegisthus on that account. So the matter stands. Aeschylus does not make it any easier for you. A bad modern playwright would make Clytaemnestra a sadly misunderstood woman with a pitiful “case.” It so happens that the queen does have something of a case, really a good case, but she does not much insist on it. She knows quite well that it is not for her murdered daughter’s sake that she has killed the king. Neither is it from fear of detection; the woman does not know the meaning of fear. Aeschylus will not purchase your sympathy for her by any pretences. One of his unexpected, wonderful touches is to make her superbly intelligent. She feels herself so much superior intellectually to every one else that she hardly takes the trouble to deceive them. Nobody is asked to like Clytaemnestra, but surely she gives food for some reflection on the power and subtlety of Greek psychology, and the unswerving truthfulness of Greek realism, in a peculiarly complex affair of the heart.

There are in Sophocles at least two fine and tender studies of conjugal love of the conventional (but not silly conventional) type, namely Tekmessa in the Ajax and DÊianeira in the Trachinian Women; and one study not conventional in the very least, the Iokasta of Oedipus the King. She is the woman who slew herself because she had borne children to her own son, who had murdered his father, who begot him by her. The legend has made her a thing of night and horror. Sophocles has made her grand, proud, sceptical, lonely, pitiful, ravaged by thoughts not to be breathed, horribly pathetic. But these three are wives. Of love between man and maid Sophocles has hardly a word to say. People quote Haimon and Antigone. There is no doubt of the young man’s love for Antigone; he dies for her. But is she in love with Haimon? She is betrothed to him of course, but in ancient Greece these matters were arranged. She probably liked him a good deal; everybody likes him; but we are speaking of love. Those who have little doubts on the subject quote her cry, Dearest Haimon, how thy father slights thee! which she utters when Kreon has said, I hate bad wives for my sons. But they have no right to quote the cry as hers until they have proved she utters it; which they don’t, but merely assume the manuscripts be wrong. The manuscripts give the line to IsmÊnÊ, the sister of Antigone, and they appear to be clearly right. Any one who looks at the context will see that it is IsmÊnÊ who brings the mention of Haimon into the dispute with Kreon. Antigone stands apart in proud and indignant silence. She will die rather than let the man who has outraged her dead brother see how much her resistance is costing her. Besides, I think the manuscripts are right anyway. Imagine the case of an extremely high-minded young lady, who for the very best reasons has quarrelled with her prospective father-in-law. The young lady’s sister reminds the old man that after all Octavia is engaged to his son, which provokes the retort, “I object to bad wives for my boys.” Would Octavia then exclaim, “Dearest William, how your father insults you!”? Well, would she? But it looks delightfully like what Octavia’s sister would say. Therefore, I vote for the manuscripts and giving the line to IsmÊnÊ.

Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took refuge in Argos, where he gathered assistance and marched against his native city. The attempt had no success, and Polyneikes and Eteokles fell in single combat. This mutual fratricide left Kreon, their uncle, king. He, in a flame of “patriotism,” had Eteokles interred with honour and commanded that the body of Polyneikes should be left unburied. Such an order might be compared to excommunication, for the effect of it was for ever to bar the spirit of the dead from peace. Antigone sprinkled dust on the naked corpse, which satisfied the gods of the underworld and eluded the penalty of the ban. When Kreon asks her if the spirit of Eteokles will not resent the saining of his fraternal enemy—which would be the orthodox opinion—she replies, beautifully but inconsequently, It is not my nature to join in hating, but in loving. She also speaks of a higher, unwritten law. But Polyneikes is the favourite brother. I hardly think any one can read carefully the Antigone and the Oedipus at Colonus without seeing that. All through the Antigone he is never out of her thoughts. “Natural enough,” you may be inclined to say. But is it? On the supposition that she is in love with Haimon? There is another play, the Electra, in which Sophocles portrays the love of a sister for a brother; and there are a good many points of resemblance between Electra and Antigone. Only there is in the love of Electra for Orestes (whom she brought up) a fierce, hungry, maternal quality, which would be out of place between the children of Oedipus.

When we pass to Euripides we seem by comparison to approach the modern. The impression is largely illusory, but not wholly false. It is the fact that he is troubled by many of the problems that trouble us, and it is the fact that he sometimes answers, or does not answer, them in a way we should regard as modern. This comes out in his treatment of love. It is best seen in the Medea and the Hippolytus. Medea has a special interest for us because she is a Barbarian (princess of Colchis in the eastern corner of the Black Sea). But her case is quite simple. She is a woman in love with a man who is tired of her. Necessarily he cuts a poor figure in the story. She had saved his life. On the other hand, she had thrown herself at his head, she had done her best to ruin his chances in life, and all she had now to offer him was a perfect readiness to murder anybody who stood in his way. She is one of those women who are never satisfied unless the man is making love to them all the time, so that one may have a sneaking sympathy for that embarrassed, if rather contemptible, Jason. Indeed, Euripides’ opinion of this kind of “Romantic” love is probably no higher than Mr. Shaw’s. It is the passion of the Barbarian woman. That does not prevent Euripides from sympathizing profoundly with Medea, the passionate, wronged, foreign woman. Why, indeed, should it? The case of Medea, as Euripides with the pregnant brevity of Greek art presents it, has seemed to many as true as death. It is an excellent example of realism.

More definitely than the Medea, the Hippolytus is a tragedy of love. Yet in the eloquence of the Romantic lover the one is as deficient as the other. Phaedra was dying for love of Hippolytus. Her secret is discovered and she dies of shame. What an opportunity for the sentimentalist! However, adds the relentless poet, that is not all the story. Before killing herself she forged a message to her husband making the charge of Potiphar’s wife against Hippolytus. She could not die without the pleasure of hurting him. Yet Euripides does not represent her as an odious woman; quite the contrary. The question for us is, does she, when we read the play, strike us as real or not? The poet has set himself a difficult task—to convince us that a soul overthrown by desire, cruel, lying, unjust was yet essentially modest, gentle and honourable. If she is almost too convincing, so that a sentimental part of you bleeds inside, you will perceive that realism was not invented in Norway. And there is this about the Greek sort: it never exaggerates.

It is hardly to be believed how startling an effect of truth this moderation of the Greek writers can produce. Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her “sweat” with agony and look “greener than grass.” Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But, even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the “beauty” or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might appear, with none at all. Thus Aeschylus represents Prometheus as the proudest of living beings. The Prometheus Bound opens with a scene in which Hephaistos, urged on by two devils called Strength and Force, nails Prometheus to a frozen, desert rock. While the hero of the play endures this horrible torture, he has to listen to the clumsy sympathy of Hephaistos, who does not like his job, and the savage taunts of the two demons. To all this he replies—nothing at all. No eloquence could express the pride of that tremendous silence. Of course there is, or there used to be, a certain kind of commentator who hastens to point out that a convention of the early Attic stage forbade more than two persons of a tragedy to speak together at any time, so that in any event it was not permissible for Prometheus to speak. All you can do with a critic like that is (mentally, I fear) to hang a millstone round his neck and cast him into the deepest part of the sea.

Not but what the point about convention, if rightly taken, is extremely notable. It is an undying wonder how the kind of realism we have been discussing could be combined with, could even, as in that instance from the Prometheus Bound, make use of, the limitations imposed on the ancient poet. To a reader who has not looked into the case it is hard to give even an idea of it. If a man were to tell you that he had written a novel in which the hero was Sir Anthony Dearborn and the heroine Sophia Wilde, while other characters were Squire Crabtree, Parson Quackenboss, Lieutenant Dashwood and the old Duchess of Grimthorpe, you would think to yourself you knew exactly what to expect. Yet you must admit there is nothing to prevent the man leaving out (if he can) Gretna Green, and the duel, and the eighteenth-century oaths. But if a Greek tragic dramatist put on the stage a play dealing, say, with the House of Atreus, he positively could not leave out any part of the family history. It was not done. So the audience knew your story already, and knew, roughly, your characters. Nor, as historians say, was that all. There had to be a Chorus, which had to sing lyrical odes of a mythological sort at regular intervals between the episodes of your drama; while the episodes themselves had to be composed in the iambic metre and in a certain “tragic diction” about as remote from ordinary speech as Paradise Lost. How Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides contrive under such conditions to give a powerful impression of novelty and naturalness it is easier to feel than explain. About the feeling at least there is no doubt. Let us look again for a moment at that singular convention, the tragic Chorus. Very often it consists of old men who ... sing and dance. Consider the incredible difficulty of keeping a number of singing and dancing old men solemn and beautiful and even holy. Yet the great tragic poets have overcome that difficulty so completely that I suppose not one reader in a hundred notices that there is a difficulty at all. The famous Chorus of old men in the Agamemnon, whose debility is made a point in the play, never for a moment remind one of Grandfer Cantle. Rather they remind us of that “old man covered with a mantle,” whom Saul beheld rising from the grave to pronounce his doom. It is, in their own words, as if God inspired their limbs to the dance and filled their mouths with prophecy.

There is only one way of redeeming the conventional, and that is by sincerity. I am very far from maintaining that the moral virtue of sincerity was eminently characteristic of the ancient Greek; but intellectual sincerity was. None has ever looked upon gods and men with such clear, unswerving eyes; none has understood so well to communicate that vision. To see that essential beauty is truth and truth is beauty—that is the secret of Greek art, as it is the maxim of true realism. To keep measure in all things, that no drop of life may spill over—that is the secret of Greek happiness. To be a Greek and not a Barbarian.