Part 16 (1/2)
?e??? e? s??p??, ?e?ss?? ep? ????pa p??t??, t?ss?? ep????s???s? ?e?? ????ee? ?pp??.[111]
{hosson d' eeroeides aner iden ophthalmoisin hemenos en skopie, leusson epi oinopa ponton, tosson epithroskousi theon hypsechees hippoi.}
[111] _Iliad_, xvi. 428 f.: 'As vultures with crooked talons and curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.'
_Ibid._ v. 770 f.: 'As far as a man's view ranges in the haze, as he sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the G.o.ds.'
It is hard, as the beginnings of Roman poetry show, to devise a metre which is not rough, unmusical, or even grotesque: yet for richness and strength this first metre of Europe has never been rivalled by the Greeks or by any one else. The same natural technical skill appears in more subtle things even than metre or language. Homer is born knowing by some instinct the profound secret of literary art which Aristotle formulated centuries later as the principle of unity of Action. The plot of a play, he writes in the _Poetics_, 'should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.... It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be.... Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again the transcendant excellence of Homer appears. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view: while if he had kept it in moderate limits it would have been over-complicated by the variety of incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion.'[112] Once stated, the principle of unity of action becomes a commonplace of literary art. But, as the _Annals_ of Ennius or the _Faerie Queen_ show, it is not obvious until stated, and the poets from whose practice Aristotle made his induction, must have had a rare technical instinct unconsciously to preserve unity of interest through the complications of a long epic or drama. Such achievements were only possible to a people with a natural genius for literary art. In the hands of the Greeks the various elements of literature found their te??? {telos} and achieved their natural form, almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to its predestined shape.
[112] _Poetics_, c. 23 (tr. Butcher).
This can be ill.u.s.trated even better from Greek drama. A modern author who wishes to write a play may not find the task easy, but he knows the general form which a drama has to take and the general principles to be followed in writing it. The right length is given him, the division into scenes and acts, the methods of exposition and dialogue, the conception of a _denouement_, the law of unity of action, and the rest. The fathers of Greek tragedy had no such help. They had no drama in our sense of the word, but simply a band of fifty persons dressed like satyrs, and dancing round an altar and singing a song. Out of this anything or nothing might have been made. The Greeks, with the instinctive and unerring motions of genius, developed from it the highest and most elaborate of literary forms, and within a hundred years are writing plays which Sh.e.l.ley cla.s.ses with _King Lear_, and which Swinburne can call, 'probably, on the whole, the greatest spiritual work of man'.
In divining the principles of literary art and evolving the various kinds of literature no people can be compared to the Greeks, and probably none can show a ma.s.s of work executed with so uniformly high a finish. But when we compare writer with writer we shall find individual artists to rival them. Though the strength of English literature does not lie in technical perfection, Milton, Pope, and Tennyson--to name no others--have in their different ways as firm a grasp of it as any Greek, and it can be learned from French writers, with whom it is the rule rather than the exception, as well as from the Greeks. This is hardly true of another quality of Greek writing, which may be cla.s.sed with technical finish, though it is in fact something more. It is one of the most characteristic features of Greek; yet on first acquaintance, it is often disconcerting and even distasteful. If a reader new to the cla.s.sics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Sh.e.l.ley or Tennyson, he came across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae,
? ?e??', a??e??e?? ?a?eda??????? ?t? t?de ?e?e?a, t??? ?e???? ??as? pe???e???,[113]
{o xein', angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti tede keimetha, tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi,}
he might see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which is always at its greatest when most simple, and he would have been face to face with a characteristic quality of it.
[113] 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obeying their words.'
The contrast with the usual English manner may be ill.u.s.trated by quoting a famous epigram--Ben Jonson's epitaph on a boy actor:
Weep with me, all you that read This little story; And know, for whom a tear you shed, Death's self is sorry.
'Twas a child that so did thrive In grace and feature, As heaven and nature seemed to strive Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen When Fates turned cruel, Yet three filled zodiacs had he been The stage's jewel;
And did act (what now we moan) Old men so duly, As sooth the Parcae thought him one, He played so truly.
So, by error, to his fate They all consented; But, viewing him since, alas, too late!
They have repented.
These lines--and they are not the whole of the poem--are enough to ill.u.s.trate the difference between the Greek method and the English, the latter rich and profuse, following the flow of an opulent fancy, the former reticent and restrained, leaving the reader's imagination room and need to play its part. There are materials for half-a-dozen epigrams in Ben Jonson's poem. Had he been Simonides or Plato, he would have stopped after the fourth line and, in the opinion of some critics, by saving his paper he would have improved his poem.
In their theory and in their practice the Greek writers were true to this principle of Economy. Their proverbs proclaim it 'the half is greater than the whole': 'sow with the hand and not with the whole sack.' The great pa.s.sages of their literature ill.u.s.trate it. It is to be found no less in Thucydides' account of the siege of Syracuse and in the close of the _Phaedo_ or the _Republic_ than in the death of Hector or the meeting of Priam and Achilles. The Greek writers may have emotions that would seem to demand vehement and extended expression, topics to inspire a poet and tempt him to amplify them; but resisting the temptation they set the facts down quietly and pa.s.s on practically without comment. The close of the _Phaedo_ exemplifies this restraint.
Plato has just related with severe economy of detail the death of his master. His comment on the event which saddened and confounded his whole life is but this: 'Such, Echecrates, was the death of our friend, the best man, I think, that I have ever known, the wisest too and the most just.'[114]
[114] _Phaedo_, 118 B.
There are n.o.ble examples of reticence and economy in English literature, some of the most conspicuous of which can be traced to cla.s.sical influence; but no one would contend that these qualities are the rule in our great writers. The English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho,
?spe?e, pa?ta fe??? ?sa fa?????? es?eda?' a???, fe?e?? ???, fe?e? a??a, fe?e?? ap? ate?? pa?da,[115]
{Hespere, panta pheron osa phainolis eskedas' auos, phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida,}
[115] fr. 95: 'Star of evening, bringing all things that bright dawn has scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.'
than like Byron,