Fig. 8.Fig. 8. VOTIVE TABLET representing cupping and bleeding instruments from Temple of Asclepius at Athens. In centre is represented a folding case containing scalpels of various forms. On either side are cupping vessels.
After Celsus comes Dioscorides in the first centuryA. D.He was a Greek military surgeon of Cilician origin who served under Nero, and in him the Greek intellect is obviously beginning to flag. His work is prodigiously important for the history of botany, yet so far as rational medicine is concerned he is almost negligible. He begins at the wrong end, either giving lists of drugs with the symptoms that they are said to cure or to relieve, or lists of symptoms with a series of named drugs. Clinical observation and record are wholly absent, and the spirit of Hippocrates has departed from this elaborate pharmacopœia.
With the second century of the Christian era we terminate the creative period of Greek medicine. We are provided with the works of four important writers of this century, of whom three, Rufus of Ephesus, Soranus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, though valuable for forming a picture of the state of medicine in their day, were without substantial influence on the course of medicine in later ages.
Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us the first formal work on human anatomy and is of some importance in the history of comparative anatomy. In medicine he is memorable as the first to have described bubonic plague, and in surgery for his description of the methods of arrestinghaemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy of the eye. A work by himOn goutwas translated into Latin in the sixth century, but remained unknown till modern times.
Soranus of Ephesus (A. D.c.90-c.150), an acute writer on gynaecology, has left a book which illustrates well the anatomy of his day. It exercised an influence for many centuries to come, and a Latin abstract of it prepared about the sixth century by one Moschion has come down to us in an almost contemporary manuscript.[92]It is interesting as opposing the Hippocratic theory that the male embryo is originated in the right and the female in the left half of the womb, a fallacy derived originally from Empedocles and Parmenides, but perpetuated by Latin translations of the Hippocratic treatises until the seventeenth century. His work was adorned by figures, and some of these, naturally greatly altered by copyists, but still not infinitely removed from the facts, have survived in a manuscript of the ninth century, and give us a distant idea of the appearance of ancient anatomical drawings.[93]We may assist our imagination a little further, in forming an idea of what such diagrams were like, with the help of certain other mediaeval figures representing the form and distribution of the various anatomical ‘systems’, veins, arteries, nerves, bones, and muscles which are probably traceable to an Alexandrian origin.[94]
Aretaeus of Cappadocia was probably a contemporary of Galen (second half of the second centuryA. D.). As a clinical author his reputation stands high, perhaps too high, his descriptions of pneumonia, empyema, diabetes, and elephantiasishaving especially drawn attention. In treatment he uses simple remedies, is not affected by polypharmacy, and suggests many ingenious mechanical devices. It would appear that Aretaeus is not an independent writer, but mainly a compiler. He relies largely on Archigenes, a distinguished physician contemporary with Juvenal, whose works have perished save the fragments preserved in this manner by Aretaeus and Aetius. Aretaeus was a very popular writer among the Greeks in all ages, but he was not translated into Latin, and was unknown in the West until the middle of the sixteenth century.[95]He is philologically interesting as still using the Ionic dialect.
There remains the huge overshadowing figure of Galen. The enormous mass of the surviving work of this man, the dictator of medicine until the revival of learning and beyond, tends to throw out of perspective the whole of Greek medical records. The works of Galen alone form about half of the mass of surviving Greek medical writings, and occupy, in the standard edition, twenty-two thick, closely-printed volumes. These cover every department of medicine, anatomy, physiology, pathology, medical theory, therapeutics, as well as clinical medicine and surgery. In style they are verbose and heavy and very frequently polemical. They are saturated with a teleology which, at times, becomes excessively tedious. In the anatomical works, masses of teleological explanation dilute the account of often imperfectly described structures. Yet to this element we owe the preservation of the mass of Galen’s works, for his intensely teleological point of view appealed to the theological bias both of Western Christianity and of Eastern Islam. Intolerable as literature, his works are a valuable treasure house of medical knowledge and experience, custom, tradition, and history.
As in the case of the Hippocratic corpus, so in the case of the Galenic corpus we are dealing to some extent with materialfrom various sources. In the case of Galen, however, we have a good standard of genuineness, for he has left us a list of his books which can be checked off against those which we actually possess. The general standpoint of the Galenic is not unlike that of the Hippocratic writings, but the noble vision of the lofty-minded, pure-souled physician has utterly passed away. In his place we have an acute, honest, very contentious fellow, bristling with energy and of prodigious industry, not unkindly, but loving strife, a thoroughly ‘aggressive’ character. He loves truth, but he loves argument quite as much. The value of his philosophical writings, of which some have survived, cannot be discussed here, but it is evident that he is frequently satisfied with purely verbal explanations. An ingenious physiologist, a born experimenter, an excellent anatomist and eager to improve, possessing a good knowledge of the human skeleton and an accurate acquaintance with the internal parts so far as this can be derived from a most industrious devotion to dissection of animals, equipped with all the learning of the schools of Pergamon, Smyrna, and Alexandria, and rich with the experience of a vast practice at Rome, Galen is essentially an ‘efficient’ man. He has the grace to acknowledge constantly and repeatedly his indebtedness to the Hippocratic writings. Such was the man whose remains, along with the Hippocratic collection, formed the main medical legacy of Greece to the Western world.
Some of Galen’s works are mere drug lists, little superior to those of Dioscorides;[96]with the depression of the intelligence that corresponded with the break up of the Roman Empire, it was these that were chiefly seized on and distributed in the West. Attractive too to the debased intellect of the late Roman world were certain spurious, superstitious, and astrological works that circulated in the name of Galen and Hippocrates.[97]TheGreek medical writers after Galen were but his imitators and abstractors, but through some of them Galen’s works reached the West at a very early period in the Middle Ages. Such abstractors who were early translated into Latin were Oribasius (325-403), Paul of Aegina (625-690), and Alexander of Tralles (525-605). Of the best and most scientific of Galen’s works the Middle Ages knew little or nothing.
Later Galen and Hippocrates became a little more accessible, not by translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version ofAphorismsof Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were already available in Latin dress, together with the HippocraticRegimen in acute diseases, and certain works of Galen as corruptly interpreted by Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into Latin by Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte Cassino and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman with an imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective was the great twelfth-century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of Cremona (died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from Arabic, and who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more important for the advance of medicine, however, was the learned revival of the thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based on translations from Arabic, but a certain number of works were also rendered direct from the Greek. During the thirteenth century Aristotle’s scientific works began to be treated in this way, but more important for the course of medicine were those of Galen, and they had to wait till the following century. The long treatise of Galen,περι χρειας των εν ανθρωπου σωματι μοριων,On the uses of the bodily parts in man, was translated from the Greek into Latin by Nicholas of Reggio in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This work, with all its defects, was by far the best account of the human body then available. Many manuscripts of the Latin version have survived, and it was translated into several vernaculars, includingEnglish, and profoundly influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of this treatise, and its wide distribution, may be regarded as the starting-point of modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover a part of the phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had begun to be practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[98]and was a generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and fifteenth.[99]
Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was almost imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and Hippocratic texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but still without vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual printing of collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather late, for the debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to prefer Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared, so that medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of scholarship. The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an isolated edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance in Medicine was not made by direct study of these works. So long as they were treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of no more value than those of the Arabists or others inherited from the Middle Ages. Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and it was not until the investigator began actually to compare his own observations with those of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value of these works became apparent. The department in which this happened first was Anatomy, and such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518), who neverpublished, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose great work appeared in 1543, were really basing their work on Galen, though they were much occupied in proving Galen’s errors. Antonio Benivieni (died 1502), an eager prophet of the new spirit, revived the Hippocratic tradition by actually collecting notes of a few cases with accompanying records of deaths and post-mortem findings, among which it is interesting to observe a case of appendicitis.[100]His example was occasionally followed during the sixteenth century, as for instance, by the Portuguese Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (1511-c.1562), who printed no fewer than seven hundred cases; but the real revival of the Hippocratic tradition came in the next century with Sydenham (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), who were consciously working on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring to extend the Hippocratic experience.
Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the sixteenth-century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré (1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.
Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral part in the medical instruction of the universities from their commencement in the thirteenth century. The first Greek text of theAphorismsof Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited by no less a hand than that of François Rabelais. With the further recovery of the Greek texts and preparation of better translations, these became almost the sole mode of instruction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The translators became legion and their competence varied. One highly skilled translator, however, is of special interest to English readers. Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor to the Princess Mary, founder and first president of the Collegeof Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and one of the earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating of the English humanists, spent much energy on this work of translation for which his abilities peculiarly fitted him. He was responsible for no less than six important works of Galen, of which one, theDe temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie, printed at Cambridge in 1521, was among the earliest books impressed in that town and is said to be the first printed in England for which Greek types were used. It has been honoured by reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such works as these, purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century and more, and were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic products sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new scientific method, a degree of fury which was only rivalled by that of some of the humanists themselves towards the translators from the Arabic. But these are now dead fires. As the clinical and scientific methods of teaching gained ground, textual studies receded in medical education, as Hippocrates and Galen themselves would have wished them to recede.
The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now ceased to occupy a place in any medical curriculum. Yet all who know these writings, know too, not only that their spirit is still with us, but that the works themselves form the background of modern practice, and that their very phraseology is still in use at the bedside. Modern medicine may be truly described as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our medical system, some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. It would indeed be a bad day for medicine if ever this debt to the Greeks were forgotten, and the loss would be at least as much ethical as intellectual. But there is happily no fear of this, for the figure and spirit of Hippocrates are more real and living to-day than they have been since the great collapse of the Greek scientific intellect in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.
Charles Singer.
The author has to thank Mr. R. W. Livingstone, Dr. E. T. Withington, Prof. A. Platt, and Mr. J. D. Beazley for corrections and suggestions.
The author has to thank Mr. R. W. Livingstone, Dr. E. T. Withington, Prof. A. Platt, and Mr. J. D. Beazley for corrections and suggestions.
A man walking down Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly to Charing Cross Road passes theLyric Theatre. If it is the evening, adramaticperformance is probably taking place inside. It may be atragedy, or some form ofcomedy. If it is amusical comedyand he enters, he will see elaboratesceneryand a play which may open with aprologueand which is partly composed ofdialoguebetween the variouscharacters, partly of songs in variousmetressung by achorusto the accompaniment of anorchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home.
The same imprint, clear or faint, is on all our literary forms, except perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history, biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin, and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost. There are even one or twogenres, such as the imaginary speech, which Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found inmodern literature. When the curtain rose on Homer, European literature did not exist: long before it falls on the late Byzantines, the lines were laid on which it has moved up to our own day. This is the entire work of a single people, politically weak, numerically small, materially poor—according to the economy of nature which in things of the mind and the spirit gives a germinating power to few. The Greeks are justly admired for individual poems, plays, and pieces of writing; but it was something even greater to have explored the possibilities of literature so far that posterity, while it has developed Greekgenres, has not hitherto been able to add to them. This is one part of the Greek Legacy to literature.
Another part are the works themselves. Literature can only be judged by reading it, and certainly it cannot be characterized in a few pages. But a man ignorant of Greek and anxious to estimate its value might form some idea by inquiring the opinions of qualified judges. He would find them unanimous: I suppose it is true that no man of eminence qualified to speak has ever spoken of Greek literature in any tone but one. The first testimony is that of the Romans. It is borne by their literature, starting in translations from Greek, adopting one after another of theirgenres, permeated through and through (and most of all in the greatest writers) by imitations, reminiscences, influences of Greek, confessing and glorying in the debt. ‘In learning,’ says Cicero, ‘and in every branch of literature, the Greeks are our masters.’[101]A Roman boy should begin his studies with Greek, Quintilian thought, ‘because Latin learning is derived from Greek.’[102]The same note is repeated in the literature of the Renaissance, and re-echoed by the most various voices of our own century.
‘Though one of the Greek tragedians may seem rather greater and more complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading quality. It is marked by grandeur,excellence, sanity, complete humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful intuition (Anschauung). We find these qualities in their surviving lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their philosophers, orators, and historians and, to an equally high degree, in their surviving sculpture.’[103]
‘Beside the great Attic poets, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am absolutely nothing.’[104]
‘He spoke with great animation of the advantage of classical study, Greek especially. “Where,” he said, “would one look for a greater orator than Demosthenes; or finer dramatic poetry, next to Shakspere, than that of Aeschylus or Sophocles, not to speak of Euripides.” Herodotus he thought “the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible, which had ever been written”.’[105]
‘The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.... The wrecks and fragments of these subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language ... in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world.’ Then, after some words on their sculpture, he adds: ‘their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so disproportionate a rank, in the comparison’ (with other literatures).[106]
‘The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed.... They were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes itsboast.... They were the first people who had a historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind) as their oratory, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics, of physics, of the inductive study of politics, of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest.’[107]
‘I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself.... I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition “Primum Graius homo”. I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life and when my taste and judgement are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five-and-twenty.... A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet!’[108]
These men—and there is no difficulty in adding to their number—are not only qualified but unprejudiced witnesses. They have noparti pris. They cannot be accused, as schoolmasters and dons are sometimes accused, of holding shares in a great Trading Bank of Greece and Rome Unlimited, and having a personal motive for their enthusiasm. Nor can it be said that they admired Greece because they knew nothing better. All—Goethe no less than the others—had Englishliterature in their hands, knew it well and appreciated its greatness. Yet this, given in their own words, is the impression which Greek made on them.Securus iudicat orbis terrarum; and the verdict here is plain. It is clear that we have in Greek a surviving body of poetry and prose which is of unique interest to any one who cares for literature.
I have tried to give a summary answer to the question, What did the Greeks achieve? They invented every literarygenrewhich we know, they laid the lines which European literature has followed, they created a body of prose and poetry which has won the homage of the world. The further question, What can the world still learn from them, is less easy to answer. The answer lies in Greek literature, and the essence of a literature cannot be extracted and bottled in a number of abstract formulae. No literature is great in virtue of its qualities, which are always something less than the literature itself, but only in so far as it expands to the breadth of the universe and climbs to its height. This is the final test which must be applied. How far Greek literature satisfies it, can be judged from the testimonies which have been quoted above.
Remembering this let us deliberately narrow our view and talk of qualities: and here, narrowing it again, let us confine the discussion to certain qualities, which are found indeed in all literatures, but are elsewhere neither so universal nor carried to so high a power. No one can think of Greek literature without thinking of them; they live on the lips of its admirers, and in them the inspiration of Greek literature is chiefly enshrined. These essential qualities are Simplicity, Perfection of Form, Truth and Beauty. Greek literature is much more than these qualities. TheAgamemnon, theOedipus, theBacchaeare not to be explained wholly by them. The greatness of these plays is partly something individual, and partly it iswhat makesKing LearorFaustorBrandgreat: and that is neither entirely nor mainly simplicity or beauty or truth or form. But my object is to emphasize qualities for which Greek is exceptional, and though some critics may have talked of the beauty of Greek literature till beauty was absurdly supposed to be its chief or only quality, they were right to recognize the prominence of beauty there, and though truth is a mark of the greatest writing in all languages, it is more universal in Greek than in any other literature.
If a reader turned from Milton to Homer, from Shakespeare to Sophocles, from Plato or Aristotle to some modern work on ethics, politics, or literary criticism, he would find one point of difference between the earlier and the later writers in the greater simplicity of the former. They are briefer: theOedipus Tyrannushas 1530 lines while the first two acts ofHamletalone have more than 1600, and Greek histories and philosophical writings are correspondingly shorter than their modern counterparts. The whole of Thucydides could be printed in a twenty-four page issue ofThe Times, and leave room to spare; the essay of Aristotle on Poetry, which for generations dictated the principles of dramatic writing, has forty-five short pages; theRepublicof Plato, which has influenced thought more than any other philosophic work, has a little over three hundred. Brevity indeed is not always simplicity, and it is possible to be at once simple and lengthy. But any one who examines these Greek writers will find that they are brief, because, avoiding bypaths and by-plots, elaboration or minute detail, they strike out the central features of their picture with an effortless economy of line. Their writing has a double quality. It shows a firm hold on the central and fundamental things: and it presents them unmixed with and unconfused by minor issues, so that they stand out like forest trees which no undergrowth of brushwood masks. It is importantto make this distinction, for all great literature has the first of these qualities; the second is largely an accident of time. As civilization moves further from its origin, it cannot but receive a thousand tributaries that continually augment its volume, and colour and confuse its streams: at the sources it flows clear and untroubled. The interests of an early age are the primal and essential interests of human nature and the literature of such an age presents them unalloyed and uncomplicated by lesser issues. In the thinkers the main and fundamental problems stand clearly out, and Plato and Thucydides take us straight to them. The poets make their poetry from emotions and interests that are as old as man, and have none of the refinements and complications which education and a long inheritance of culture superadd to the essential stuff of human nature. ‘You Greeks are always children,’ said the Egyptian priest to Solon; and he spoke the truth in a sense which he did not mean. The Greeks’ feelings were not dulled or sophisticated by thedamnosa hereditasof the past. Neither their life nor their mental atmosphere was complicated. They had not ‘thought themselves into weariness’. They were the children of the world, and they united the startling acuteness, directness, and simplicity of children to the intellects of men.
Pater tookLa Giocondaof Leonardo da Vinci to symbolize the difference of modern and ancient art, and to illustrate the intricacy and complication of the former, as compared with the simplicity of the latter. ‘Hers is the head,’ he writes of the Monna Lisa, ‘upon which all “the ends of the world are come”, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world haveetched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form.... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ...; and all this lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.’ Slightly fanciful and Pateresque as these words are, they are substantially true, as any one who sets Monna Lisa by a piece of fifth-century sculpture can easily see. There is the same contrast between Greek literature and our own. How ‘troubled’ would Homer or Sophocles be by the writings of Browning or Meredith, of Henry James or Conrad, in whom so many eddies and cross-currents of thought and experience unite.
Compare the story of Hector and Andromache with some famous passage from any of these writers. ‘So spake glorious Hector and stretched out his arm to his boy. But the child shrunk crying to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at the look of his dear father and in fear of the bronze and the horsehair crest that nodded fiercely from his helmet’s top. Then his dear father and his lady mother laughed aloud: forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, on the earth; then kissed he his dear son and danced him in his arms, and spoke in prayer to Zeus and all the gods, “O Zeus and all ye gods, grant that this my son may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans, and as valiant in might, and may he be a great king of Troy.” So he spoke and laid his son in his dear wife’s arms; and she took him to her fragrantbosom, smiling through tears. And her husband had pity to see her and caressed her with his hand, and spoke and called her by her name: “Dear one, I pray thee be not of oversorrowful heart; no man against my fate shall send me to my death; but destiny, I ween, no man hath escaped.” So spake glorious Hector and took up his horsehair-crested helmet; and his dear wife departed to her home, often looking back and letting fall great tears. And she came to the well-built house of man-slaying Hector, and found therein her many handmaidens, and stirred lamentation in them all. So they wept for Hector, while he yet lived, in his house; for they thought that he would no more come back to them from battle.’[109]These are emotions shared by mankind twenty centuries before Christ and twenty centuries after him, common equally to Shakespeare or Napoleon and to the stupidest and least educated of mankind; and these emotions are expressed with a simplicity as elemental as themselves. Subjects as simple may be found in our literature; expression as direct would be hard to find. Even a primitive like Chaucer is the heir of dimly apprehended inheritances from Greece and Rome, and is haunted by fancies from lost and living fairylands of literature. It is in our Bible that we find the elemental feelings of Homer and an expression even more direct. ‘And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat down over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.’[110]
Like the writer of the Pentateuch, Homer lived in a worldwhose emotions were elemental, and writing of this kind came naturally to him. The weight of tradition began to weigh on succeeding ages, but it never became heavy, because the accumulations were small and the world was still comparatively simple. Also its poets and prose writers moved in the fields of action as soldiers and politicians, continually confronting the realities of life, and knowing them as they are, not as they appear in a study. Thus their topics are central, the writing is simple. The subjects of theOedipus Tyrannusor theHercules Furensmight be called morbid; but not the handling of them by Sophocles and Euripides. The unnatural element is in the background and almost unnoticed; the interest lies in the spectacle of great men in overwhelming disaster—an elemental theme and belonging to the general life of man. The treatment is as simple as in Homer, the figures few, subordinate interests out of sight, the light thrown full on the central tragedy. Hence comes a rare intensity, an immediacy of impression, a sense of nearness to the thing described, which will strike anyone who reads the messenger’s speech in theHercules Furens, or the scene where the identity of Oedipus is discovered, or indeed any great passage in Greek Drama. This simplicity of treatment persists, when with Menander and the Alexandrians we pass into a world more like our own and find literature, still simple in form, but more artistic, more intellectual, more literary, less centrally and fundamentally human.
It would be foolish to demand that modern writers should have the simplicity of Homer or the age of Pericles, or to pretend that they cannot be great without it. Every age must and will have its own literature, reflecting the minds and circumstances of those who write it. Nor is the advantage entirely on the side of the Greeks. A drama of Shakespeare or a novel of Tolstoi, with their long roll ofdramatis personae, are more like life than a Greek tragedy with its absence of byplot andits few, central, characters. A modern historian would have recorded and discussed aspects of the history of fifth-century Greece which Thucydides ignores. Modern literature may claim that, with less intensity, it has greater amplitude and a more faithful presentation of the complexity of life. On the other hand the Greeks are free from that dominance of the abnormal which is one danger of modern literature; they do not explore sexual and other aberrations or encourage their readers to explore them. They are also free from that dominance of the unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their simplicity is refreshing and salutary.Porro unum necessarium.In life human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their souls. In literature, which is the shadow of life, they need to do the same.
The simplicity of Greek literature is accompanied by the highest literary art. Nothing could be more surprising. The primitive conditions that preserve simplicity are apparently incompatible with technical perfection, which is a late-born child of literature and the creation of matured taste, long experiment, and patient work. But in Greek, and perhaps only in Greek,naïvetéand art go hand in hand. There is something almost uncanny in Homer’s union of the two: it is a paradox that the character of Achilles, the death of Hector, the primitive cunning of Odysseus, should be portrayed in such a metre and such a vocabulary; it seems unnatural that so highly wrought and refined a medium should be used to depict the life and ideas of a society which is nearer to savagery than to civilization. But unnatural or not, so it is.
The most obvious quality of Greek literature is its form, the high level of its technique. There are exceptions: the earlier plays of Aeschylus are crude in conception, the prose of Gorgiasis as fantastic as that of Lyly, the sentences of Thucydides are often awkward and ungrammatical; Aeschylus stands at the origin of drama, Gorgias and Thucydides are the creators of periodic prose, and they have the weaknesses of pioneers. But in general, Greek work in poetry and prose is highly wrought and finely finished; and so rapidly did their art find itself, that within the lifetime of Aeschylus Sophocles reached the highest level of dramatic and literary technique, and within a generation from Thucydides Plato evolved his unequalled style. An artistic instinct was in the blood of the Greeks, and betrays itself throughout their literature, in the choric odes with their complicated respondencies and subtle variations; in Plato arranging and rearranging the first eight words of hisRepublic; in the interest which the Greeks took in the theory of literary art, seeking here as elsewhereλογον διδοναι, to give an account of their practice. How much more they reflected on it than we do, theRhetoricof Aristotle, theDe Compositioneof Dionysius and the endless writings of the rhetoricians show.
This is universally admitted, but justice is more rarely done to even clearer evidence of the Greek gift for technique. Other nations have understood the art of writing, and left those monuments in words which are as unsubstantial and fleeting as air, yet more imperishable than brass or stone; but no nation has created literary art in the sense in which the Greeks created it, or developed, as they did, the various literarygenresout of nothing. They had no models or guides or external help. Rome had Greek literature to follow and herself gave patterns to her successors; but the Greeks made what they made out of nothing, and are thus creators in the true sense of the word, and as no other people have been. Two instances, Homer and the Greek Drama, will serve to show this.
In the dawn of a literature at least, we expect roughness and crudity, an uncertain judgement and a faltering hand; but the first known Greek poem, like Athena in the myth, is born fullgrown and mature. Yet its makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and unrivalled metre for themselves. It does not lessen this achievement that the Homeric poems may have been the fine flower of a period of poetic growth; the work that went to form them was done by Greeks. But it needs imagination to appreciate the difficulty of the task which they undertook unconsciously and performed without theory or deliberate purpose by the mere light of nature.
It is hard to create even a primitive poetic vocabulary, where one does not exist, and there is nothing primitive about
ὁι δ’ ὡς τ’ αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαιπετρη εφ’ ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,{hoi d’ hôs t’ aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilaipetrê eph’ hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,}
ὁι δ’ ὡς τ’ αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαιπετρη εφ’ ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,
{hoi d’ hôs t’ aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilaipetrê eph’ hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,}
or
ὁσσον δ’ ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισινἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον,τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.[111]{hosson d’ êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisinhêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton,tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.}
ὁσσον δ’ ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισινἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον,τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.[111]
{hosson d’ êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisinhêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton,tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.}
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 thePoetics, ‘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, buta 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 theAnnalsof Ennius or theFaerie Queenshow, 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 theirτελοςand achieved their natural form, almost with the same instinctive evolution by which a seed unfolds to its predestined shape.
This can be illustrated 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 adénouement, 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 ofliterary forms, and within a hundred years are writing plays which Shelley classes withKing 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 mass 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 classed 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 classics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Shelley or Tennyson, he came across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae,