STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS.* Ma. SYMONDS gives us another
welcome volume of that " Culture- history " (as the Germans call it) of which he is so skilled a writer, whether Greece or Italy be his immediate subject. A scholar himself, and acquainted with what scholars think and say, and combining with this knowledge a great—perhaps too great- testhetic and artistic taste and sentiment, he yet here, as in his other books, shows himself something more than a mere scholar or artist, in his habitual sympathy with and reference to the human life which underlies all literature, and makes it not merely a work of art, but an expression of the very life—the humanity—of him who wrote, of those for- whom he wrote, and of those who in long following ages read him still. Thus, with reference to the fashionable theories about solar myths, and the "disease of language" which produced them, Mr. Symonds says :—
" The handbooks of mythology which are now in vogue in England • Studies of the Greek Poets. Second Series. By John Addington Symonds. Loudon: Smith, Eider, and Co. 1876. expound this solar theory so persistently that it is probable ,a race is growing up who fancy that the early Greeks talked with moat damn- able iteration' of nothing but the weather and that their conversation on that fruitful topic fell sick of some disease breeding the tales of Thebes and Achilles and Pelops' line, as a child breeds measles The true relation of the solar theory may be illustrated by the tale of Herakles, whom the Greeks themselves may perhaps have recognised as a solar deity, since Herodotns identified him with a Phcenician god.
But is this all ? In other words, is this, which the current handbooks tell us about Herakles, the pith of the matter as it appeared
to the Greeks ? The solar foundation of the mythus is wholly valueless and unimportant,—in other words, is alien to its essence, when compared with the moral import it acquired among the Greeks. It is the conception of life-long service to duty, of strength combined with patience, of glory followed at the cost of ease, of godhead achieved by manhood through arduous endeavour; it is this that is really vital in the myth of Herakles. By right of this, the legend entered the sphere of religion and of art. In this spirit the Sophist enlarged upon it, when he told how Herakles in his youth chose virtue with toil, rather than pleasure, incorporating thus the high morality of Hesiod with the mythical clement. If myths like these are in any sense diseased words about the sun, we must go farther and call them immortalised words, words that have attained eternal significance by dying of the disease that afflicted them. The seine remark applies to all the solar and lunar stories,—to Achilles, Endymion, Kephalos, and all the rest. As solar myths, these tales had died to the Greeks. As poems, highly capable of artistic treatment, in sculpture or in verse, pregnant with humanity, fit to form the subject of dramatic presentation or ethical debate, they retained incalculable value. The soul of the nation was in them. And this is their value to us."
So, again, in the chapters on Homer and Hesiod, on the Eleatics, and on the Dramatists, tragic and comic, while we have careful and scholarly analyses of the books and their con- tents, Mr. Symonds never forgets to show us how these contents are lighted up and made really and completely intelligible only in as far as we enter into the mental and social conditions of the writers, and of their original readers, and verify these by the thoughts and feelings which they have still power to call forth in ourselves. Thus, after an examination of the whole story of Achilles, which for accurate as well as subtle analysis would be most helpful to every student of the text,—though we do venture to ask whether the critic has not enlarged Homer's own definition and limitation of the t.omoi; of Achilles, in taking it to include his love for Patroclus, as well as his anger against Agamemnon,—Mr. Symonds goes on beyond the merely literary interest of the poem :— " For us, Achilles has yet another interest. He, more than any other character of fiction, reflects the qualities of the Greek race in its heroic age. His vices of passion and ungovernable pride, his virtue of splendid human heroism, his free individuality asserted in the scorn of fate, are representative of that Hellas which afterwards, at Marathon and Salamis, was destined to inaugurate a new era of spiritual freedom for mankind. It is impossible for us to sympathise with him wholly, or to admire him otherwise than we admire a supreme work of art, so far is he removed from our so-called proprieties of moral taste and feeling. But we can study in him the type of a bygone, infinitely valuable period of the world's life, of that age in which the human spirit was emerging from the confused passions and sordid needs of barbarism into the higher emotions and more refined aspirations of civilisation. Of this dawn, this boyhood of humanity, Achilles is the fierce and fiery hero. He is the ideal of a race not essentially moral or political, of a nation which subordinated morals to art and politics to personality ; and even of that race he idealises the youth, rather than the manhood. In some respects Odysseus is a truer representative of the delicate and subtle spirit which survived all changes in the Greeks. But Achilles, far more than Odysseus, is an impersonation of the Hellenic genius, superb in its youthfulness, doomed to immature decay, yet brilliant at every stage of its brief career. To exaggerate the importance of Achilles in the education of the Greeks, who used the Mad as their Bible, and were keenly sensitive to all artistic influences, would be difficult. He was the incarnation of their chivalry, the fountain of their sense of honour."
Then follows a chapter on "The Women of Homer," with a succession of sketches of Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa, Briseis, and Andromache, which we have no room to transfer to these columns, but which are all drawn with artistic skill from their originals. And hardly less interesting in its way is Mr. Symonds's account of Hesiod, as the poet of that other side of Greek, as, indeed, of human life, which Homer barely hints at,—the existence and the condition of "the unrecorded and unhonoured earners of the bread whereby the brilliant and the well-born live." But it is, we think, in his chapter on /lischylus that Mr. Symonds reaches the height of his argument. With the feeling that the man himself counts for something in the examination and understanding of what he has written, Mr. Symonds—like Mr. Maurice, in his Moral Philosophy—begins with telling us all that is known, and may serve to present to us some delineation, real though faint, of the man whose works he takes in hand. Then he compares the genius of lEschylus with that of Tintoretto and Michelangelo, and with what that of Marlowe might have been, had he lived: suggesting that we, who have been educated by the Shake- spearian drama, can possibly do him more justice than his own countrymen did, he proceeds to give an account of how the Greek poet created the drama ; how he worked with a divine inspiration— con furia, as the Italians say—on a colossal scale, and with materials such as no feebler poet could handle and subdue, yet with true artistic finish and unity, though without the elaborated detail which would not have suited his scale of design, as it did that of Sophocles, to whom lEschylus is sometimes compared, to the disadvantage of the latter. We must not compare a single play of ./Eschylus with one of Sophoclea, nor even judge of any one play of .Eschylus by itself. We must remember that "we gain no insight into his method as an artist, if we consider only single plays,—be thought and wrote in trilogies ; " and we possess one, though only one, of these, by which we can judge of that method and its results, and can even restore, with some probability, an outline, however imperfect or even conjectural, of what must have been the counterparts of those single dramas which have alone survived. Of the Oresteia, Mr. Symonds, in his usual way, has given us an admirable analysis, as well of the text as of the story, while showing how that story rests upon and reflects the religious faith and human sym- pathies of the Greek race, and not only theirs, but ours too. And then, with a skill which is not the less real and successful because the author very modestly describes it as merely conjectural and tentative, he shows how the Prometheus Bound requires, for its adequate under- standing, to be supplemented by those two portions of its trilogy which are now lost, but which were probably the first and the last of the series, with the titles of Prometheus the Fire-bearer and Prometheus the Unbound. Every reader of the play which does remain to us knows that its chief difficulty is to reconcile the representation of Prometheus and of Zeus with the theology of lEschylus, which recognised the justice as well as wisdom of the latter,—and with that ideal of Greek tragedy which proposes to itself not merely to depict a noble character in action, but a noble character which, by some one fault of temperament, is brought into that condition of suffering or of death which is eminently and essentially the tragedy itself. And how this diffi- culty would probably be solved if we had the trilogy complete— how Prometheus would have been seen to have committed one sin which Zeus was justified in punishing, and how, at the last, this mighty collision of the human and divine wills would have ended in a perfect reconciliation—is argued by Mr. Symonds with so clear an apprehension of the whole question, and with such apparent conclusiveness, that we are ready to believe that he has passed from conjecture to certainty more nearly than he himself claims to have done.
Having said thus much in proof of the worth of this volume, we must pass to the last chapter, where we find ourselves in strong opposition to our author, both as to his facts and his theories, while we respect the courage with which he avows opinions which he knows must be distasteful, or more than distasteful, to many of his readers. In the last pages of his former volume on the Greek Poets he had expressed his belief that the spirit of Greek poetry and Greek philosophy was destined to supplement, and in supplementing so to transform as eventually to supersede, Christianity. And now, partly in explanation, partly in vindication of that position, Mr. Symonds has discussed the subject at greater length than before. That morality and religion are henceforth to be investigated, and the truth con- cerning them to be arrived at, by the methods of physical science, is no longer a new doctrine ; nor is the confident assurance that the result of such investigation is the supersession of "L'Ancien Dieu" by the "Goddess of Humanity," the "Tendency that makes for Righteousness," or the " Divine Average" before which Walt Whitman delights to dance naked, and to chant indecent platitudes in prose run mad. But such-like blessings for ourselves and our children, Mr. Symonds in all seriousness assures us, may be obtained by our imitating—not the morality from which he clearly recognises the advance which has been made by Christi- anity, but—." the moral attitude of the Greeks." "Modern morality," he says, "has hitherto been theological ; it has im- plied the will of a divine governor. Greek morality was radically scientific ; the faith on which it eventually leaned was a belief in 446,4, in the order of the Universe, wherein gods, human socie- ties, and individual human beings had their proper places." But why, we ask, should we expect that this "scientific morality" should do for us now what it has never yet done for the world ? It did not save Greece itself from a corruption more rapid and not less complete than has fallen on every other of the great nations of antiquity. When (in the language of Mr. Symonds), the true Greek ethics received their final exposition in the age of the Roman Stoics, was it Marcus Aurelius or any like noble spirits to his who sowed and fostered the germs of a new life till it sprang up from the hopeless decay of the Empire? or was it "the Galilseans " who believed in a divine governor as well as in a divine order? Or when all that Greek poets and philoso- phers had thus taught was again made known in the middle-ages, was it Leo X., or even Erasmus, with their Greek art, literature, and philosophy, or was it Luther, with his barbarous theology, who again saved humanity ? And now that in our own day the question has again to be brought to the practical test of results, when more than ever yet we are understanding that we must have a morality which will meet the needs of the man, and not merely of the comfortable gentleman—of Lazarus, and not only of Dives,—are we likely to find that help from Greece which— much else as she has given us—she has never given yet to mankind?
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