Love Season A Novel

Now available at alibris.com

( 4.5/5.0 ★ | 344 downloads )
-- Click the link to download --

https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&offerid=1494105.26
539780312993771&type=15&murl=https%3A%2F%2F2.zoppoz.workers.dev%3A443%2Fhttp%2Fwww.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2
Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780312993771
Love Season A Novel

ISBN: 9780312993771
Category: Media > Books
File Fomat: PDF, EPUB, DOC...
File Details: 18.1 MB
Language: English
Website: alibris.com
Short description: This item is in overall good condition. Covers and
dust jackets are intact but may have minor wear including slight curls
or bends to corners as well as cosmetic blemishes including stickers.
Pages are intact but may have minor highlighting writing. Binding is
intact; however spine may have slight wear overall. Digital codes may
not be included and have not been tested to be redeemable and or
active. Minor shelf wear overall. Please note that all items are
donated goods and are in used condition

DOWNLOAD: https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&
offerid=1494105.26539780312993771&type=15&murl=http%3A%2F%2F
www.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780312993771
 Love Season A Novel

• Click the link: https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&offerid=1494105.2653978031299377

1&type=15&murl=https%3A%2F%2F2.zoppoz.workers.dev%3A443%2Fhttp%2Fwww.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780312993771 to do
latest version of Love Season A Novel in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, and more.

• Don’t miss the chance to explore our extensive collection of high-quality resources, books, and guides on
our website. Visit us regularly to stay updated with new titles and gain access to even more valuable
materials.
.
It would be enormously interesting to consider how a passage like
this—
I was but seven year auld,
When my mither she did dee:
My father married the ae warst woman
The warld did ever see.
For she changed me to the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o’ the tree,
And my sister Masery
To the machrel of the sea.

And every Saturday at noon

The machrel comes to me,
An’ she takes my laily head
An’ lays it on her knee,
And kames it wi’ a siller kame,
And washes it i’ the sea—
which is pure magic, such as you might find in the Kalevala, is
transformed into a passage like
“O haud your tongue o’ weeping,” he says,
“Let a’ your follies a-bee;
I’ll show you where the white lilies grow
On the banks o’ Italie”—
which is Romantic poetry at its best—or into
Now Johnnie’s gude bend-bow is broke,
And his gude gray dogs are slain;
And his body lies dead in Durrisdeer;
And his hunting it is done—
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.
(Note 168)

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:
Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
’Tis something better not to be.
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:
What though the field be lost,
All is not lost, the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
Or what is else not to be overcome.
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 (Note 172)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.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you
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 (Note 175)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 ψυχρός, “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, (Note 182)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 (Note 183)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 (Note 184)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 (Note 189)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 (Note 190)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. (Note 191)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,
(Note 192)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 (Note 193)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,