CHAPTER II.
THE INDIVIDUAL SPIRIT IN WORLD-LITERATURE.
§ 62. The relations of imagination and reason to forms of social life present or suggest great problems which have never received a tithe of the attention they deserve. Although it is impossible to separate these two great faculties of the human mind, although at their extremities, so to speak, they fade into one another in a manner which seems, and perhaps must always be, inscrutable, yet to distinguish them in general outline, without attempting minute distinctions, is not impossible. Perhaps the essential features of imagination are two—the building up of generalisations and abstractions out of individual facts, and the transition from the individual self to the collective conception of humanity on a more or less extensive scale. Similarly, perhaps, the essential features of reason may be stated as the analysis of generalisations and abstractions into individual facts, and the transition from the social or collective conceptions of action and thought to the individual. If we accept some such view of imagination and reason, we shall be able to explain that decadence of imagination which Macaulay, in his essay on Dryden, elevates into a general law of literary progress. Macaulay failed to observe the dependence of imagination upon social sympathies, a dependence which Chateaubriand and Shelley have alike hinted, but without any attempt at logical explanation.When the author of the Génie du Christianisme maintains that the principal cause of the decadence of taste and genius is unbelief, he perhaps unwittingly lays his finger on a principle which may be illustrated far beyond the range of Christian influences. A common creed, whether it be that of Christianity or any other system, rests, and must rest, on the belief of men in their fellow-men, on the sympathy of man with man, on the extension of man's pains and pleasures beyond the narrow circle of his personal being, within which he may be a god or a "glorious devil," but never the possessor of a creed. Moreover, since any literature deserving of the name must address itself to a community of human hopes and fears however narrow, the disbelief of man in his neighbour, which cuts away all sympathies, also paralyses the workings of imagination in its efforts to pass from the individual to a wider and greater world. Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, has expressed this truth in words worthy of quotation, especially as coming from the pen of one whose conception of Christianity, and indeed of all creeds, was so different from that of Chateaubriand. "A man, to be greatly good," says Shelley, "must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Poetry and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are respectively the God and Mammon of the world. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship, what were the scenery of this beautiful world which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave and what our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? … These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by persons of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and while they last self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature."
The periods which followed the fall of Athens in Greece were eminently unfavourable to this unity of social feelings which forms the groundwork of imagination and poetry. The break-up of social ties and the substitution of action from self-interest had resulted from the decay of old Athenian morality at the touch of associations far wider than early Athens had ever known; and now, when her political power was reduced, expansion of social and political ideas as a matter of theory continued. In three different directions the improvement of prose, the proper vehicle of philosophic individualism, was being carried on, The practical oratory of the law-court and assembly was being advanced to a perfection which in Demosthenes, the last great representative of practical Athenian politics, attained its highest point. The art of speech-making, in the hands of the cosmopolitan theorist Isokrates, had established the normal shape of Greek prose. In the dialogues of Plato the destructive logic of the sophists had resulted in an attempt to reconstruct the moral and political union of citizens out of universal principles in place of local and antiquated traditions. Like the political reconstructions of Isokrates, thephilosophic reconstruction of social life contemplated by Plato looked to the whole range of Greek life, and did not attempt to glide back into days of narrow isolation beyond which the expansion of Greek intellect had now for ever passed. At the same time, the relations of the individual to the group, relations which the general loosening of social ties was rendering sharply distinct, became the great questions to which philosophy addressed itself. In the highly poetical and imaginative style of Plato these questions are put, directly or indirectly, again and again. Is human action to be regulated by eternal principles of justice or by personal self-interest? Is there a sanction for personal morality in a future state of personal reward or punishment? Does the government of the State properly belong to a few wisely experienced persons or to the many? Such are some of the Platonic problems in which the new Greek consciousness, social and personal, is expressed.
Perhaps the relations of the individual to the group are nowhere so curiously realised by Plato as in the social classification laid down in his Republic. Instead of accepting such classes as the social life of Athens might have supplied—freeman, metœc, slave—and thus anticipating the process by which English economists have built up their theories on a classification supplied by English life—landlord, capitalist, labourer; instead of adopting a plan like that of the Bráhman redacteurs of the Code Manu, viz. that of accepting certain existing classes, but arranging them according to religious theory; Plato sets out from an analysis of individual psychology which he applies to the classification of the State. The individual soul he regards as composed of the appetite (ἐπιθυμία), naturally wild but capable of being tamed; the spirit (θυμός), courageous though capable of both good and evil; and the guiding intelligence (νοὕς), the source of wisdom and culture. This analysis of individual being Plato transfers to social life, and finds in his State (which, to apply the expression of Milton, is simply the citizen "writ large") three classes corresponding with these three elements of individuality. The philosophers, to whom he would intrust the government of his State, represent its νοὕς; the warriors or military class, its θυμός; the mob, its ἐπιθυμία.[1]
Plato's ideal communism of wives and property in his Utopia has recently met with apologists who would reduce the former to a State control of marriage and education, and remind us of the limited range within which the latter was to be confined. But for us the really significant fact is that Plato's ideal communism clearly results from his observing how personal inequalities of property had contributed to destroy the old Greek union of citizen and city, the State and its individual units. Men who agree with Aristotle's criticism on this ideal communism will do well to remember the social conditions which suggested that ideal, especially when we find similar conditions in Hebrew society producing, not merely an ideal Utopia, but organisations, like that of the Essenes, aiming at a practical return to the communism of the old Hebrew village community.
§ 63. But while the enlargement of Athenian ideas and the development of prose were leading to the severance of science from literature in Aristotle's dry theorising and collections of facts, the heart of literature was being eaten away by the growth of an individualism which more and more was coming to regard itself as linked with social existence solely through the fact of common government, that is, by chains not of sympathy but of force. Lyric and epic poetry had in the city commonwealth given way to the drama; and when the old morality and political freedom, upon which Athenian comedy and tragedy had been based, were weakened, almost the only scope for a new Athenian poetry lay in the direction of a new drama of some sort. Tragedy, of course, this new drama could not be; for not only had the old morality been undermined, but the hero-worship which old Athenian tragedy expressed was impossible in a society of individual units, equally assertive of their own personal merits and distrustful of any character transcending the very limited degree of greatness which their own associations rendered probable. Comedy, on the other hand, was admirably suited to such a society; not, indeed, the comedy of Aristophanes, with its extravagant political caricature, its allegorical or typical characters, through which satire on classes and individuals is conveyed, but the comedy of contemporary life and manners, in which analysis of individual character could be wrought out in a spirit of polished ridicule resembling that of Molière. It is usual to say that the "Middle" comedy of Athens, exchanging a tone of philosophic and literary criticism for the political farce of the old comedy and losing the chorus, lasts from about 390 B.C. to 320, Antiphanes, Alexis, Arâros, being its chief makers; and to date the "New" comedy of manners, with its stock characters of father, son, parasite, soldier of fortune, as beginning about 320 B.C., its chief makers being Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and terminating about 250 B.C. But any such exact limits are artificial. Our real interest lies not in these uncertain distinctions, but in the general lines taken by the Attic drama in its decadence, and the causes of this course.
In its descent from the ideal worlds of the old tragedy and comedy, the world of heroes struggling against fate and the world of uproarious burlesque, the Attic drama of contemporary life found two great obstacles to a truly profound analysis of human character—the presence of slavery and the low intellectual status of Attic free women. In a city of twenty-one thousand free citizens reposing on the labours of some four hundred thousand slaves, a city in which out of every twenty human beings you met at least eighteen would be chattels bought and sold in open market, the variety of human character which so largely arises from free diversity of social pursuits must have been greatly limited. Moreover, these limits were narrowed still farther by the almost servile dependence of Attic free women. The speeches of Isæus, which shed many interesting lights on the Attic family relations, show us that, though an Athenian could not disinherit his son nor separate his estate from his daughter, he could choose the person whom his daughter might marry; and her position when married was not greatly superior to that of the Roman wife sub manu viri. And when we turn from the forensic orator to the philosophers of Greece we meet the same dependence of women. Though Plato in his caste of guards proposes the equal treatment of the sexes, his idea of temporary marriage would hardly have suggested itself save in the degrading associations of Attic womanhood. Aristotle believed that women differed from men intellectually not only in degree but also in kind, and did not "contemplate their ever attaining more than the place of free but inferior and subject personages in the household."[2] It is not surprising that comedy turned away from individuals of such limited freedom to another class of Attic women whose intellectual culture was purchased at the expense of their morals—the hetæræ, or courtesans. Among the characteristics of the New Comedy Mr. Mahaffy places "the increased prominence of courtesan life;" and among the stock characters the designing courtesan now occupies the foremost place. As an evidence of this prominence, it may be observed that out of some forty female characters in the extant plays of Plautus (whose drama is a close imitation of the New Comedy) about one-half are courtesans or lenæ, or their maids; while the Captivi, notable as the most moral play of Plautus, "ad pudicos mores facta," contains no female characters at all—a fact which would seem to imply that their presence was incompatible with a drama "ubi boni meliores fiant," the quality claimed for the Captivi by its Caterva.
§ 64. The main materials of this later Athenian comedy were supplied by domestic life, though philosophers of the day, such as Epicurus and Zeno, or even occasionally political personages, even Alexander himself, might be attacked. In truth, the individualism of Attic life could not have tolerated any drama but that of trivial personalities. Whether we accept the extant Characters of Theophrastus as really his or not, we have abundant evidences in the ethical and political theories of Plato and Aristotle to show that analysis of individual character had become from the conditions of Attic society a common subject of Attic thought. It was individualism, though in the very different social life of Elizabethan England, that produced such works as Earle's Microcosmography[3] and Overbury's Characters. It was individualism within the circle of the "Grand Monarch's" court that produced at once the Caractères of La Bruyère and the comedies of Molière.
Bringing out his first comedy in the very year of Demosthenes' death (322 B.C.), Menander, the model of Terence, is a literary man who may be said to occupy the unique position of a link at once between Athens and Alexandria, and between Athens and Rome. The drama, like the written dialogue of criticism and the written speech, had now become an instrument of the literary artist rather than a public voice addressing itself to the people; and the enormous number of comedies attributed to the later comedians, contrasted with the small number of their victories, has been regarded as an evidence of their plays having been intended to be read, and fulfilling to some extent the functions of the critical press in our days. Thus the severance of literature from practical life—a severance in which some modern critics have discovered a kind of literary Arcadia—was everywhere accompanying the decadence of the creative spirit. We need not here pause to inquire how far the plays of Menander were intended for reading rather than acting; we only notice the prominence of the former purpose as a point of similarity between the drama of cosmopolitan Athens and that of Indian world-literature. The play had, in fact, come to address itself to a cultured class who could take as much pleasure in turning over its pages with critical acumen as in witnessing its action on the stage. There are certain other respects in which the drama of Menander recalls the Indian, and indeed the Chinese, theatre. The introduction of philosophic speculation could be easily illustrated by parallels from Indian and Chinese plays. The following fragment of Menander will serve as an example of its introduction:—
"O Phania, methought that wealthy men,
Who need not borrow, never groan at night,
Nor, tossing to and fro, cry out 'alas,'
But deeply sleep a sweet and gentle sleep
While some sad pauper makes his bitter cry;
But no; I see the men called 'blessed with wealth'
Distressed like any of us; is there then
Some bond of kinship between life and pain—
Pain that accompanies the life of wealth,
Stands close beside the life of reputation,
And with the life of poverty grows old ?"[4]
How far the comedy of Menander resembled the Indian drama in its picturesque descriptions of natural scenery, we have not now the means of discovering; but another fragment given by Meineke[5] would at least suggest that the ephemeral span of individual existence beside the comparatively eternal life of Nature was forcing itself on the Greek mind with something of that deep pathos which only the poets of modern Europe have profoundly expressed. The fragment runs thus:—
Who, having seen without a touch of pain
The show of all these splendid things—the sun,
Common to all the world, stars, water, clouds,
Fire—then returns to whence he came, my friend;
For, though a man should live a few sad years,
Yet shall he ever see this show pass by,
And, though he were to live a century,
No grander sight than this he e'er shall see."
§ 65. When the muse of Menander was thus uttering the last notes of that dramatic song which had risen from Athens at the birth of her literature, the separation of philosophy and science from the spirit of literary creation had been established. Science, which, save in its infancy, refuses to be the citizen of any peculiar State and rapidly grows into the cosmopolitan questioner of Nature and Humanity, had thrown off the pleasing form of Athenian conversation, so brilliantly assumed by the world-wide thought of Plato, and in Aristotle had settled down into a dry-as-dust collector of facts. Two circumstances would seem to prove that Aristotle himself realised with peculiar distinctness this separation of science from literature. The first of these is his intentional alteration of his own style from a graceful imitation of the Platonic to that crabbed but closely accurate use of words with which every student of his extant works is familiar. Not only do Cicero, Quintilian, and others speak of Aristotle as a master of style, but it is a well-ascertained fact that in his early writings he essayed to imitate the form of Plato's dialogues; and, though Aristotle's dialogues may not have been so dramatic as those of Plato, he certainly produced three of these compositions (περὶ φιλοσοφίας, περὶ τἀγαθοῦ, and Εὔδημος) closely after the Platonic model. This transition from the diction of a stylist to the harsh and often obscure brevity which has been likened to a table of contents, a transition which has been aptly compared to "passing from a sunlit garden, gay with flowers, to a dark and chilly reading-room," may be taken as one mark of the Aristotelian separation of critical from creative faculties, of science from literature, of reasoning analysis from imagination.
Another mark of the same process is to be found in the library associations which Aristotle's works contain. In his youth Aristotle had been a collector of books; while residing at Athens as a pupil of Plato his house had been designated the "house of the reader" (οἶκος ἀναγνώστου), and the sum of £200,000, given him by Alexander mainly with a view to collections for his natural history, probably contributed to swell his private library. The days of public libraries, too, and laborious study of the past had now arrived. Aristotle died in 323 B.C., shortly before the death of Demosthenes, and a few years afterwards, at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus, last of Attic orators, Ptolemy Soter founded the celebrated library of Alexandria, the city in which the cosmopolitan Greek spirit was henceforward to find a more congenial home than in any of the old city commonwealths. From a Latin scholium on Plautus (discovered by Professor Osann in 1830) we learn that this library (partly kept in the temple of Serapis, partly in the Brucheium adjoining the palace) contained "in the Brucheium 400,000 rolls of duplicates and unsorted books, and 90,000 separate works properly arranged, and in the Serapeum 42,800 volumes, probably the ultimate selection or most valuable books in the whole collection." Here was a reservoir for literature; and, if literature were really of artificial making and not the outflow of social life, this famous Alexandrian library should have made up for the stagnant shallows into which the living streams of old Greek society had now spread out. But though a library may produce excellent grammarians, critics, scientists, it can do little for literature as distinct from science and criticism. It cannot make imagination live or change the dry skeletons of analysis into creatures of flesh and blood. Hence in Alexandrian erudition formal prose occupies the foremost place, critics like Zenodotus, men of science like Euclid and Archimedes, and chroniclers like Manetho and Berosus, finding it their proper instrument. Didactic "poetry," like the astronomical "epic" of Aratus, called Prognostics of the Weather (Diosêmeia), and the so-called "epics" of Nicander on venomous bites and on antidotes to poison, are not sufficiently removed from science to be called "literature," and as examples of imagination in the service of science rank much below Darwin's Loves of the Plants. If Alexandria could offer us nothing better than such productions we might pass by the great library, contented to note that literature had become so much a thing of the past, so little a reflection of living mind, that even Theocritus is believed to have made one of those tricks with written words which mark a time when literature has become a formal toy rather than a spiritual reality. The Syrinx, a little poem in twenty verses attributed to Theocritus, is so arranged that lines, complete and incomplete, succeed one another in couplets, "passing from the hexameter down to the dimeter dactylic metre, so as to represent the successive lengths of the reeds in a Pandean pipe." When we remember how such "half-mechanical conceits" (as Sir J. F. Davis calls them), consisting in the fantastic imitation of such objects as a knot, a sceptre, a circle, have been well known to the Chinese and Arabs, we may find in this Syrinx and in the practice of Simmias of Rhodes (who wrote verses "in the shapes of an egg, an altar, a double-edged axe, a pair of wings") evidences of the Oriental torpor which had fallen upon Greek poetry at Alexandria.
§ 66. Yet the name of Theocritus reminds us that in the midst of this decay a new kind of genuine poetry blossomed forth. The ephemeral life of individual men, contrasted with the apparent eternity of Nature, had profoundly affected Menander; and the contrast was now to be expressed in those "little pictures" of Theocritus, in which the shepherds in the front stand out against beautiful backgrounds of Nature's own creation. It was not, indeed, the first time that the sentiment of Nature had found a Greek voice. In the great epics, dating from a time when city life had not yet absorbed all the social interests of Hellas, we may readily cull out evidences of this sentiment. Thus in the Iliad[6] we have the simile—
"As when at night shine out in the sky by the moon in her glory
Bright stars, when not a breeze is stirring the calm of the heavens;
Watch-posts stand out clear, high headlands, and in the distance
Open glades, and the open of sky looks a break in the heavens;
And as he watches the host of the stars the shepherd rejoices;"
or, in the Odyssey,[7] the famous description of the great boar's lair—
"Here was the lair of the great boar deep in the heart of the thicket,
Here where the raging rains of the storm-clouds never had entered,
Here where the blaze of the noonday sun shot never a sunbeam,
Here where the piled-up leaves lay dark in the heart of the thicket."
Every reader of the Greek epics can recall similar passages the—description of Calypso's cave or that of the garden of Alkinous; and the Works and Days of Hesiod contain a picture of winter truly ancient and graphic. Moreover, in certain lyrics of early Greece a deep feeling for Nature had not been wanting. Thus Aleman's description of night, it has been said, is "more like the picture we should expect from Apollonius Rhodius or Vergil than from an early Greek poet"—
"Now sleep the mountain-peaks and vales,
Headlands and torrent-beds,
The leafy trees and the creeping things the black earth nourishes;
The wild beasts on the mountains, and all the swarms of bees,
And the snakes in the deeps of the purple sea
Are sleeping;
And all the tribes of wide-winged birds
Are sleeping."
Again, while philosophers like Empedocles turned from the perpetual jar of human conflicts to physical Nature, poets like the Ionic Mimnermus were beginning to sing in a strain which anticipates the tones of Menander—his confession of human sorrow, his pessimism, as we call it in these Schopenhauer days, and his contrast of man's ephemeral life with the ever-renewing powers of Nature. His pessimism Mimnermus expresses thus:—
"We, as the leaves which the season of spring full-budding begetteth,
When the warm ray of the sun gloweth to glory again,
Only a span-length time by blossoms of youth are delighted,
Knowing nor evil nor good sent by a being divine.
For in the garments of mourning the Fates stand ever beside us,
One with the sorrows of age, one with the sorrows of death,
Therefore the fruitage of youth grows short-lived in their presence,
And as a gleam of the sun so is it scattered and gone."
But the sentiment of Nature in Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, is something deeper than we can find in any of the early epic or lyric poets. Cosmopolitan Greece had now experienced the littleness of individualised life to a degree which neither rhapsodists nor lyric poets could have conceived. Men had broken loose from their old clan groups only to isolate themselves in turn from the State; and if the individual had thus become "free," it was at the expense of that greatness which, as a member of such corporate bodies, he once possessed. Therefore more than in the days of kingly heroism, more than in the days of city patriotism, men turned to Nature as symbolising that permanence which looks divine. To the glades, the springs, and the rivers Moschus turns for a voice of lamentation over Bion—to the trees of the forest and the flowers rather than to men and women, who have become too selfish to lament much over any of their short-lived fellows. The sad contrast of man's being with the life of Nature, the contrast of Homer, Simonides, Mimnermus, is thus repeated by Moschus:—
"Raise, ye muses of Sicily, raise ye the wail of the mourner!
Ah! when the mallows have withered, have withered away in the garden,
Or the green parsley dies, or dies the soft bloom of anêthum,
Yet will they rise in life and spring for the season returning;
But we, the great and the wise and the strong among men, when we perish,
Silently sleep in the earth the sleep that knows no waking."
sentiment.
§ 67. Theocritus is the true spokesman of this new sentiment. Like other Alexandrian poets (Philetas of Cos, Callimachus of Cyrene, who has been called "the type of an Alexandrian man of letters," Lycophron of Chalkis), Theocritus was not an Alexandrian, but either, as seems most probable, a native of Syracuse, or of Cos. His use of Sicilian Doric and the Sicilian tone of his poems would seem to confirm the general opinion that he was a Syracusan. In any case bucolic or pastoral poetry finds its home in Sicily; and, when we remember the slave-gangs of Italy and the vast estates (latifundia) which ruined her free yeomanry, we shall see that the home of bucolic poetry is not so secondary a matter as might at first appear. There can be little doubt that the rise of a true poetry of Nature, besides being checked by the municipal organisations of Greece and Italy, was partly prevented by the ugly associations of slavery with country life. Just as the presence of serfdom in medieval Europe would appear to have diverted the feudal singers from Nature herself to Nature seen through the medium of the seigneur's life of war and the chase, so the singers of Greece and Italy could not take that intense interest in Nature which largely arises from the personal freedom of man in her presence. To discuss the influences of different forms of landownership on the sentiment of Nature would carry us too far afield; yet, if the village community of India is to be largely credited with the Indian love of Nature, the very different system of the Roman latifundia may be credited with an opposite effect. If Sicily, then, was the real home of bucolic poetry, we may feel assured that there was some special reason for the fact; that the relations of man with Nature were here less repulsive from servile associations than elsewhere; that his freedom and happiness were not so far removed from those of the bucolic Daphnis or Damœtas as to make the idyll a grotesque falsehood. No such idylls would ever have been suggested by the associations of an American slave-worked plantation any more than by those of a Roman ergastulum; and if, among all the slave-owning countries of the Alexandrian age, Sicily was the home of the idyll, we cannot help believing that, while the new poetry of Nature marks a general desire to look for poetic inspiration elsewhere than in the littleness of human individualism, it also indicates special conditions of social life in the country of the idyll.
It is the union of vivid natural descriptions with graphic pictures of simple human life and character that has made Theocritus the favourite of so many and diverse literary epochs. To sympathise truly with the dramas of Sophocles or Aristophanes, we must be largely acquainted with the contemporary spirit of social life at Athens, or even with minute points in Athenian politics. To sympathise with the odes of Pindar we must possess some of a Dissen's learning as well as a musical imagination which no learning can create. But the idylls of Theocritus present man and Nature in such simplicity that we take in all at a glance. Take, for instance, part of the twenty-first idyll as a picture in which the human interest predominates; and, though the idyll opens with the heartless sophism of wealth—"Want, Diophantus, alone stirs men to the arts of invention"[8]—
"Two ancient fishers once lay side by side
On piled-up sea-wrack in their wattled hut,
Its leafy wall their curtain. Near them lay
The weapons of their trade, basket and rod,
Hooks, weed-encumbered nets, and cords and oars,
And, propped on rollers, an infirm old boat.
Their pillow was a scanty mat, eked out
With caps and garments. …
Their craft their all; their mistress, Poverty;
Their only neighbour Ocean, who for aye
Round their lone hut came floating lazily."
Elsewhere the framework of natural scenery attains to greater prominence, as in the following description at the end of the seventh idyll.
"There we lay
Half-buried in a couch of fragrant reed
And fresh-cut vine-leaves—who so glad as we?
A wealth of elm and poplar shook o'erhead;
Hard by a sacred spring flowed gurgling on
From the nymphs' grot, and in the sombre boughs
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously;
Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away
The tree-frog's note was heard; the crested lark
Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,
And o'er the fountain hung the gilded bee.
All of rich summer smelt, of autumn all;
Pears at our feet, and apples at our side
Tumbled luxuriant; branches on the ground
Sprawled, overweighed with damsons; while we brushed
From the cask's head the crust of four long years."
Theocritus has combined dramatic pictures of human life and character with graphic description of Nature; but let it not be forgotten that the latter is only description, not what Mr. Matthew Arnold has appropriately termed interpretation. Theocritus cannot see, makes no effort to see, Nature as distinct from human associations. He cannot, like Keats and Guérin, speak of the physical world "like Adam naming by divine inspiration the creatures." His expressions do not altogether "correspond with the things' essential reality." Nature for him is beautiful not because she is Nature, but because Lycidas, "the favourite of the Muse," with shaggy goat-hide slung across his shoulder, broad belt clasping his patched cloak, and gnarled olive branch in his right hand, watches "the lizard sleeping on the wall," or "the crested lark fold his wandering wing." Nature is bountiful for Theocritus because some human singer hears "the bees that make a music round the hive," and when this singer dies all Nature may "go wrong"—
"From thicket, now, and thorn let violets spring;
Now let white lilies drape the juniper,
And pines grow figs; and Nature all go wrong;
For Daphnis dies."
§ 68. In Roman imitations of this Alexandrian poet Nature likewise owes her beauty to human associations. A Roman Daphnis sits beneath the "whispering oak" of Vergil; the Mincius has his "green banks wreathed with tender reeds," the "swarms of bees are humming from the sacred oak," and Corydon sings the delights of the summer scene; but it is the presence of man that the heart of the poet loves, it is humanised Nature he really celebrates. Between the Alexandrian and the Roman poetry of the empire there are, indeed, many bonds of kinship. Social conditions at the Alexandria of the Ptolemies and the Rome of Augustus were not widely dissimilar. In both courtly adulation had taken, or was taking, the place of old political freedom. In both the elegant imitation of models was choking any inspiration of genuine poetry. In both literature had become the peculiar possession of the few. In both individualism was well pleased to offer the incense of its learned refinement to any human god who was strong enough to embody the force of government and propitious to grant official reward. Perhaps there was no domain of poetry in which the Romans could breathe a little freely from the mastering spirit of Greek song save one—that of natural poetry; but the Eclogues of Vergil show us that no such freedom was to be attempted. Abounding in imitations of Theocritus—for out of the 840 lines of which they are made up we may reckon at least 150, or about one-fifth, as imitations of Theocritus more or less distinct—the Eclogues illustrate a fact in the imitation literature of Rome which is singularly significant and often singularly overlooked. This is the fact that Roman littérateurs sought their models less in the splendid masterpieces of the free Athenian commonwealth than in the cosmopolitan writings of Athenian decay and Alexandrian pedantry. If the models of Plautus and Terence were found in Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and the "New Comedy" in general, Vergil is deeply indebted—more deeply than most scholars suppose—to the Argonauts of Apollonius Rhodius, the pupil of Callimachus. Aratus, the poetic scientist of Alexandria who threw the astronomy of Eudoxus into hexameter verse, was the model of Cicero's and Domitian's poetic attempts. In Callimachus and Philetas Propertius found his models; and the Coma Berenices of Catullus is a close translation of the courtly flattery in which Callimachus delighted. It was in imitation of Callimachus, too, that Ovid wrote his Ibis. In a word, Roman poetry owes so deep a debt to Alexandria that without her Rome might never have possessed a Catullus, an Ovid, a Vergil. Where shall we find the cause of this indebtedness? In similarity of social conditions, in the great truth that literature, even in its imitative work, depends on contemporary life and thought; that no number of exquisite models can make up for deficiencies in these living sources of inspiration. If it were otherwise, not only would the making of literatures be matter of chance or personal caprice, but the scientific study of literature would almost be an absurdity.
The main characteristics of Roman, as of Alexandrian, world-literature are its individualism and the colossal personality of the emperor, who, in an age when force alone held the community together, absorbed as the world-god all the divinity Roman courtiers could feel. In the satirists of Rome we have the spirit of this individualism crying aloud, a spirit which only takes permanent possession of a community when a profound belief in human selfishness has become the terrible substitute for a creed. "Satira tota nostra est," says Quintilian; and, though the satiric spirit was by no means absent from Athens, we must allow that, in spite of the moral purposes to which Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal applied it, only the Rome of the empire could have produced such witnesses to social disintegration as the works of the last three writers. It was an error, common until Mommsen (erring, perhaps, in the opposite direction) had exposed the sham of later Roman Republicanism, to suppose that this disintegration was due to the decay of old Roman life alone. It was to a large extent the result of an organised religious, political, and moral hypocrisy which the coexistence of aristocratic rule with mock democracy rendered unavoidable. In a community based on slave-labour it was really impossible that the democratic sentiment of equality could count for much. The Roman citizen had only to walk out into streets thronged with slaves in order to realise the truth that plebeian citizenship was, after all, only an aristocracy with a larger radius than the old circle of patrician kinship. To the other ruinous results of Roman slavery—decline of production and population, discredit of manual labour, discouragement of legitimate marriage, and the like—must be added the constant evidence it afforded that high-flown language of social reformers, as in appeals to the "Law of Nature," were but expressions of an organised hypocrisy. When it is also remembered that old Roman religion long before the time of the emperors had become such a farce that Cicero wondered how two augurs could meet without bursting into laughter in one another's face, it need not surprise us that Roman literature produced its most original works in satires which exposed the political, religious, and moral hypocrisy upon which the decaying republic as well as the empire depended for social stability. In such works the rage of an Archilochus or the misanthropy of a Swift can do great things, because they are built out of unsocial antipathies, personal piques, and all that little meanness which is fatal to the truly constructive imagination nothing but wide and deep social sympathies can create.
§ 69. But over and above this individualism, which must have sadly chilled any original imagination of the Roman poets, there was another cause which, from the rise of the empire, turned the makers of Roman literature to cosmopolitan and courtly Alexandria for guidance. This was the centralisation of all power in the person of the emperor. The adulation of Callimachus, who found among the stars the stolen tresses of Berenice, was now to be outdone. In his first Eclogue Vergil does not shrink from calling Augustus his god—
"For he shall be to me ever a god, and his altar be reddened
Oft with the blood of the tenderest lamb to be found in the sheepfolds."[9]
So Horace addresses Augustus as a god to whom altars are being raised—
"Præsenti tibi maturos largimur honores,
Jurandasque tuum per nomen ponimus aras,
Nil oriturum alias, nil ortum tale fatentes."
And gradually this worship of the emperor became not merely a piece of courtly flattery or vulgar servility, but the last substitute for a common creed between Romans of wealth and birth, the proletariate, and the provincials.
If we wish to observe the influence of this divine imperial personage on literature, we cannot do better than turn to the pages of the Roman Thucydides—Tacitus, the man of all others opposed to the new divinity. The cessation of the Comitia, the conversion of the Senate into a mere registering machine for imperial decrees, the dependence of the law-courts on the emperor's despotism, had now checked any farther development of Latin prose—if, indeed, under any circumstances it could have been carried higher than the point in which the eloquence of Cicero had culminated. Moreover, the extension of Latin, for administrative purposes, over a vast extent of conquered territory was beginning to affect Roman literature much as a similar cause some centuries later produced the mixture of pure Arabic with Persian and other languages of peoples subjugated to Islâm. As yet, however, prose, the proper medium of Roman literature (for, except the rude Saturnian, Roman metres were only Greek exotics), showed little sign of decay. It is not any weakness in his prose, certainly as vigorous and graphic as Rome had yet known, that makes Tacitus an exponent of imperial times. It is the fact that, in spite of his Republican Conservatism, he is forced to make the Imperator the central figure in his Histories and Annals. While his dominant idea, like that of Lucan, is a mistaken belief in the old Roman oligarchy which had been a manifest failure a hundred years before the battle of Actium, it is the personal character of the Cæsar that not only gives their unity to his historic writings, but supplies a false explanation of Roman decline as due to the depravity of the emperors. Extreme individualism had, in fact, reached such a height in Rome that even the historic theorist could only picture the unity of the Roman world in the person of the emperor, and insensibly transferred to it all the dark traits of the selfish units into which Roman society had been broken up. Closely connected with this effect of individualism is another literary characteristic which Tacitus shares with all Roman historians—preference for biography over any description or explanation of social life. So Sallust's Catiline and Jugurtha, and Suetonius' lives of the Cæsars, remind us how an aristocratic and courtly society, in many respects resembling that of Paris a century ago, showed the aptitude for memoir-writing which long characterised the literature of France. Another mark of the individualising spirit shared by Tacitus with such writers as Saint Simon and De Retz is the satirical tone often heard in the Histories and the Annals, but perhaps most distinctly in the Germany—a work which even loses some of its antiquarian credit from its clear intention to contrast the vices of civilisation with the virtues of barbarians.
But, besides these marks of Roman decadence, the prose of Tacitus contains an element which is at once the secret of its strength and an evidence of literary decay. The condensed brevity with which he writes is not, like the brevity of Thucydides, a mark of undeveloped prose, not, like that of Aristotle, an effort to be scientifically accurate in the use of words, but rather like the epigram itself the outcome of an age which thinks it knows all that men can know, and seeks to make up for the triteness of its ideas by packing them in small bundles, weighty yet portable, and in themselves complete. It is possible for communities, no less than individuals, to exhaust their old stock of ideas without acquiring new; and such an age of exhaustion, reduced to the elegant or brief expression of small witticisms, is marked by the epigrams of Martial, the contemporary of Tacitus.
§ 70. Beyond Martial (who died between 102 and 104 A.D.) we need not pass. The world-literature of Rome, which had from the first been an imitative toy made and intended to be appreciated by a narrowly exclusive class of cultured men, never heartily sought the only fountains of true literary inspiration-popular life and the life of nature. There was now not much to inspire song in the life of Rome-that cascade of contempt which we may conceive as perpetually falling from the wealthy patrician to the poor patrician, from the poor patrician to the plebeian, from the plebeian to the provincial, and from all these to the slaves. Such was the miserable state of social life which drew forth from Pliny the remark that "there is nothing more proud or more paltry than man." A society of such limited sympathies and unlimited selfishness was unsuited to the production of song, save such as "the flock of mockbirds" (as Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, Claudian, are termed by Shelley) could produce by imitation. Perhaps the making of oratorical prose (which, by the way, was largely due to contact with popular life) was the true mission of that language which, as Heine says, "is the language of command for generals, of decree for administrators, an attorney language for usurers, a lapidary language for the stone-hard people of Rome"-"the appropriate language of materialism" which Christianity has "tormented itself for a thousand years in the vain attempt to spiritualise." Not even in Nature herself had the cultured Romans a refuge from the paralysing spectacle of Roman society. It is true that the Roman poets occasionally give us descriptions of Nature. Such, for example, is Vergil's picture of the gathering and bursting tempest in the first book of the Georgics; such is Ovid's description of the fountain on Mount Hymettus, or Lucan's sketch of the ruined Druidic forest in the third book of the Pharsalia. But the gloomy spectacle of slavery would seem to have checked the development of a truly imaginative Nature-poetry, and to have thrown back Roman genius on those scenes of social life in which the unsympathetic characters of Roman citizens were enough to freeze the most vigorous imagination.[10]
Thus did the broken bonds of social sympathy, a disruption terribly confessed in Diocletian's famous edict on prices, and inevitably avenged by the disappearance of the Roman empire before barbarians who reintroduced the devotion of man to man, react upon the sentiment of Nature. If, as Professor Blackie has said so truly, the writing and appreciation of poetry depend on kindly and genial sensibility, if imagination itself depends on the existence of some genuine sense of human brotherhood, be it wide as the world or narrow as the clan, we must admit that the social life of Imperial Rome was such as must destroy any literature. The Stoic maxim, "to watch the world and imitate it," may seem to us a fine thought finely expressed; but the world of the Roman had become a microcosm too small and selfish to suggest anything of that universe by participation in which we rise out of our individual littleness. The philosophy of self-culture could do little but aggravate the miseries of such an age. No renovation of a perishing society was to be expected from that isolating individual culture which had breathed its poison into Roman literature in its Greek fosterage, and now
"Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round
With blackness as a solid wall,
Far off she seemed to hear the dully sound
Of human footsteps fall."
Footnotes edit
- ↑ See Rep. bk. iv. 440 E., etc. Cf. Hist Gk. Lit., Müller, vol. ii. p, 245.
- ↑ Mahaffy, Hist. Class. Gk. Lit., vol. ii. p. 415. See Aristotle, Nat. Hist., bk. ix. ch. 1.
- ↑ "Microcosmographie, or a peece of the world discovered; in essays and characters. London. Printed by William Stansby for Edward Blount, 1628." In the introduction to Mr. Arber's reprint of this book, it is observed that "in these earlier days of Puritanism especially, and generally throughout the seventeenth century, there was a strong passion for analysis of human character. Men delighted in introspection. Essays and characters took the place of the romances of the former century. Dr. Bliss, to an edition of Microcosmographie in 1811, added a list of fifty-seven books of characters, all, with one exception, published between 1605 and 1700. Forty-four years later, writing in 1855 to Notes and Queries, he stated that this list in his own interleaved copy had increased four-fold." So popular was Microcosmographie that five editions appear to have been published in the first two years of publication. It is worth adding that the character of the "upstart country knight" (like that of Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's play) marks the changes in landownership which the prosperity of the commercial classes was bringing about. In other characters of Earle we may similarly discern the social conditions of his day.
- ↑ For Greek, see Meineke, vol. iv. p. 149.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 211.
- ↑ Iliad, viii. 555–559.
- ↑ Odyss., xix. 439–443.
- ↑ ἁ πενία, Δι´φαντε, μόνα τὰς τέχνας ἐγείρει.
- ↑ "Namque erit ille mihi semper deus; illius aram
Sæpe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus." - ↑ It is worth observing that the landscape painting of Rome (so far as may be judged from excavations at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia) would seem to have consisted of pictures which were often mere bird's-eye views, resembling maps, and aimed rather at the representation of seaport towns, villas, and artificial gardens, than of Nature in her freedom. That which the Greeks and the Romans regarded as attractive in a landscape seems to have been almost exclusively the agreeably habitable, and not what we call the wild and romantic."-Humboldt, Kosmos, vol. ii. p. 77 (Colonel Sabine's translation). Cf. Ruskin, Mod. Painters, vol. iii., on the "subservience of classical landscape to human comfort."