Editor's Study.
COMPARATIVE estimates of different periods in the literature of any people are apt to be misleading, and never more so than when the present is contrasted with the past. Often, as in the case of Greek literature, the remote past seems brighter and fresher than all the after-time. The Homeric poems seem indeed so incomparable with anything in literature and art as to belong to neither. In truth, they do not belong to either. As the first myths are the spontaneous creations of a plastic imagination, so the early epic is the product of the imagination reacting upon the legends of heroic deeds, and is thus inseparable from the race type rather than belonging to any particular department of its development. Sometimes, as among the Finns, there is no significant sequel in the national growth, and the marvellous epic stands alone, the single manifestation of a people's genius.
No Greek ever thought of comparing Æschylus with Homer, although he was the master of a more developed art. It must be borne in mind that the Homeric like the great Hindu epics, as we know them, were the products of civilizations far in advance of those which produced the Kalevala or the Nibelungenlied, and that a long way behind them was the true morning, the creative font of the myths and legends which enriched them. Homer was not wholly unsophisticated. But to the Hellas of the fifth century b.c. he stood at the gates of Dawn, and was, moreover, invested with all the glamour of the Heroic Age. The great Hellenic tragedians modestly confessed that their plays were only crumbs from Homer's table, and it is true that their themes were in the main borrowed from him. But their operation—that for which we esteem them and which won the plaudits of their contemporaries—was in a field a world away from Homer.
Hardly more than a century removed from Æschylus the great orators of Greece flourished, Thucydides lifted history into the realm of art, and Plato laid the foundations of speculative philosophy. New conditions incident to the enlargement and deepening of human thought brought into exercise new activities, developed new qualities, and disclosed a new order of excellences. Doubtless many critics in this advanced era regretted the past glories of a former and mightier generation. Already Euripides, then self-exiled from Athens, wise and complex beyond his time, had at once worried and fascinated an audience upon whose sensibility he had been over-exacting and in whose minds his plays must have suffered by comparison with the simple grandeur of Æschylus and the perfect art of Sophocles, though of this celebrated triad he was the greatest poet. Aristophanes, who in this period was at his best, had a richer and freer fancy than any other Greek poet, but in the critical estimate of his contemporaries he would have been dwarfed when contrasted with Pindar. If we go a little farther ahead in time so as to include Aristotle, we may say that this age had more influence upon human thought than any other in the history of civilization.
In the evolution of human culture as in that of the physical universe every advance involves at the same time a sacrifice of elemental force and a gain in structural excellence. It is in the lowest orders of organic life that the creative quality of that life is most conspicuous. So in literature the obvious and striking instances of creative power pass, giving place to a higher and more complex organization in which that power is veiled more and more in the progressive course of culture. Also, when the human imagination is most potently creative—that is, in the primitive and most plastic stage of the evolution—it is in its operation, whether of myth-making or of rhythmic expression, the movement of the mass rather than the manifestation of individual genius. No later manifestation can seem so nearly a divine operation as this. What is there in the whole range of art and science—of all human culture—more marvellous than the genesis of a language?
Yet we would not call back into being these prehistoric wonders or those of the
