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 LIBRARY I 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF J 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO \
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822 01944 8869 
 
 
 Central University Library 
 
 University of California, San Diego 
 Please Note: This item is subject to recall. 
 
 Date Due 
 MAR ) H 1QQR 
 
 PiHr\ L U I33J 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CI 39 (7/93) UCSD Lib.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 THE ORIGINALITY OF GREECE
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 THE ORIGINALITY 
 OF GREECE 
 
 BY 
 
 S. H. BUTCHER 
 
 HON. D.LITT. OXFORD ; HON. LITT.D. DUBLIN 
 
 HON. LL.D. GLASGOW AND EDINBURGH 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AND OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 i g i i
 
 First published under the title 
 " Harvard Lectures on Creek Subjects" 1904.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THESE Lectures — Public Lectures delivered at 
 Harvard University in April 1904 — owe their 
 origin to a generous gift made to the University 
 by Mr. Gardiner Martin Lane, of the Class of 
 1 88 1 ; and will remain associated in my memory 
 with the recollection of infinite kindness re- 
 ceived during my visit to Cambridge and 
 Boston. 
 
 The Lectures, here and there slightly ex- 
 panded, are, in other respects, published almost 
 in the form in which they were delivered. The 
 hearers to whom they were originally addressed 
 
 comprised not only classical scholars, but also 
 v
 
 vi HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 the general public ; and they are now offered 
 to a similarly mixed body of readers. 
 
 The book may be regarded as forming a 
 kind of companion volume to Some Aspects of 
 the Greek Genius (third edition, Macmillan 
 and Co. 1 904). Under various lights I have 
 attempted to bring out something of the 
 originality of Greece. The contrast is at the 
 outset drawn between Greece and two older 
 civilisations : — that of Israel, dominated by a 
 great religious idea, and that of Phoenicia, 
 given over to the pursuit of material well- 
 being (I. and II.). In the subsequent lectures 
 two features of the Greek intellect come into 
 special prominence. First, a Love of Know- 
 ledge, which not only seeks out the facts of 
 nature and of man's life, but persistently asks 
 their meaning ; and this belief in the interpreta- 
 tive power of mind, working on and transmuting 
 all raw material of knowledge, is shown to
 
 PREFACE vu 
 
 extend beyond the domain of philosophy or 
 of science, and to give significance to Greek 
 theories of history and Greek views on educa- 
 tion (HI.)- Secondly, a Critical Faculty stand- 
 ing in singularly close relation to the Creative 
 Faculty. Art and inspiration, logic and intui- 
 tion, elsewhere so often disjoined, enter into 
 perfect union in the constructive efforts of the 
 Greek imagination. It is but one eminent 
 example of that balance of contrasted qualities, 
 that reconciliation of opposites, which meets us 
 at every turn in the distinguished personalities 
 of the Hellenic race, and which is too often 
 thought of, in a merely negative way, as the 
 avoidance of excess, rather than as the highest 
 outcome of an intense and many-sided vitality 
 (IV.). But the critical instinct, one of the 
 primary endowments of the Greeks, operates 
 also apart from the constructive power, and 
 (chiefly from the time of Aristotle onwards)
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 tries to penetrate the secret of the literary art. 
 Here we have no longer the same sureness of 
 insight ; — indeed the lack of it is frequently 
 startling. Nevertheless there remains a sufficient 
 body of interesting — and even illuminating — 
 Criticism, to enable us to see, through Greek 
 eyes, some of those literary principles of en- 
 during value which Greece has bequeathed 
 (V. and VI.). 
 
 S. H. BUTCHER. 
 
 October 1904.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Greece and Israel . . . . i 
 II. Greece and Phoenicia .... 44 
 
 III. The Greek Love of Knowledge . . 82 
 
 IV. Art and Inspiration in Greek Poetry 129 
 V. Greek Literary Criticism . . .169 
 
 VI. Greek Literary Criticism . . .219
 
 I 
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 Two nations, Greece and Israel, stand out 
 from all others in the history of the world, 
 and form a striking contrast as representing 
 divergent impulses and tendencies of human 
 nature, different ideals of perfection. In this, 
 however, they are alike, that each felt itself 
 to be a peculiar people, marked off from the 
 surrounding races by distinctions more inefface- 
 able than those of blood — by the possession 
 of intellectual or religious truths which deter- 
 mined the bent and meaning of its history. 
 That history, as it was gradually unfolded, 
 became to each an unfailing source of inspira- 
 tion. The records and famous deeds of the 
 race were invested with ethical significance. 
 
 B
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 In interpreting them each people gained a 
 deeper consciousness of its own ideal vocation. 
 From the heritage of the past they drew fresh 
 stores of spiritual energy. Exclusive indeed 
 they both were, intensely national ; between 
 Greeks and Barbarians, between Israel and the 
 Heathen there could be no intimacy, no union. 
 For many centuries the work of the Hellenes 
 and of Israel went forward at the same time, 
 but in separate spheres, each nation unconscious 
 of the other's existence. Had they crossed 
 one another's path, they would have aroused 
 mutual hatred and suspicion ; the Jews would 
 have been barbarians to the Greeks, the Greeks 
 idolaters to the Jews. Yet this very spirit of 
 exclusiveness was one of the conditions which 
 enabled each to nurture and bring to maturity 
 the life-giving germ which it bore within it. 
 In process of time each people burst the narrow 
 limits of its own nationality, and in dying to 
 itself, lived to mankind. Morientes vivimus 
 is the epitome of each history. The influence 
 by which both Jews and Greeks have acted on 
 all after ages is one which has survived the
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 outward forms of national existence ; it belongs 
 to the mysterious forces of the spirit. Through 
 humiliation and loss of independence they each 
 entered on a career of world-wide empire, till 
 at length the principles of Hellenism became 
 those of civilisation itself, and the religion of 
 Judaea that of civilised humanity. 
 
 The Jews were from the outset conscious of 
 their separateness, of their peculiar mission. 
 From the family to the tribe, from the tribe to 
 the nation, they felt themselves to be destined 
 for some high purpose, though the idea was 
 deepened and expanded as their history 
 advanced. With the Greeks it was otherwise. 
 In the Homeric age Greeks and Barbarians did 
 not yet stand sharply opposed ; and, though 
 during that period and long afterwards many 
 elements of foreign civilisations were slowly 
 absorbed, yet in the process of absorption they 
 were so transmuted that for the Hellenes the 
 net result was a heightened sense of difference 
 between themselves and the non- Hellenes. 
 The first impulse, however, towards national 
 unity came, as with the Jews, through religion.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 The religious life of primitive Greece centred 
 at Dodona in Epirus, the seat of the oracle of 
 Zeus, of whose cult we catch a curious glimpse 
 in the famous invocation of Achilles (//. xvi. 
 2 3 3). Dodona retained its immemorial sanctity 
 far into historical times , but it never formed a 
 meeting-point for the scattered families of the 
 Hellenic race. At a very early date the Dodo- 
 naean cult gave place to the worship of Apollo, 
 who made his abode on the Eastern coast of 
 Greece, at Parnassus, with Delphi as his sanc- 
 tuary. Zeus still remained the supreme god, 
 and Apollo, the youngest of the Olympians, 
 became his ' prophet,' his interpreter. The 
 tribal cults are henceforth merged in a higher 
 worship. A league of states representing the 
 common sentiment of the Hellenes is associated 
 with the Delphic shrine. Apollo here presides 
 at the Theoxenia — the festival celebrating the 
 friendship of the gods. In reconciling the 
 local deities he stands as the symbol of Hellenic 
 fraternity and union. The nobler energies of 
 the race now obtain a religious consecration. 
 The Delphic religion was in its highest
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 intention an effort after spiritual freedom and 
 enlightenment. In this respect it offers a 
 remarkable counterpart to Hebrew prophecy. 
 It asserts the binding claim of the moral law 
 alike over states and individuals. It deepens 
 the conception both of guilt and purification. 
 As the Hebrew prophets were charged with 
 guarding the spiritual heritage of Israel, 
 so the Pythian Apollo fostered the ideal of 
 Hellenic character in religion, morality, and 
 art. In speaking of Delphic prophecy we 
 must dismiss the vulgar notion of merely 
 predicting future events or revealing secrets. 
 This lower art of soothsaying was, no doubt, 
 in great demand in Greece at all periods of 
 her history. Tablets discovered in Epirus in 
 1877 1 give examples of the questions addressed 
 by its rude votaries to the oracle of Dodona. 
 A certain Agis asks about some lost property 
 — mattresses and pillows — whether they may 
 have been stolen by a stranger. 2 Another 
 
 1 C. Carapanos, Dodone et ses Riiines. 
 
 2 eVepwret T A7is Ai'a Naoe [/ecu Aiuivav] birep tQiv (TTpw/xaTuv 
 k[cu tQv 7rpocr"\Ke<pa\aiwv, to. tXTruiXdX^cv] (? a.TTj\w\ev), 7) tQiv 
 Qwdev tis Slv %K[\t\fei>].
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 inquires whether the god advises sheep-farming 
 as an investment. 1 Even at Delphi some of 
 the responses recorded are trivial enough. But 
 the influence of Delphi must not be judged by 
 such isolated utterances. The ethical and 
 civilising purpose it served is apparent to every 
 attentive reader of Greek history and literature. 
 Apollo's chief office is not to declare the future ; 
 nor is he concerned with minute ceremonial 
 observances. He bears a personal message to 
 the people ; he is the expounder of the divine 
 will ; it is part of his function to maintain an 
 ethical ideal and to quicken the national con- 
 sciousness. The pious inquirer at his shrine 
 approaches him in the confidence of glad com- 
 panionship, and holds converse with him as with 
 a living personality. The mind of the supreme 
 god is declared not in dark signs through the 
 voices of nature or through perplexing dreams, 
 but by human utterance and in rhythmical 
 speech. Apollo, the irpo^rrj^ of Zeus, has 
 human 7rpo<j)i'iTat of his own. But it is in 
 accordance with the religion of Delphi to 
 
 1 ai' eari avrol TrpofiarevovTi &va.iov Kal iJocpeXip-ov.
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 recognise not only a direct guidance from 
 without, but also an inward revelation, telling 
 of clear-felt duties and pointing to the god in 
 the human breast. Apollo, speaking from the 
 ' just -judging ' * sanctuary, insists on inward 
 motive, on purity of heart rather than on out- 
 ward cleansing, on the spirit rather than on the 
 letter of religion. He prefers the pious offering 
 to the sumptuous sacrifice ; he maintains the 
 cause of the weak and the oppressed — of 
 women, slaves, suppliants ; he inculcates the 
 duty of reverence for oaths. But he was also 
 the familiar friend and counsellor of the nation. 
 He took into his keeping the civic life of 
 Greece. Under Delphic supervision the colonial 
 system was organised, and missionaries of 
 Greek culture were settled in every land. The 
 express sanction of the Delphic oracle was 
 sought for the founding of colonies, such as 
 Byzantium, Syracuse, Cyrene. Apollo, more- 
 over, was invested with all the gracious attributes 
 of knowledge and artistic skill. He was the 
 god of science, of art, of poetry ; he presided 
 
 1 Find. Pyth. xi. 9.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 at the games and festivals. Under his influence 
 were developed the contrasted ideals that mark 
 the type of Hellene and of Barbarian — the 
 Hellene with his self-knowledge and self- 
 control ; his love of ordered freedom ; his belief 
 in reason and in the supremacy of the spirit 
 over the senses : the Barbarian glorying in 
 brute force, with blind impulses carrying him 
 now towards anarchy, now towards slavery, 
 unconscious of moral limitations, overstepping 
 the bounds of law and reverence. 
 
 I am speaking of the Delphic worship on 
 its ideal side, apart from the inherent unrealities 
 and corruptions in which it was embedded. 
 Yet, even from this point of view, there are strik- 
 ing differences as well as resemblances between 
 Delphic and Jewish prophecy. The Delphic 
 priestess, seized and subdued by an apparently 
 divine possession, lifted out of herself in trans- 
 port, presents a contrast to the Hebrew prophet 
 whose reason and senses remain undisturbed 
 under stress of inspiration. The familiar atti- 
 tude, also, of the Greek towards his god is as 
 unlike as can be to the distant and awful
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 communion which the Hebrew prophet holds 
 with the Almighty. Nor again does the history 
 of the Hebrew prophets afford any parallel to 
 the defection of Delphi from the national cause. 
 Even before the Persian wars Delphi had more 
 than once yielded to the temptations which 
 beset an ambitious priesthood. Now, at the 
 supreme crisis of the nation's history, she could 
 not rise above timid and temporising counsels. 
 She was, it must be owned, forced to make 
 a difficult choice. Her connexions over the 
 barbarian world were widely extended. The gifts 
 of the East flowed in on her. Phrygia and 
 Lydia were among her clients. Her material 
 interests forbade her to pronounce the clear 
 word which would have put her at the head 
 of Greek resistance to the barbarians. And so, 
 the place, which from the eighth century onward 
 she had held as the recognised conscience of 
 Greece, she now forfeited and never wholly 
 regained In politics, the championship of 
 the Panhellenic cause was assumed by Athens ; 
 and outside the political sphere, it devolved 
 more and more on poets and philosophers to
 
 HA R VA RD LEG TURES 
 
 perpetuate the Delphic tradition by an effort to 
 spiritualise the popular creed and reconcile it 
 with a purer morality. The case of the Hebrew 
 prophets is one of marked contrast. They 
 never ceased to be the guardians of an ideal 
 national sentiment. Not that they merely 
 reflected prevalent opinion. If in a sense they 
 were the spokesmen of the nation, they became 
 so only by combating the will and denouncing 
 the vices of their fellow-countrymen. Between 
 prophets and people there was an unending 
 conflict. We speak of the monotheism of the 
 Jews ; yet they were ever prone to idolatry, 
 being recalled from it only by warning and 
 disasters. We speak of their spiritual faculty ; 
 yet who more carnal than they? — lovers of 
 pleasure, lovers of ease, lovers of money. Again 
 and again they were saved from themselves only 
 by their inspired teachers, by the austere 
 voice of prophecy. 
 
 There were moments when religion stood 
 opposed — as one might think — to a larger 
 patriotism ; and the prophets had to bear 
 the hard reproach of appearing anti-national.
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 Jeremiah was cast into prison as a traitor. 
 Two conflicting tendencies, as Renan has shown, 
 were at work within Judaism : one, to mix with 
 other nations and learn the ways of the world ; 
 the other, to shun all contact with alien civilisa- 
 tions — art, commerce, foreign alliances being 
 regarded as so many dangers which might 
 detach the people from their true allegiance. 
 The first policy — that of expansion — was the 
 policy of the kings ; the second, the policy of 
 the prophets. The attitude of the prophets 
 towards outside movements and influences was 
 one of extreme circumspection or distrust. But 
 the narrower — we might be inclined to say the 
 more illiberal view — was, after all, the truly 
 national one. Once we grant that the peculiar 
 mission of Israel was to guard the principle of 
 monotheism, and that any premature attempt at 
 expansion would have meant absorption into 
 heathendom, it follows that the pursuit of 
 secular aims and of a many-sided development 
 would have been for the nation the abandon- 
 ment of her high calling. 
 
 Delphi in her earlier and better days was
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 more happily placed in relation to outside 
 currents of thought. Vividly conscious though 
 she was of the antithesis between Greeks and 
 Barbarians, no timid fears that Hellenism might 
 be lost in barbarism checked her forward 
 energies. Greece must not be kept out of the 
 general movement of the world. Rather it was 
 dimly felt that the world was one day to be 
 hellenised. The idea that is openly expressed 
 in the fourth century B.C. of a larger Hellenism 
 resting not on racial but on spiritual affinities 
 seems to have floated vaguely before the mind 
 at an earlier date. Delphi was long able to 
 pursue a policy of progress and expansion with- 
 out endangering either patriotism or religion. 
 
 Here we strike on the fundamental difference 
 between Hebrews and Greeks — the Hebrews 
 preoccupied, dominated by a single idea, and 
 that a religious one ; the Greeks moved by the 
 impulse for manifold culture. Two distinct 
 individualities stand out in clear relief. To the 
 Hebrews it was committed to proclaim to man- 
 kind the one and supreme God, to keep alive 
 his pure worship, to assert the inexorable moral
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 law in a corrupt and heathen world. For the 
 Greeks the paramount end was the perfection 
 of the whole nature, the unfolding of every 
 power and capacity, the complete equipment of 
 the man and of the citizen for secular existence. 
 The Hebrews had no achievement to show in 
 the purely secular sphere of thought and con- 
 duct. They had no art, — if we except music — 
 no science, no philosophy, no organised political 
 life, no civic activity, no public spirit. In 
 regard to plastic representation, they were pure 
 iconoclasts ; for idolatry was a danger near and 
 menacing. The search for causes — the inspir- 
 ing principle of the scientific spirit — was for 
 them either an idle occupation of which man 
 soon wearies, as in Ecclesiastes, or an encroach- 
 ment on the rights of God. The discovery of 
 a reign of law in nature, which to the Ionians 
 of the sixth century B.C. seemed the highest 
 function of the human intellect, was alien to 
 the Hebrew mode of thought. 
 
 Poetry indeed they had, unique in its kind : 
 the lyrical utterances of the Psalms, outpourings 
 of religious emotion unsurpassed, or rather un-
 
 14 HARVARD LECTURES i 
 
 approached, in depth and range of feeling ; that 
 sublime drama, again, or dramatic lyric, the 
 Book of Job ; the apocalyptic visions of the 
 prophets, revealed in words such as those which 
 Isaiah the son of Amos 'saw.' Yet if we ex- 
 cept the idyll of the Book of Ruth and the Song 
 of Solomon — a beautiful and human love-song, 
 which stands in such curious isolation from 
 the other contents of the volume with which it 
 is bound up — Hebrew poetry is of a different 
 order from that of our Western civilisation ; it is 
 poetry lifted into another sphere and made one 
 with religion. The epic, and the drama in its 
 strict sense, are wanting. We have not the 
 laughter as well as the tears of humanity ; no 
 airy structures of the fancy ; none of the playful 
 ironies of existence ; no half lights or subtle 
 undertones ; none of the rich variety of poetry in 
 its graceful and intermediate forms. The world 
 which Hebrew poetry reproduces is not a second 
 world recreated out of the elements of the actual, 
 though separate from reality — a region into 
 which we are transported by the power of imagin- 
 ative sympathy. It is the actual world itself.
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 15 
 
 The two living realities, God and the Soul, are 
 face to face, engaged in everlasting colloquy. 
 We overhear voices of pleading and warning, of 
 pathos and hope, of repentance and forgiveness. 
 And as with the individual so with the nation. 
 All the spiritual experiences of the race, as 
 summed up in an unforgotten past, are ex- 
 pressed in language instinct with poetic emotion. 
 In Hebrew poetry there is a pervading sub- 
 limity which has no precise parallel in any other 
 literature. To the Greek poet, ' Wonders are 
 many and nothing is more wonderful than 
 man ' : yet marvellous as are the achievements 
 of man's art and skill, his daring courage, his 
 civic inventiveness, all fall short of the moral 
 sublimity he attains through suffering, by the 
 endurance of god-sent calamity, and by an un- 
 conquerable will. In Hebrew poetry, lyrical and 
 descriptive, the note of sublimity is of a different 
 kind. It belongs to the domain of heaven. 
 Man is in himself ' a thing of nought,' ' even as 
 a dream when one awaketh ' ; feeble and perish- 
 able ; vicissitude and decay are stamped on his 
 terrestrial life. ' The earth shall reel to and fro
 
 16 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a 
 cottage.' At the sight of the majestic order of 
 the universe, still more in the contemplation of 
 God's everlasting righteousness, his unsearchable 
 greatness, there arises a sense of awe-struck 
 exultation. ' The Lord is King, the earth may 
 be glad thereof : yea the multitude of the isles 
 may be glad thereof. Clouds and darkness are 
 round about him : righteousness and judgment 
 are the habitation of his seat.' 'The Lord sitteth 
 above the water-flood : the Lord remaineth a 
 King for ever.' Essentially sublime, too, are 
 the descriptions which suggest the omnipotence 
 of the divine word. ' And God said, Let 
 there be light : and there was light.' ' For 
 he spake and it was done : he commanded 
 and it stood fast.' ' Where wast thou when 
 I laid the foundations of the earth ? declare, 
 if thou hast understanding. ... Or who laid 
 the corner stone thereof, when the morning 
 stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
 shouted for joy ? Or who shut up the sea 
 with doors . . . and said, Hitherto shalt thou 
 come, but no further ; and here shall thy proud
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 17 
 
 waves be stayed ? ' He who ' commandeth the 
 sun and it riseth not, and sealeth up the stars.' 
 
 Greek poetry in its more serious forms is 
 almost as deeply penetrated with theology as 
 is Hebrew poetry with religion. The Hebrew 
 poets seldom dare to dwell upon those problems 
 touching the moral government of the world 
 which exercised a grave fascination over the 
 imaginative mind of Greece. Yet at times 
 some troubled reflections escape their lips, as in 
 the Psalms, or in shorter outbursts of lyrical 
 emotion. In one book, however, of the Bible 
 the cry of humanity utters itself in tones of 
 reasoned rebellion and with unique audacity. 
 The Book of Job and the Prometheus of 
 Aeschylus may be placed side by side, as the 
 two protests of the ancient world against divine 
 oppression — the one the protest of monotheism, 
 the other of polytheism. Let us glance for a 
 moment at these two poems. They form a 
 luminous comment on the contrasted spirit of 
 the two nations. 
 
 The character of Zeus in the Prometheus 
 
 exhibits every line and colour of tyranny as it 
 
 C
 
 i8 HARVARD LECTURES i 
 
 was understood by the Greeks. Zeus is the 
 ' new lord,' l enforcing his will by relentless 
 ministers, ' ruling by his own laws,' 2 ' keeping 
 justice in his own hands,' 3 ' a harsh monarch 
 and irresponsible,' 4 distrustful of his friends, 5 
 malevolent towards his subjects, ungrateful to 
 those who had done him service. Even his 
 friends do not question the judgment of his foes. 
 His character is thrown into yet darker shade 
 by the appearance in the play of Io, in whose 
 history is recorded one of the distinctive marks 
 of the tyrant — a selfish and heartless love. 
 The two sufferers, Io and Prometheus, meet by 
 chance on the rocks of Scythia, the one the 
 victim of the love of Zeus, the other of his hate ; 
 the one the very emblem of restless movement, 
 the other of a chained captivity. In various 
 details, moreover, the old legend is so modified 
 as to place in strong relief the beneficent effects 
 of Prometheus' revolt. A single point may be 
 
 1 Prom. 96 vtos TC176S, cp. 149, 310, 389, 955. 
 
 2 lb. 403 Idiots P0/J.01S KpaTvviov. 
 
 3 lb. 1S7 Trap' eavri2 to diKaiov ^x WJ/ - 
 
 4 lb. 324 Tpax'''S /J-ovapxos ov8' virevdvvos Kparel, cp. 35. 
 
 6 lb. 224-225.
 
 i GREECE AND ISRAEL 19 
 
 mentioned. In Hesiod the theft of fire leads 
 indirectly to all the evils that flesh inherits. 
 Till then, under the rule of Cronus men were 
 as gods enjoying all happiness — ware 6eo\ 
 8' e^coov. In the train of civilisation came all 
 manner of woes and sicknesses. It was as it 
 were the Fall of man. The age of ignorance 
 was the age of gold. In Aeschylus, by the act 
 of Prometheus, the human race so far from 
 forfeiting a state of primitive well-being, rises 
 for the first time out of a feeble, timorous exist- 
 ence ; it subdues to its own use the forces of 
 nature ; ' blind hopes ' are planted in man's 
 heart — the pledge of future progress. Nor did 
 Prometheus, as some would have it, by an act 
 of impatient philanthropy forestall the wise 
 purposes of Zeus. The design of Zeus was to 
 sweep away the race. Prometheus, therefore, 
 rescued man not merely from a life of brute 
 stagnation, but from death itself. 
 
 Many critics have maintained that in ranging 
 ourselves on the side of Prometheus against 
 Zeus we are interpreting the drama in a modern 
 sense and in a manner alien to the thought of
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 Aeschylus. But the character of the benefactor 
 is drawn in outlines no less firm than that of 
 the oppressor of mankind ; and the words in 
 which Prometheus sums up his own history 
 accord with all the facts of the dramatic 
 presentation : ' In chains ye see me, an ill-fated 
 god, the foe of Zeus, because J loved mortals 
 overmucli ' (8ta ttjv Xiav (f>i\ori)Ta fjporwv). 1 
 Prometheus embodies the Greek type of moral 
 heroism as truly as Zeus does that of tyranny. 
 The hero of Greek poetry, the hero as Athens 
 loved to portray him, is not only eminent for 
 courage or indomitable in his will-power ; he is 
 also generous in sympathy; pitiful to the weak ; 
 moved by a chivalrous, a romantic impulse to 
 redress the wrongs of the world. Prometheus 
 unites the two sides of the heroic character. 
 He is tender as well as magnanimous. ' Out 
 of the strong came forth sweetness.' Towards 
 the Ocean Nymphs he shows a delicate and 
 gentle courtesy. The tormented and confiding 
 Io pours her woe into his ear ; and the sublime 
 sorrow of the god finds room within it for the 
 
 1 Prom. 119-122.
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 plaintive outpourings of the mortal. And, as 
 ' love overmuch ' has been his fault, so all 
 creation, animate and inanimate, mourns in 
 sympathy with him in the splendid chorus, lines 
 
 397-435- 
 
 If this, then, is the true reading of the play, 
 
 it presents the struggle between two wills, each 
 equally unyielding, the one strong in the con- 
 sciousness of physical power, the other in moral 
 greatness and wisdom. That Aeschylus should 
 have placed Zeus in such a light before an 
 Athenian audience, has seemed to many readers 
 an impiety so daring as to be impossible. But 
 let us not lose sight of the far-off period at 
 which the action is imaginatively laid. The 
 Aeschylean heroes are often men in whose veins 
 the blood of gods still runs — 
 
 koiVoj <t<1>lv ej~irr]Xov aifia Saifiovtav. 1 
 In this play they are not godlike men but 
 actual gods. We are carried back to an age 
 anterior even to the action of the Iliad. One 
 dynasty of gods has overthrown another, but 
 not without the rough and lawless deeds which 
 
 1 Aesch. Fr. 146.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 accompany such a change. The sovereignty of 
 Zeus is as yet insecure. The ' new lord ' of 
 Olympus has had a beginning ; he will also have 
 an end unless he mends his ways of governing. 
 The shadow of dispossession hangs over him. 
 He is subject to a mysterious power stronger 
 than himself ; between his will and the supreme 
 Fate there is still a discord. His omnipotence 
 is limited by this control. So far is he from 
 being omniscient that he is ignorant of the 
 secret on which the permanence of his throne 
 depends. His reign is stained by caprice and 
 crime. This is surely not the same Zeus that 
 is elsewhere called in Aeschylus, ' king of 
 kings,' ' most blessed of the blest,' ' all-seeing,' 
 1 who rewards all men according to their works,' 
 ' who guides men in the path of wisdom.' 
 Rather, he represents a passing epoch ; he is the 
 ruler of the visible order of things in an era 
 when might and right are not yet reconciled. 
 The play itself looks forward to a future which 
 shall adjust the disorders of the present. We 
 cannot here discuss the difficult question of the 
 sequel ; but once we admit that within the
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 mythological framework of the Greek religion 
 the supreme god might be exhibited as subject 
 to a law of development, and as growing from 
 lawlessness into righteousness ; that even for 
 Zeus Time could be the great Teacher, in the 
 full significance of Prometheus' words — 
 
 dA/V e/cStSacTKet irdvO^ o yijpdcrKWV \povos 1 — 
 
 then, many of the elements for the future 
 reconciliation are ready to hand. As Aeschylus 
 elsewhere sets the Eumenides against Apollo, the 
 old against the new, so in the Prometheus does 
 he set Zeus against the Titan, the new against 
 the old. In each case the strife must be resolved 
 in a final harmony. In the Prometheus, the 
 sovereignty of the supreme god becomes 
 assured only when Wisdom and Power shall 
 have entered into indissoluble union. Wisdom 
 without Power is ineffectual : Power without 
 Wisdom, though it may last for a time, cannot 
 be enthroned as immortal.'- This is probably 
 
 1 Prom. 981. 
 
 2 This view of the Prometheus, which I have placed before 
 my pupils for more than twenty years, is, I find, supported by 
 the authority of so eminent a scholar as Dissen, in a letter to 
 Welcker printed in Welcker's Trilogie 1824 ; see an interesting
 
 24 HARVARD LECTURES \ 
 
 the explanation of what at first sight seems 
 
 the most daring audacity ever enacted on the 
 
 Greek stage. The mind of Aeschylus loved 
 
 to move among the dim forms of the elder 
 
 world. Before his vision gods in their succession 
 
 came and went. Viewed in the immense 
 
 perspective of the past the sway of these gods 
 
 was almost as ephemeral as that of mortals. 
 
 With them too the higher displaced the lower 
 
 Their story, like that of humanity, was one of 
 
 moral growth. There was a law of evolution, 
 
 a process of becoming, from which even deity 
 
 was not exempt. To Aeschylus the dramatist 
 
 no theme could well have been more congenial 
 
 than that of the Prometheus, giving scope, as it 
 
 did, for a conflict of will-power on a scale of 
 
 such colossal grandeur. But Aeschylus the 
 
 profoundly religious theologian would surely 
 
 have shrunk from a dramatic situation so 
 
 perilous to piety, were it not that the fluid 
 
 and ever- shifting forms of Greek mythology 
 
 article in the Classical Review, March 1904, by Janet Case. Also 
 it has been ably and independently put forward by Professor 
 Lewis Campbell in his introduction to the Prometheus Bound 
 (1890).
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 25 
 
 lent themselves to the utmost freedom of poetic 
 handling. 
 
 In passing to the Book of Job, we observe 
 some points of detailed resemblance in the 
 setting of the two poems. Just as Prometheus 
 at the outset maintains silence — one of those 
 eloquent Aeschylean silences — so too Job held 
 his peace ' seven days and seven nights ' ; and 
 then, like Prometheus, reviews his life, proudly 
 proclaiming his own innocence. His friends 
 seek to convince him that he has done wrong. 
 They cannot extort from him the admission. 
 As compared with other men he knows himself 
 to be guiltless. And as the chief actors use 
 similar language about themselves, the language 
 they use about the deity is also in some degree 
 similar. In Prometheus it is an expression of 
 proud defiance towards one whom he regards 
 as a tyrant and an upstart, and whose future 
 overthrow he calmly contemplates. In Job, 
 the voice of accusation seems to touch more 
 nearly on blasphemy, as addressed to a God 
 who was not only supreme, but in the highest 
 sense righteous. It is, however, this very
 
 26 HARVARD LECTURES 1 
 
 perfection of power and goodness which adds a 
 sting to the apparent injustice. The feeling is 
 one of conflict and strange perplexity. Almost 
 in the same breath with passionate remonstrance 
 and complaint there come accents of trust and 
 utter self-surrender. It is the sort of irony 
 which belongs to love. In form an accusation 
 it is in reality an expression of belief in the 
 very attributes that are denied, an appeal to 
 the deity to remove the inconsistencies which 
 seem to darken his character, to explain 
 the flaws in his own work, to reconcile his 
 goodness and his power. Hence the sudden 
 transitions and alternations of mood. Now God 
 is a hard adversary ; for man to plead against 
 him is despair : yet plead he will, though it 
 should be at the cost of his life (ch. ix. 20- 
 21). 'Thou knowest that I am not wicked' 
 (ch. x. 7) ; ' is it good unto thee that thou 
 shouldest oppress?' (ch. x. 3). In his anguish 
 God and his enemies seem ranged on one side 
 (ch. xvi. 7-16). But again by a sudden revulsion 
 of feeling he turns to God, whom he invokes 
 to be judge in his own cause ; he makes him
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 27 
 
 his arbiter even while he is his adversary: ' Even 
 now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he 
 that voucheth for me is on high' (ch. xvi. 19 
 Rev. Vers.). He complains that God hides 
 from him, that he is not in the East nor in the 
 West. ' Oh that I knew where I might find 
 him ! that I might come even to his seat ! I 
 would order my cause before him.' ' When he 
 hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold ' (ch. 
 xxiii. 1- 10). ' Now I have ordered my cause ; I 
 know that I shall be justified ' (ch. xiii. 1 8). The 
 sense of ill treatment and despair is heightened 
 in Job's case by a special circumstance. 
 Whereas Prometheus is conscious that he is an 
 immortal and that his victory in the future is 
 assured, Job has no clear belief in immortality. 
 At the most, it stands out dimly as a hope. 
 The old patriarchal theory of life was in need 
 of no hereafter. The good man was always 
 rewarded, the bad man punished. But the 
 theory was giving way ; it was discredited by 
 experience ; and with the blank so created the 
 whole scheme of things fell into confusion. 
 For commonplace minds, such as Job's friends,
 
 28 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 the old formulas still sufficed. But to those 
 who looked steadily on life the discord between 
 merit and reward was apparent. How account 
 for the divine misrule ? There are moments 
 when Job hints, as it would seem, at a life here- 
 after as the key to these moral problems ; but 
 such rare glimpses are soon lost in deeper 
 darkness. 
 
 The endings of the two poems are signifi- 
 cantly different. The decisive contrast lies in 
 the characters of the two deities whose justice 
 has been impugned. The God who is the 
 antagonist of Prometheus has power, but he has 
 not goodness : the God who is the antagonist 
 of Job is perfect in goodness as in power. And 
 so Prometheus, strong in conscious right and in 
 foreknowledge of the future, remains unshaken 
 by persuasions and threats. At the close of the 
 drama, from out of elemental ruin — earthquake 
 and lightning and tempest — he utters his last 
 defiant words : ' Thou seest what unjust things 
 I suffer.' Job, who in all his troubled question- 
 ings has never lost his central trust in the God 
 whom he has upbraided, ends by a retractation :
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 29 
 
 ' I know that thou canst do all things, and that 
 no purpose of thine can be restrained ... I 
 have uttered that which I understood not, 
 things too wonderful for me, which I knew not ' 
 (ch. xlii. 2, 3 Rev. Vers.). The infinite mysteries 
 of creation, as they are flashed before him in 
 a series of sublime descriptions (ch. xxxviii.- 
 xli.), have subdued the heart as well as the in- 
 tellect. Love, dormant throughout, is now fully- 
 awakened. Yet even for Job the bewildering 
 problem remained unsolved. Jehovah's answer 
 had merely shown him Nature's immensity and 
 the nothingness of Man. 
 
 While philosophy had for the Jews no mean- 
 ing, history had a deeper significance than it 
 bore to any other people. It was the chief 
 factor in their national unity, the source from 
 which they drew ethical and spiritual enlighten- 
 ment. Thither they turned as to living oracles 
 inscribed with the finger of the Almighty. To 
 history they appealed as the supreme tribunal 
 of God's justice. Nor was the history of their 
 past merely a possession of their own ; it was 
 a treasure they held in trust for the human race.
 
 30 HARVARD LECTURES l 
 
 The story of the Jews was part and parcel of 
 the ' book of the generations of man.' Before 
 the eyes of the prophets history as a whole 
 emerged as an orderly plan, conceived in the 
 counsels of the eternal, slowly unfolding itself 
 in the rise and fall of empires, in startling 
 catastrophes, in sharp and swift punishments 
 which smite the innocent with the guilty ; but 
 not less in the normal processes of a nation's 
 life, its growth, its decay, its obedience, its 
 rebellion, in the seed-time and harvest of the 
 moral world. The great monarchies, Egypt, 
 Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, pass across the scene. 
 Their fortunes cross and interlock with those of 
 the chosen race. Israel is the pivot on which 
 their destiny turns. In their pride they boast 
 of victories not their own. The Assyrian says 
 4 By the strength of my hand I have done it, 
 and by my wisdom ' ; but they are each an 
 instrument, though they know it not, in the 
 hands of the Almighty, by which he chastises 
 his forgetful people or re-admits them to his 
 favour. History, in a word, is the drama in 
 which God himself is the protagonist, vindicating
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 
 
 his justice and moral government on the stage 
 of the visible world. 
 
 Never has any people been so conscious of 
 its own spiritual calling as the Jews ; none has 
 had so profound an intuition of the future. 
 They pondered their long preparation and 
 equipment for their office, its unique design, 
 their repeated lapses, their baffled hopes, the 
 promises postponed. The outward trappings 
 of national existence fell away. All that 
 constitutes history in the eyes of secular nations 
 — war and politics, the deeds of kings, heroic 
 struggles for independence — these things occu- 
 pied an ever lessening space in their annals ; 
 their only life was the indestructible life of the 
 spirit. They were content to suffer and to wait. 
 They had all the tenacity of hope. Disen- 
 cumbered of material greatness, they enlisted 
 themselves on the side of purely spiritual forces. 
 It was the prerogative of their race to be ' an 
 ensign to the nations,' to bear the banner of 
 the true God. 
 
 The only Greek historian whose philosophy 
 of historv recalls in some chief features that of
 
 32 HARVARD LECTURES i 
 
 the Jewish Scriptures is Herodotus. To him 
 the course of the world, its incidents great and 
 small, are under divine governance. The same 
 ' forethought ' l or providence which is at work in 
 maintaining a just balance of forces within the 
 animal kingdom, likewise presides over the 
 destiny of empires. This supreme power reveals 
 its will through various modes of utterance — 
 through oracular voices, through signs, through 
 disturbances in the physical order of nature. 
 It humiliates human pride, it lures on insolence 
 to its ruin, it pursues the guilty through genera- 
 tions. And as in Jewish history the fortunes 
 of Israel intermingle with the secular currents 
 of universal history, so in Herodotus Greek 
 history is read in its larger and world-wide 
 relations. The great military monarchies pass 
 before our eyes in a seriesof apparent digressions ; 
 but the main theme is never forgotten ; the 
 tragic action moves onward through retarding 
 incidents, till at last the divine retribution 
 hastens towards its goal, and all the pride of 
 the East, gathered into one under Persia, flings 
 
 1 irpovoir), Herod, iii. 10S.
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 33 
 
 itself in preordained ruin on the free land of 
 Hellas. 
 
 The problems of politics never exercised the 
 mind of Israel. No questions arose about 
 royalty, aristocracy, or democracy, as entitled 
 to put forward their several claims ; there was 
 no thought of tempering the evils of unmixed 
 or extreme constitutions, or of harmonising 
 conflicting ideals, such as at an early period 
 seized upon the reflective spirit of Greece. The 
 Jewish wars of liberation were waged not for 
 political, but for religious freedom. It has been 
 remarked by Renan that the Jews accepted 
 with easy acquiescence any political regime 
 which, like that of Persia, was fairly tolerant of 
 their religious worship. On the other hand, 
 the mind of Israel, ill-fitted indeed to found a 
 secular state, or to adjust the various functions 
 of government, went out in aspiration towards 
 the citizenship of a larger country. The one- 
 ness of God carried with it, as an implicit con- 
 sequence, the oneness of humanity. Even the 
 law, though in the first instance a covenant 
 with a single people, and in spite of its minor 
 
 D
 
 34 HARVARD LECTURES \ 
 
 enactments and disciplinary rules, itself became 
 a unifying power. Its moral precepts, flowing 
 from one God as the sole source of law, had 
 a universal and binding force. And if the 
 demands of the law knew no restriction of race, 
 so its privileges were open to all. No ancient 
 constitution accorded to strangers such a 
 position as they enjoyed under the Mosaic code. 
 At Athens resident aliens received a more 
 humane and favoured treatment than in any 
 other state in Greece. Still, even there, they 
 had no legal or civic status ; access to the courts 
 was secured to them only through the service 
 of a patron ; and though this measure of 
 recognition may be put down in part to Attic 
 tyikavOpwrrla or kindliness, the direct motive 
 undoubtedly was a commercial one. With the 
 Jews the rights of the alien are placed on a 
 clear religious basis — the unity of God involving 
 the brotherhood of man. ' Ye shall have one 
 manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for 
 one of your own country : for I am the Lord 
 your God' {Lev. xxiv. 22). The declaration 
 that ' God loveth the stranger ' {Dent. x. 1 8)
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 35 
 
 involved far-reaching consequences which cannot 
 be extracted from the kindly religious sentiment 
 expressed in the Homeric words, ' the stranger 
 and the beggar are from Zeus.' The lessons, 
 moreover, of suffering and the memory of the 
 house of bondage are brought in to reinforce 
 the ethical duty. ' Thou shalt love him as 
 thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of 
 Egypt' {Lev. xix. 34). At the heart of 
 Judaism beneath its hard and often repelling 
 exclusiveness the idea of universal humanity 
 was being matured. With the preaching of 
 the prophets in the eighth century Judaism 
 became essentially a social religion, a religion 
 of humanity. In the last days of the kingdom 
 of Judah the feeling of compassion for the weak, 
 of sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, 
 takes a deeper and tenderer tone. The sense 
 of the inequalities of life strike in upon the mind 
 with a new and piercing force. ' To undo the 
 heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free ' ; 
 ' to open the eyes of the blind ' ; ' to satisfy the 
 afflicted soul ' ; to deliver suffering humanity 
 from the darkness of the prison-house — this
 
 36 HARVARD LECTURES I 
 
 became the absorbing passion of the Hebrew. 
 Such a moral enthusiasm could recognise no 
 restrictions of age or country. In a regenerate 
 society, and under the law of the spiritual king- 
 dom foreshadowed by the prophets, all barriers 
 must be broken down. The families of the 
 earth, already united by a common origin, are 
 henceforth to be united by a common hope. 
 ' For my house shall be called an house of 
 prayer for all people.' 
 
 Greek thinkers no less than Hebrew prophets 
 figure to their imagination an ideal society. In 
 Plato's Republic justice finds an earthly home. 
 The outward fabric and framework of the city 
 are essentially of the Hellenic type. In its 
 laws and bye-laws, as distinct from the moral 
 principles on which it is based, it is subject to 
 the usual Hellenic limitations — with, indeed, one 
 notable exception, that war between Hellenes 
 is forbidden, and that one Hellenic state may 
 not enslave another. But the distinction 
 between Greeks and barbarians is retained ; and 
 within the city sharp lines of demarcation are 
 drawn. There are full citizens, for the sake of
 
 GREECE AND ISRAEL 37 
 
 whose complete training in virtue and intellect 
 the state exists ; the governing power resides 
 in their hands ; but beyond these there is a 
 great disinherited class, of traders and artisans 
 who are not true members but only parts of 
 the community, and of slaves who are mere 
 instruments for carrying out their masters' will. 
 So far Plato does not rise above his own age 
 and country. But his real concern is not with 
 the external organisation of the state. The 
 secret he desires to discover is the true method 
 of training intellect and character: — how human 
 nature may be moulded into the form of perfect 
 goodness ; how the highest natural endowments, 
 the love of beauty, which reveals the world of 
 art and literature, and the love of truth, which 
 makes man one with himself and one with his 
 fellow -men, may be fostered and combined. 
 Plato is under no illusions as to any facile mode 
 of reforming society. The high hopes of early 
 youth had been shattered. The lesson of Greek 
 history was to him full of despair. Selfishness 
 and corruption, the inordinate assertion of the 
 individual without regard to the welfare of the
 
 38 HARVARD LECTURES I 
 
 whole — this was what confronted him in civic 
 life. The thinking man who shrinks from 
 engaging in the turmoil of faction may well be 
 tempted to ' hold his peace and do his own 
 business,' ' content if only he can live his own 
 life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, 
 and depart in peace and good will with bright 
 hopes.' 1 
 
 No merely external changes could restore a 
 society so deeply corrupt. Until wisdom and 
 beneficence, knowledge and power — the power 
 of government combined with true philosophic 
 insight — were united in the same persons, man- 
 kind could have no release from evil. We are 
 reminded of the union foreshadowed in the 
 Prometheus of power and goodness in the govern- 
 ment of Olympus. Plato is bent on arriving 
 at an intellectual apprehension of the moral 
 forces which underlie all political and social 
 improvement. On the one hand he traces the 
 ascent of the soul, of the nobler philosophic 
 nature, from the darkness to the light, and 
 studies the law of its upward progress ; on the 
 
 1 Rep. vi. 496 d-e.
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 39 
 
 other hand he gives a penetrating psychological 
 analysis of the successive stages of moral decline 
 both in states and individuals. The fervour 
 with which he describes the power of philosophy 
 to raise and transform life, to bring thought 
 and action into harmony, has the glow of 
 religious emotion. His words fall little short 
 of Hebrew prophecy in their intensity. But 
 let us not mistake his drift and purpose. He 
 has not the directly operative aim of the social 
 reformer. He is not seeking to ameliorate the 
 outward conditions of existence, or to raise the 
 lot of the poor and struggling. He is well 
 aware that the earthly state, in which he seeks 
 to embody his highest conception of justice or 
 human goodness, is an ideal, and that the 
 pattern of his city is ' laid up in the heavens.' 
 The regeneration of society stands out before 
 him as a far-off hope. He strains his eyes after 
 the heavenly vision, but it is the vision of a 
 philosopher not a prophet, of one who is ' the 
 spectator of all time and all being ' ; for whom 
 the laws of truth and conduct are the great 
 primary reality, towards which the mind must
 
 40 HARVARD LECTURES i 
 
 strive in far-reaching aspiration, though no era 
 of righteousness is as yet dawning on the world. 
 Yet he insists that the ideal is none the worse 
 for being merely an ideal. His belief never 
 wavers in the sovereignty of reason, in the 
 affinity of the human soul to the divine, and in 
 the vision of the Good as the illuminating power 
 of human life. It is the business of the 
 philosopher to open the eyes and to direct the 
 groping steps of the multitude. ' Could they 
 see the philosopher as he is, they would 
 certainly accept him for their guide.' 
 
 The vision of the prophets differed from the 
 vision even of the greatest of the philosophers 
 in the ever increasing clearness with which its 
 reality was apprehended. The spirit of hope, so 
 distinctive of the Jewish people, the invincible 
 optimism which survived every disappointment, 
 sustained them to the last. They laid hold of 
 the future as their own possession, with a confi- 
 dence unapproached by any other nation, unless 
 we may find a distant parallel in the exhilaration 
 of tone with which the Roman poets forecast 
 the imperial greatness of Rome. To the Greeks
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 41 
 
 the future is dim and inscrutable; poets and 
 prose writers repeat with many variations the 
 sad refrain, ' uncertain is the future ' 1 — aSr)\ov 
 to /xeXXov. ' Forecasts of the future,' says 
 Pindar, ' have been doomed to blindness.' 1 The 
 future is the secret belonging to the gods, and 
 it were presumptuous for man to seek to pene- 
 trate it. His duty is to seize the present with 
 its limitless possibilities, and to use it with that 
 rational energy and forethought which are born 
 of an enlightened experience. It is a temper 
 of mind wholly unlike that of the Jew, the loss 
 of whose earthly country seemed to point him 
 forward with a more victorious certitude to ' the 
 city which hath foundations,' to the Heavenly 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 'He hath set Eternity in their heart': 2 so 
 might we sum up the spirit of Israel. But the 
 Jewish ideal simplified life by leaving half of it 
 untouched. It remained for Greece to make 
 the earth a home, ordered and well equipped for 
 
 1 Pind. 01. xii. ad init. tGiv 5£ n(W6vT(av TervcpXuvTai 
 4>pa8ai. (Trans. Jebb.) 
 
 2 Eccksiastcs iii. 11 (margin). But the rendering is doubtful.
 
 42 HARVARD LECTURES I 
 
 the race, if not indeed for the individual. Greece 
 supplied the lacking elements — art, science, 
 secular poetry, philosophy, political life, social 
 intercourse. The matchless force of the Greek 
 mind and its success in so many fields of human 
 activity is, as we shall see, due above all to this, 
 that it was able harmoniously to combine diverse 
 and even opposite qualities. Hebraism and 
 Hellenism stand out distinct, the one in all the 
 intensity of its religious life, the other in the 
 wealth and diversity of its secular gifts and 
 graces. 
 
 Thus the sharp contrasts of the sculptor's plan 
 
 Showed the two primal paths our race has trod ; — 
 
 Hellas the nurse of man complete as man, 
 Judaea pregnant with the living God. 
 
 I do not ask you to estimate the value of these 
 two factors, one against the other, to compare 
 things so incommensurable. Each people is at 
 once the historical counterpart and the supple- 
 ment of the other. Each element, by contribut- 
 ing its own portion to our common Christianity, 
 has added to the inalienable treasure of the 
 world. For the present, however, our immediate
 
 I GREECE AND ISRAEL 43 
 
 concern is with Greece. Within these walls 
 the Hellenes are, I imagine, a small and peculiar 
 people ; though not, I hope, a dwindling 
 minority. Outside are the larger ranks of the 
 non-Hellenes — I hardly like to call them by 
 their Greek title, the Barbarians. But the 
 Hellenes, like the Hebrews, have always pre- 
 vailed by the few, not by the many. Nor 
 was it till ancient Hellas ceased to be an 
 independent nation that it became one of the 
 moving forces of the world's history. With 
 the Greeks, as with the Hebrews, the days of 
 their abasement have once and again preceded 
 their greatest triumphs ; the moment of apparent 
 overthrow has been the starting-point for fresh 
 spiritual or intellectual conquest. That is a 
 cheering omen when we are asked to believe 
 that the study of Greek is now an anachronism, 
 and out of keeping with our progressive civilis- 
 ation.
 
 II 
 
 GREECE AND PHOENICIA 
 
 In this lecture I propose to place side by side 
 two contrasted civilisations — that of Phoenicia 
 and that of Greece. The history of Phoenicia 
 centres mainly round the names of the great 
 commercial cities of Sidon, Tyre, and at a later 
 period Carthage. I need not remind you that 
 the Phoenicians were the pioneers of civilisation 
 in the Mediterranean, and did the carrying 
 trade of the ancient world. They perfected 
 the industrial discoveries of earlier nations, 
 exhibiting singular resource and ingenuity in 
 developing such arts as pottery, glass-making, 
 gold-working, and the like. But theyalso started 
 new branches of industry of their own, and, in 
 particular, by the discovery of the purple dye, 
 established an immense trade in textile fabrics. 
 44
 
 [I GREECE AND PHOENICIA 45 
 
 Fearless and patient navigators and explorers, 
 they felt their way along the stepping-stones of 
 the Greek archipelago till they pushed to the 
 furthest limits of the known world. Their 
 settlements extended over the whole Aegean, 
 along the African coast and the western 
 Mediterranean, and thence to the Atlantic ; 
 they traded from the coasts of Britain to those 
 of North -West India. Phoenicia was the 
 ' mart of nations ' ; ' whose merchants ' were 
 ' princes, whose traffickers ' were ' the honour- 
 able of the earth.' * In the earliest glimpse 
 we get of them we see their mariners touching 
 at every shore, exchanging their manufactured 
 articles for the natural products of the country, 
 and at each point shipping some new cargo 
 for their homeward voyage. Overtaken by 
 winter on a distant coast, they would quietly 
 wait there till the return of spring enabled 
 them to sail on calmer seas. They opened up 
 trade routes for overland as well as maritime 
 commerce. The Phoenician merchant would 
 penetrate into African deserts or exile himself 
 
 1 Isaiah xxiii. 2, 8.
 
 46 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 for years in the bazaars of Nineveh or Babylon 
 to extend his markets. Starting from the 
 coast of Palestine, a mere handful of men, this 
 people created a world-wide commerce, main- 
 tained themselves in scattered groups among 
 unfriendly populations, holding the very out- 
 posts of civilisation, and laid the foundation of 
 a great colonial dominion. About 600 B.C. 
 Tyrian sailors, despatched on a mission by 
 Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, are said to have 
 doubled the Cape of Good Hope and circum- 
 navigated Africa. 
 
 ' Those English of antiquity,' says a French 
 writer; — but, as one may hope, with only partial 
 truth in the description ; for the Phoenicians 
 amassed indeed wealth untold, and secured a 
 monopoly in most of the markets of the world ; 
 but they drove hard bargains on the strength 
 of their monopoly ; they eked out their gains 
 by kidnapping and trafficking in slaves. Wher- 
 ever they appeared they were dreaded and 
 disliked, though, for business purposes, they were 
 indispensable. Unpleasant names are already 
 applied to them in the Homeric poems. This
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 47 
 
 was, perhaps, partly due to the instinctive 
 antipathy which has always existed between 
 the Semitic and Aryan races. In part it may 
 be traced to some inevitable misunderstanding 
 between people who refuse to learn one another's 
 language. But, making all allowance for these 
 facts, and speaking without any anti-Semitic 
 prejudice, we must own that the Phoenicians 
 were an inhuman and unlovable race. They 
 were animated by one passion, the greed of 
 gain. Wealth was with them the end of life, 
 and not the means. Theirs was, in Bacon's 
 phrase, ' the Sabbathless pursuit of fortune.' 
 They had no larger horizons, no hopes beyond 
 material advancement. Every artifice of con- 
 cealment was employed by them to maintain 
 their monopoly. With jealous exclusiveness 
 they guarded the secret of their geographical 
 discoveries, of their trade routes, of the winds 
 and currents. By inventing fabulous horrors 
 they sought to deter rivals from following in 
 their track, and at times committed acts of 
 murderous cruelty upon those whose indiscreet 
 curiosity impelled them to pursue the quest.
 
 48 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 To the past and the future they were alike 
 indifferent. Among the articles of their export 
 trade we may reckon the alphabet, through 
 which they conveyed to Greece the art of 
 writing, though they themselves never really 
 learnt to write. Enough for them if they could 
 draw up their tariffs and keep their accounts. 
 Even of their own history they have left no 
 records; and it is to the research of the Greeks 
 that we are almost wholly indebted for such 
 fragments of information as we possess. Litera- 
 ture they had none. Their art was merely 
 an imitation or reminiscence of the art of 
 others. The sense of political unity, again, 
 was wanting ; for Phoenicia was not a country 
 or a continuous territory, but a series of ports. 
 Their municipal life was not without the vigour 
 which is often inspired by commercial activity ; 
 and, on occasion, too, Phoenician towns dis- 
 played heroic qualities in defending their 
 independence. But, speaking roughly, we may 
 say that civic discipline and loyalty were 
 but feebly felt ; even the great colony of Car- 
 thage suffered the battles of the State to be
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 49 
 
 fought mainly by mercenaries. In the absence 
 of any high ideal of personal or national welfare 
 the individual was crushed in the onward 
 movement of material civilisation. 
 
 Let us turn now to Greece. The Greeks, 
 also, were born sailors and traders, who from the 
 dawn of history looked upon the sea as their 
 natural highway, and explored its paths in a 
 spirit in which the love of science and the love 
 of adventure were equally blended. To them 
 might be applied the name, ' Aetvavrai, 1 which 
 was given to a party of shipowners at Miletus 
 who transacted their business on board ship. 
 They too were always afloat — their home was 
 on the sea. Like the Phoenicians, they were 
 shrewd men of business, keen in the pursuit of 
 commerce, eager to make money. From the 
 Phoenicians they learned all the arts and handi- 
 crafts ; by degrees they wrested from them the 
 secrets of their trade routes, and equipped 
 themselves with all the instruments of wealth 
 and civilisation which their jealous teachers 
 sought to retain in their own hands. But with 
 
 1 Plutarch ii. 298 c.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 the Greeks the love of knowledge was stronger 
 than any instinct of monopoly ; the love of 
 knowledge carried with it the desire to impart 
 it, and in giving to others they received again 
 their own with usury. No people was ever less 
 detached from the practical affairs of life, less 
 insensible to outward utility ; yet they regarded 
 prosperity as a means, never as an end. The 
 unquiet spirit of gain did not take possession of 
 their souls. Shrewd traders and merchants, 
 they were yet idealists. They did not lose 
 sight of the higher and distinctively human 
 aims which give life its significance. They had 
 a standard of measure, a faculty of distinguish- 
 ing values ; the several elements of national 
 welfare fell each into its proper place and 
 order. The Greek states did not, it is true, 
 all in equal measure grasp the principle of the 
 subordination of the lower to the higher aim. 
 In Corinth and Aegina, where the Semitic 
 instinct for trade was dominant, the distinction 
 between the material means and the moral or 
 intellectual ends was not apprehended with the 
 same sureness or so decisively translated into
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 51 
 
 action as at Athens. Still the fact remains 
 that Greece was aware of the ideal ends of life ; 
 Phoenicia was not. And so political science, 
 ignored by the Phoenicians, became to the 
 Greeks the highest of the practical sciences, 
 the science of man, not as a trader, but as a 
 man, fulfilling his function as a member of the 
 social organism, and living with all the fulness 
 of life. Aristotle speaks of the State as exist- 
 ing not ' for the sake of mere life, but of the 
 noble life ' ; and, though the formula is his own 
 and bears a philosophic stamp, he was but 
 following the guidance of educated thought and 
 deepening a popular conviction. Granted that 
 certain external conditions must be satisfied 
 and material wants supplied, the true aim of 
 civic existence still lies beyond. The State 
 was felt to be no mere mechanism for the 
 getting of wealth ; its function was to build up 
 character and intellect, to unfold the powers of 
 the heart as well as of the head, to provide free 
 scope for the exercise of human personality in 
 its manifold activities. An Athenian could 
 have said with Burke : ' The State is a partner-
 
 52 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 ship in all science, in all art, in every virtue, 
 and in all perfection.' The Greek orators are 
 animated by the same conception. Demo- 
 sthenes never wearies of insisting on the moral 
 basis of national greatness. Wealth, population, 
 armies, fleets, all the material elements of 
 strength, if disjoined from the nobler sources of 
 civic inspiration, become ' useless, ineffectual 
 unavailing.' * 
 
 Phoenicia remains a lasting witness to the 
 instability of power resting on a purely 
 commercial basis and unsustained by any lofty 
 or aspiring aims. No more striking contrast 
 can be drawn than that between Greek and 
 Phoenician colonisation. From the Phoenicians 
 the Greeks learnt all the rudiments of the 
 colonising art. But the Phoenician colonies, 
 scattered over the Mediterranean shores, were 
 as a rule little more than trading stations and 
 factories planted along the great international 
 routes ; paying over, in some cases, to the 
 mother city a portion of their commercial 
 revenues, but owning no real allegiance, and not 
 
 1 Phil. iii. 40 axpyjcfra, anpaKTa, dvovrjra.
 
 [I GREECE AND PHOENICIA 53 
 
 infrequently detached in sentiment. Nor did 
 they show much power of self-government or 
 any aptitude for entering into political union 
 with others. To keep on good terms with the 
 native populations on whose land they had 
 settled, and to turn to profitable use the 
 resources of the neighbouring tribes, was their 
 chief endeavour. Carthage, indeed, the greatest 
 of Phoenician colonies, displayed a magnificent 
 and conquering energy ; but her projects of 
 territorial ambition in Sicily, Sardinia, and 
 Spain were precisely the occasion of her down- 
 fall. 
 
 The influence of Greater Greece is the 
 determining fact in the history of the Hellenic 
 people. Already in the sixth century B.C. the 
 coasts and islands were studded with Greek 
 towns from the Crimea to North Africa, from the 
 regions of the Caucasus to Lower Italy, to Sicily, 
 and even to Gaul. In the Macedonian period 
 the chain of Greek cities extended to the Indus. 
 Plato might speak of the sea as ' a bitter and 
 brackish neighbour,' l a pleasant thing enough 
 
 1 Laws iv. 705 A aknupbv tcai iriKpov yeirbvrifxa.
 
 54 HARVARD LECTURES u 
 
 to have near you, but dangerous, and likely to 
 bring in other strange products besides foreign 
 merchandise. Nature, however, had marked 
 out a maritime destiny for the Hellenes, and 
 their colonial activity was the highest political 
 achievement of the race. Different motives led 
 the several states to send out colonies. Greece 
 was a poor country — irevlri ael /core crvvrpo(f)6<i 
 ian: 1 — the growth of population outstripped 
 the means of existence, and a foreign market 
 was necessary to supplement the food supply 
 and to furnish the material for native industries. 
 But though actual need was perhaps the most 
 frequent of the impelling causes of emigration, 
 the highest instincts of the race sought other 
 satisfaction in the colonising energy. Each 
 founding of a city was a missionary enterprise. 
 The emigrants carried with them the Apolline 
 worship as the symbol of their spiritual unity ; 
 and, as we expressly read in regard to the found- 
 ing of Naxos (735 B.C.) — the earliest of the 
 Greek colonies in Sicily — the first act on touching 
 the new shore was to erect an altar to Apollo 
 
 1 Herod, vii. 102.
 
 n GREECE AND PHOENICIA 55 
 
 Archegetes. 1 The jealousies which were so rife 
 in the narrow cantons of Greece were softened 
 and sometimes forgotten in absence from home. 
 The sense of Hellenic kinship was deepened 
 and clarified. The Hellenes became aware of 
 themselves as children of one family, however 
 widely dispersed ; guardians of a common herit- 
 age which they were bound to protect against 
 surrounding barbarism ; they listened to one 
 Homer, they were nurtured on the same heroic 
 legends ; on the same days they sacrificed to 
 the same gods as their kinsfolk in the mother 
 cities ; they lived under customs and institutions 
 similar in spirit to the old. 
 
 Great diversity of aim and method prevailed 
 in the colonising states. Corinth, the Venice 
 of antiquity, pursued a commercial policy, and 
 that policy rested on a colonial basis. Athens, 
 entering much later on the field of colonial 
 expansion, kept larger political and social ends 
 in view. Her colonial empire, growing out of a 
 religious federal union, owed its final and distinc- 
 tive form to the part the city played in repelling 
 1 Thucyd. vii. 3. I.
 
 £6 HARVARD LECTURES II 
 
 the common danger which menaced Greece 
 during the Persian wars. Even into the work 
 of colonisation Athens sought to introduce a 
 large and comprehensive spirit. A salient 
 example occurs in the history of Magna 
 Graecia, the home of so many novel and in- 
 teresting experiments in social organisation. 
 After the destruction of Sybaris, the new city 
 (henceforth named Thurii) was restored under 
 the guidance of Pericles, who desired to make 
 it a Panhellenic community : from the outset 
 it comprised not Athenians only but Arcadians, 
 Eleans, and Boeotians. But widely as the 
 states of Greece differed as colonising agencies, 
 Hellenic colonisation, viewed generally, had one 
 notable characteristic. Fitting in with the 
 spirit of adventure and the disinterested curio- 
 sity of a restless and daring intellect, it carried 
 men into the heart of every science. With the 
 enlargement of the physical horizon new in- 
 tellectual needs sprang up. The art of naviga- 
 tion demanded a closer study of astronomy and 
 mathematics. The opening up of unknown 
 lands, the importation of unfamiliar products,
 
 n GREECE AND PHOENICIA 57 
 
 the acquaintance gained with alien civilisations, 
 whetted the desire for anthropological and his- 
 torical research. We can observe the fascinat- 
 ing influence of geographical discoveries on 
 the imagination of a poet such as Aeschylus. 
 We are reminded of the effect of similar ex- 
 plorations on our own Elizabethan age. Indeed, 
 the versatile colonial intellect of Greece, with 
 its many-sided and, as it might seem, incom- 
 patible activities, produced a type of character 
 which it is not too fanciful to compare with so 
 romantic a personality as that of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, who was ' poet, historian, chemist, 
 soldier, philosopher, courtier.' 
 
 The intellectual movement of the Greek 
 world during the sixth century, and down to 
 about the middle of the fifth century, radiates 
 from Greater Greece. The philosophic intellect 
 of Ionia led the way. All the early philosophers 
 are Ionians by birth — Thales, Anaximander, 
 Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Xeno- 
 phancs, Hcraclitus ; and of these the first three 
 belong to one city Miletus. That same Miletus, 
 which from the eighth century onwards sent forth
 
 5S HARVARD LECTURES II 
 
 intrepid mariners, who penetrated to the remotest 
 corners of the Euxine, planting some eighty 
 settlements along the 'inhospitable' shores, also 
 made fearless excursions into the domain of 
 physical science, and gave to western Europe 
 its first speculative impulse. In philosophy, the 
 colonies of Southern Italy and Sicily followed 
 the Ionian lead. In poetry, the earliest outburst 
 of inspired song after Homer came from the 
 island of Lesbos. Sicily gave birth to comedy, 
 to dramatic dialogue, to rhetoric. The smaller 
 islands contributed their share. Ceos produced 
 the great Simonides ; Samos, Pythagoras ; Cos, 
 Hippocrates, the father of medicine ; a century 
 later Crete gave to the world the Cynic 
 Diogenes ; and Melos, the ' atheist ' Diagoras. 
 Withdraw from Greece the colonies of her own 
 blood, and you rob her of some of her greatest 
 names ; not only those just mentioned, but 
 also Terpander, Archilochus, Mimnermus, Arion, 
 Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, 
 Bacchylides, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Herod- 
 otus, Hellanicus, Gorgias — I need not complete 
 the list.
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 59 
 
 In the colonies again the most diverse 
 political experiments were tried. The old 
 forms of constitution proved to be too rigid 
 for the new countries. Difficult problems pre- 
 sented themselves and pressed for practical 
 solution. All the adaptive powers of the race, 
 their rich and flexible intelligence, their evrpa- 
 irekia, were called into play. Rival centres of 
 industry or culture each acquired a distinctive 
 character. The literature, the art, the mode of 
 thought of the several colonies took their own 
 local colouring. The marvel is that at a dis- 
 tance from home, a mere handful of strangers, 
 they were not merged in the prevailing barbar- 
 ism ; that they did not ' forget their language, 
 forget their poets, and their gods.' 1 As it was, 
 they not only maintained their Hellenism de- 
 spite all diversity of developments, but enriched 
 the common stock by a ceaseless output of ideas. 
 The sacred fire taken from the hearth of the 
 metropolis city, they kept alive, and from it 
 kindled new and illuminating thoughts which 
 they transmitted to the land of their origin. 
 
 1 Perrot, Histoire de I 'Art dans V Antiquiti, vii. 299.
 
 60 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 The history of Greek art 1 offers multiplied 
 instances of this vital and effective interaction 
 between the colonies and the mother city. A 
 colony, free from the hampering traditions of a 
 school, aided, it might be, by the discovery of a 
 new material as the medium of artistic expression, 
 would strike out some bold experiment which 
 only received its finished form in the old home. 
 Among the causes which acted as a powerful 
 stimulus on artistic production none ranks 
 higher than the agonistic contests of Greece. 
 The desire to win national renown in this field 
 of coveted achievement created a civic rivalry, 
 intense in character and of far-reaching con- 
 sequence. Each state was eager to know and 
 appropriate the best results that had elsewhere 
 been accomplished. Hence there was an un- 
 limited interchange of art products extending 
 even to the outlying regions of Hellenism. 
 Famous artists travelled with their wares. Not 
 only were the great religious and social centres, 
 such as Olympia, Delphi, Dclos, Miletus reposi- 
 
 1 Here I am much indebted to hints kindly given me by 
 Professor Waldstein.
 
 II GREECE AND PHOENICIA 61 
 
 tories — we might almost say museums — where 
 works of art could be viewed, but minor locali- 
 ties also took a pride in acquiring masterpieces 
 representing well-known individuals or different 
 schools. This free trade in art had in it an 
 educative and expansive force ; it gave unity 
 no less than variety to artistic culture ; it 
 quickened the sense of Hellenic patriotism ; it 
 had an influence analogous to that exercised by 
 the poetic recitations of the wandering rhap- 
 sodists on the thought, the language, and the 
 sentiment of Greece. 
 
 Here I can do no more than allude to the 
 topic. For the detail we should recall the 
 history of sculpture from the second half of the 
 seventh century onward, especially in connex- 
 ion with Chios, Crete, Samos, and other islands, 
 whence the hereditary craft of certain families 
 and schools found its way to the Grecian main- 
 land. To Glaucus of Chios is attributed the 
 invention of soldering iron ; to Melas of Chios, 
 the first working of marble — an art which he 
 bequeathed to his son Micciades and his direct 
 descendants, Archermus, Bupalus, and Athennis.
 
 62 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 In Samos the art of bronze-casting originated 
 with Rhoecus and his son Theodorus. Crete 
 produced a well-known school of sculpture, the 
 earliest names being those of Dipoenus and 
 Scyllis, who travelled through Greece proper, 
 visiting Sicyon, Argos, Cleonae, and Ambracia, 
 and there introduced their new.methods. Later, 
 during the second half of the sixth century 
 and the first half of the fifth, we note the fresh 
 and daring originality displayed in sculpture 
 by Sicily — pre-eminently in the earlier metopes 
 from Selinus — and also by Magna Graecia. 
 Pythagoras of Rhegium, a rival of Myron of 
 Eleutherae, and famous chiefly as the sculptor 
 of Olympic victors, introduced his principles of 
 ' symmetry and rhythm ' ; he marks the last 
 step in the process of emancipation from archaic 
 and hieratic bonds, which prepared the way for 
 the age of Phidias. Another colonial sculptor 
 of genius was a contemporary of Phidias — 
 Paeonius of Mende, near Aenus in the Thracian 
 Chersonese. His Nike, discovered at Olympia 
 in 1875, exhibits an original spirit which un- 
 doubtedly influenced the art of the fifth century.
 
 n GREECE AND PHOENICIA 63 
 
 Again, in painting, Polygnotus of Thasos, under 
 whom were executed the great mural decorations 
 at Athens, appears to have held with Cimon a 
 position similar to that of Phidias with Pericles. 
 In the Periclean age itself one of the most 
 distinctive features of Attic art is its breadth 
 of view, its large hospitality, its power of 
 assimilating every fruitful element of artistic 
 taste and culture which came to it from all 
 other Hellenic centres. Even in the following 
 period, when Argos and Sicyon and Athens 
 took the lead, it is worth remembering that 
 among sculptors Scopas was a Parian ; and in 
 the fourth century, when painting reached its 
 highest point, the masters of the art were 
 Zeuxis from Heraclea, Parrhasius from Ephesus, 
 and Apelles from Colophon. 
 
 In that enchanted island of Sicily, which 
 for more than a thousand years was the battle- 
 ground of southern Europe, swept by a long 
 succession of conquering races, Greeks and 
 Phoenicians confronted one another for centuries. 
 At certain critical moments of history Phoenicia 
 threatened to engulf our Western civilisation.
 
 64 HARVARD LECTURES II 
 
 Yet to-day, go where we may through the 
 island, it is Greece that speaks to us, in her 
 theatres and temples, in her ruined columns 
 and along deserted shores. The voice of Greek 
 poets, Greek philosophers and historians, who 
 lived or died there, is still heard in the undying 
 pages of the past. As for Phoenicia, in Sicily 
 as elsewhere, her memorial has perished with 
 her. In her day she did some humble, but 
 real, service to mankind in helping forward, 
 though with a reluctant hand, a more gifted 
 people on the road of material progress. To 
 her they owed their first lessons in shipbuilding 
 and navigation, their knowledge of some of the 
 lesser arts and crafts, and, as it would seem, 
 certain practical applications of arithmetic. 
 But, with all her wealth, she passed away, as 
 was foretold by Ezekiel in his doom of Tyre, 
 and the vestiges of her that remain have an 
 antiquarian, not a human interest. 
 
 It is just this human quality, lacking in the 
 Phoenicians, which marks so conspicuously the 
 Hellenic temperament. There is in it a natural 
 expansiveness, a desire to enter into kindly
 
 GREECE AND PHOENICIA 
 
 human relations with others, to exchange 
 greetings with the stranger on the road, to give 
 utterance to the passing thought or fugitive 
 emotion ; or, if oral utterance is impossible, to 
 make writing serve the turn of speech, and so 
 bind together in friendly intimacy the present 
 and the absent, the living and the dead. Even 
 inanimate objects are drawn into the circle of 
 this genial human intercourse. A bowl fore- 
 stalls your curiosity by telling you something 
 of its personal history. A word or jotting on 
 a piece of pottery — sometimes a mere " irpocr- 
 ayopevo) " — carries the message of the artist to 
 his friend. Or again, a fragment inscribed 
 with the name of an Athenian youth calls up 
 a tender reminiscence of old friendship when it 
 is found far from Athens in the rock-tombs of 
 Etruria. The "^alpe," again, that is uttered over 
 the departed is repeated on the sepulchral 
 slab ; and not infrequently the farewell word 
 is expanded into a brief dialogue between the 
 dead man and the surviving friend, or even a 
 chance wayfarer. Such sepulchral greetings 
 have a memorial value of a very special kind. 
 
 F
 
 66 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 Unlike more formal monumental inscriptions, 
 they are the direct address of person to person ; 
 they make an immediate appeal to the heart 
 for the very reason that they are so simple, so 
 spontaneous ; as if the unspoken thought had 
 been intercepted before it reached the lips, and 
 had taken external shape while yet upon its 
 way. 
 
 In all these instances mind is not subjected 
 to things material ; it is the inner world that 
 dominates the outward. This is of a piece 
 with other characteristics already noted. In 
 Plato's ideal commonwealth material well-being 
 does not occupy a commanding place. The 
 true constituent elements of happiness are 
 moral and intellectual. It is only in the 
 Utopias of the comic poets that material enjoy- 
 ments come into the foreground of the picture. 
 In one of the fragments of Pherecrates x (a 
 contemporary of Aristophanes), human beings 
 are by the bounty of Plutus equipped with all 
 good things without any effort of their own : 
 ' Of their own accord rivers of black broth, 
 
 1 ap. Athen. vi. 97.
 
 II GREECE AND PHOENICIA 67 
 
 gushing and gurgling, will flow along the high- 
 ways from the springs of Plutus. . . . From 
 the roofs rivulets will run of the juice of the 
 grape with cheese-cakes and hot soup and 
 omelets made of lilies and anemones.' Some 
 rabbinical descriptions of the material happiness 
 that will prevail in the visible kingdom of God 
 do not fall far short of this comic paradise. 
 The rivers will flow with wine and honey ; the 
 trees will grow bread and delicacies ; in certain 
 districts springs will break forth which will 
 cure all diseases ; suffering will cease, and men 
 will be very long-lived, if they die at all. Even 
 if we admit that ' a good dose of materialism 
 may be necessary for religion that we may not 
 starve the world,' still Judaism, even in its 
 loftiest moments, is a little too much inclined 
 to hanker after material delights, and to express 
 itself in a form which would have shocked the 
 ideal sentiment of Greece. Take again the 
 enjoyment of a Greek festival. The occasion 
 was not, as with other nations, one for eating 
 and drinking. The people shared the more 
 refined tastes of their gods, who, at the agonistic
 
 68 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 and dramatic festivals, came forth for the day 
 from their sanctuaries, and mingled gladly 
 with the throng of worshippers, demanding 
 from them no costly banquets, but perfected 
 human powers dedicated to the service of 
 religion : physical manhood with all its dis- 
 ciplined skill ; powers too of intellect and 
 imagination, expressing themselves in diverse 
 forms of poetry and music. Similarly in the 
 great national athletic contests, so long as the 
 finer instinct of Greece prevailed over Asiatic 
 ostentation, the reward of the victor had 
 no material value ; the wreath of wild olive, 
 laurel, or parsley, with which he was crowned, 
 was but the symbol of his consecration, nor 
 did he retain 'it as a personal possession ; it 
 was hung up in the shrine of the local deity. 
 
 The Greek way of regarding private luxury 
 offers a similar note of idealism. Money 
 lavished on purely personal enjoyment was 
 counted vulgar, oriental, inhuman. It was an 
 offence against good taste, a violation of the 
 law of measure and self-restraint, the glorifica- 
 tion of the individual on his selfish side. It
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 69 
 
 implied a failure to discern the true ends which 
 make social existence desirable. The famous 
 saying of Pericles, ' We are lovers of the 
 beautiful, but without extravagance ' ((f)i\ofca- 
 \ovfiev yap fier ei)Te\e/a<?), may be taken as the 
 motto of the private life of the Periclean age. 
 Refinement and simplicity — such was the ideal 
 union. Mere economy had no attraction for a 
 Greek, the real question being not the amount 
 you spend, but the occasion of the outlay and 
 the end in view. As for meanness, it was 
 viewed with special disfavour. We may recall 
 the man in Aristotle's Ethics, who, having spent 
 liberally on a fitting object, then spoils the 
 whole effect for the sake of a trifle (eV [ii/cpa to 
 koKov a-TToXet)} But, of all forms of meanness, 
 the worst was that which was combined with 
 display ; of which we have an example in a 
 fragment of a comic poet, where an economical 
 person boasts that he had invited his guests to 
 a wedding breakfast on the express understand- 
 ing that they were each to bring their own food. 
 Large outlay on rare and interesting occasions 
 
 1 Eth. Nic. iv. 2. 21.
 
 70 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 even in private life meets with approval from 
 Aristotle ; and one of the most characteristically 
 Greek features in his description of such justifi- 
 able outlay is that not only is the outlay on the 
 great scale, it is also in the grand manner. 
 The total effect is impressive ; it depends not 
 on the amount expended, but on a certain 
 harmonious and aesthetic quality that affects 
 the imagination. 1 
 
 Great outlay, according to the old ideal of 
 Athens, should be limited to public objects. 
 In the next generation, Demosthenes looks back 
 with regret to the lost simplicity of private life. 
 In earlier Athens, he says, the houses of 
 Miltiades and Themistocles differed in no way 
 from those of the ordinary citizen, while the 
 public buildings and temples were on a scale of 
 grandeur and magnificence that no future ages 
 could surpass.' 2 The vast sums spent on the 
 Parthenon and other edifices have, indeed, been 
 criticised by some modern economists as so 
 much wealth locked up in bricks and mortar — 
 as unproductive expenditure which contributed 
 
 1 Eth. Nic. iv. 2. 10. 2 Dem. Olynth. iii. 25-26.
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 71 
 
 to the ruin of Athens. From the narrow 
 financial point of view it may be difficult to 
 justify such expenditure. But, if we try to look 
 at it in the Athenian spirit, is there not much 
 to be said in its defence ? Simplicity in the 
 home, splendour in the city — that was the 
 principle. To spend largely on our private 
 selves, on our personal satisfaction, was luxury, 
 and culpable luxury. To incur great outlay 
 for worthy objects which transcend self and 
 minister to the enjoyment of the community, 
 was praiseworthy munificence. The individual 
 man and his material surroundings passed away; 
 the city was the enduring reality ; it was in 
 some sense a spiritual fabric, the embodiment 
 of the people's nobler aspirations, of their higher, 
 their collective self. All the efforts of art might 
 worthily be expended in its service ; that wealth 
 was not wasted which added to its beauty and 
 dignity, and inspired in the citizens a passionate 
 and admiring attachment. Here, again, the 
 Athenians look beyond material interest or profit, 
 and estimate the value of a thing in relation to 
 ideal ends, which are above the world of sense.
 
 72 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 This conviction that the things of the mind 
 have a worth, an inherent dignity, which cannot 
 be measured in terms of money, is at the root 
 of many Greek ideas on education. If we 
 would pursue knowledge aright, we must love 
 it disinterestedly. Even learning may be 
 followed in the spirit of a shopkeeper ; and the 
 intellectual vulgarity thus fostered is more 
 ignoble than the frank avowal of money-getting 
 as in itself the end. Nothing is so truly de- 
 grading as the intrusion of lower and mercenary 
 motives into the sphere of the higher activities. 
 Plato 1 distinguishes between the education 
 which aims only at outward and worldly success 
 and the true, the liberal education, which fits 
 men for perfect citizenship. ' We are not now 
 speaking of education in the narrower sense, but 
 of that other education in virtue from youth 
 upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue 
 the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches 
 him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This 
 is the only education which, upon our view, 
 deserves the name ; that other sort of training 
 
 1 Lazes i. 643 E-644 A *
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 73 
 
 which aims at the acquisition of wealth or 
 bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from 
 intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, 
 and is not worthy to be called education 
 at all.' 
 
 The superior value of leisure in the Hellenic 
 scheme of life as compared with work connects 
 itself with this high ideal of citizenship. Leisure 
 is the Hellenic starting-point, the normal condi- 
 tion of the citizen, the prerogative of freemen. 
 Without leisure there is no freedom. ' We 
 work/ says Aristotle, ' in order that we may 
 have leisure.' * At first sight this may bear 
 some resemblance to the schoolboy view of the 
 working term as being of the nature of an 
 interruption, an infelicitous break, in the holi- 
 days. But leisure to the Greek thinker means 
 not the opposite of activity — for activity is of 
 the essence of life — but a special form of 
 activity ; an activity not evoked by external 
 needs, but free, spontaneous, and delightful ; an 
 ordered energy which stimulates all the vital 
 and mental powers. It is an energy strenuous 
 
 1 Nic. Eth. x. 7. 6 acrxo^oi'fxtdo. yap Iva o"xoXdj"w ; ufi'.
 
 74 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 and productive, released from the bondage of 
 mechanical routine, and satisfying at once the 
 instinct for conduct, the instinct for knowledge, 
 and the instinct for beauty. Hence the 
 organised enjoyment of leisure was elevated by 
 the Greeks into a national art, and associated 
 with religion and politics. The games, the 
 festivals, the dramatic performances provided 
 the community with a refined recreation which 
 was the birthright and privilege of all. Greek 
 leisure, then, was not idleness. With the more 
 finely endowed natures it led to philosophy. 
 There is a passage in Plato's Symposium 1 where 
 Apollodorus, a pupil of Socrates, is speaking of 
 his love of philosophic conversation. ' But 
 when I hear other discourses, especially those 
 of rich men and traders, they are irksome to 
 me. I pity you who are my companions, be- 
 cause you always think that you are hard at 
 work when you are really doing nothing ' 
 (oteaOi Tt, iroielv ovhev iroiovvres:). So the mere 
 money-maker is the idler ; it is he who is 
 engaged in unproductive labour. The ' lover 
 
 1 Symp. 173 C.
 
 II GREECE AND PHOENICIA 75 
 
 of wisdom ' is the true worker ;' he consecrates 
 his leisure to ends that are human and delight- 
 ful. It is half playfully said, but one sees the 
 meaning. And it reminds one a little of a passage 
 in R. L. Stevenson's Inland Voyage, where he 
 tells of the evening he spent at the Club-house 
 of the Royal Sport Nautique in Brussels. ' We 
 are all employed in commerce during the day ; 
 but in the evening, voyez-vous, nous sommes 
 serieux ! ' ' These,' says Stevenson, ' were the 
 words. They were all employed over the 
 frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during 
 the day ; but in the evening they found some 
 hours for the serious concerns of life. I may 
 have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that 
 was a very wise remark.' It was only in the 
 decay of civic life, when thought was divorced 
 from action, and cloistered learning had become 
 the fashion of a few, that a^oXtj or leisure came 
 to denote a busy trifling, and the adjective 
 ' scholastic ' was accepted as equivalent to 
 1 pedantic.' 
 
 With the ideal view of leisure went a corre- 
 sponding ideal conception of friendship. The
 
 76 HARVARD LECTURES II 
 
 intellectual employment of leisure consisted 
 mainly in oral discussion on the deeper problems 
 of human life. Only through the strife of con- 
 versation and the kindling contact of mind with 
 mind could truth be elicited. An atmosphere 
 of intimacy was the first condition of dis- 
 interested learning. Friendship and philosophy 
 were linked together in inseparable union, and 
 perfect friendship became in itself a mode of 
 mental illumination. A man's ' wits and 
 understanding,' says Bacon, ' do clarify and 
 break up in the communicating and discoursing 
 with another.' Friendship ' maketh daylight 
 in the understanding out of darkness and 
 confusion of thoughts.' That is a genuine 
 Hellenic sentiment. The friendships of Greece 
 are still proverbial ; and so important a factor 
 did friendship form in social intercourse, 
 especially when the loss of freedom had robbed 
 politics of its chief interest, that the rules to be 
 found in the later Greek writers for the making 
 of friends are as numerous as the modern 
 prescriptions for making happy marriages. 
 Such phrases as ' he who has friends has no
 
 II GREECE AND PHOENICIA 77 
 
 friend ' x point to the high demands implied in 
 perfect friendship. The friendship between 
 good men as sketched by Aristotle 2 glows with 
 an eloquence which surprises us in a writer so 
 studiously quiet in tone, and deserves to stand 
 beside the impassioned chapter describing the 
 bliss of philosophic speculation. Friendship, he 
 tells us, is realised in that partnership of speech 
 and thought in which the distinctive life of man 
 consists, a life that is social, not merely 
 gregarious — ' that is what living together 
 means ; it is not as with cattle herding on the 
 same spot.' To know that you have a good 
 man as your friend quickens the play of vital 
 energy ; it promotes the vivid consciousness of 
 life which is the essence of happiness. Your 
 friend is different from you and yet identified 
 with you ; and in the spectacle of his noble 
 actions and the sympathetic sense of his existence 
 your own sense of personality is ennobled. It 
 is even a friend's privilege to give up wealth. 
 
 1 Diog. Laert. v. 21 u <pi\oi ovSels <pi\os. So Eth, End 
 1245 b 20 oi)5fis </)i\os ui iroWoi 4>L\oi. 
 
 2 Eth. Nic, ix. ch. 8 and 9.
 
 78 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 station, life itself, for the sake of his friend, and 
 so achieve the true self-love, realising his higher 
 self through self-sacrifice. ' He will prefer,' 
 says Aristotle, ' the intense joy of a brief 
 moment to the feeble satisfaction of an age, 
 one glorious year of life to many years of trivial 
 existence, one great and glorious deed to many 
 insignificant actions.' 1 Friendship is for Aris- 
 totle the glorified form of human intercourse. 
 
 I am far from suggesting that these Greek 
 ideals, just as they stand, can be transferred to 
 our own age and country. In many points of 
 detail the Greek way cannot be our way. 
 Some lines of necessary divergence will at once 
 have occurred to you while I have been speak- 
 ing. Under the stress of our industrial life 
 the principles here indicated will need adjust- 
 ment, adaptation, limitation. But the principles 
 themselves, I would submit, are profoundly and 
 permanently true. And, in the task of education, 
 perhaps, as much as in any department of civic 
 
 1 Et/i. Nic. ch. 9. 9 6\iyov yap xpbvov r}a6rjvai <T(p65pa /xdXKov 
 UXoit av r) 7roXiV ripip-a, Kal (iiuxrai KCtXws iviavrbv rj ir6W Utt) 
 rvxbvTOJS, kclI p-iav wpa!-ii> KaXyv Kal fxeydXijv 7) 7ro\\<xs Kal 
 fxiKpas.
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 79 
 
 life, we need a reminder that there are certain 
 ideals of character, certain paramount ends of 
 conduct, which should underlie and determine all 
 our efforts. We are tempted, perhaps, to fix 
 our eyes on the machinery of education, on the 
 subjects of instruction, on the direct mercantile 
 results of our system, on our own immediate 
 ends as the teachers of this or that branch of 
 knowledge. But sometimes we may do well 
 to test and revise our standards ; to ask our- 
 selves what, after all, we are aiming at, what 
 kind of human being we desire to produce. 
 
 It was part of the beneficent function of 
 Greece to emphasise this idea. The Greeks, as 
 I have tried to show, introduced a large and 
 humanising conception into the one-sidedness of 
 an earlier civilisation with which they came in 
 contact. They had a perception of what Isaiah 
 calls ' the things by which men live.' They 
 knew that ' man does not live by bread alone,' 
 that livelihood is not life, that mere wealth is 
 not well-being. The satisfaction of material 
 wants is not the end of human endeavour. The 
 wealth of nations, like the happiness of
 
 80 HARVARD LECTURES n 
 
 individuals, has its source deeper than in the 
 accumulation of riches or the expansion of 
 commerce. The true value of the goods of life 
 is determined by the sense of life as a whole, 
 and by their relation to the higher and distinc- 
 tively human ends of existence. All this may 
 be called idealism. I have here omitted all 
 reference to the ideal creations of Greek poetry, 
 to those features of character which lift the men 
 and women of Homer or Sophocles above the 
 trivial and the real, and which, in spite of all 
 moral flaws and imperfections, make us feel 
 that they belong to a humanity nobler and 
 richer than the people of our everyday world — 
 that they are real and concrete personalities, and 
 yet ideal types. Nor, again, have I mentioned 
 the heroic figures who stand out at intervals in 
 the pages of Greek history — men who responded 
 to great calls of duty and showed a splendid 
 disregard of consequences ; rare and exceptional 
 men such as inspired the biographies of 
 Plutarch. I speak of idealism in a more restricted 
 sense. We have seen how the breath of poetry 
 touches the common affairs of life, disengaging
 
 ii GREECE AND PHOENICIA 81 
 
 the things of the mind from the things of sense. 
 It is partly poetry, partly philosophy ; for the 
 Hellenic people felt by a poetic instinct truths 
 which their philosophers arrived at by reflection 
 and analysis. It was these truths that gave 
 meaning and reality to the public and private 
 life of the Greeks — their institutions, their ex- 
 ternal surroundings, their recreations — to their 
 estimate of human personality and human 
 fellowship, so that the practical world was for 
 them lit up by an imaginative ideal.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 No one can read Homer without being aware 
 that the spirit of man has here shaken off 
 the torpor of an earlier world and has asserted 
 its freedom. There is no brooding sense of 
 mystery ; none of those oppressive secrets with 
 which the atmosphere of Oriental poetry is 
 charged. A fresh and lucid intelligence looks 
 out upon the universe. There is the desire to 
 see each object as it is, to catch it in some 
 characteristic moment of grace or beauty. And 
 the thing seen is not felt to be truly understood 
 until it has taken shape in words, and the exact 
 impression conveyed to the eye has been trans- 
 mitted to another mind. A single epithet, one 
 revealing word in Homer will often open up to 
 
 us the very heart of the object ; its inmost and 
 82
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 83 
 
 permanent character will stand out in clear-cut 
 outline. Nothing is too great, nothing too 
 trivial, to be worth describing — the sea, the 
 dawn, the nightly heavens, the vineyard, the 
 winter torrent, the piece of armour, the 
 wool -basket, the brooch, the chasing on a 
 bowl. Over each and all of these the poet 
 lingers with manifest enjoyment. There is but 
 a single exception to the rule of minute delinea- 
 tion. In the description of the human person 
 the outward qualities are but lightly touched. 
 Beauty and stature — these are noted in general 
 terms ; the colour of the hair is sometimes 
 added ; not unfrequently, it would seem, as a 
 racial characteristic. But the portraiture of 
 the individual is not drawn with any exactitude. 
 There is no inventory of the features of men or 
 of fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of 
 the decline or in modern novels. Man is some- 
 thing different from a curious bit of workman- 
 ship that delights the eye. He is a ' speaker 
 of words and a doer of deeds,' and his true 
 delineation is in speech and action, in thought 
 and emotion.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 Again, though each thing, great and small, 
 has its interest, the great and the small are not 
 of equal importance. There is already a sense 
 of relative values ; the critical spirit is awake. 
 The naivete of Homeric society must not lead 
 us to think of Homer as representing rude and 
 primitive thought. Homer stands out against 
 a vast background of civilisation. The language 
 itself is in the highest degree developed — 
 flexible and expressive, with a fine play of 
 particles conveying delicate shades of feeling 
 and suggestion. Homeric men are talkative ; 
 each passing mood seeks some form of utter- 
 ance ; but garrulous they are not. They wish 
 to speak, but they have always something to 
 say. They are bent on making their feelings 
 and actions intelligible. They endeavour to 
 present their case to themselves as it presents 
 itself to the minds of others. They appeal both 
 to living witnesses and to the experience of the 
 past ; they compare and they contrast ; they 
 bring the outer and the inner world into 
 significant connexion ; they enforce their 
 arguments by sayings containing the condensed
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 85 
 
 wisdom of life. Homeric discourse, with the 
 marvellous resources of its vocabulary, its 
 structural coherence, its intimate union of 
 reason and passion, has in it all the germs of 
 future Greek oratory. 
 
 Moreover, the poet aims at being more than 
 entertaining. He sings to an audience who 
 desire to extend their knowledge of the facts 
 of life, to be instructed in its lessons, to enlarge 
 their outlook. Gladly they allow themselves to 
 be carried into the region of the unknown. 
 Common reality does not suffice. They crave 
 for something beyond it. But the world of 
 the imagination is no nebulous abode of fancy ; 
 it is still the real world, though enriched and 
 transfigured, and throbbing with an intenser 
 life. Through known adventures they pass 
 imperceptibly into an undiscovered country — 
 strange and yet familiar — in which they still 
 find themselves at home. Poetry is not for 
 them, as it so often is for us, an escape from 
 reality, a refuge from world-weariness. 
 
 Strabo observes that ' to construct an 
 empty teratology or tale of marvels on no
 
 86 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 basis of truth is not Homeric ' ; 1 and that ' the 
 Odyssey like the Iliad is a transference of actual 
 events to the domain of poetry.' - 
 
 He insists, in particular, that ' the more 
 Homeric critics' {oi 'O/jajpiKcorepot) — as opposed 
 to Eratosthenes and his school — 'following 
 the poems verse by verse ' (rot? eirecriv clkoXo- 
 dovvres) were aware that the geography of 
 Homer is not invented ; that he is ' the leader 
 of geographical knowledge ' (ap^jerrj^ Tr/s 
 <y€ayypa(f)ifcri<i e/A7reipta?), 3 and that his stories 
 are accurate, more accurate than those of 
 later ages. 4 Strabo has, of course, an ex- 
 cessive belief in the scientific accuracy of 
 Homer ; still the Odyssey is a truly remarkable 
 geographical document, and recent investiga- 
 tions tend to heighten its value as a record of 
 early travel. The desire indeed to identify 
 Homeric localities and even personages, has 
 
 1 Strabo i. 2. 9 ix /x^Sevbs 6" aXydovs dvairreLv Kevrjv reparo- 
 \oylav ovx '0/J.yjpiKov. Cp. i. 2. 17 to 8e navra ttXclttelv 
 ov iridavov, ov8' '0fjLT]piK6v. 
 
 2 lb. iii. 2. 13 (bare /cat ttjv 'Oduaveiav Kadawep kclI tt)v 
 IXiaOa airb tQv avfi^dfTuv fAcrayayeiv els Troltjaiv. 
 
 3 lb. i. I. 2. 4 lb. i. 2. 7.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE S7 
 
 led to some strange results both in ancient and 
 modern times. An ingenious writer, who has 
 translated the Odyssey, convinced himself that 
 the authoress of the poem was ' a very young 
 woman who lived at a place now called Trapani, 
 and introduced herself into the work under the 
 name of Nausicaa ' — the would-be princess being 
 in truth a ' practised washerwoman,' who in 
 several passages betrays a suspicious famili- 
 arity with that art. But, apart from such 
 extravagances of criticism, the Odyssey in all 
 its geographical bearings has lately been made 
 the subject of a fascinating and exhaustive 
 inquiry by M. Victor Berard in his two volumes 
 entitled, Les Phiniciens et tOdyssec. What- 
 ever may be thought of his Phoenician theories, 
 and rash as we may regard some of his attempts 
 at locating the scenes described in the poem, 
 M. Berard has shown with a wealth of illustra- 
 tive material and under entirely new lights, 
 how precise an acquaintance the poet had 
 with the navigation of the Mediterranean, 
 with its winds and currents, the coasts and 
 islands, and with the habits of those early
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 mariners. 1 Even when we pass into the outer 
 zone of the wanderings of Odysseus, there 
 are links of connexion with reality. And we 
 can imagine with what avidity the seafaring 
 population of traders, pirates, and sailors on 
 their return home from their voyages listened 
 to the recitation of the Odyssey — to the 
 description of places lying on fabulous shores 
 or bordering on the world of fairyland, yet 
 calling up frequent reminiscences of the actual 
 lands they had themselves visited, and of perils 
 they had encountered. 
 
 The close correspondence in the Odyssey 
 between poetic fancy and the realities of a 
 mariner's life may be illustrated by a few 
 examples taken from M. Berard. In Book ii. 
 212 ff. 2 Telemachus asks the suitors for a 
 ship and twenty comrades, that he may go to 
 Sparta and sandy Pylos to inquire about his 
 father's return. They refuse. Athene, how- 
 ever, under the form of Mentor equips the 
 
 1 Cp. Strabo i. 2. 20 kclv tois KXlfiaai 6t k&v rots dv^/xois 
 Siacpaivei to iro\vfj.ades rb vepl ttjv yeuypa^iav "Ofnjpos. 
 
 2 Berard, vol. i. p. 64 tt.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE Sg 
 
 expedition. Some hours after sunset Mentor 
 and Telemachus set sail. The time is marked 
 by line 388 : — 
 
 8v(rer6 t vyeAios ctkiowvto re ■koxto.i uyviat, — 
 a formula occurring, in connexion with travel, 
 seven times in the Odyssey, and denoting, 
 apparently, the dead of night. Athene sent 
 them ' a favouring gale, a fresh wind from 
 the North West (d/cpai) Zetyvpov) singing 
 over the wine-dark sea.' Next morning at 
 dawn they reach Pylos. Turn now to the 
 official 'Sailing Directions' of to-day. In 
 these Greek waters, we are told, land and sea 
 breezes follow one another alternately. The 
 sea breeze springs up each morning about 10 
 A.M. During the day, therefore, it keeps the 
 ships locked in the harbour. At sunset it falls. 
 Then for several hours there is a calm. To- 
 wards 1 1 P.M. the land breeze rises. Hence, 
 this ship of Telemachus leaving Ithaca about 
 1 1 P.M., sails almost before the wind to the 
 Peloponnese. The wind and the pilot do the 
 work. At early dawn the mariners easily make 
 the harbour. Later, it would be more difficult,
 
 90 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 for — see again ' Sailing Directions ' — the land 
 breeze then freshens, and does not fall till 
 about 9 A.M. The poet who described this 
 voyage of Telemachus wrote, we cannot doubt, 
 with all the knowledge of a skipper. 1 
 
 One more example may be added. 2 In 
 Book V. 295-296, after Odysseus had quitted 
 the island of Calypso, as he approaches the 
 Phaeacian coast a tempest arises : 
 
 (TVV 8' E5/)OS T€ NoTOS T£ e7TC(TOV Zc^l'/DGS T£ Sl'O ai]$ 
 
 Kal Bopo^s aWpi^yeveryjS juya. Kv/ia Kvkiv8<DV. 
 
 1 The South East and South West wind 
 clashed and the stormy North West, and the 
 North East that is born in the bright air, 
 rolling onwards a great wave.' Here we have 
 four winds, Eurus, Notus, Zephyrus, Boreas. 
 Finally Boreas prevails (383-392). It lasts 
 two days and two nights ; then it falls, and a 
 
 1 The same custom of embarking at night is found in three 
 other places in the Odyssey : — iv. 780 ff., where the sailors go to 
 waylay Telemachus on his return ; xiii. 24 ff., describing the 
 convoy of Odysseus from Phaeacia ; xv. 389 ff., Eumaeus' 
 story of the Phoenician merchant-ship quitting the isle of Syria 
 — the same formula being there used (xv. 471) as in ii. 388 
 Suaero t ijeXios k.t.\. 
 
 2 Berard, vol. i. p. 48 1 ff.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 91 
 
 'windless calm' comes on. This was on the 
 morning of the third day. 
 
 Again we look at our ' Sailing Directions.' 
 ' It frequently happens,' we read, ' that winds 
 from the N.E., N.W., and S.E. blow at the same 
 time in different parts of the Adriatic. The 
 wind called Bora is most to be feared and 
 demands active and incessant watch. ... Its 
 most furious blasts are announced by the 
 following symptoms — a black and compact 
 cloud, surmounted by another cloud more 
 light and fleecy, covers the horizon in the N.E. 
 (cp. aldp7]jeveri]<;). ... In summer it never 
 lasts more than three days.' 1 
 
 This, says Berard, is not the storm of 
 literature, but a genuine Adriatic storm. 
 Virgil's storms always last three days : that 
 was part of his poetic furniture : 
 
 Tres adeo incertos caeca caligine soles 
 Erramus pelago, totidem sine sidere noctes. 2 
 
 The poet of the Odyssey knows what he relates ; 
 he is minutely accurate in each detail ; and the 
 
 1 Instructions Nautiques, No. 706. 
 2 Aen. iii. 203-204.
 
 92 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 Adriatic storm, as he describes it, off the 
 Phaeacian coast, is a curious confirmation of 
 the old tradition that the island of Phaeacia is 
 none other than Corfu. 
 
 The love of knowledge (to (piXo/xade^), says 
 Plato, 1 is as marked a characteristic of the 
 Greeks as is the love of money (to (f)i\o-^p?]fia- 
 tov) of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. From 
 the dawn of history to know seemed to the 
 Greeks to be in itself a good thing apart from 
 all results. They had a keen -eyed and dis- 
 interested curiosity for the facts of outward 
 nature, for man — his ways and his works — 
 for Greeks and Barbarians, for the laws and 
 institutions of other countries. They had the 
 traveller's mind, alert in observing and record- 
 ing every human invention and discovery. One 
 thing alone they viewed with unconcern — the 
 language of the foreigner. Up to the time of 
 Alexander, the Scythian Anacharsis is the only 
 traveller of whom we read as having thought it 
 
 1 Rep. iv. 435 E. Cp. Laws v. 747 c, where the contrast 
 between <ro<pia and iravovpyia is noted as a similar race distinc- 
 tion.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 93 
 
 worth his while to learn any language other 
 than his own. Neither Herodotus, nor Demo- 
 critus, nor Plato, availed themselves, as far as 
 we know, of any such linguistic aid in their 
 researches. Greek seemed to them the only 
 human language ; and even a sceptical philos- 
 opher like Epicurus felt no doubt that the gods, 
 if they spoke at all, spoke in Greek. The 
 neglect of foreign languages led to conse- 
 quences more serious than the absurd etymo- 
 logical guesses that found acceptance in Greece. 
 The notion that Greek words represented the 
 original and natural names of things gave rise 
 to mistaken theories as to the relation of 
 language and thought. Even so great a 
 thinker as Plato fell a victim to fallacies which 
 could hardly have misled him had he been 
 familiar with the grammar of any other tongue. 
 But the open eye and the open mind are 
 not all that is required to discover truth. The 
 Greeks soon became aware that, in order 
 to see rightly, the facts must be looked for 
 in a special way. ' The god of Delphi,' says 
 Heraclitus, ' neither speaks nor conceals, but
 
 94 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 gives a sign.' 1 And again, ' Nature loves to 
 hide.' 2 She must be tracked, therefore, into her 
 inmost recesses. Her secret must be wrested 
 from her unawares. In the process of initiation 
 into her mysteries no one can succeed who is 
 faint-hearted in the search. ' Unless a man has 
 good hope ' — once more to quote Heraclitus — 
 ' he shall not find out the unexpected.' 3 Truth 
 assumes paradoxical forms. It is the incredible 
 which happens, and the investigator must be 
 on the look-out for surprises. But the stage of 
 wonder is only the initial stage in scientific 
 inquiry. ' We begin,' says Aristotle, 4 ' by 
 wondering that a thing should be so, just as 
 marionettes appear wonderful to those who 
 have not yet investigated the cause ' ; in the 
 end we should be astonished if things were not 
 as they are : ' there is nothing that would 
 astonish a geometrician more than if the 
 
 1 Ileracl. Fr. II [93] ovre \tyci oure Kp'jTrrei dXXa a-qixaivei. 
 
 2 lb. IO [123] <pvais KpuwTecrdai <f>iXe?. 
 
 3 lb. 7 [18] eav fxri fKiryjat, dvi\in.aTov ovk e^evp^ffet. 
 
 4 Arist. Met. i. 2. 983 a 12-20. Cp. Plat. Theaet. p. 155 n 
 fid\a yap <pi\oa6(pov tovto rb irados, to 6avp,&feiv ov yap 
 fiMij dpx^l <pi\oao<pias f) avrrj.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 95 
 
 diagonal should prove to be commensurate 
 with the side.' The progress of science from 
 the unexpected to the inevitable, as here 
 described by Aristotle, is not unlike his account 
 of the evolution of a dramatic action — the most 
 impressive tragic effect being that which arises 
 from the shock of surprise at an unlooked for 
 event followed by the discovery of necessary 
 sequence : the catastrophe, however startling, 
 could not have been otherwise than it was : 
 the end was already implicit in the beginning. 1 
 From the outset Greek thinkers looked 
 slightingly on that multifarious learning which 
 holds together a mass of unrelated facts, but 
 never reaches to the central truth of things. 
 As soon as they began to think at all, they 
 directed their energies to the search for causes, 
 the discovery of law throughout the universe. 
 They are tempted at times to be too much 
 elated by their own successes, to accept a hasty 
 generalisation, to be over-confident in the power 
 of a formula ; they cannot decipher ' the long 
 
 1 Poet. ix. II 1452 a 2-3 (the union of the irapa. ttjv 86£av 
 with the Si' <£\\r;Aa).
 
 96 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 and difficult language of facts.' 1 Yet the facts 
 are looked at steadily, the data of experience are 
 interrogated, sifted, collated, by methods indeed 
 still imperfect, but without bias or partiality. 
 We can see the writers at their task, revising 
 and testing each judgment, and reviewing their 
 conclusions. What a refreshing candour, for 
 instance, it is when a physician, in one of the 
 Hippocratic writings (a treatise On Diet in 
 Acute Diseases) introduces a point he had over- 
 looked in the words, ' This argument will be of 
 assistance to my opponent.' Everywhere there 
 is the same invincible desire not to rest in out- 
 ward appearances, but to penetrate to reality, to 
 interpret phenomena, to make the words of 
 nature and of man intelligible. Mere beliefs 
 or opinions — the image is that of Plato, 2 though 
 he shares the thought with many of his pre- 
 decessors — are, like the statues of Daedalus, 
 runaway things : not until they have been tied 
 down by the chain of causal sequence do they 
 
 1 Plat. Polit. 278 D r&r tGjv Trpayfidruv jucu-pas k<xl fir] fodiovs 
 ffvWapds. 
 
 2 Meno, p. 97 E-98 A.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 97 
 
 stand fast and become in the true sense know- 
 ledge. ' Rather,' said Democritus, 1 ' would I 
 discover the cause of one fact than become 
 King of the Persians.' 
 
 The love of knowledge worked on the Greeks 
 with a potent spell. It came to them as did 
 the Sirens' voice to Odysseus, luring him with 
 the promise that he should know all things — 
 the things that have been and those that are 
 to be. 2 They were, however, partly, conscious 
 of the peril. And we find in them that the 
 spirit of inquiry, daring indeed and far-reach- 
 ing, was generally combined with reverence. 
 It is not the timid Oriental fear that man might 
 find out too much and so incur the jealousy of 
 the gods — though of this feeling traces may be 
 detected ; chiefly, however, embedded in ancient 
 strata of mythology : it is a feeling rarely 
 hinted at in literature. The reverence I speak 
 of is rather that restraining instinct which 
 reminds man of the limits assigned to human 
 
 1 Democr. ap. Eus. Pr, Ev. xiv. 27. 3 Ar]p.6KpiTos yovv avrbs 
 &s 4>aaiv i\tye fiovktcrdai fiaXKov fxiav eiipelv alrLoKoyiav f) ttji> 
 WepcCiv oi ftacrCKeLav yevtaOai. 
 
 3 Odyss. xii. 1S9-191. 
 
 H
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 faculties, and tells him that the utmost scope of 
 his powers cannot avail completely to grasp 
 the eternal order of the universe. Man cannot 
 place himself at the centre and see as far as 
 the circumference. Empedocles strikes this 
 note in memorable verses : 1 
 
 ' Straitened are the powers that are shed 
 through the limbs of men ; many the strange 
 accidents that befal them, and blunt the 
 edge of thought ; brief is the span of that 
 life in death which they behold — swift death to 
 which they are doomed ; then are they whirled 
 away, and like a vapour fly aloft, each persuaded 
 only of that on which he has himself chanced to 
 light, driven this way and that. But the whole — 
 man boasts that he has found it : all idly ; forthese 
 things no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, neither 
 may they be grasped by the mind. Thou, then, 
 since thou hast strayed hither, shalt learn no 
 more than human wisdom may discern. But, 
 O ye gods, turn aside from my tongue the mad- 
 ness of these men. Hallow my lips and cause 
 
 1 Emped. 36-49. In this passage some of the readings are 
 doubtful.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 99 
 
 to flow from them the stream of holy words. 
 And thee, I beseech, O Muse, much -wooed 
 maiden white-armed, tell me the things that the 
 creatures of a day may hear. From the 
 House of Holiness speed me on my way and 
 guide thy willing car.' 
 
 As in conduct the pride (v/3pi<;) which thrust 
 itself into a sphere not its own, and violated the 
 rights of others — gods or men — was condemned ; 
 so too the feeling prevailed, though less 
 frequently asserted, that the intellect should 
 beware of over-stepping its proper limitations. 
 Here too it was right to exercise the quality of 
 temperate self-restraint (o-axfrpoavvr}). Take 
 again the magnificent opening lines of the poem 
 of Parmenides — the poet whose sight was 
 ' straining straight at the rays of the sun.' ! 
 The youthful inquirer is borne in the chariot of 
 thought to the house of the goddess Wisdom. 
 The daughters of the Sun show the way. At 
 their entreaty the portals of the paths of night 
 and day are flung open by Retributive Justice 
 who holds the keys. The goddess receives 
 
 1 Farm. 144 cu'ei ira-Tnalvovaa wpbs avyas rjeXLoio.
 
 ioo HARVARD LECTURES III 
 
 him graciously and proceeds to expound to him 
 both truth and error — ' the unshaken heart of 
 persuasive truth ' and the vain fancies of mortals. 
 The reverential awe with which the search for 
 Truth is here described is rare in the mouth 
 either of poet or philosopher. But an ethical 
 sense — -a sense of moral limitations — akin to 
 religious emotion, is conspicuous in the early 
 Ionian philosophy. The great idea which Ionia 
 contributed to human thought was that of the 
 universal rule of law. It is one and the same 
 law that runs through the physical and the 
 moral world : ' The Sun will not overpass 
 his bounds, or the Erinnyes, the ministers of 
 justice, will find him out.' 1 The link is not yet 
 broken between nature and man. The cosmic 
 order rests on moral sanctions, on certain 
 principles of limitation divinely ordained ; it is 
 the embodiment of supreme Justice — that 
 Justice whose earthly counterpart seemed to 
 later Greek thinkers to stand at the summit of 
 all the virtues : — ' neither Evening nor Morning 
 
 1 Heraclit. Fr. 29 [94] "HXtos ovx vTrepfiqceTai fi^rpa 4 el Se 
 fir], 'Epifves p.Lv Blktjs eirlKovpoi i^evp-qaovai
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 101 
 
 Star so wonderful.' x The thought is not unlike 
 that of Wordsworth's lines : 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
 And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh 
 and strong. 
 
 Greek scientific knowledge, however, grew 
 up under secular influences, not as in the East 
 under the shadow of the temple. There was 
 in Greece no separate and leisured class of 
 priests and scholars ; no sacred books which 
 hampered the free play of intellect. Even 
 medicine, which is slow to detach itself from 
 magic, was developed in an atmosphere of lay- 
 thought, partly through the philosophic 
 investigation of nature, partly by the close 
 study of health and disease in those families of 
 physicians in which the art was hereditary. 
 Fortunately for the Greeks they were able to 
 utilise the scientific observations made in Egypt 
 and Chaldaea by an organised priesthood, while 
 they themselves dispensed with the teaching of 
 
 1 Arist. Nic. Eth. v. I. 15 nal 5ia tovto ttoWclkis KpariaTT} 
 tCiv aperQv elvat dotce? 17 SiKaio<rvvrj, /cat oi)'0' ecnrepos ovd' ii^os 
 ovtw Oai'ixaards.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 the priests. All the accumulated lore of the 
 earlier civilisations they appropriated, making it 
 the starting-point for fresh inquiry. But they 
 never rested in unverified tradition. Even re- 
 ligious cosmogonies they do not take ready-made. 
 Science followed the ebb and flow of thought ; 
 its free movement was unhampered ; its truths 
 were not conveyed through hieratic channels 
 and never hardened into lifeless dogmas. 
 
 Thus Greek science, Greek philosophy, is the 
 awakening of the lay mind. The Greeks dared 
 to ask the question ' Why ? ' The fact was not 
 enough ; they sought out the cause {jo Siori) 
 behind the fact (to otl). Their answer to the 
 ' Why ? ' is often wrong ; but no anxious 
 scruples, no priestly authority deterred them 
 from venturing into the hidden domain of 
 causes. In the abstract mathematical sciences 
 they were the first to ask the Why of things, and 
 seldom failed to hit on the true answer. One 
 of the facts long known to Chinese, Hindoo, 
 and Egyptian architects was that if the sides of 
 a triangle are represented numerically by 3, 4, 
 and 5, the sides whose lengths are 3 and 4, are
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 103 
 
 perpendicular to one another. Century upon 
 century passed before any one asked the 
 question, Why is this so ? In a dialogue 
 written by a Chinese emperor, Tchaou-kong, 
 about 1 100 B.C., in which the emperor himself 
 takes a part, his interlocutor reveals to him the 
 property of this famous triangle. ' Indeed ! 
 wonderful ! ' exclaimed the emperor ; but it 
 never occurred to him to ask the reason : — 
 the wonder in which philosophy begins some- 
 times stops short of philosophy. Not till the 
 Greeks appeared in history was the reason 
 asked and the answer given. Greek geometry 
 was, in short, a new thing in the history of the 
 human mind. Geometry, according to Herodotus, 
 was born in Egypt ; but it was geometry as an 
 applied science, practical in its aims, and such 
 as was requisite for the arts of building and land- 
 surveying. Theoretic geometry the Greeks 
 created for themselves ; and so rapid was their 
 advance that by the fifth century B.C., as it 
 would seem, the greater part of what is con- 
 tained in the elements of Euclid had attained 
 to demonstrative and logical form. The kind
 
 104 HARVARD LECTURES III 
 
 of geometry which the Greeks discovered is 
 characteristic of the idealist temperament so 
 conspicuous in their art and literature. Lines 
 which have length without breadth, which are 
 absolutely straight or curved, indicate at once 
 that we are in the region of pure thought. The 
 conditions of empirical reality are neglected ; 
 the mind is striving towards ideal forms. 
 Pythagoras, we are told, offered a sacrifice to the 
 gods in joy at a mathematical discovery. In 
 what earlier civilisation was mathematics 
 pursued with this disinterested ardour ? 
 
 The Jews as well as the Greeks felt that the 
 paramount need of humanity was knowledge — 
 that man should know the truth about himself 
 and his relation to the power outside him. 
 But the Greek, with unwearied insistence, 
 asked himself, What is knowledge ? Can it be 
 attained, and how ? No problem appeared to 
 him more difficult. It was looked at from every 
 side by a succession of great thinkers. Many 
 and various were the answers. To the Jews, on 
 the other hand, the answer was not remote or 
 difficult ; there was but one knowledge and
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 105 
 
 that the highest : ' The word is very nigh unto 
 thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou 
 mayest do it.' It had been revealed to them by 
 the divine voice ; repeated at every crisis of 
 their marvellous history ; written indelibly on 
 the conscience of the nation ; it was indeed 
 the secret of which they were the repository, to 
 be guarded inviolate and disclosed in due time to 
 the world. The knowledge of the Lord was 
 the beginning and end of wisdom. And the 
 words of this wisdom — so ran the command — 
 ' ye shall teach your children, speaking of them 
 when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou 
 walkest by the way, when thou liest down and 
 when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them 
 upon the door-posts of thine house, and upon 
 thy gates.' 
 
 The Greeks, like the Jews, had their sacred 
 volume. Already in the seventh century B.C. 
 at the Delian festival and in many other parts 
 of the Hellenic world, they assembled to hear 
 their minstrels recite the Homeric poems. At 
 Athens, from the sixth century onward, a public 
 recitation of Homer was held every fourth year
 
 106 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 at the Panathenaic festival. It was analogous 
 to the Jewish provision that once in every seven 
 years the law was to be read at the Feast of 
 Tabernacles in the hearing of all Israel. In 
 444 B.C. we read of Ezra on his return from 
 Babylon to Jerusalem renewing the old observ- 
 ance and reading the book of the law to the 
 assembled people ; and it is curious to reflect 
 that at Athens at the same time, in the Periclean 
 era, the corresponding custom continued to 
 exist. But there was this difference. Whereas 
 for each nation, Jews and Greeks alike, the 
 reading of their own ancient volume served to 
 heighten the sense of spiritual kinship and to 
 create an ideal of conduct : to the Greeks the 
 Homeric poems had now become but one among 
 many means of satisfying the needs of thought 
 and imagination. The popular mind still found 
 in them the knowledge of all things human and 
 divine ; but the deeper and pressing intellectual 
 problems that had arisen, met with no solution 
 there. The drama was already presenting its 
 own interpretations of human destiny ; philo- 
 sophy had entered on its long quarrel with
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 107 
 
 poetry ; Socrates had started speculation on 
 the road that it was to pursue for centuries. 
 Received traditions were now being questioned. 
 The Why of duty, no less than the meaning of 
 knowledge, was being subjected to discussion. 
 Thus the Homeric poems, while they never 
 ceased to be the inspiration of the race, had lost 
 their unique authority. Meanwhile to the Jews 
 the law, in the widest sense of the word, was 
 still the one book on which to meditate day and 
 night. Nor was the knowledge of it a thing to 
 be received with languid or otiose mind, or in the 
 quietude of religious rapture. Man's bliss was to 
 exercise himself therein, to go back upon it in his 
 inmost thoughts, to drink deeply of those inex- 
 haustible springs. The intervalsof sacred leisure 
 which were enjoyed by all classes within the 
 community, were devoted to the deepening of 
 the religious life ; for the outward observance 
 of the Sabbath and the non-performance of 
 thirty-nine various kinds of work afterwards 
 enumerated by the Rabbis did not exhaust the 
 significance of the day to pious minds. More- 
 over, as this knowledge was to be translated
 
 10S HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 into action, and adapted to all circumstances as 
 the vivifying principle of conduct, it became 
 necessary not to rest satisfied with the letter of 
 the law, but to pass beyond the unwritten word, 
 and divine the things that were unsaid, — or in 
 the later Rabbinical phrase, ' the commands 
 left to the human heart.' There remained a 
 multitude of details outside the province of 
 strict law, in which, as with the Greeks, the rules 
 of conduct could only be discovered by im- 
 mediate perception — by what Aristotle calls 
 ata-0i](Ti<i — that delicate and sensitive faculty 
 which intuitively apprehends the facts of the 
 particular case. Still the greater issues of life 
 were once for all determined, and there was no 
 riddle left for the wise man to solve. 
 
 Aristotle, like the Jew, places the supreme 
 bliss of man in a certain mode of knowing and 
 thinking. But the human Reason is with him 
 the one instrument by which this highest know- 
 ledge is to be attained. It is a thing either 
 intrinsically divine or the divinest gift that we 
 possess. Alone it is loved for its own sake ; of 
 all our activities it is the most continuous, the
 
 (II THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 109 
 
 most pleasurable, the least dependent on ex- 
 ternal conditions. Man's felicity consists in 
 the exercise of this sovereign faculty with such 
 untiring vigour as our human condition admits. 
 Such a life of speculation is the noblest employ- 
 ment of leisure. It is an energy which is also 
 tranquillity, an activity of mind that is set free 
 from mechanical occupations and the pressure 
 of material needs, and directed inward, not upon 
 ends external to itself; — the deep repose of 
 the soul in the contemplation of truth. It is a 
 life higher than human ; nor can we live it save 
 in virtue of the divine principle inherent in us. 
 1 Let us not listen therefore to those who tell us 
 that as men and mortals we should mind only 
 the things of man and of mortality ; but, so far 
 as we may, we should bear ourselves as im- 
 mortals (cWavari^eiv), and do all that in us lies 
 to live in accord with that element within us, 
 that sovereign principle of Reason, which is our 
 true self, and which in capacity and dignity 
 stands supreme.' * Here we have the love of 
 knowledge in its highest Greek conception, 
 1 Arist. Nic. Eth, x. 7. 8 : see the whole chapter.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 touched with religious emotion, and almost 
 carried into the sphere of mysticism. I need 
 not stay to enlarge on the divergence between 
 this ideal and that suggested by the words of 
 the Hebrew prophet : ' Let not the wise man 
 glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man 
 glory in his might . . . : but let him that glorieth 
 glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth 
 me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving- 
 kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the 
 earth.' 
 
 Consider, again, how the Greeks regarded 
 the facts of history. They felt, first of all, the 
 intellectual curiosity to know what had really 
 happened. A fact was interesting because it 
 was true. The past was in itself worthy 
 of investigation, of tolerant and sympathetic 
 inquiry. We have here "i<TTopia" in its primary 
 sense as the search for truth. But no Greek 
 could treat history as a mere succession of facts, 
 a chance sequence of events. An explanation 
 of the facts must be sought, some unifying 
 principle discovered. Particulars must be 
 viewed in larger relations. The interpretative
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE m 
 
 force of mind must be brought to bear upon 
 them, and their hidden meaning extracted. It 
 is not the facts, but the meaning of the facts, 
 that is of paramount interest ; the facts must, if 
 possible, be made into truths. And it is re- 
 markable with what intellectual insight the 
 great historians of Greece do actually ap- 
 prehend the wider significance of the special 
 chapters in Greek history which they severally 
 narrate. 
 
 The conflict of Greece and Persia was for 
 Herodotus the culminating point of a great 
 drama, a clash of forces rendered inevitable by 
 events that had been long preparing in the 
 kingdoms of the East. Thucydides saw in the 
 Peloponnesian war and in the tragedy of the 
 Athenian downfall, an inner crisis affecting 
 national character. Polybius recognised that 
 with the empire of Rome new historical per- 
 spectives were opened up, and countries hither- 
 to disconnected drawn into the current of 
 universal history. Each of these writers was in 
 his own way a philosophic historian. We 
 have already seen in what sense this is true of
 
 112 HARVARD LECTURES m 
 
 Herodotus. 1 To penetrate the mind of Thucy- 
 dides is a less easy task. In his austere reserve 
 he is far removed from the ingenuous charm 
 and candour of Herodotus. He is not ready 
 to come forward and reason with us. He has 
 no intimate confidences to bestow. He offers 
 few reflections containing a moral judgment. 
 While the moral impression is clear and sharp, 
 the award of praise or blame is left to the 
 reader. Thucydides is concerned with under- 
 standing rather than with judging ; his aim is 
 to throw light on the laws of human action 
 and the permanent principles of conduct ; 
 to enable the statesman to direct the present 
 and in some measure to forecast the future. 
 He is under no illusions. Psychological facts 
 are often unlovely enough : he records them 
 coldly : but to regard him as cynically in- 
 different is to misread the severe impartiality of 
 his art. He felt the sombre fascination of the 
 Peloponnesian war, its terror and grandeur. 
 Great passions were there aroused, destructive 
 energies let loose, issuing in deeds both of 
 
 1 Supr. p. 32.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 113 
 
 savagery and heroism. The outward events 
 were for the historian a material which must be 
 rendered in terms of mind. His philosophic 
 impulse shows itself in tracing causes ; not final 
 causes, as with Herodotus ; but the secondary 
 causes which are revealed on the stage of human 
 life and in the heart of the actors. He does not 
 profess to read the purposes of a supernatural 
 power. Neither destiny nor chance is for him 
 the governing force of the world. Events have 
 their roots in character, of which they are the 
 outcome ; it is here that we must seek their 
 inner meaning. They are not mere startling or 
 dramatic incidents, but phenomena whose reason 
 lies deep in the moral disposition of nations 
 and individuals, and the law of whose succession 
 can be discovered. The great agent in shaping 
 outward circumstances is the human will. The 
 historian, therefore, who would interpret the 
 world of facts must analyse the various forms 
 in which mind manifests itself, must study its 
 laws and reach the vital forces which are at 
 work below the surface. History is a scroll 
 written by human intelligence in the large and
 
 ii 4 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 legible letters of the past. Thus, Thucydides 
 is a philosophic historian, but he expounds no 
 theory : he remains a historian, he is not a 
 philosopher — a historian, however, of imagin- 
 ative insight who brings out both the poetry and 
 the philosophy latent in the facts. 
 
 Polybius, writing between two and three 
 centuries later, derives his guiding principles 
 direct from Thucydides. He narrates the 
 struggle between Rome and Carthage for the 
 supremacy of the world ; and his design is to 
 exhibit the organic unity of history, the idea of a 
 universal history corresponding, as he conceived 
 it, to the fact of universal empire. It is this 
 ' clear oecumenical view,' says Freeman, ' which 
 makes him the teacher of all time.' Unfortun- 
 ately his style is a serious deterrent to the reader. 
 We long for the ease, the finished grace, the flow- 
 ing simplicity of Herodotus ; or again, for the 
 terse and rapid phrase of Thucydides, the energy, 
 the precision of each single word, the sentence 
 packed with thought. Polybius has lost the 
 Greek artistic feeling for writing, the delicate 
 sense of proportion, the faculty of reserve. The
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 115 
 
 freshness and distinction of the Attic idiom are 
 gone. He writes with an insipid and colourless 
 monotony. In arranging his materials he is 
 equally inartistic. He is always anticipating 
 objections and digressing ; he wearies you with 
 dilating on the excellence of his own method; he 
 even assures you that the size and price of his 
 book ought not to keep people from buying it. 
 Yet admirable as is the substance of his writing, 
 he pays the penalty attaching to neglect of 
 form — he is read by the few. His interest, 
 however, for us here is that, while he intends 
 his history to be a practical treatise, containing 
 useful lessons for men of affairs, he is true to 
 the philosophic tradition he has inherited from 
 Thucydides, in his persistent effort to exhibit 
 the relations of cause and effect through the 
 texture of the narrative. In particular, he is at 
 pains to search out the true cause of an event, 
 as distinguished from the occasion of its happen- 
 ing ; and such causes he follows back to their 
 source in character. National life, like indi- 
 vidual life, has for him an ethical basis ; it is in 
 character, and the institutions that grow out of
 
 Ii6 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 character, that the true movement of a people's 
 history is revealed. 
 
 The idea that the true causes of events 
 lie deep in character was appropriated as a 
 theory of history by Polybius : Demosthenes 
 had long ago received it from Thucydides as 
 an inspiring motive of civic eloquence. 1 The 
 Athenians, when defeated by Philip, were wont 
 to lay the blame on their politicians or their 
 generals, on adverse winds, on unkindly fortune. 
 Demosthenes carries the failure back to them- 
 selves — to their own indolence and improvi- 
 dence. He will not be put off with superficial 
 explanations. Character with him is all in all. 
 Every PJiilippic oration is instinct with the 
 thought. ' Is Philip dead ? No, he is only 
 ill. Dead or ill, what difference to you ? If 
 anything befals him, you will instantly create 
 another Philip for yourselves.' 2 Or again : 
 ' Always letting slip the present and imagining 
 that the future will take care of itself, it is we 
 that have made Philip great and exalted him 
 
 1 See S. II. Butcher, Demosthenes (Macmillan and Co.), 
 p. 144. 2 Phil. i. 11.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 117 
 
 to a height of power above that of any previous 
 king of Macedon.' * Men who can hope to 
 succeed must have a mind that can anticipate 
 and control outward circumstances : but in 
 politics, as in war, the Athenians ' wait upon 
 events ' ; they begin to think when the time 
 has come for action ; they strike after the blow 
 has fallen. 2 
 
 The use of opportunity, the strong man's 
 ability to seize the present and to shape the 
 future, is a favourite topic of Demosthenes. 
 Its full significance may best be read in con- 
 nexion with the Greek idea of Kairos {jcaipoi) 
 in literature and art. No other nation has 
 distinguished so subtly the different forms 
 under which time can be logically conceived. 
 Chronos {ypovoi) is time viewed in its extension, 
 as a succession of moments, the external frame- 
 work of action. Under this aspect of simple 
 duration Time achieves, it is true, a silent work 
 of its own. Man cannot ignore its revealing 
 power. He looks on and almost unconsciously 
 learns his lesson. The arts, the sciences, come 
 1 Olynth. i. 9. 2 Phil. i. 39-41.
 
 i lis HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 into being under its gradual influence. ' Time 
 as it ages teaches all things ' 1 ; ' Time alone 
 is the proof of real truth,' 2 the ' touch-stone 
 of every deed,' 3 the one ' wisest thing.' i The 
 phrases in which Aristotle describes Time as 
 agent or joint-agent in the work of progres- 
 sive discovery, 5 bear an impressive resemblance 
 to the thought and language of Bacon. Chronos, 
 however, remained on the whole too abstract, 
 too indeterminate to admit easily of personal 
 embodiment in literature or art. It was 
 otherwise with Kairos — a word which has, I 
 believe, no single or precise equivalent in any 
 
 1 Aesch. P. V. 981 : 
 
 d\\' iKdidaaxei TravO' 6 yy}pdaKwv XP° V0S - 
 - Find. 01. xi. 59-61 : 
 
 t e^eXeyx^v /jlovos 
 
 dXddeiav irr]TVfj.ov 
 
 Xpovos. 
 
 3 Simon, of Cos Fr. 175 : 
 
 ovk 'iarw fj.eii'wi' pa&avos XP° V0V ovdevbs Zpyov. 
 
 4 A saying of Thales (quoted Plut. Conv. vii Sap. 9) in 
 answer to the question ri aocpuiTarov ; — Xpovos ' to. ^.ev yap 
 evprjKei' ovtos ij5ri, rd d£ evp-qaei. Cp. Bacon Aphor. xxxii. 
 ' Sapientissima autem res tempus (ut ab antiquis dictum est) et 
 novorum casuum quotidie auctor et inventor.' 
 
 5 Arist. Nic. Eth. i. 7. 17 86i;eie 8' av . . . <? XP°" 0S T &v 
 tolovtwv euperrjs fj ovvepybs ayaObs elvcu.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 119 
 
 other language. Kairos is that immediate 
 present which is what we make it ; Time 
 charged with opportunity ; our own possession, 
 to be seized and vitalised by human energy ; 
 momentous, effectual, decisive ; Time the inert 
 transformed into purposeful activity. Not 
 only did the poet Ion compose a hymn to 
 Kairos in which he is called the youngest child 
 of Zeus — opportunity being truly thought of 
 as the latest and god-given gift — but in art the 
 rendering of Kairos is various and interesting. 
 Sometimes he is a youth pressing forward with 
 wings on his feet and back, holding a pair of 
 scales, which he inclines with a slight touch of 
 the right hand to one side. His hair is long 
 in front and bald behind ; he must be grasped, 
 if at all, by the fore-lock. In one relief, where 
 Kairos occupies the centre, Regret (Merdvoca) 
 is represented as a shrinking and dejected 
 form who stands beside an old man, symbol- 
 ising the sadness felt over the lost moment 
 that cannot be recalled. In the palaestra — 
 and here he is most at home — Kairos appears 
 in the guise of a Hermes, an athlete god. It
 
 120 HARVARD LECTURES III 
 
 is Kairos who seizes the lucky moment in the 
 wrestling bout ; Kairos who with his chariot- 
 wheels closely grazes the goal ; Kairos to 
 whom men offered sacrifice as they entered the 
 stadium. Kairos is the god of the man with 
 a mind swift but sure in decision, and with 
 a body trained to be the mind's obedient 
 servant. The sense of the opportune that is 
 here suggested is as unlike as possible to what 
 is commonly known as ' opportunism ' ; it is 
 ' the triumphant flash of daring and right 
 judgment ' ; it goes with high originality and 
 initiative, and reaches even to the point of 
 genius. 
 
 Thucydides and Demosthenes had the same 
 ideal of statesmanship. Great men are those 
 in whom the power of the spirit dominates 
 matter. Their strong intelligence, free from 
 illusion, their calm and clear reflection does not 
 issue in any hesitating purpose ; it leads direct 
 to action. They know how to seize occasion ; 
 they are masters of things outward ; they go 
 boldly forth to meet the incalculable thing we 
 call fortune ; they thrust obstacles aside or
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 121 
 
 fall, if needs must be, in the attempt. It is a 
 view akin to that of tragedy, where external 
 actions and events are but the setting in which 
 character is displayed ; where, in a much more 
 complete and deeper sense, man can prove 
 himself to be not the creature, but the lord of 
 circumstances, which he moulds in the strength 
 of his spiritual energy. Just as in the region 
 of creative art the imagination impresses its 
 own form on the lifeless elements, remaking 
 them with its touch ; so too the Greek philo- 
 sopher, historian, orator, each proclaims in 
 divers ways the supremacy of spiritual over 
 material forces ; each brings some new outlying 
 territory under the domain of reason. 
 
 We have followed the working of the Greek 
 intellect as revealed not in a passive reception 
 of ideas, but in the energetic action it brings to 
 bear on all that comes within its range : it 
 correlates, interprets, unifies the facts of ex- 
 perience ; translates outward things into terms 
 of spirit, transmuting all dead material. The 
 views of Greek thinkers on Education are in 
 accord with this attitude of mind. With all
 
 122 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 their restless curiosity, their insatiable love of 
 knowledge, they had no respect for mere 
 erudition. ' Wealth of thought, not wealth 
 of learning ' was the thing they coveted : — 
 7ro\vvotr)v, ov TrokvfxaOiriv acrtcelv XPV> ^ s the 
 striking saying of Democritus. 1 Heraclitus, 
 Plato, Aristotle, all speak in similar depreciatory 
 terms of mere ' polymaths ' — men of multifarious 
 learning, untouched by the quickening force of 
 reason. Extensive reading, the acquisition of 
 facts, the storing of them in the memory — all 
 this is possible without any discipline or 
 enlargement of mind. In order that learning 
 may become wisdom two conditions must be 
 satisfied. First, the facts must be assimilated 
 and interpreted ; the formative power of thought 
 must work upon the material of knowledge. 
 And, secondly, learning must be humanised. 
 True learning is bound up with human fellow- 
 ship. It is a partnership in which there is 
 give and take, a joint search and joint discovery. 
 To the Greeks the subject taught seemed of 
 
 1 Democr. ap. Stob. iii. 4. 81. Cp. lb. ttoWoI noXv/xadeei 
 voov ovk 'exovcn.
 
 in THE GREEK' LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 123 
 
 less importance than the man who taught it. 
 The teacher's office was to show the right 
 method of learning. He himself is a learner, 
 who in and through learning becomes a teacher. 
 Just as Greek poetry, more than that of any 
 other nation, is the expression of the people's 
 collective life, so Greek learning draws its 
 inspiration not so much from solitary study as 
 from noble companionship and ideal human 
 intercourse. Education, as the Greeks con- 
 ceived it, was based on broad and deep 
 sympathy — sympathy of intellect and character, 
 and sympathy of aim. The Pythagorean 
 motto Koiva ra tcov (fiiXcov, ' Friends have all 
 things in common,' might have been written 
 over every Greek class-room. The love of 
 truth, the spirit of joint investigation, the 
 ' following of the argument whithersoever it 
 leads ' — this was the bond of union, the prized 
 possession of the brotherhood of learning. 
 
 There is one salient difference between 
 education as understood by the Greeks and 
 the popular idea of education in our own day. 
 To the Greeks education was primarily a train-
 
 124 HARVARD LECTURES m 
 
 ing of faculty that should fit men for the 
 exercise of thought and the duties of citizen- 
 ship. The modern world looks rather to the 
 acquisition of some skill or knowledge that is 
 needed for a career ; it thinks more of the 
 product than of the process. Acquaintance 
 with facts counts more with the modern ; 
 mental completeness and grasp are primary 
 with the Greek. But that mental completeness 
 was not to be won through intellectual dis- 
 cipline alone ; it meant also a discipline and 
 moulding of character, a training in public 
 spirit, a suppression of the individual, a devotion 
 to civic ends. The Greek Paideia (irai^e'ia) in 
 its full sense involves the union of intellectual 
 and moral qualities. It is on the one hand 
 mental illumination, an enlarged outlook on 
 life ; but it also implies a refinement and 
 delicacy of feeling, a deepening of the sympa- 
 thetic emotions, a scorn of what is self-seeking, 
 ignoble, dishonourable — a scorn bred of loving 
 familiarity with poets and philosophers, with 
 all that is fortifying in thought or elevating in 
 imagination. Our nearest equivalent for this
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 125 
 
 generous and many-sided training is Culture ; 
 but unfortunately the word has acquired a 
 tinge of meaning that is alien to the Greek 
 Paideia. Culture to many minds suggests 
 a kind of polish, a superficial refinement. 
 Besides, it has about it an air of exclusiveness ; 
 it is thought of as the privilege of a favoured 
 few. The man of learning in modern times is 
 too apt to remain in seclusion ; he seems to be 
 shut up within a charmed circle, in possession 
 of a secret hidden from the many ; and the 
 impression not unfrequently left on outsiders 
 by the life of learned isolation is conveyed in 
 the remark of a French writer, that ' every man 
 of learning is more or less of a corpse.' Now 
 Greek culture in its ideal form is a connecting 
 link between learning and citizenship ; it is a 
 meeting-point of virtue and knowledge, an out- 
 come of character, an attitude of the whole 
 mind towards life. The intellectual elite are 
 not estranged from the life of the community. 
 Learning is thus humanised ; instead of a dead 
 weight of erudition it becomes a living force, a 
 civilising and liberating power. We have here
 
 126 HARVARD LECTURES III 
 
 the spirit of a University in its true conception. 
 One chief function of academic training should 
 be to foster this broad view of learning ; and, 
 in so doing, incidentally to disprove the saying : 
 ' Gentlemen are untaught by the World what 
 they have been taught by the College.' l 
 
 A tincture of Greek is, fortunately, no 
 longer regarded as a hall-mark of good breed- 
 ing, or a sign that one has acquired at College 
 a few gentlemanly vices. And the popular 
 mind has, therefore, jumped to the conclusion 
 that Greek has ceased to have any value ex- 
 cept to furnish barbarous compounds for the 
 advertisement of a new umbrella or of a quack- 
 medicine. The call to burn our unlawful books 
 of Greek is heard from many sides. But those 
 who care for the deeper principles of education 
 will never cease to go back to what the Greeks 
 have said or hinted on this theme. All great 
 teachers have been Greek in spirit. Educa- 
 tion, in the Greek view, is the antithesis of any 
 mere specialism, and that in two senses. It 
 emancipates us from the narrowing influence 
 
 1 Berkeley, Minute Phil. Dial. v. 24.
 
 in THE GREEK LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE 127 
 
 of a trade or a purely professional calling, and 
 lifts us into the higher air of liberal studies. 
 But also, even within the domain of learning, 
 we are reminded that expert knowledge may 
 itself become a contraction of the intellect ; 
 and that the thoroughness of the craftsman, 
 the minute work of the investigator, must not 
 lead the teacher to miss the larger relations of 
 his subject, and lose sight of the whole. Nor 
 can we forget that the man himself is behind 
 what he says or writes. Plato observes that 
 for the higher forms of literary composition the 
 name of writer or author is an inadequate 
 description : the title is well enough for one 
 who has nothing in him greater than the 
 phrases he puts on paper (top fir) eyovra 
 TLfiicorepa 6)v crvvedrjKev 77 eypaijrev). And a 
 similar remark may be made about the teacher. 
 As Life is something beyond Literature, so 
 Personality is something beyond Learning. 
 The teacher who leaves an impress on other 
 minds is greater than his own knowledge, 
 greater than the information he conveys. This 
 1 Tlat. Phaedr. 278 d-e.
 
 128 HARVARD LECTURES in 
 
 is true of all teachers who have in any degree 
 succeeded in making their appeal to that 
 mighty and half-utilised force — the idealistic 
 impulses of youth ; and from this point of 
 view Teaching — as I believe some one has said 
 — while it is the vilest of trades becomes the 
 noblest of professions.
 
 IV 
 
 ART AND INSPIRATION IN GREEK 
 POETRY 
 
 GREEK literature is the one entirely original 
 
 literature of Europe. With no models before 
 
 their eyes to provoke imitation or rivalry, the 
 
 Greeks created almost every form of literary 
 
 art — the epic, the lyric, the elegy, the drama, 
 
 the dialogue, the idyll, the romantic novel, 
 
 history, and oratory ; and the permanence of 
 
 the types so created shows that they rest on 
 
 no arbitrary rules or on the mannerisms of a 
 
 people, but answer to certain artistic laws of 
 
 the human mind. We who see for the most 
 
 part only the perfected forms, are apt to 
 
 forget what varied and repeated experiments, 
 
 what frequent failures, must have gone to the 
 
 making of each of these types. In the Poetics 
 129 K
 
 130 HARVARD LECTURES IV 
 
 Aristotle notes the gradual and tentative pro- 
 cess by which special metres proved them- 
 selves adapted to the several kinds of poetry — 
 the iambic to tragedy, the hexameter to epic 
 song. They are instances, as we should say, 
 of the survival of the fittest : airo Trj<; 7reipa<i 
 Tjp/jLoicev 1 — that is Aristotle's phrase. The 
 process here indicated was a familiar idea to 
 the Greeks. Popular observation summed it 
 up in the simple proverbial form, irelpa aptarov, 
 1 nothing like experiment.' It is the sentiment 
 which Herodotus puts into the mouth of 
 Mardonius : ' Nothing comes of its own accord 
 to men, but all things by experiment' 2 On 
 the same principle tragedy itself, as Aristotle 
 remarks, ' having passed through many changes 
 found its natural form, and there it stopped.' 3 
 Man's selective instinct, working tentatively, 
 
 1 Arist. Poet, xxiv. 5 to de jxirpov to ripwucbv awb ttjs Trelpas 
 jjpfAOKev. Cp. iv. 9 ev oh ml to apfxttTTOv [i'a/x^etoc] rfkde 
 fxerpou. 
 
 2 Herod, vii, 9 avTdfxaTov yap ovdtv, dXX' awb welp-qs wolvtu 
 avOpdmoLai (piXiei yeveaOau 
 
 3 Arist. Poet. iv. 12 7ro\\&s /ueT<x/3o\as /uera/3a\o0<ra 17 
 Tpaywdia iwavaaTO, (wei &rx e T V V o-vttjs (pijffiv.
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 131 
 
 brought the process of development to its 
 proper term. 
 
 When once any particular type was created, 
 it assumed its sharp Hellenic outline. No 
 blurred image, no confusion of kinds was per- 
 missible. Any deviation from the type fell 
 within well-defined limits. Each branch of 
 literature obeyed a stringent code of its own. 
 Its governing traditions answered to an artistic 
 sense that art to be progressive must also be 
 conservative. It must maintain a spirit of 
 reverent regard for the past. Old material 
 must be used up : new ideas, whether of native 
 origin or due to the absorption of foreign 
 influences, must be slowly assimilated. If in 
 political history we meet with revolutionary 
 violence, in literary as in artistic development 
 there is growth and orderly advance. The 
 whole effort of Greek literature is to evolve 
 itself in unbroken sequence, without the rude 
 snapping of any links which bind the present 
 to the past, with no premature rejection of 
 existing elements. 
 
 Yet the persistent force of tradition did not
 
 132 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 check the free play of individual genius. With 
 the observance of a strict artistic code and the 
 accepted conventions of a school, the literary 
 art was not hardened into mere formalism. The 
 more rigorous the rules, the greater the triumph 
 of genius in obeying them without effort. In 
 tragedy the poets at first ranged at will over the 
 whole field of legendary story. 1 The domain 
 of the drama was by degrees restricted. 
 But the narrower limits within which freedom 
 was henceforth possible stimulated rather than 
 checked dramatic originality. The inventive 
 faculty found ample scope in re-interpreting 
 the known cycle of legends with subtle and 
 significant divergence in detail. ' Great and 
 precious origination,' says George Eliot, ' can 
 only exist on condition of a wide massive 
 uniformity. When a multitude of men have 
 learned to use the same language in speech and 
 writing, then and then only can the greatest 
 matters of language arise. For in what does 
 their mastery consist ? They use words which 
 are already a familiar medium of understand- 
 
 1 Arist. Poet, xiii. 15.
 
 iv ART AND LXSPl RATION 133 
 
 ing and sympathy in such a way as greatly 
 to enlarge the understanding and sympathy.' 
 This that is said in the first instance of style, is 
 in its measure also true of the handling of the 
 subject-matter. The creative act of genius does 
 not consist in bringing something out of nothing, 
 but in taking possession of material that exists, 
 in appropriating it, interpreting it anew. The 
 original force of the Greek poet stamps all rude 
 material with the mark of the race — ' made in 
 Greece.' 
 
 The treatment of the Chorus in the drama is 
 perhaps the most signal instance of the power 
 of the poet to turn to account a consecrated 
 tradition. Here was an undramatic element, 
 that was yet an indispensable part of every 
 play — a religious survival from an early stage 
 of the undeveloped art. The chorus was a 
 collective personage, with a character shifting 
 and ill-defined, an awkward presence on the 
 stage and often out of keeping with the poetic 
 illusion. In Aeschylus it is generally what Aris- 
 totle in the Poetics (ch. xviii. 7) says the chorus 
 ought to be — ' one of the actors ' ; in Sophocles
 
 134 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 more often it fulfils the function assigned to it 
 in Aristotle's Problems (xix. 48) ; it is a icr)8evTr)<; 
 airpa/cTos, one who does not act but who is in 
 intimate or friendly relation with some of the 
 actors ; an interested spectator or a kindly 
 sympathiser. 1 Who would have thought that 
 an element apparently so inartistic could have 
 been anything but a mere encumbrance, a 
 clog on the action — as indeed it became in 
 Euripides — a structural flaw in the composi- 
 tion ? 
 
 Yet this ambiguous personage plays a great 
 part. It forms a connecting link between 
 the actors and the audience. Whatever its 
 sympathies may have been in the piece, it 
 generally manages in the end to place itself in 
 the attitude of an impartial witness. In comedy 
 it pronounces the verdict on the ayeov — that 
 pitched battle between the combatants — which 
 is distinctive of this branch of the drama. In 
 tragedy it seldom fails to utter the last word. 
 At certain moments of the play it provides a 
 contemplative pause, an interlude for moralising 
 
 1 eilvoiav yap fxbvov irapix^Tai oh irapeaTiv.
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION 135 
 
 reflection. In Aeschylus, it becomes the vehicle 
 of the poet's profoundest theological thought ; 
 in Sophocles, more frequently it interprets the 
 course of the action and sums up the emotions 
 awakened in the spectator's mind. In either 
 case, the choral odes, apart altogether from their 
 intrinsic beauty as forms of lyrical and musical 
 utterance, gather up for us the lessons of life 
 and clarify our human experience. Those great 
 and eternal commonplaces in which Greek 
 poetry delights, with their measured cadence, 
 their serene and condensed wisdom, have a 
 strange power of solemnising and subduing the 
 emotions. They come home to us in all the 
 fulness of their original meaning, as familiar 
 truths fraught with new significance. The 
 tension of overwrought feeling is relaxed when 
 the fret and stir of the moment, and the accidents 
 of the individual existence, are placed in the 
 larger perspective of some universal law. In 
 almost every branch of literature we have 
 similar achievements. The great writers, by 
 the very force of their individuality, accept 
 with ease much that is conventional, while they
 
 136 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 reject what is merely artificial. 1 The more 
 closely we examine the masterpieces of Greek 
 literature, the greater appears to be the place 
 occupied by artistic tradition and convention. 
 Thus Greece presents a phenomenon unique in 
 literary history — namely, the creation of fixed 
 types, governed by a rigid code of rules, yet 
 working in harmony with the spontaneous play 
 of native faculty. 
 
 This continuity of movement in art and 
 literature involved some self-suppression on the 
 part of the individual. While the collective 
 
 1 The history of sculpture affords many analogous examples. 
 See the remarks on the Metopes and Frieze of the Parthenon 
 in a recent volume, Greek Sculpture, by E. von Mach, Boston 
 (Ginn and Co.), 1903, p. 216 ff. ; compare also pp. 156-160. 
 Similarly in vase-painting, the restrictions of space and the 
 conditions of decorative art force the artist to recognise that the 
 human body is not a human body only, but also a thing that is 
 capable of being rendered as a beautiful pattern. The figures, 
 therefore, are not thrown vaguely into a given space, but are 
 closely tied up and related to the parts they do not fill. And 
 the notable result is that these figures, by mutual adaptations 
 and concessions, gain a heightened beauty through forming 
 part of a decorative design. The feet of the dancing Maenads on 
 Hieron's cup is a case in point. It is, of course, only the great 
 masters who can so employ the limitations imposed. Lesser 
 artists cramp their figures in obedience to physical necessity.
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION 137 
 
 personality of the race is indelibly stamped on 
 the products of the Greek mind — on their art 
 and literature, even on their science — the 
 personality of the individual, though seldom to 
 be mistaken in the realm, at least, of imaginative 
 creation, does not appear in an obtrusive form. 
 The plastic clearness of outline which is 
 characteristic of the classical Greek manner is 
 mainly due to two causes : — on the one hand, 
 to the omission of accidental detail, on the other 
 to the absence of a disturbing atmosphere. In 
 the romantic handling of a theme the image is 
 apt to be seen through a sensitive and vibrat- 
 ing medium, through a coloured light, in the 
 1 halo ' of romance ; and the ' halo,' the atmo- 
 sphere, is often caused in part by the excited 
 personality of the writer. He catches fire from 
 his own creation, he projects his personal trouble 
 into his art, and the contagion spreads to the 
 reader. The great classical writer remains 
 more detached ; he holds the image, so to speak, 
 at arm's length. The spectacle he presents 
 impresses us by its own moving quality ; there 
 is no personal or turbid atmosphere ; no per-
 
 138 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 plexed light is interposed between our eye and 
 the object. We are still within the domain of 
 the universal reason. 
 
 Yet according to the popular view poetry 
 was a thing inspired — evOeov fj TroiTjai^: 1 it 
 was a form of frenzy, a divine possession. 
 Poetic inspiration was regarded as supernatural 
 in its origin, the poet being but the channel 
 through which the god finds utterance ; he acts 
 under a stimulus from without, which robs him 
 of his reason. This theory of direct revelation 
 is explicitly stated in prose for the first time 
 by Democritus of Abdera ; 2 it is applied by 
 him to Homer ; it remains current to the latest 
 period of Greek literature. The idea of the 
 frenzied poet strikes us as having a strangely 
 un-Greek air. It seems to accord better with 
 
 1 Arist. Rhet. iii. 7. 1408 b 19. 
 
 2 Dio Chrys. Or. liii. ad ink. 6 p.ev Arj/xoKpiTos irepl 'O/xripov 
 <py)<jiv outws' ""Oixrjpos (pvaews \ax&v dea£ov<Tr]s eweuv nbapov 
 iT€KTT)va.To iravToiuv." Clem. Strom, vi. 168 p. 827 P koX 6 
 Ar)/j.oKpiTos ofioiws {i.e. like Plato in the Ion) " ttoitjtiis oe acrcra. 
 p,£v hv ypdcp-qi. paT ev9ovaLa.ffp.ov koX lepov Trvevp-aros, /caXa 
 Kapra effriv." Cic. de divin. I. 38, 80 'negat enim sine furore 
 Democritus quemquam poetam magnum esse posse, quod idem 
 dicit Plato.'
 
 TV ART AND INSPIRATION 139 
 
 Oriental notions, or with modern speculations 
 about the subliminal self as the region out of 
 which emerge both poetry and insanity. The 
 Greek poets themselves seem to have thought of 
 their own aptitude more as the result of trained 
 skill than of abnormal inspiration. It is remark- 
 able how the word ao(f)la, ' wisdom,' ' skill,' is 
 selected by them to denote the poetic gift 
 where we should be disposed to speak of 
 genius. 1 We are not greatly surprised when 
 a poet like Bacchylides, conscious perhaps of 
 no high originality, speaks of poetry as so 
 much traditional lore : ' Poet from poet learns 
 his art both now and of old.' 2 
 
 But the case of Pindar is more striking. 
 No poet, it is true, dwells with such con- 
 viction on inborn power of genius as surpassing 
 all the efforts of art. ' Nature's gift is always 
 supreme : where the god is not, silence is 
 ever the better part of wisdom.' 3 ' He is the 
 
 1 Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, p. 17. 
 
 2 Bacchyl. Fr. 14 [13] erepos e'£ erepou crowds to re wd\ai rb 
 T€ vvv. 
 
 :i I'ind. 01. ix. 100 ff. to oe (pvq: kp&tmttov airav | . . . &vev 
 5e Oeov a(cnyap.evov | ov aKawTepov XPVt 1 ' (kclcttov.
 
 Ho HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 skilled poet to whom nature has taught much.' * 
 Proudly he avows his own originality, his 
 daring novelty of treatment : ' To many have 
 I shown the ways of song.' 2 Yet he also 
 exalts to the utmost the influence of art. His 
 poetry is a subtle science, which obeys laws of 
 its own, fixed rules or ordinances, 3 transmitted 
 by the masters of the craft. And modern 
 research has brought into marked prominence 
 the long development of the lyrical art, and 
 the fashioning of a special vocabulary ; it has 
 analysed the elaborate structure of a Pindaric 
 ode, and shown not only the trained skill 
 implied in the poetic handling of the myths, 
 but the science needed to combine the complex 
 resources of metre and music, and adapt them 
 to the intricate choral dance. Truly, as Pindar 
 says, ' the heights of art are steep ' ; 4 and 
 although mere training cannot scale them 
 without the inborn gift, yet nowhere more 
 
 1 01. ii. 86 crorpbs 6 7roA\<x eidws <pva : i.e. the true cro<pia is 
 
 (plKTLS. 
 
 2 Pyth. iv. 247 TroWolcn 5' rjyt]fxai <ro<pias erepotx. 
 
 3 Cp. 01. vii. 88 vnuov Ted/j.bs '0\v/u.ttioi>Lkos. 
 
 4 01. ix. 115 crcxpiai. /mev aiTreivai.
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION 141 
 
 surely than in Greek lyric song did nature need 
 the assistance of art. 1 
 
 The popular theory of poetry as a divine 
 possession perhaps owed its origin to the fact 
 that direct revelation, in its most familiar form 
 of mantic or oracular utterances, was conveyed 
 in metrical language. The mystery of the poetic 
 gift could best be accounted for by suppos- 
 ing that the poet was the inspired interpreter 
 of the Muse as the Pythian priestess was of 
 the Delphic deity. Pindar himself appropriates 
 the mythological phrases : ' Utter thy oracles, 
 O Muse, and I will be thy mouthpiece.' 2 It 
 was but a coarse form of the inspiration theory 
 which credited Aeschylus with composing his 
 tragedies in a state of intoxication. 3 In con- 
 nexion with this bit of literary gossip Athenaeus 
 records the saying attributed to Sophocles : 
 ' You, Aeschylus, do the right thing, but 
 without knowing why.' 4 It is just this ' ov/c 
 
 1 On Pindar as an artist cp. R. C. Jebb, Growth ana 
 In /I ariice of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 160 ff. 
 
 2 Find. Fr. 127 [118] fiavreueo ^lolaa, irpocparevcru 0' iyu>. 
 
 3 Athen. i. 39 p. 22 a and x. 33 p. 428 f. 
 
 4 el ko.I t& otovTa 7roteis d\\' ovk ei'Siis -ye.
 
 I 4 2 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 el&cos ' — the ' not knowing ' — that Plato 
 accentuates in various passages, in which, 
 adopting the current theory of inspiration, he 
 speaks in severe disparagement of poetry. 
 ' The poet,' he says, 1 ' when he sits down on 
 the tripod of the Muses is not in his right 
 mind. Like a fountain he allows the stream 
 of thought to flow freely, and, his art being 
 imitative, he is often compelled to represent 
 men under opposite circumstances, and thus to 
 say two different things ; neither could he tell 
 whether there is any truth in either of them or 
 in one more than in the other.' So in the 
 Apology; when Socrates goes to the poets and 
 asks them the meaning of their own works, he 
 finds them the most incompetent of all critics ; 
 they can give no rational account of what they 
 have written. ' They showed me in an instant 
 that not by wisdom do men write poetry but 
 by a sort of genius and inspiration ; they are 
 like diviners and soothsayers who say many 
 fine things, but do not understand the meaning 
 
 1 Plat. Laws iv. p. 719 C. 
 2 Apol. p. 22 A,
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION 143 
 
 of them.' The poet, then, even when he 
 speaks inspired truth l has no clear knowledge 
 of the grounds of his beliefs ; he may also 
 speak inspired falsehood. At the best he 
 attains to right opinion, which, however, falls 
 far short of knowledge. 
 
 The popular conception of the poet as an 
 inspired madman, destitute of art, who can 
 compose nothing so long as he is in his senses, 
 leads Plato to a slighting appreciation of the 
 poetic gift. But there is another side to the 
 case, and this is developed by him in the 
 Phaedrus. If the popular point of view merely 
 brings the poet and the philosopher into sharp 
 antithesis, the kinship between them is marked 
 by another and nobler view of poetry as a 
 revelation to sense of eternal ideas. Poet and 
 philosopher, each alike is lifted out of himself. 
 In this state of ' ecstasy,' when the soul is 
 possessed by a passionate yearning after truth — 
 a divine enthusiasm — it recalls the celestial 
 world whence it came and catches a glimpse 
 of the invisible or ideal beauty, of which the 
 1 Cp. Laws iii. p. 682 A.
 
 i 4 4 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 Eleusinian mysteries are a faint type. For the 
 poet, as for the philosopher, the highest inspira- 
 tion comes from the spiritual insight gained 
 in this moment of rapture. The faculty of 
 reminiscence which makes this beatific vision 
 possible is for Plato the common principle of 
 philosophy and poetry. The poet is possessed 
 by an imaginative enthusiasm that is akin to 
 the speculative enthusiasm of the philosopher. 
 
 Poetry is thus a stage in the upward 
 progress of the soul ; it is the servant of 
 philosophy whose truths it dimly shadows 
 forth. When fully perfected it is absorbed in 
 a philosophy which through the manifold 
 things of sense ascends to that highest sphere, 
 where truth and beauty are one with virtue. 
 In the PJiaedrns and the Symposium Plato 
 passes beyond the poetry of his own age and 
 prefigures an art which has been realised, if at 
 all, in Dante, in whom the speculations of 
 philosophy, the visions of the poetic imagina- 
 tion, and a devotion to beauty and goodness, 
 are blended together in one mystical passion. 
 It is a world whose secrets can be unlocked
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION I45 
 
 only by those who like Plato and Dante are at 
 once poets and prophets. 
 
 Plato's account of inspiration agrees in 
 essentials with modern ideas. The metaphors 
 in which he clothes his thought in the Phacdrus 
 must not be allowed to disguise his true mean- 
 ing. With him the inspiration of genius, 
 whether poetic or philosophic, is not a direct 
 revelation, operating as an influence from with- 
 out, but one of the modes in which the soul 
 puts forth certain divine powers inherent in her 
 nature. These natural gifts, however, are 
 quickened and kindled to higher activity. A 
 new and rapturous energy springs up, inexpli- 
 cable, unfamiliar, breaking in upon the monotony 
 of common life. It achieves in a moment of 
 insight what no effort of conscious thought can 
 accomplish. The reason is not overpowered or 
 the personality lost ; but the man's self is raised 
 above the normal level. It is no longer the 
 self of the working-day existence ; nor again is 
 it an alien self ; it is the true and highest self 
 in which the lower one is merged. Poetic in- 
 spiration even on this lofty view of it, docs not 
 
 L
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 dispense with conscious art ; for the inspired 
 moment often is but the sudden consummation 
 of a long period of mental travail ; and, more- 
 over, even after the creative idea has flashed 
 upon the mind, a conscious and shaping process 
 is needed to give it complete embodiment. 
 On the other hand, no one can be admitted 
 into the higher ranks of poetry who is devoid 
 of the inspired faculty. The more or less, how- 
 ever, in the matter of inspiration is a difference 
 of degree which almost amounts to a difference 
 of kind ; and we commonly apply the term in- 
 spired only to those in whom the impression of 
 spontaneous genius overmasters the impression 
 of art. 
 
 Aristotle incidentally notes the difference 
 between the two orders of poets : ' Poetry im- 
 plies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of 
 madness. In the one case a man can take the 
 mould of any character, in the other he is lifted 
 out of his proper self : The poet of the first 
 
 1 Poet. xvii. 2 810 eixpvovs rj ttoitjtikti ccttlv f) fiavLKov- 
 TovTuv yap ol /x£v einrXaaroL ol 8£ iKffTariKoi eiaiv. All MSS. 
 but one have i^erao-TiKol : but see S. II. Butcher, Aristotle's 
 Theory of Toe try and Fine Art, third ed.
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRA TION 147 
 
 class is a man of flexible genius, with keen and 
 versatile intelligence, with a delicate power of 
 seeing resemblances. 1 He is quick to receive the 
 impress of another personality, and to enter 
 dramatically into another's feelings. Contrasted 
 with him is the poet who is touched with a fine 
 frenzy, possessed by an inspiration or enthusiasm 
 in virtue of which he is ' ecstatic ' ; he is readily 
 lifted out of himself and loses his own personality. 
 The ev(pv)js here is marked off from the fxavcKu^ 
 by a more conscious critical faculty. As 
 examples of the two contrasted types, one might 
 suggest Sophocles and Aeschylus, Bacchylides 
 and Pindar, Dryden and Marlowe, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, M. Arnold and Blake. The contrast 
 drawn by Aristotle is not expressed in such pre- 
 cise form in any previous writer, but the distinc- 
 tion was constantly present to the mind of 
 Plato ; it is developed and illustrated from many 
 points of view in the treatise On the Sublime ; 
 and indeed the idea is at the very basis of that 
 
 1 Cp. Poet. xxii. 9 where command of metaphor (rb 
 lxtTa<j>opiKbv elvai) is ev<pvia$ ffrj/xelov ; and the making of good 
 metaphors is rb rb S/jloiov Oeuipilv.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 treatise. The supreme excellence which the 
 author means to convey by the term v^os, 
 including not only sublimity in our sense, but 
 elevation of tone, a glow of imagination, a 
 grandeur of style, is the distinguishing mark of 
 the inspired writer. He is raised into a higher 
 plane under the influence of noble emotion, and 
 produces on his hearers the effect not of per- 
 suasion but of ' transport ' (eWTaert?). 1 
 
 The examples given are not only passages 
 in the poets, such as the prayer of Ajax in the 
 Iliad — iv 8e (pciec koX o\eacrov, ' Destroy us 
 but destroy us in the light,' or Sappho's great 
 ode (paiverai /jloi Krjvos, but passages from Demo- 
 sthenes, such as that containing the famous 
 oath in the speech On the Croivn — fxa tov? ev 
 yiapaOwvc 7rpofciv8vv€v<ravTa<;, — -and the words 
 of the Book of Genesis, ' God said, Let there 
 be light : and there was light.' Demosthenes 
 is cited as the master of such emotional 
 effects. He may lack the fluent ease, the 
 
 1 Longinus De Sub!, c. i. 4 ov yap els TreiGui tovs aKpowixtuovs 
 dXX' eh 'iKffTacnv dyei. ra imep<pva. Cp. iii. 5 ^earrjKOTes Tpbs 
 
 QVK e^e(TT7]K6TaS.
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 149 
 
 urbane and piquant charm of Hypereides, but 
 his 'heaven-sent gifts' {OeoTre^irra Stopi'mara) 
 leave him supreme above all rivals : ' he silences 
 by his thunders and blinds by his lightnings 
 the orators of every age. One could sooner 
 face with unflinching eyes a descending thunder- 
 bolt than meet with steady gaze his bursts 
 of passion in their swift succession.' 1 Yet the 
 final lesson to be gathered from the eloquence 
 of Demosthenes is, as Longinus observes, that 
 ' even in the revels of the imagination sobriety 
 is required.' 2 Here we have the true Hellenic 
 note. Speeches which are alive with the 
 fire of passion have been laboriously prepared 
 in the closet. We never lose the impression of 
 severe and disciplined strength. In his highest 
 outbursts of eloquence Demosthenes still owns 
 the sway of reason. ' It is not possible with 
 him, as with lesser orators, to map out a 
 speech into parts and say here is an appeal to 
 feeling ; here is pure reasoning ; for thought is 
 
 1 De Subl. c. xxxiv. 4 uawepel Karafipovrqi kcll Karacp^yyet 
 tovs air' aiwvos p-qropas k.t.X. (Trans. H. L. Havell, Macmillan 
 and Co. ) 
 
 2 lb. c. xvi. 4 did&ffKwv on ko.v fia.Kyt.v(x.a.oi vrj<p€iv avaynouov.
 
 150 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 everywhere interpenetrated with feeling ; reason 
 is itself passionate. What fuses all into unity 
 is the force of an intense personality, which 
 cannot convince the intellect without kindling 
 the emotions.' l The eloquence of Demosthenes 
 is the eloquence of impassioned reason. The 
 inspired orator is also the cool thinker and the 
 consummate artist. A somewhat analogous fact 
 meets us in the Sophoclean drama. In the 
 very height of tragic suffering the actors are 
 masters of themselves ; their vision is undis- 
 turbed, their judgment unclouded. They 
 reason and reflect on what they have done. 
 They place themselves in the attitude of 
 criticism. Out of the depth of their anguish 
 they seem to gain a heightened intellectual 
 force, a more penetrating insight. When we 
 are dealing with Greek literature we must be- 
 ware not to separate too sharply thought and 
 emotion, reason and inspiration. 
 
 Aristotle's distinction between the inspired 
 poet and the finely gifted artist admits of rarer, 
 or at least less striking, illustration from Greek 
 
 1 S. H. Butcher, Demosthenes, p. 159.
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 15 1 
 
 than from modern literature. The imaginative 
 creations of the modern world seldom unite in 
 anything like equal proportions the twofold 
 elements of art and inspiration. In Greek 
 poetry these qualities are not often present in so 
 disparate a form as to affect the general sense 
 of harmony. Sometimes indeed the impression 
 of inspired faculty, of original genius, in Greek 
 poetry is a little obscured by the other impres- 
 sion of poetic art obeying the strict rules of a 
 code. We take account of the conventional 
 elements ; we note also the narrow range of, 
 poetic subject-matter ; and we are in danger 
 of forgetting that genius often lies in creating 
 much out of little ; that it wins its most signal 
 triumphs from the very limitations within 
 which it works. Again, the Greek perfection 
 of form may itself lead moderns, who are imbued 
 with the spirit of romantic literature, to under- 
 rate the original power which underlies such 
 art. Genius, poetic inspiration, at once 
 suggests — and truly suggests — to our minds 
 a welling up of thought and feeling, an effort- 
 less and spontaneous energy, a sudden inrush
 
 i52 harvard lectures 
 
 of new emotion as the creative idea rises into 
 consciousness. Aeschylus, we readily say, is 
 an inspired poet, one who thinks in images, 
 who sees intuitively where another reasons. 
 We recognise in him the fervour of the prophet, 
 whose words, instinct with passion, struggle to 
 express thoughts which transcend the expressive 
 capacity of speech. No wonder that the 
 utterance is often rugged and inartistic. We 
 are fain to believe that we see the workings of 
 a hidden self, whose processes are higher than 
 those of our normal intelligence, and whose swift 
 insight discerns the way to its artistic result 
 without employing the common logical links of 
 thought. The saying ascribed to Sophocles, 
 which has been already quoted, returns to our 
 mind : — ' You do the right thing, but you do 
 it without knowing why.' 
 
 Yet this is a one-sided judgment. Aeschylus 
 the inspired thinker is at the same time a great 
 artist. And, similarly, Sophocles the conscious 
 artist is none the less an inspired poet. If 
 there is more of grandeur and mystery, a larger 
 output of imaginative ideas in Aeschylus, there
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 153 
 
 is more of a beauty which is itself an inspiration 
 in Sophocles. It is a beauty of the distinctively 
 Greek order, which results not from any sum of 
 effects but from a harmony of effects, from a 
 network of delicate relationships, from the 
 subordination of the parts, and their convergence 
 on a single end. It is a quiet unobtrusive 
 beauty, in which the total impression is one of 
 simplicity so perfect that it must needs be the 
 product of consummate art. But a modern 
 reader on first acquaintance with a play of 
 Sophocles may well fail to realise that the 
 constructive power which is capable of fashion- 
 ing such a whole itself implies inspired insight, 
 imaginative vision of the highest order. We 
 are perhaps inclined to rate too low the genius 
 which is displayed in the general structure of 
 an artistic work ; we set it down merely as the 
 hard-won result of labour, and we find inspira- 
 tion only in isolated splendours, in the lightning 
 flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic 
 imagery. The study of Greek literature leads 
 us not indeed to undervalue these manifestations 
 of genius, but to view all partial beauties in
 
 154 HARVARD LECTURES lv 
 
 their relation to the whole. The supreme result 
 which Greek thought and imagination achieve 
 by their harmonious co-operation is the organic 
 union of the parts. In the East the poetical 
 way of seeing things is that of direct intuition. 
 The East knows nothing of the dialectical 
 workings of the mind. The service Greece 
 rendered lay in establishing the balance between 
 these faculties. The emotional and intellectual 
 fields are no longer kept apart. Reason and 
 intuition enter on a new alliance. Greek artists 
 and poets have not indeed, like Mozart or 
 Wordsworth, left us any psychological account 
 of the processes of their own creative activity ; 
 and indeed the detailed working of these pro- 
 cesses is generally hidden from the man of 
 genius himself. In any case, it would be a 
 bold critic who would attempt to define in any 
 great imaginative composition the part played 
 by an instinctive or emotional element on the 
 one hand, and by logical thought on the other. 
 But though we cannot say precisely how the 
 synthesis is effected in the mind of the creative 
 artist, we may safely apply a critical analysis to
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 155 
 
 the completed work of art. It matters not 
 whether some idea, to which the critic has been 
 guided only by a chain of reasoning, was flashed 
 instantaneously on the artistic vision. The in- 
 terest of the analysis in the case of Greek art and 
 literature is this — that the parts are discovered 
 to be bound together by an inward, and 
 assuredly not an unconscious, logic. Especially 
 in architecture and the drama we can trace the 
 subordination of ideas. There is no room here 
 for caprice or happy accident. The elements 
 of thought and feeling, of reason and imagi- 
 nation have been fused together not in any 
 dim-lit region of sub-conscious thought. The 
 unified and artistic whole has been born in the 
 upper air ; it follows the laws of the universal 
 reason. ' There is not a single effect which 
 if not reasoned is not at least reasonable.' 1 
 Moderns are prone to believe that the action 
 of poetic genius is purely instinctive or intuitive, 
 and that genius abdicates its rights and descends 
 to the lower level of talent when it begins to 
 reason. Greek literature decisively refutes such 
 
 1 Le Parthenon, E. Boutmy, p. 201.
 
 156 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 a notion. It exhibits the critical faculty as 
 a great underlying element in creative power. 
 The analytic spirit of Aristotle's Poetics is not 
 to be explained solely by a certain prosaic 
 vein in the mind of the philosopher. It is 
 distinctive of a race whose highest flights of 
 imagination are controlled by reasoned principles 
 of art, and whose creative work cannot be dis- 
 joined from the dialectic effort of thought. 
 
 The union of contrasted qualities which we 
 have been considering in the special field of 
 imaginative production is but one example of a 
 characteristic, which more eminently perhaps 
 than any other, constitutes the originality of 
 Greece. We trace it in Greek life as well as in 
 Greek literature, in the impressive personalities 
 who stand out not only as actors in Greek 
 history, but also as writers and thinkers. In 
 the history of Rome the man is often sunk in 
 the Roman ; his features are in low relief ; we 
 are led to forget the individual in the type. In 
 Greece great personalities, with an ineffaceable 
 stamp of their own, are far more numerous — 
 men not only great in the things which they
 
 iv A R T AND INS PI R A TION 157 
 
 accomplished, but interesting in themselves, in 
 endowments of mind and force of character, in 
 the union of many outwardly discordant gifts 
 — idiosyncrasies, it may be, but the idiosyn- 
 crasies of genius. Illustrations might be drawn 
 from all branches of Greek literature and from 
 all periods ; I will confine myself to a rapid 
 glance at that early period, the sixth to the 
 fifth century B.C., before poetry was severed 
 from philosophy or philosophy from science ; 
 when thought and action were not yet divorced ; 
 when specialised knowledge and pursuits had 
 not limited, and in limiting, also obscured the 
 wonderful variety of powers residing in the 
 gifted individual of the Hellenic race. 1 
 
 We recall first Thales of Miletus, in the 
 beginning of the sixth century B.C., the earliest 
 of Greek philosophers, a man of science, a mathe- 
 matician, one of the founders of the deductive 
 Greek geometry, an astronomer who predicted the 
 total eclipse of the sun which occurred in the war 
 
 1 The philosophers, whose names are here selected for pur- 
 poses of illustration, are, among others, brilliantly handled by 
 Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol i. (Trans.).
 
 158 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 between Lydia and Media on May 28, 585 B.C. 
 — a memorable prediction, the first of the kind 
 recorded in European history x — one whom 
 tradition remembered as the typical philosopher 
 who tumbled into a well while gazing at the 
 stars. 2 But he was also a traveller, a shrewd 
 man of business, who turning to account his 
 meteorological researches is said to have made 
 the first ' corner ' in oil ; 3 a politician, more- 
 over, of singular insight, who, if we may 
 believe Herodotus, advised his Ionian fellow- 
 countrymen to form a federal state with its 
 capital at Teos as a protection against 
 Persia. 4 
 
 Or, again, take Xenophanes of Colophon 
 (flor. circ. 545 B.C.), the founder of the Eleatic 
 school of philosophy, who at the age of twenty- 
 five was driven from his Ionian home by the 
 Persian invasion, and for nearly threescore 
 years, by the testimony of his own verses, 
 ' tossed his troubled thoughts up and down 
 
 1 Herod, i. 74 ; Clem. Strom, i. 65 p. 354 P. 
 
 2 Plat. Theaet. 174 A. 
 
 3 Arist. Pol. i. 11. 1259 a 6 ; Diog. Laert. i. 26. 
 
 4 Herod, i. 170.
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRATION 159 
 
 Hellas'; 1 a rhapsoclist and a wandering philo- 
 sopher, attended by a slave who carried his 
 cithara. In the course of his travels he made 
 valuable scientific observations. He was the 
 first who pointed to the fossil remains of plants 
 and animals as proofs of the great changes that 
 the earth must have undergone in the remote 
 past. He broke sharply with the traditions 
 and beliefs of his people. He is a satirist who 
 does not spare any of the institutions of Hellas — 
 the athletic games of Olympia any more than 
 the unimproving conversation of the dinner 
 table. But it is as a religious reformer that 
 he utters his deepest convictions. He passes 
 scathing criticism upon the beliefs of poly- 
 theism. His passionate verses, introducing the 
 first note of discord between polytheism and 
 philosophy, echoed in the ears of the Greeks 
 throughout their history, and are again over- 
 heard in the final conflict between the de- 
 
 1 Xenoph. Fr. 24 : 
 
 ■fjbt\ 5' iirrd t Zacri Kal i^KOVr' (vtavrol 
 fi\r)<TTpi'$ovTe l i e/xriv (ppovrid' dv' 'KWdoa 7^f. 
 
 The word p\r)<TTpLfa is used in Hippocrates for tossing on a bed 
 
 of sickness.
 
 160 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 fenders of expiring paganism and the Christian 
 apologists. 
 
 Let us pass to another man even more re- 
 markable, a poet-philosopher of brilliant genius, 
 Empedocles of Agrigentum, of Dorian not 
 Ionian race, some features of whose character 
 are singularly un-Hellenic, though none but a 
 pure Hellene could have written the noble 
 hexameters of which some five hundred are 
 extant. His poem On Nature was one of the 
 books which inspired Lucretius, whose magni- 
 ficent eulogy every one will remember. 1 As 
 poet and physicist, with a wide outlook into the 
 universal life of things, Empedocles traced a 
 unity running through all natural and spiritual 
 processes. He made original observations on 
 physiology, ingenious experiments illustrating 
 some laws of physics ; he threw out hints of 
 the doctrine now known as natural selection, 
 and anticipated some great discoveries of 
 modern chemistry. 2 He was a practical 
 physician and sanitary engineer as well as a 
 
 1 Lucret. i. 716 ff. 
 2 Gomperz, i. 230 (Trans.).
 
 IV ART AND INSPIRA TION 1 6 1 
 
 biologist, and by draining the marshes rid the 
 city of Selinus of a pestilence. No ancient 
 philosopher of whom we read took such a lead- 
 ing part in public life ; he was the eloquent 
 champion of the democracy and was offered 
 and refused the kingship. 1 Aristotle tells us 
 that he was also the founder of the art of 
 rhetoric ; and Gorgias of Leontini was said to 
 be among his pupils. 2 
 
 But there was also another side to him. He 
 was a seer, a mystic, a healer of the maladies of 
 the soul as well as of the body, the author of 
 purificatory chants of which fragments survive. 
 In outward demeanour he resembled the wonder- 
 worker from the East rather than the sober 
 Hellene. Clad in purple robe, with a Delphic 
 wreath on his head and a golden circlet about 
 his brows, his long hair flung loose, with grave 
 set features he was borne in pomp through Sicily, 
 the children flocking to his car, and the towns- 
 people greeting him in his progress. 3 He is 
 
 1 Diog. Laert. viii. 63. 
 2 Arist. ap. Diog. Laert. viii. 57. 
 3 Diog. Laert. viii. 73. 
 
 M
 
 162 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 by his own description a spirit in exile, 1 one 
 of those heavenly beings, who for crime done 
 in another life are doomed ' to wander for 
 thrice ten thousand years away from the 
 Blessed,' tossed from sea to sky, from earth to 
 
 sea, 
 
 and who returns 
 Back to this meadow of calamity, 
 This uncongenial place, this human life, — 2 
 
 the ' unlovely land,' ' the unfamiliar region.' 
 Nor can the disinherited spirit regain his birth- 
 right except by long and rigorous discipline 
 and suppression of the senses. But I cannot 
 linger over this strange, this unique figure in 
 Greek speculation, in whom mysticism and 
 science, intuition and logic, religious exaltation 
 and practical capacity, the humility of a sin- 
 laden spirit and the boundless pretensions of a 
 charlatan were united to form so baffling a 
 compound. To this day in Girgenti, that 
 memorable city, where rows of ruined temples 
 guard the southern slopes of the acropolis, 
 stretching towards the sea, Empedocles is a 
 
 ' KaOapfioi, line 12, <pvyas dehOev ko1 dX^rr/s. 
 2 Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna.
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 163 
 
 name of power ; he is the idol of his fellow- 
 countrymen ; legend and history still cluster 
 round him. 
 
 I will but remind you of one other name — 
 the founder of the famous Pythagorean brother- 
 hood, which formed a close intellectual and 
 spiritual partnership whose aim was the en- 
 nobling of the whole life, public and private, 
 of its members. Pythagoras himself was a 
 mystical theologian and at the same time an 
 original mathematician ; an astronomer who 
 showed that the earth is spherical ; a musician 
 who made a brilliant discovery in the theory of 
 sound ; x a man of genius who, like Socrates, 
 committed nothing to writing — from mistrust, it 
 would seem, of the written word ; but whose 
 personal influence so lived in the school as to 
 leave an abiding mark on speculative thought 
 long after the brotherhood itself had been 
 dissolved by the violence of political faction. 
 
 What is it that constitutes the striking and 
 original quality of such characters — of the 
 physicist who is also a merchant ; the religious 
 
 1 Gomperz, i. 102 (Trans.).
 
 164 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 reformer, who is at once minstrel, poet, and 
 man of science ; the practical engineer who 
 has the soul of a mystic ; the mathematician 
 who is the head of a semi -religious order? 
 The secret lies in the harmonious blending of 
 opposites. Such contrasts are not indeed con- 
 fined to Greece ; but elsewhere they are rare 
 phenomena : in Greece these, or other not 
 widely dissimilar combinations, are part of the 
 normal psychology of those original minds 
 that have left their stamp upon the intellectual 
 life of Europe. We see in them the con- 
 junction of a rich, an inexhaustible imagination 
 with a keen critical faculty, a restless, wonder- 
 ing, questioning spirit, fearless of consequences, 
 bringing all things to the test of reason. We 
 see also a generalising power, constructive and 
 masterly, but apt to be over-hasty, balanced 
 however and corrected by a faculty of subtle 
 analysis and a delicate eye for differences in 
 detail. Again, we observe the love of pointed 
 antithesis, visible in the very structure of the 
 sentence and form of the thought, in philo- 
 sophical conceptions {e.g. unity and plurality,
 
 iv ART AND INSPIRATION 165 
 
 finite and infinite, Being and not Being, rest 
 and motion, etc.), in the 'balanced and con- 
 trasted groups of character within the drama. 
 
 Yet, quick as were the Greeks to dis- 
 cern antagonisms in the world of nature or 
 of man, it was also the conscious effort of 
 Greek philosophy to reconcile the discordant 
 principles, to build the bridge by which 
 thought might travel across the gulf, and so 
 by a finely graduated series of transitions 
 to restore the broken unity. Heraclitus of 
 Ephesus (born probably about 540 B.C.), anti- 
 cipating a fruitful idea of modern philosophy, 
 laid down the law of the harmony of con- 
 traries, of identity in difference. Contraries 
 do not exclude, but rather presuppose one 
 another ; nay, each passes imperceptibly into 
 the other. ' The dissonant is in harmony with 
 itself.' x ' The invisible harmony ' — which lies 
 behind the contradictions of sense — ' is better 
 
 1 Heracl. Fr. 59 [10] avp.<pep6fi€vov 8ia<p€p6/j,evoi>, avvaldov 
 dialoov. Cp. 46 [8] rb avrii-ovv <Tvp.<pipov, koX e'/c twv 5ia<pep6vTwv 
 KaWioT-qv app-ovlav. 45 [51] ov ^vviatn Skojs 5ia<pepop.evov euvrw 
 bp.o\oy£ei.
 
 166 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 than the visible.' l It is interesting to reflect 
 that one of the last of the Greek philosophers, 
 Plotinus (born 204 A.D.), joins hands with 
 Heraclitus, applying the same principle to 
 illustrate the harmony of contrasted elements 
 in a work of art, and especially in the drama. 2 
 The ' rational principle of the drama is a unity ' 
 of action, ' containing in it many collisions,' 3 
 and out of this play of contraries is evolved 
 the harmony of the whole. So too, he argues, 
 in the drama of life where the soul is the 
 actor, the universal reason, presiding over the 
 struggle, resolves the dissonance and discord 
 in a final harmony. Heraclitus had already 
 grasped the truth of Western civilisation, that 
 the struggle of opposing forces — his meta- 
 phorical ' warfare ' (7roA,e/xo9) — is the condition 
 of progress, and that this holds good in human 
 society no less than in the evolution of 
 the cosmic order. This profound philosophic 
 truth the Greeks applied instinctively in prac- 
 
 1 Heracl. Fr. 47 [54] apfiovirj acpavris {paveprjs Kpeiffawv. 
 
 2 Plotin. Enu. iii. 2. 1 1 ff. 
 
 3 lb. iii. 2. 16 Spd/xaros X670S eh '4x wv ^ v o.vtu> rroWas /j,axa.s.
 
 i v A R T AND INS PI R A TION 1 67 
 
 tical life. In politics they never fell under the 
 fanatical sway of any single principle — not 
 royalty, not aristocracy, not democracy. Here 
 too they sought to discover the harmony of oppo- 
 sites. The friction and play of contending forces 
 were needed, they felt, alike for stability and 
 development. The State and the Individual, 
 Order and Progress, Necessity and Freedom — 
 these permanent antagonisms of thought, were 
 not left, as they were in the East, to confront 
 one another in hostile isolation. The contra- 
 dictions, if not solved, were at least softened. 
 Nowhere more than in her colonial life, in 
 those busy and rival centres of intellect and 
 commerce, did Greece exhibit her versatile 
 power of reconciling things not previously 
 combined. The new experiments struck out 
 in art, in philosophy, in social and political 
 organisation, involved a kind of mediatorial 
 process. They were the product of a spirit of 
 adjustment, balance, compromise. They are 
 the creation of the Western mind. 
 
 The temperament of the people as a whole 
 is a compound as remarkable as are the gifts
 
 168 HARVARD LECTURES iv 
 
 united in the great men of the race — a 
 people shrewdly practical yet sternly idealistic ; 
 jealous of alien influences yet hospitable to 
 foreigners ; intolerant of unorthodoxy yet 
 ready to laugh over their own pantheon ; 
 slaves to party spirit yet gifted with a singular 
 faculty of political compromise ; endowed with 
 a proverbial gaiety of heart, which blends, 
 however, with a sadness sometimes bordering 
 on pessimism. The diverse and seemingly 
 opposite qualities which mark the Greek mind 
 are one secret of its matchless force, and the 
 cause of its success in so many fields of human 
 activity, practical and speculative. They con- 
 stitute the chief reason why Greek literature 
 speaks in so many voices, and utters its appeal 
 to every race and generation in its turn. 
 Hence comes its wealth of suggestion, its 
 recuperative energy, its power of perpetual 
 adaptation.
 
 V 
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM x 
 
 In devoting two lectures to a subject which 
 extends over seven or eight centuries and 
 carries us from the fifth century B.C. far into 
 the Christian era, I propose to restrict myself 
 to a few authors and a few points of interest. 
 
 1 In preparing these somewhat desultory discourses (V. and 
 VI.) I have had in mind the fact that Professor Saintsbury's 
 History of Criticism (Blackwood and Sons) has now placed in 
 the hands of English readers a systematic treatment of the 
 whole subject. I have, therefore, confined myself to following 
 out a few trains of thought which seemed to fall in with the 
 general scheme of this volume. Some excuse is needed for 
 passing so lightly over ' Longinus ' On the Sublime (irepl 
 C^ous), a critical essay of unique value and interest. The truth 
 is, it would not be easy to add much to the admirable apprecia- 
 tion contained in Professor Saintsbury's chapter (vol. i. pp. 152- 
 173) and to the handling of the treatise by Professor W, Rhys 
 Roberts in his edition (Cambridge University Press). 
 169
 
 i7o HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 The treatment will necessarily be discursive 
 and the order not always chronological. But it 
 may be convenient so far to follow the lines of 
 historical development as to include in the first 
 part of our survey mainly the criticism of 
 Poetry, in the latter part, the criticism of 
 Prose. 
 
 Literary criticism in Greece as a distinct 
 and conscious art was late in its appearing. 
 The period of creative activity was, it is true, a 
 period also of varied critical reflection both in 
 art and literature ; and here and there we 
 come across writers of original genius who 
 were critics of their own craft or of that of 
 others. But these are rare exceptions. It 
 is not till the time of Aristotle that we find 
 any systematised discussion on works of litera- 
 ture, or on the principles that govern the 
 literary art. Professed critics — men who write 
 books on other books — were still unknown. 
 The essay, the monograph, the literary study 
 of a particular author, are a product of the 
 post-classical age, when the centre of Greek- 
 civilisation had been shifted, and Hellenism
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 171 
 
 had found a new abode first at Alexandria, 
 and afterwards at Rome. With the ' reviewer ' 
 in the modern sense the Greek world never 
 became acquainted. 
 
 In the poetical schools of Greece reflection 
 had been at work and discussion rife for 
 centuries before the Periclean era. Between 
 master and pupil there was a constant and 
 oral interchange of ideas. Theory and prac- 
 tice went hand in hand. Criticism was as yet 
 from within ; it was, as we might say, the 
 criticism of the workshop or the studio. Such, 
 for instance, is the advice given to Pindar by 
 Corinna, the Boeotian poetess : ' Sow with the 
 hand, not with the sack.' 1 Here we have the 
 principle of artistic parsimony, the law of 
 reserve, the truth expressed by the Greek- 
 proverb, ' The half is greater than the whole.' 
 In such an atmosphere of teaching and 
 learning poetry grew up. Literary forms or 
 types were created — epic, lyric, dramatic, 
 
 1 Plut. De Glor. Athen. c. iv. p. 347 xfj x ei P l ^ € "' (Tireipeiv 
 dXXd /xt] oXcj rip OuXaKqi. For other examples see W. R. Hardie, 
 Lectures on Classical Subjects (Macmillan and Co. ), pp. 266-269.
 
 172 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 elegiac — which have stood the test of time and 
 become the accepted models of the Western 
 world. Behind the activity of creative genius 
 a ceaseless critical effort was at work, control- 
 ling and inspiring poetic invention. Standards 
 of writing were formed, canons of taste laid 
 down, and the great problem of reconciling 
 tradition with freedom of development was in 
 process of solution. Meanwhile the variations 
 of literary type answered to the living forces 
 operating in society. The poets followed close 
 upon the movements of the race and the 
 people. Their ' invention,' their originality, 
 consisted chiefly in vitalising old material, in 
 interpreting the legends in the light of the 
 present, in re-creating and ever renewing the 
 marvellous history of the past. To make 
 old things seem new and new things seem 
 familiar, was one main function of their art. 
 Viewed in this light the critical faculty of the 
 Greeks stood nearer to the creative imagination 
 than moderns can easily realise. The fine gift 
 of discrimination, the instinct of omission and 
 rejection, the power of seizing in their own
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 173 
 
 mythology the facts which had in them the 
 kernel of poetic truths — all this formed part of 
 the poetic equipment of the race. 
 
 In the Periclean age this creative, or re- 
 creative, function of poetry was fulfilled more 
 especially by the tragic drama. But what form 
 did dramatic criticism take ? Professional 
 critics as yet there were none : but we must 
 not infer that there was no effective criticism. 
 The Athenians were ' nothing if not critical ' ; 
 and never probably at any epoch of history 
 were literary productions brought so directly 
 to the bar of public opinion ; a public opinion, 
 too, that was in a sense the verdict of the 
 State. If literary judgments were not passed 
 daily or weekly, the decision was but the more 
 authoritative when it came. At Athens the 
 dramatic competitions were held twice a year, 
 at the two great festivals of Dionysus. The 
 judges — five in number for comedy.and probably 
 the same number for the tragic contests — acted 
 under solemn oath as in a court of law. They 
 were appointed with elaborately devised pre- 
 cautions to secure an impartial verdict. These
 
 174 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 anonymous umpires were chosen by ballot from 
 a select list, and their names divulged only after 
 the award. A defeated competitor might ques- 
 tion the fairness of their award by instituting 
 a prosecution, and the case would then be 
 tried before a popular tribunal. In our own 
 day we have seen actions for libel brought 
 against dramatic critics: we should like to be 
 better informed as to how a similar prosecution 
 was conducted at Athens. We read indeed of 
 some strange results in these competitions ; the 
 defeat, for instance, of the Oedipus Tyrannus of 
 Sophocles (the play which Aristotle regarded 
 as the model of dramatic construction) by an 
 obscure poet Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus. 
 Still more unaccountable in the next century 
 was the poor success that attended Menander, 
 who exhibited 108 comedies, but was only 
 eight times victorious. Yet in most instances 
 our surprise would probably be lessened if we 
 were in possession of all the facts — if the com- 
 peting plays were extant for comparison, and 
 if, moreover, we could estimate the other factors 
 which both in Tragedy and the Old Comedy
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 175 
 
 counted in the award — the singing, the danc- 
 ing, and the choral equipment. 
 
 We hear of but few protests against the 
 verdict of the judges. In Greece at large the 
 Athenian judgment on tragedy seems to have 
 been accepted as final. To Athens the trage- 
 dian looked for his credentials ; it lay with her 
 to set the seal of her approval on his art. The 
 testimony of Plato on this head ! agrees with 
 the view ascribed to Aeschylus in the Frogs, 
 that ' the rest of the world,' compared with 
 them ' were mere trash at judging the poetic 
 faculty.' 2 He himself, it is true, had to wait 
 fifteen years before he won success ; but having 
 done so, he retained his supremacy to the 
 end ; and at his death poetic privileges, of a 
 kind then unique, were conferred on him. 3 
 Sophocles, in like manner but without pre- 
 
 1 Laches 183 A-B. 
 
 2 Frogs 809-810 : 
 
 \ripov re t&W ijyeiTO rod yvQvai iripi 
 
 (pVffeiS 7TOt7JTU)I'. 
 
 * The Athenians passed a special decree permitting his tragedies 
 to compete at the Dionysia after his death ; Schol. on Frogs, 868: 
 6tl i] irolycns oi>xl avvT^dvjjKe uoi.
 
 176 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 liminary failures, during a literary career of 
 about sixty years, held an almost undisputed 
 sway. And yet there is no trace of either of 
 these great masters ever having lowered his 
 art to satisfy a vulgar taste. They were able to 
 lift their hearers to their own high plane of 
 thought and imagination. It was an unparal- 
 leled achievement. The themes handled were 
 such as demanded and received ideal treatment. 
 The theatre was of colossal size ; the audience 
 a vast one, far outnumbering the gatherings of 
 the assembly or the law-courts ; it comprised 
 every grade of culture and ignorance, though 
 the men of culture formed but a small minority. 
 If Euripides fared less well at the hands of his 
 countrymen — his victories amounting in all 
 only to five — we must remember that he 
 generally competed against Sophocles. After 
 his death the balance was redressed ; a great 
 and growing enthusiasm for him set in ; due, 
 we may suspect, not less to the love of rhetoric 
 which had overspread the Greek world than to 
 his genius, which at first had been somewhat 
 underrated. Be that as it may, the critical
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 177 
 
 instinct of the public and the sureness of their 
 literary perceptions in the fifth century is on 
 the whole a fact as certain as it is signi- 
 ficant. 
 
 A contemporary judgment is often reversed 
 by posterity ; examples are afforded by the 
 literary history of almost every nation. But 
 Time, to which Aeschylus is said to have 
 dedicated his tragedies, 1 has not only ratified 
 his particular claim, but in well-nigh every 
 department of poetry, has endorsed the ver- 
 dict of Athens. Aristotle had good grounds 
 for the opinion he held as to the critical 
 value of popular taste. While laying emphasis 
 on the mixed elements of refinement and 
 vulgarity of which an audience is composed, 2 
 he still maintains that the collective judgment 
 of the many in aesthetic matters is superior 
 to the judgment of any single individual. 3 
 
 1 Athen. viii. 39 xpo"V t<xs rpayuioias dvartdeuai. 
 
 2 Pol. v. (viii.) 7. 1342 a 18-22 e7ret 5' 6 dearrjs 5ltt6s, 6 ftev 
 i\evdepos /cat ireTraiSev/a^vos, 6 5e (poprutds k.t.X. 
 
 3 lb. iii. II. 1281 a 42 ff., esp. 1281 b 8-IO 5t6 koX Kplvovaiv 
 dfieivop oi TroWoi teal to. rrjs /jLOvaiKrjs £p~/o. Kai ra tu>v ttoitjtloV 
 ctWot yap &\\o ri fxopiov, iravra 5t iravTes, Cp. 1282 a [-21, and 
 
 N
 
 178 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 And we can to-day observe that what often 
 distinguishes the verdict of an intelligent 
 public from that of the expert critic, is a 
 swift and immediate impression which em- 
 braces the whole instead of accentuating the 
 parts. 
 
 Plato would not have agreed with Aristotle's 
 view. The supreme test of artistic excellence is, 
 he holds, the pleasure afforded to ' the one man 
 who is pre-eminent in virtue and education.' 1 
 He contrasts his own age with earlier times. 
 The judges, he says, have now fallen under the 
 dominion of the audience ;— and he coins the 
 word dearpoKparia to denote this idea. Instead 
 of instructors they have become the pupils of the 
 crowd. They have yielded to the clamour of 
 the theatre : and the poets in turn, infected by 
 their corruption, are obliged to humour a de- 
 generate public. 2 It is indeed probable that 
 popular taste underwent some weakening in 
 the fourth century. Rut the contrast as drawn 
 
 iii. 15. 1286 a 30 5ib kclI Kplvei dfxeivov 3xXos 7roXXa rj eh 
 ooTKjovv. 
 
 1 Laws ii. 659 A eua rbv apery re Kal irai.5eia dicupe" povra. 
 
 2 lb. ii. 659 A — C, iii. 700 C — 701 A.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 179 
 
 by Plato is surely overstated. The drama has 
 been truly called the most democratic of the 
 arts ; 1 and in every age when it has been a 
 living force, the influence of the audience has 
 been powerfully felt. We cannot doubt that 
 in the fifth as in the fourth century the voice 
 of the people must often have decisively affected 
 the award of the judges. 
 
 The influence of the audience on the poet 
 is one of the points of dramatic criticism which 
 is touched on in the Poetics? The question 
 as to the proper ending of tragedy seems to 
 have been debated at the time in literary circles. 
 Aristotle pronounces in favour of the unhappy 
 ending, the other kind being, as he thinks, 
 appropriate only to comedy, where the bitterest 
 enemies walk off hand in hand at the close, — 
 ' no one slays or is slain ' ; or, as Goethe says, 
 1 no one dies, every one is married.' But even 
 
 1 Brander Matthews, The Development of the Drama (New 
 York), p. ■$$. This volume traces in a very interesting way the 
 influence which the audience, the actors, and the size and con- 
 struction of the theatre exert on the form of the drama. 
 
 - Poet. xiii. 6-8. See Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry 
 and Fine Art (third ed.), p. 305 ff.
 
 180 HARVARD LECTURES V 
 
 in tragedy, Aristotle observes, the happy ending 
 is commonly preferred ' owing to the weakness 
 of the audience ' (Bia tijv Qearpwv aadevetav). 
 People are not robust enough to endure the 
 painful conclusion ; so the poet against his 
 better judgment yields to the liking for melo- 
 drama. ' We have all,' as some one has said, 
 ' a secret penchant for false sentiment.' The 
 craving for ' poetic justice,' the morbidly moral 
 desire to make things come right on the stage, 
 all the more because they are so apt to go 
 wrong in life, is only one example of an instinct, 
 amiable but prosaic, to which the play-going 
 public is always liable. 
 
 Criticism in the form of public opinion, 
 direct and effective as it was at Athens, is not 
 in strictness literary criticism. Literary criti- 
 cism proper spoke for the first time through 
 the lips of comedy. Unlike tragedy, comedy 
 in the fifth century B.C. had its life in the 
 present ; it reflected the spirit of the day ; its 
 allusions were local ; its topics were current 
 events, politics, literature. The comic poet 
 was not only author, stage- manager, ballet-
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 181 
 
 master, musician, and sometimes actor, but 
 wielded an office which combined in some 
 degree functions similar to those exercised by 
 Punch, the old Saturday Review, and the 
 Comic Opera. As an organ of literary criti- 
 cism the Aristophanic comedy dealt mainly 
 with the productions of the tragic stage. Nor 
 was it enough for the comic poet to be witty 
 or scathing ; as a critic of poetry he must 
 himself be a master of the poetic art, and able 
 to hold his own beside the great tragedians 
 themselves. In the Frogs of Aristophanes, 
 Aeschylus and Euripides, as rival candidates 
 for the throne of poetry, are placed upon the 
 stage. Each argues his own cause and cari- 
 catures the manner of his opponent. It is 
 the earliest instance we possess of literary 
 criticism in the form of parody, and probably 
 the most brilliant example of the kind in all 
 literature. In this as in other plays Aristo- 
 phanes vindicates his claim to be a critic by 
 proving himself a consummate craftsman in 
 every style of poetic composition ; while in 
 lyrical utterance, his notes are among the
 
 i82 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 purest and most melodious that have flowed 
 from any Greek singer. 
 
 We cannot here discuss the justice of the 
 Aristophanic criticism or the value of his re- 
 flections on the art of poetry. But two obser- 
 vations may be made in passing. First, in 
 the linguistic attacks made on Euripides he 
 touches with playful irony that love of verbal 
 subtlety, of fine-drawn distinctions, the 
 
 Quibbling, counter-quibbling, prating, 
 Argufying and debating, 
 
 to which the Greeks were always addicted, and 
 which, when the genius of the race was ex- 
 hausted, ended in the arid disputations of 
 Byzantine schoolmen. Secondly, Aristophanes 
 is still at the standpoint of the early Greek 
 world ; he assumes that poetry has a didactic 
 aim ; the poet is the moral teacher of the 
 community, the educator of grown men ; it is 
 he that inspires them with courage and civic 
 loyalty : 
 
 Children and boys have a teacher assigned them, — 
 The bard is a master for manhood and youth,
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 1S3 
 
 Round to instruct them in virtue and truth, 
 Beholden and bound. 1 
 
 These words are put into the mouth of 
 Aeschylus. But they are tacitly accepted by 
 Euripides, who admits the duty of good 
 counsel (^pr/crra Xeyeiv, yjpit]<na StSdo-fceiv), 
 merely insisting that it should be conveyed ' in 
 the language of men ' (avOpwirems cppd^eiv), not 
 couched in the grandiloquent style of his rival. 
 Already the question had been put to him : 
 
 Tell me then what are the principal merits 
 Entitling a poet to praise and renown ? 
 
 and he had replied : 
 
 The improvement of morals, the progress of mind, 
 
 When a poet by skill and invention 
 
 Can render his audience virtuous and wise. 2 
 
 By Euripides' own confession it is the glory of 
 poetry that it ' makes men better ' ; though, 
 
 1 Frere's Trans, of Frogs 1054- 1056 : 
 
 to?s fiev yap wcuoapioiffLv 
 tfoTi 5i5d<r/ca\os 6'cms (ppa^u, rdicriv 5' 7//3cD<n Troirjral. 
 iravv drj 8ei xP 7 l a " ra Xeyeiv rjfias. 
 
 2 Frere's Trans, of Frogs 1008- 1010 : 
 
 kll. airoKpivai fioi, t'lvos oiVe/ca XPV Oav/j.d^eiv dvdpa Trotr/Ti)v ; 
 ET. Be^idrrjTos ko.1 vovOeaias, on peXriovs re iroiov^ev 
 tovs avdpuiTrovs iv reus Tr6\e<riv k. t.X.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 doubtless, the phrase would not bear quite the 
 same meaning to him as to Aeschylus. And if 
 the citizens, once good men and true, have 
 been debased by him, he deserves, Dionysus 
 says, ' to die ' ; and he himself does not dissent. 
 This attitude of mind was at once the strength 
 and the weakness of Greek poetical criticism : 
 its strength because it kept alive the idea that 
 art and poetry are not merely the private 
 delight of the individual ; they belong to the 
 community ; they are the expression of its 
 moral and spiritual life : a source, again, of 
 weakness, inasmuch as the poets came to be 
 thought of as moralists. They were expected 
 to yield edifying lessons outside their art ; and 
 if their utterances could not be wrested to the 
 desired end, adverse sentence was too often 
 passed upon them. 
 
 The vein of parody which runs through 
 the Aristophanic drama and appears to have 
 been a marked feature of the Old Comedy, 
 was imitated and developed in the next gener- 
 ation. For sixty or seventy years after the 
 death of Aristophanes comedy was a frequent
 
 v GREEK LITER. IKY CRITICISM 185 
 
 vehicle of indirect literary criticism. The 
 interest, however, of these later jcux d'esprit, 
 so far as we can judge from the surviving 
 fragments, lies less in their suggestive or 
 critical value than in the acquaintance they 
 seem to imply on the part of the audience 
 with the poetical literature of Greece. Trage- 
 dians and lyrical writers all came under con- 
 tribution. Whole scenes from tragedy were 
 travestied. The manner or diction of par- 
 ticular authors was reproduced. Quotations 
 and reminiscences were strewn broadcast 
 through the plays. The popular love of 
 literary parody, combined with certain com- 
 pliments (surely half ironical) addressed to 
 the audience by the comic poets, has led some 
 scholars to infer the existence of a large 
 reading public at Athens in the fifth and 
 fourth centuries B.C. 1 The evidence, however, 
 is far from supporting this view. Actual illiter- 
 ates, doubtless, were rare. But there is a great 
 
 1 E.g. Frogs 1109-1118: esp. 11 14: 
 
 fiifikiov t' tx<dv Zkchttos /.lavOdvei to. St^iA, 
 where [lifi\iov seems to be the ' libretto ' or book of the words.
 
 1 86 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 array of facts to show that the bulk of the 
 people can have had little or no direct acquaint- 
 ance with books. And not only was there no 
 diffused literary culture in the stricter sense, but 
 the mass of the audience at the theatre were 
 not even familiar with their own mythology. 
 There is a startling sentence in the Poetics 
 which is too explicit to be set aside : ' The 
 known legends are known only to a few.' * 
 
 So far as the audience were acquainted 
 with tragic poetry, it was from stage repre- 
 sentation, not through reading. Yet we cannot 
 on that account assume any lack of a literary 
 sense. Indeed, it is probably true that under 
 certain conditions, an instinctive good taste, 
 which has been cultivated by listening to oral 
 literature, is merely deadened or impaired by 
 book learning. In any case, at Athens, how- 
 ever narrow may have been the range of their 
 culture, the people had an exquisite feeling 
 for words and appreciation of the musical 
 capacities of speech. When Gorgias made 
 
 1 Poet. ix. 8 e7ret koX to, yvuipi/xa dXLyois yvwpi/j.d ianv d\\' 
 S/xws eixppaivei. ir&vras.
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 187 
 
 his first appearance among them, we are told 
 that the striking novelty of his diction came 
 with a pleasurable shock on the sensitive ears 
 of the audience. 1 In political debate and in 
 the administration of justice this aesthetic 
 sensibility was a danger of which the Athenians 
 themselves were aware ; and it would seem 
 that there was a special nickname for persons 
 who were thus fooled by the pleasure of the 
 ear. 2 But a fine and trained instinct for 
 language was the very condition which made 
 it possible for the average Athenian, unversed 
 in books, to become a capable critic even of 
 the higher poetry. Add to this a marvellous 
 alertness of mind, a power of catching a point 
 or seeing an allusion, which is vouched for 
 by the most various testimony, and which 
 justified Demosthenes in declaring : ' No people 
 
 1 Diodor. xii. 53 Ka l T V i;evi£oPTi rrjs Xe'^ews il-iirkiji-e rovs 
 ' Adrjvaiovs ovras ev(pveh Kai (pi\o\6yovs. 
 
 2 See Eustath. 1522, 26 " <5 /xouol Cotoi tuu 'EWfyuv " (a quota- 
 tion from comedy), and the explanation 16S7, 60 oi pq.oi> bird tov 
 tvxovtos £i;airaTw/j.evoi wroi eXeyovro, ■rrpo<T<pv£o'Tepov Se d.v wtoi 
 ko\o?vto oi in fijvTjs aKorjs aTrepiipyus nal d^e|erctcTTu;s dirdTrjv 
 Trdax oUT€S - The word meant literally a 'homed owl,' hence a 
 'booby.'
 
 i88 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 is so quick at taking a speaker's mean- 
 ing.' 1 
 
 With such intellectual gifts, aided also 
 by the art of the actor — his gestures and 
 declamation — the regular theatre-goer would 
 at once recognise on the comic stage the tone 
 and diction of tragedy, the familiar manner 
 of its dialogue or choral songs, and would 
 flatter himself on his own discovery. It 
 mattered not if only a few could identify the 
 lines that were quoted or adapted, and assign 
 them to their proper sources. 2 Even the 
 scenes that were travestied might not to the 
 ordinary hearer suggest the originals, except 
 in those rare instances — some of which are 
 known to us — where the play from which the 
 parody was drawn had been recently ex- 
 hibited. The comedian, after all, aimed only 
 at a broad effect. He counted, and not in 
 
 1 01. iii. 15 yCivai iravrwv Vfxth d^vraroi ra prjOevra. 
 
 2 Cp. Diphilus ii. Fr. 73 K : some lines are quoted from 
 Euripides, and one speaker asks, 
 
 irodev earl ravra irpos deQiv ; 
 
 The other replies, 
 
 t'i bi aoL /ue'Xei ; 
 
 01) yap to 5pa/j.a i rbv 8i vovv aKoirovfieda.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 189 
 
 vain, on a general and keen appreciation of 
 literary style. It was enough for him if the 
 mass of the audience took the main point. 
 There was always an inner circle who would 
 delight in the subtler turns of phrase and 
 the associations which the parody called 
 up. 
 
 All this, however, is literary criticism of the 
 indirect kind, — though characteristically Attic 
 in its very indirectness and allusiveness. In 
 Plato we have the first beginnings of the large, 
 the philosophic criticism which views literature 
 as one of the ideal expressions of the human 
 spirit, and seeks to arrive at the innermost laws 
 of the art. Yet Plato seldom speaks of literary 
 productions except in a tone of apology and 
 distrust. Himself the greatest artist in prose 
 that has ever lived, he was apt to think of the 
 written word as dead, mechanical, irresponsive, 
 standing before you with the cold beauty of a 
 graven image, but helpless for self-defence, 
 wanting in flexibility and adjustment. 1 Litera- 
 ture, if it is to be of any worth at all, must be 
 1 Phaedr. 275 d-e.
 
 i go HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 the image of the animated word, 1 a living force, 
 engendering life and moulding character. This 
 it can only be if it is planted in a congenial 
 soul, whence to other souls can be transmitted 
 a fruitful and immortal seed of thought. It 
 must come in the spirit and power of philosophy 
 not as a doctrine but as a quickening influence. 
 The (f)i\6\oyo<i must himself be (friXoaocfros. 
 This it was that determined Plato's view of 
 the relation in which literature stands to life. 
 To do things worthy to be written was in his 
 eyes a dignity higher than to write things 
 worthy to be read. A noble life is the noblest 
 drama : the maker or artist who can teach us 
 to build up such a life is the best of poets. 2 
 The words of Milton, at once Hellenist and 
 Hebraist, come to our memory : ' He who 
 would not be frustrate of his hope to write well 
 hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be 
 
 1 Phaedr. 276 A top tou elSoros \6yov Xiyeis $Q>vtcl ko\ 
 tfj.\pvx<>v, ou 6 yeypa/xixfros eiSwXov &v tl \£yot.To diKaius. 
 
 - Laws vii. 817 B Tj/jLeh ia/xev Tpayui5ias avrol TroirjTai Kara 
 duvafiiv S tl KaXki<TT7]$ a/xa ko.1 apioTrys- iraaa ovv ij/xiy 7) 
 iroKirela. ^vviaT7]Ke fxifirjcris tou KaWiaTov ko.1 dpicXTOV §lov, 8 
 dri (pap.ev rjfj.e?s ye Svtws elvcu Tpaywdtav tt)v aKrjdeaT&Trjii .
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 191 
 
 a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern 
 of the best and honourablest things.' As 
 against this we may set the remark of a modern 
 writer : ' A fine book is the end for which the 
 world was made.' 
 
 Of the great ideas which Plato has contri- 
 buted to literary criticism the greatest are to 
 be found in the Phaedrus. We have already 
 alluded to the theory there set forth of poetic 
 inspiration. 1 Two other ideas may here be 
 noted. In the first place, at the root of all 
 good writing lies sincerity of conviction. The 
 writer must have something to say, and must 
 say it at first-hand. Where there is nothing to 
 express there can be no artistic beauty, for the 
 essence of the literary art is that it shall express 
 reality. ' It is no genuine art of words that he 
 will have who does not know the truth of things, 
 but has tried to hunt out what other people 
 think about it.' 2 Hence the uselessness of 
 mere mechanical rules. All the ' ologies ' and 
 technical terms of the rhetoricians will not teach 
 you to speak or write well. When once a true 
 
 1 Supr. p. 143 ff. ' 2 Phaedr. 262 C.
 
 i 9 2 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 idea is strongly conceived, the ' irresistible law 
 of right utterance ' (XoyoypcupiKr) apdy/cr)) 1 will 
 follow. The second principle, closely related to 
 the first, is that an artistic composition is an 
 organic whole. ' It must in its structure be 
 like a living thing, with head, feet, and body ; 
 there must be a middle and extremities, the 
 parts being adapted to one another and to the 
 whole.' 2 
 
 Here, observe, and for the first time, the law 
 of internal unity is enunciated as a primary 
 condition of literary art — now a commonplace, 
 then a discovery. 3 The thought was taken up 
 by Aristotle and became the basis of his reason- 
 ing on the drama. Organic as distinct from 
 mechanical unity ; not the homogeneous same- 
 ness of a sand-heap, but a unity combined with 
 variety, a unity vital and structural, implying 
 mutual interdependence of all the parts, such 
 that if one part is displaced or removed the 
 
 1 Phaedr. 264 B. - lb. 264 C. 
 
 3 Plato applies this principle of organic unity to the moral 
 government cf the world in the Laws x. 903 B-C, where all the 
 parts are said to be ordered with a view to the excellence of the 
 
 whole.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 193 
 
 whole is dislocated — that is the leading critical 
 idea of the Poetics} From this point of view 
 the unity and artistic beauty of a literary com- 
 position are found to reside in a pervasive 
 harmony, a dominant impression, a single 
 animating and controlling principle. So said 
 the Greeks and so we say. But every people 
 has not shared this view. ' In the Persian 
 ode,' says Mr. Leaf (in his introduction to 
 Versions from Hafiz), ' we find a succession of 
 couplets often startling in their independence. 
 . . . To the Persian each couplet is a whole in 
 itself, . . . sufficiently beautiful if it be adequately 
 expressed, and not of necessity owing anything 
 to that which comes before or after. It is 
 from the common metre and common rhyme 
 alone that the ode gains a formal unity. As 
 Eastern poets are never tired of telling us, the 
 making of an ode is the threading of pearls 
 upon a string ; the couplet is the pearl, round 
 and smooth and perfect in itself, the metre is 
 but the thread which binds them all together.' 
 This is very unlike the law of unity as under- 
 
 1 Poet. viii. 4 ; cp. xxiii. I.
 
 i 9 4 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 stood by the Greeks. To them the dominant 
 impression of oneness, the feeling of the whole, 
 both in prose and poetry, seemed so indis- 
 pensable that even in historical composition 
 they shrank from admitting actual records, 
 speeches, treaties, letters, or the like — anything 
 which even in style might seem to mar the 
 narrative by crossing it with a thing of alien 
 texture. 
 
 Moderns, however, while accepting the Greek 
 principle of unity as a primary requirement of 
 art, have not in their judgments on Greek 
 literature always accepted it in the Greek sense. 
 Unity they demand, but another unity than that 
 which satisfied the Greeks. They often fail to 
 take account of the varying degrees of unity 
 appropriate to the different forms of literature. 
 Within the spacious compass of the Epic, as 
 Aristotle pointed out, 1 ampler episodes may be 
 admitted and a more discursive freedom allowed 
 than is possible in the close and serried sequence 
 of the drama. And it may be observed that, 
 while in antiquity captious critics discovered all 
 
 1 Poet, xviii. 4 ; xxiii. 3 ; xxiv. 4.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 195 
 
 manner of flaws in Homer, one defect alone 
 they never discovered — a want of unity in the 
 Iliad or the Odyssey. Indeed, according to 
 Aristotle, it is the unity of these poems that 
 constitutes their pre-eminent excellence, a unity 
 derived not from the hero being one but from 
 the action being one. 1 ' In structure they are 
 as perfect as possible ; each is, in the highest 
 degree attainable, an imitation of a single 
 action.' 2 The Platonic dialogues are another 
 case in point. Several strands of thought are 
 here subtly interwoven. In the Phaedrus — the 
 very dialogue in which the stringent law of 
 unity is prescribed — where does the unity 
 reside ? What is the real subject of the 
 dialogue ? Is it love, as treated in the earlier 
 part, or rhetoric which is treated later, or some- 
 thing larger than either of these ? So too in 
 the Republic, what is its theme ? The dialogue 
 reaches beyond the nature of Justice, or the 
 constitution of the ideal State. Only by degrees 
 do we come to see how delicate are the links 
 which bind a single Platonic dialogue into a 
 1 Poet. viii. 1-3. 2 Poet. xxvi. 6.
 
 196 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 whole, and how the apparently disconnected 
 topics may be merged in a higher unity. Here 
 is no want of art, but an art so finished as to 
 elude our rough and often mechanical tests. 
 It should serve as a warning to certain modern 
 critics to whom ancient masterpieces appear to 
 be the work of ' a committee with power to add 
 to their numbers.' 
 
 We pass now to the Poetics of Aristotle, the 
 only piece of systematic criticism — and yet how 
 unsystematic — that has come down to us from 
 the classical age of Greece. A strange irony it 
 seems that the most severely logical and, in a 
 sense, unimaginative of philosophers should have 
 seen more deeply into the inner nature of poetry 
 than Plato, who of all philosophers was most 
 poetical ; and that the Poetics, a fragmentary 
 and tentative treatise, which in many respects 
 is the spirit of prose incarnate, should have 
 permanently affected the poetical theories of 
 Europe. No ancient treatise, however, has so 
 philosophic an outlook on literature, such pre- 
 cision in detail, such wealth of suggestion, so 
 many remarks far-reaching in their scope and
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 197 
 
 dropped with such careless and lavish ease. 
 In proportion as we are able to rid ourselves 
 of old misapprehensions, to discard the glosses 
 of half- instructed expositors, and to read 
 the book in the light of Aristotle's own 
 system, the more profound does his teaching 
 appear. 
 
 We could wish, indeed, that he had taken 
 to heart the words of Plato : ' Whoso knocks 
 at the doors of Poesy untouched by the Muses' 
 frenzy, fondly persuading himself that art alone 
 will make him a thorough poet, neither he nor 
 his works will ever attain perfection, but are 
 destined for all their cold propriety to be 
 eclipsed by the effusions of the inspired 
 madman.' 1 That Aristotle did not entirely 
 ignore the ' ecstatic ' element in poetry we 
 have already seen.' 2 But while aware of the 
 existence of the inspired poet, of whom Plato 
 tells in the Phaedrus and the Ion, he writes of 
 
 1 Phacdr. 245 A 6s 5' civ avev fj.avlas MovcrQv 4ttl Troir)TiKas 
 dupas a<plKr)TCU, weurdeh ws &pa e/c rexvys Ikclvos 71-0(777-7;* icro- 
 fievos, dreXrjs avros re ko.1 r/ ttoIt]<jls Otto ttjs t£v p.aivojJ.tvtj}r 
 77 tov cruxppovouvTos r><pavladri. (Trans. \\ . II. Thompson.) 
 
 2 Supr. p. 146.
 
 1 98 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 poetry in too coldly logical a manner, as if its 
 emotional effects could be attained by follow- 
 ing rules of dramatic construction, by orderly 
 arrangement and analysis. We could wish, 
 again, that he had shown more appreciation 
 of the grandeur of Aeschylus ; of the humour 
 and unquenchable laughter of Aristophanes ; 
 that he had not passed over with deliberate 
 neglect (for such it would seem to be) the great 
 lyrical poetry of Greece — Simonides, Pindar, 
 Sappho, Alcaeus, to none of whom does he 
 make even faint allusion. True, the treatise is 
 a fragment ; but there are good grounds for 
 thinking that this does not account for the fact. 
 Was it, perhaps, that lyrical poetry interested 
 him only as a rudimentary art — uttering itself 
 in the form of improvised chants and dithy- 
 rambic hymns — which marked a stage in the 
 development of the drama ? for in the drama, 
 he held, the poetic art culminated ; even the 
 epic being treated by him as imperfectly 
 developed drama. May it not also be that in 
 the personal outbursts of lyrical song, in the 
 self-abandonment, the rush of feeling of Sappho
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 199 
 
 or Alcaeus, he missed the characteristic Hellenic 
 self-restraint — this unimpassioned critic, who 
 appears, moreover, to have been but little 
 susceptible to the magic of words and the 
 charm of musical speech ? Yet all this does 
 not explain his omission of Pindar. In any 
 case, we have here certain limitations of his 
 poetic sensibility, and of a kind so striking 
 that they should not pass unnoticed. 
 
 Still, when all deductions have been made, 
 the permanent value of the book increases the 
 more it is studied. Its strength lies in this, 
 that Aristotle had before him a literature of 
 wonderful range and originality ; that the laws 
 presiding over its creation were not the 
 arbitrary rules of a school, but, we may almost 
 say, the artistic laws of the human mind ; and 
 that he arrives at his principles by a penetrating 
 power of observation and analysis, and a wide 
 induction drawn from the practice of the great 
 writers. And, throughout the inquiry, he 
 maintains that attitude of judicial impartiality 
 which he himself, in one of his physical 
 writings, notes as a mark of the true critical
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 spirit : ' We should be umpires and not 
 litigants.' * 
 
 It has been sometimes said that Aristotle 
 thinks only of the form — the artistic form — 
 not of the content of poetry. But this appears 
 to be a misapprehension. Perhaps the most 
 original and pregnant saying in the Poetics is 
 that which declares poetry to be ' a more philo- 
 sophic and higher thing than history,' being con- 
 cerned with the universal not with the particular. 2 
 It tells of what man does or may do in given 
 circumstances ; of the permanent possibilities 
 of human nature as distinct from the acts 
 of the individual — 'what Alcibiades did or 
 suffered.' The subject-matter of poetry is the 
 universal — that which is abiding and structural 
 in humanity, which appeals to all men and 
 finds a response in every age. Poetry is not, 
 as some modern writers would have us believe, 
 interested only or chiefly in the rare and 
 unique case, in some abnormal fact of 
 
 1 De Caelo i. IO. 279 b 1 1 det diairriTus d\X' ova avridlKous 
 etecu. 
 
 2 Poet. ix. 3 8tb /cat (piXoaocpwrepov sal (nrovdaLurepov iroiyjcrts 
 IcTTopias iarlv.
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 psychology, — or rather, we should perhaps say, 
 of pathology. But here comes the point I 
 desire to emphasise. Unity of form is brought 
 by Aristotle into immediate and even necessary 
 connexion with universality of content. 1 The 
 one depends on the other. In proportion as 
 the subject-matter is universalised, the unity is 
 perfected. For in the process of universalising, 
 the transient and perishable part is eliminated ; 
 the unreason of chance is expelled ; we are 
 admitted to observe the working pf human 
 motive in a world into which pure accident 
 hardly intrudes, where cause and effect have 
 fuller and freer play — the realm of art which 
 is a realm of design. In short, the world of 
 poetry — and this is true pre-eminently of 
 dramatic poetry — is a world more unified, 
 more intelligible than the world of experience, 
 just because the subject-matter is the universal. 
 No other ancient writer, so far as I know, 
 has hinted at this close relation between artistic 
 
 1 Chap. viii. of the Poetics deals with artistic unity, chap. ix. 
 with universalised subject-matter, and the opening words mark 
 the connexion, — (pai>ep6i> 5e €k tQii> dp-q^viov.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 unity and universality of content. Lesser 
 critics have been always disposed to think of 
 form and subject - matter apart, and to lay 
 emphasis on one to the neglect of the other. 
 But in Aristotle the two things are as insepar- 
 able in the higher kinds of imaginative 
 literature as they are in his philosophy. The 
 first principle of his philosophic system is 
 that the union of form and matter, of e!8o? 
 and vkrj, is necessary to make the real, the 
 concrete object. To separate them in philo- 
 sophy is to reduce philosophic thought to mere 
 abstractions. To separate them in literature is 
 the direct negation of all that artistic produc- 
 tion implies. Literature becomes either, on 
 the one hand, formless and chaotic, or, on the 
 other, devoid of reality, out of touch with life. 
 
 Aristotle's remarks often contain an implicit 
 reply to objections which had been urged by 
 Plato. Let us take a single point by way of 
 illustration. It touches a problem which vexed 
 the mind and conscience of Greece throughout 
 its history. Plato in his dialogues wavers 
 between his awe and love of Homer, ' the
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 203 
 
 wisest of our poets,' * ' the captain and teacher 
 of that charming tragic company,' 2 and a still 
 more passionate love of truth. Fascinated 
 though he is by Homer's genius he cannot 
 admit him to his ideal republic. Homer ' tells 
 lies,' and lies too that are immoral. 3 His 
 gods and men do things which ought neither to 
 be done nor heard of. And whereas the aim 
 of poetry should be to teach us to be good and 
 brave and true, Homer by his potent spells 
 steals away our hearts. He sets before us 
 weeping heroes in all the luxury of woe. He 
 feeds emotions which ought to be starved, and 
 makes anarchy in the soul. 4 To which Aris- 
 totle's answer on the lines of the Poetics would 
 be to this effect First, as to the ' lies.' Homer 
 is the great master of the art of ' lying.' He has 
 shown all other poets ' how to tell lies as they 
 ought ' ; he has taught them the art of beautiful 
 fiction. 5 But the poet's lie is not the lie of 
 
 1 Laws vi. 776 E. 2 Rep. x. 595 c. 
 
 3 Rep. ii. 377 d-i:. 4 Rep. x. 606 A-D. 
 
 s Poet. xxiv. 9 Seoidaxev 8e /idXtcrra "Ofj-r/pos /cat tovs &\\ovs 
 J/evSrj Xtyeiv ws Set See Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine 
 Art (third ed.), p. 171 ff.
 
 204 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 common life, even as the truth of poetry stands 
 far apart from the truth of fact. The poet 
 at the outset asks you to grant him certain 
 assumptions which are the necessary conditions 
 of imaginative creation. You make your tacit 
 compact with him ; you accept his premisses ; 
 and forthwith he transports you into an ideal 
 world, remote from the world of experience. 
 In that world 'probable impossibilities' (dSvvara 
 etKora) are preferred to ' possible improb- 
 abilities ' (Svpcltcl am'iQava)} The things that 
 never were or will be, if but the poet has the 
 skill to lend them the air of likelihood, the 
 colour and the form of truth, are better — yes, 
 'truer' in a poetic sense — than the anomalies 
 of experience, the ' improbable possibilities,' 
 which people defend in fiction by saying, ' Oh, 
 but the thing happened.' 
 
 And through this emancipating word of 
 Aristotle's the poet, as by a touch of his 
 wand, can at once throw open to us the 
 whole world of fabulous adventure in epic 
 and romance, not only the wonders of the 
 
 1 Poet. xxiv. 10; xxv. 17.
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 205 
 
 Odvsscy, but also the fairyland of the Arabian 
 Nights. 
 
 So much for the ' lies,' — -Aristotle would con- 
 tinue. Then as to the ' immorality.' Do you 
 not mistake the true end of poetry when you 
 demand that it should directly teach morals ? 
 The aim of poetry is pleasure, not edification 
 or moral instruction. Ethical principles, pure 
 and simple, cannot be taken as the test of 
 Tightness in the domain of art. Poetry is not 
 morals or politics any more than it is science, 
 history, or philosophy. 1 Yet though moral and 
 aesthetic laws are not interchangeable, let it not 
 be thought that poetry is thereby severed 
 entirely from morality. For pleasures differ 
 in kind — in quality as well as in degree — and 
 the higher the poetry, — the more elevated, the 
 more moral, will be the pleasure. The pleasure 
 which is the aim of art cannot be produced by 
 the representation of the morally ignoble or 
 depraved. Some things are unfit for art — too 
 trivial, too hideous, too squalid. In tragedy, 
 nobility of character is necessary to awaken the 
 
 1 Poet, xxv. 3.
 
 206 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 blended emotions of pity and fear. Wicked- 
 ness is admissible only when demanded by an 
 inner necessity in the evolution of the action, 
 by the cogent requirement of dramatic motive. 1 
 Even the bad persons permitted in comedy are 
 not absolutely bad. Their badness consists in 
 an ugliness or deformity of character which is 
 painless, and therefore can be ludicrous. 2 
 Degraded lives there are in nature, but that is 
 no reason for reproducing them simply as 
 degraded in art. For art has to do not with 
 the ideally worse, but with the ideally better — 
 that ' better part ' (to fieXriov) to which nature 
 moves, though thwarted in her movement. 3 
 It is not the function of art to exhibit selected 
 specimens of disease or decay, but to correct 
 nature's failures, to create such things as nature 
 strives to produce, to carry them to a more 
 perfect completion. 
 
 While art, therefore, must not be asked to 
 teach morals, its business being to yield pleasure, 
 yet incidentally it will in a sense instruct and 
 
 1 Poet. xxv. 19. - Poet. v. 1. 
 
 8 See Aristotle's Tlieory of Poetry and Art, p. 151 ff.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 207 
 
 edify by the nobility of the pleasure arising 
 from its ideal creations. Nor is this pleasure, 
 this emotional delight at which poetry aims, a 
 purely individual sensation. It is a pleasure 
 which must be tested by reference to the social 
 organism ; it is, in a word, the higher and 
 enduring pleasure of the community, or of that 
 refined portion of it which may be taken as the 
 aesthetic representative of the whole. Judge 
 Homer's morality by this standard. Ask not 
 whether this or that action is in itself good or 
 bad, but how it fits into the general framework 
 of the poem ; what is the dominant impression 
 left ? Is the resultant pleasure low or is it 
 elevated ? Does Homer indeed enfeeble the 
 spirit and relax the moral fibre ? or does he 
 brace the mind to all strenuous and noble 
 action ? 
 
 The answer which Aristotle would have 
 given to this question accords with the popular 
 conviction of Greece, a conviction which sur- 
 vived into the Christian era. In an imaginary 
 conversation by a Greek writer of the empire, 
 Alexander the Great, still a youth, is asked by
 
 2oS HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 his father, why he reads only Homer to the 
 neglect of all other poets, and his reply is : 'It 
 is not every kind of poetry, just as it is not 
 every kind of dress, that is fitting for a king ; 
 and the poetry of Homer is the only poetry that 
 I see to be truly noble and splendid and royal, 
 and fit for one who will some day rule over 
 men.' ] 
 
 Had the principles of the Poetics been 
 grasped by the successors of Aristotle, Homeric 
 criticism and the criticism of poetry generally 
 might have run another course. But ancient 
 prejudice was too strong. Homer paid the 
 penalty of his greatness. He had long been 
 regarded as the inspired bard. He was also the 
 universal sage, from whom could be learned the 
 facts of history and geography and all the 
 special arts and sciences. Then, when his in- 
 formation proved incorrect, there were critics 
 who said that he ' told lies.' Yet the Iliad and 
 the Odyssey continued to hold their own as 
 popular manuals of conduct ; and it was pre- 
 cisely in his capacity of educator of youth that 
 1 Dio Chrys. Or. ii. ad init.
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 209 
 
 Homer was most sharply attacked. The philo- 
 sophers protested against his theology, the pro- 
 test dating back to the sixth century B.C. ; nor 
 was the feud between philosophy and poetry 
 ever quite healed. Various efforts at reconcili- 
 ation were made. One such attempt, well- 
 meaning but futile, was destined to be the bane 
 of criticism for centuries to come. Homer, it 
 was said, must not be interpreted literally. He 
 spoke in dark sayings. Beneath the outward 
 narrative hidden meanings (vttovolclC) may be 
 discovered. His stories are symbolical either 
 of moral truths or of physical phenomena. 
 ' Homer,' said a Stoic philosopher of the first 
 century A.D., ' would certainly be impious if he 
 were not allegorical.' 
 
 The influence of this vicious critical method, 
 and the vitality of the heresy on which it rests, 
 may be seen at their worst in the traditional 
 interpretation of Scripture. Biblical criticism 
 up to a recent date has been marked by many 
 of the faults with which we are familiar in the 
 interpretation of Homer — the violence done to 
 the language, the neglect of the context, the 
 
 P
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 explaining away of contradictions, the far- 
 fetched symbolism, the indifference to time and 
 place, to the thought of the age and the circum- 
 stances of the writers. These defects do not 
 merely mark the outbreak of a recurrent disease 
 to which the human intellect is liable. The 
 Old Testament scriptures presented moral 
 difficulties analogous to those which had 
 offended the Greek philosophers. Jews like 
 Philo (first century A.D.), and Christian writers 
 such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen 
 (both of the third century), who were versed in 
 Greek learning, met these difficulties by resorting 
 to the allegorical solution, the doctrine of the 
 hidden meaning ; and the form in which their 
 arguments are couched betray the school of 
 criticism whence they are derived. The writers 
 are working on the lines of the old Homeric 
 apologists whose theories had long ago been dis- 
 credited both by Plato and Aristotle. There is 
 no more curious example of the persistent influ- 
 ence of a faulty method, mischievous in its first 
 application, doubly pernicious when extended 
 from the secular sphere into that of religion.
 
 GREEK LITER AR Y CRITICISM 
 
 Reverting for a moment to Homer we may 
 take note of another and equally misguided line 
 of Homeric criticism, which was already in 
 vogue in the third and second centuries B.C. 
 The predecessors of Aristarchus in the school of 
 Alexandria loved to discover some ( impropriety ' 
 («7r/je7re?) in the poet. The Homeric scholia 
 abound in examples. In Odyssey xi. 524 
 Odysseus narrates the story of the Trojan horse 
 within which he and his comrades were concealed : 
 ' The charge of all was laid on me both to open 
 the door of our close ambush and to shut the 
 same.' These lines, says the scholiast, must be 
 deleted ' as unseemly ' (&>9 airpenrr]) : ' that is 
 the work of a hall--porter ' (Ovpcopov yap epyov). 
 The rules of etiquette observed in the court of 
 the Ptolemies presumably hold good for the 
 interior of the Trojan horse. Again, in Odyssey 
 xv. 82 Menelaus promises to speed his guest 
 Telemachus on his way : ' I too will go with 
 thee and lead thee to the towns of men, and 
 none shall send us away empty, but will give 
 us some one thing at least.' A note is here 
 appended, probably from the hand of Aristo-
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 phanes of Byzantium (circ. 200 B.C.): 'Again 
 it is unseemly that Menelaus should teach 
 Telemachus to be a mendicant' No wonder, 
 then, that it is also ' unseemly ' for Aphrodite to 
 set a chair for Helen {II. iii. 422), and for 
 Athene to bear a lamp to light the way for 
 Odysseus and Telemachus {Od. xix. 34). ' A 
 menial and most trivial conception ' (SovXo- 
 7rpe7re? real \iav ei>Te\e<; to t>}9 Stavoias) is the 
 comment we find on the latter passage. 
 
 Aristarchus, the great critic of Alexandria 
 (circ. 1 70 B.C.), almost alone among the learned 
 men of that day, brought genius and common 
 sense to bear on the Homeric poems. His 
 guiding principle was that Homer must be 
 explained by himself. The Epic language was 
 a thing apart ; it must be studied in detail ; 
 Homeric and Attic usages of words must be 
 distinguished. Again, the manners and the 
 customs, the civilisation of other times must 
 not be imported into the Homeric age. The 
 method of allegory should not be applied to 
 the Homeric mythology. The legends must be 
 accepted in their literal sense as belonging to
 
 v GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 213 
 
 the childhood of the race, without making 
 Homer responsible for their truth or their 
 morality. 
 
 Full justice has always been done to 
 Aristarchus as a verbal critic of Homer. But 
 he deserves no less credit for the vigorous war 
 he waged against absurdities such as those 
 which have been quoted. Yet, unfortunately, 
 he himself falls at times into the same error. 
 The atmosphere of Alexandria clings to him. 
 He cannot keep himself at the true angle of 
 vision and frankly accept the simplicity of 
 Homeric life. In Odyssey vi. 244 Nausicaa, on 
 first meeting with the shipwrecked Odysseus, 
 utters the wish : ' Would that such a one might 
 be called my husband, dwelling here, and that 
 it might please him here to abide ! ' To 
 Aristarchus the wish appeared indecorous and 
 unmaidenly. A little later (Od. vii. 311) 
 Alcinous exclaims : ' Would that so goodly a 
 man as thou art and like-minded with me, thou 
 wouldest wed my daughter and be called my 
 son-in-law, here abiding ! ' Again the critic's 
 sound principles fail him ; that is not how
 
 214 HARVARD LECTURES v 
 
 marriages were made in the court of the 
 Ptolemies. He therefore rejects (aderel) the 
 verses containing Nausicaa's unmaidenly wish, 
 and places his mark of doubt (Sio-ra^ei) against 
 the six lines that tell of Alcinous' offer of 
 marriage. But he has some misgivings. The 
 lines, he admits, have a Homeric flavour ; still 
 they can hardly be genuine ; for who would 
 think of engaging his daughter to a stranger 
 of whom he knew nothing, and who moreover 
 had not even asked for her hand ? x In a 
 similar spirit of deference to the usages of 
 polite society Aristarchus is offended by the 
 passage in Iliad ix. 322, where the envoys 
 from Agamemnon took a meal in the tent of 
 Achilles, and ' put away the desire ' (e£ epov euro) 
 ' of meat and drink,' — though they had already 
 ' drunk as much as their heart desired ' (ix. 177) 
 before leaving the tent of Agamemnon. It 
 would have been better, said Aristarchus, if the 
 poet had written, ' again tasted ' food (aty eird- 
 aavTo) — making them take merely a light refec- 
 
 1 See also Plutarch's guarded comments on the incident (de 
 And. roet. ch. viii. p. 23).
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 215 
 
 tion out of compliment to their host. Still from 
 excessive caution (v7rb irepLTTrjs evXafieias) he 
 did not change the reading. 
 
 Here we may take a rapid glance backwards 
 and observe the contrast between Alexandria 
 of the second century B.C. and Athens of the 
 fifth century B.C. 
 
 In Alexandria we have the famous Museum, 
 a royal foundation, with corporate rights and 
 large endowments, specially designed to en- 
 courage learning and research. Among its other 
 functions it aspires to maintain the purity of 
 Greek idiom, to arrest the encroachments of 
 other tongues, and to fix a standard of taste. 
 To this city erudite men resort from all parts 
 of the world. The accumulated treasures of 
 Greek literature have here found a home. There 
 are two libraries containing some five or six 
 hundred thousand volumes. A vast apparatus 
 of learning ; and with what result ? I speak 
 now only of the effect on literary taste and 
 literary criticism ; for no one could think- 
 slightingly of the services rendered us by that 
 encyclopaedic industry, above all by the
 
 2i6 HARVARD LECTURES V 
 
 laborious collection and comparison of Greek 
 texts ; — to those scholars we largely owe it 
 that we have a Greek literature to-day. But if 
 criticism implies some intuition and sympathy, 
 a faculty for apprehending a writer's inmost 
 meaning, most of their critical work, at least in 
 the domain of poetry, is unilluminating ; — save 
 where we meet with the sane and vigorous 
 intelligence of Aristarchus, or discover the too 
 rare relics and jottings of Aristotelian tradition. 
 Even from the lighter recreations of this society 
 of savants, we learn something of their quality. 
 We read of literary symposia where erudite 
 garrulity loved to amuse itself with questions 
 trivial to ask, impossible to answer — Why did 
 Nausicaa wash her garments in sea-water rather 
 than in the river ? how could Poseidon have had 
 so ugly a son as the Cyclops ? on which hand, 
 the right or the left, was Aphrodite wounded 
 by Diomede ? 
 
 Now turn from the cosmopolitan city of 
 learning to Athens of the Periclean age. Few 
 books, an oral literature, a diffused intellectual 
 atmosphere, the sway of the living word,
 
 V GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 217 
 
 criticism keen but unformulated. There, for 
 one brief moment, literature and art responded 
 with prompt impression to the call of patriotism 
 and religion ; each new product of genius made 
 its immediate appeal to a concourse of assembled 
 citizens ; and by a rare and happy fortune the 
 verdict of the few coincided with the instinct 
 of the many. The secret of the surprising 
 change — what was it ? Literature at Alexandria 
 was divorced from life ; it had become the craft 
 of a coterie, carried on within closed walls ; 
 ingenious, finished, industrious, sometimes even 
 tender and beautiful ; but no longer the 
 spontaneous expression of the mind of the 
 community. No current of national life was 
 stirring to vivify its failing force. Nor with 
 the waning of the creative impulse did the 
 critical faculty awaken — as it has done at some 
 periods of history — to prepare the way for 
 another forward movement. The critics pored 
 over their classic books, but as erudite men, 
 not as lovers of literature — TroXv/jbadels not 
 (piXuXoyoc. The links were broken which 
 bound the present in historic sympathy to the
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 past ; and many generations were destined to 
 elapse before it was discovered that the task of 
 criticism demands not only learning but direct- 
 ness of vision, some sense of perspective, and 
 an effort of imaginative reconstruction.
 
 VI 
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 'Literature,' said Goethe, 'is the fragment 
 
 of fragments. The smallest part of what has 
 
 been done and spoken is recorded, and the 
 
 smallest part of what has been recorded has 
 
 survived.' May we not add, from the Greek 
 
 point of view, — ' the smallest part of what has 
 
 survived is literature ' ? The modern world in 
 
 judging prose is often undecided as to what is 
 
 literature and what is not. We are all agreed 
 
 that we cannot include in literature every form 
 
 of written or printed matter. But where does 
 
 literature begin or end ? Must we exclude 
 
 almost all science, much history, most fiction? 
 
 On one or two points at least the Greeks 
 
 never wavered. When the early glamour 
 
 — the sense of mystery and almost of magic 
 219
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 — attaching to the discovery of writing had 
 passed away, writing was at first thought of 
 chiefly as a mechanical aid to memory. It 
 saved from oblivion the inspirations of the 
 Muse. Outside poetry its early uses were of 
 the practical kind : it was employed for regis- 
 tering treaties and contracts and for keeping 
 accounts. 1 So far, however, as it was designed 
 to serve purely material ends, it formed part 
 of the prosaic order of life and lacked the 
 dignity of art. In order to enter into the 
 domain of art, in order to become literature, 
 
 1 Euripides notes accurately the early use of writing for 
 practical purposes — letters or messages, wills, contracts, etc. ; see 
 Fr. (Palamedes) 578 Nauck : 
 
 ra tt)s ye X-qOr/s <papfx<XK 6p6'Jxras ixbvos 
 iifpbjua (puvyjevra avWafias ridels 
 e^rjupov dvdpuwoicyi ypd/xfiar' eltevou, 
 war ov irapbvra irovrias inrep ttXclkos 
 TCLKel Kar o'ikovs wolvt eiriaraaOai kclXws, 
 iralcriv re rbv dvqcjKovra xP 7 lf x -°- TUlv I^Tpov 
 ypa.\pavras eiire'iv, rbv Xa(3bvra 5' elde'vcu. 
 8. 5' els 'tpiv TriTrTovcnv &v9pu}TT0i rripi, 
 SiXros diaipel, kovk ea \pev5rj Xiyeiv. 
 
 Cp. schol. on Odyss. viii. 163 60ev Kal robs QoIvlkcls ifiirbpovs 
 inrb rijs xP € ' as tLvrrjs ('purely practical needs') ewi tt)v tQ>v 
 ypafxfj.arwv evpecnv eX6elv,
 
 *l GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 221 
 
 the written word must needs invest itself with 
 a new character. First, it must become an 
 expression of human thought or emotion. The 
 bare cold fact must pass through a human 
 medium ; it must take the personality of the 
 writer, or be coloured by the collective experi- 
 ence of the race. Secondly, some beauty of 
 form must be impressed upon it — a beauty that 
 should be tested by the ear as well as by the 
 mind. 
 
 These principles had long been instinct- 
 ively recognised in poetry. As soon as Greek 
 reflection applied itself to the difficult problem 
 of how to write prose, the conviction slowly 
 took shape, that if prose is to be more than a 
 lifeless record of facts and figures ; if it is to 
 exert its full force in civic life as an instrument 
 of persuasion ; if it is to be of enduring value 
 as a vehicle of discovered truth, it must, like 
 verse, submit itself to the law of beauty. Style 
 is no mere concession to human infirmity ; it 
 is the imperious demand of art ; and through 
 art alone can the perishable word clothe itself 
 in lasting form. Even the scientific writers of
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 Greece sought to stamp the impress of art, 
 some grace of style, upon works which other- 
 wise could not, they felt, pass outside the 
 narrow circle of specialists. The great treatise 
 of Hippocrates on medicine begins with the 
 words : ' Life is short : Art is long : Opportunity 
 fleeting : Experiment hazardous : Judgment 
 difficult.' l At once you hear the tones of one 
 who is an artist in prose ; this, you say, is 
 literature as well as science. With what de- 
 lighted surprise we should to-day greet a 
 medical treatise with such an opening ! 
 
 In our own day the style of prose is sub- 
 jected to two different and even opposing 
 influences. On the one hand, those who feel 
 the need of making prose artistic, easily become 
 artificial : they rely on the suggestive more 
 than on the expressive force of words ; they 
 adopt a manner of writing which is far-fetched, 
 allusive, recondite. Those, on the other hand, 
 who feel the need of making prose practical, 
 of producing an effect strong and immediate, 
 
 1 Hippocr. Aphor. i. I 6 /?i'os fipaxvs, rj 5e rix v V /J- aK PVj ° & 
 Kaipbs <5£i5j, t) 5£ ireipa acpaXeprj, t) 5£ Kpiffis x a ^ e7r V'
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 fall into exaggeration in the desire to be em- 
 phatic. In either case the language is strained. 
 Style becomes in the one instance affected ; 
 in the other, breathless and in a hurry. But 
 the great prose writers move us by their power- 
 ful simplicity, their quiet strength, their sense 
 of measure and proportion, even by what has 
 been called their ' grand leisureliness ' of 
 manner. They recall the Eastern proverb, 
 ' Hurry comes of the devil, slowness of God.' 
 
 No more wholesome corrective of any false 
 ideals of prose writing can be found than the 
 study of Attic prose masterpieces. At first 
 perhaps the)' strike us as cold. The rhetorical 
 manner, the pomp of phrase of aristocratic 
 Rome, is more congenial to modern taste. We 
 are accustomed to sonorous periphrases, to 
 pathetic and emotional appeals, to saying 
 rather more than we mean, in the hope that 
 people may be convinced that we mean some- 
 thing. But by degrees we become conscious 
 not only of the charm, but also of the power 
 of simplicity. We see that an exaggerated 
 phrase is often due to mere ignorance of
 
 224 HARVARD LECTURES VI 
 
 the ' proper ' word. Monotonous splendour 
 soon wearies us, and we confess the truth of 
 Aristotle's remark, that 'a too brilliant dic- 
 tion obscures the expression of character and 
 thought.' l 
 
 The Athenians disliked phrase -making. 
 Overdone ornament did not, in their judgment, 
 adorn but deface. The beauty of prose was 
 felt to lie in the texture of the whole, rather 
 than in isolated phrases or passages. To pre- 
 sent an idea in its true proportions, the parts 
 being skilfully adjusted to one another, and 
 the proper values of each given by contrast and 
 arrangement — this was their chief concern. It 
 would, of course, be misleading to speak of 
 Attic authors as if they all wrote in one style. 
 The broad contrasts between them are numer- 
 ous and striking ; the finer shades of difference 
 are endlessly various. But there are certain 
 common characteristics which mark the Attic 
 manner. The speech is that of daily life, direct 
 and lucid ; of men who are accustomed to easy 
 
 1 Poet. xxiv. II. 1460 b 4 airoKpvirTiL yap irdXii' r/ \tav 
 \afiirpa. X^is t& re ijOt] ^ai ras dtavoia?.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 225 
 
 human intercourse without artificial barrier or 
 restraint, who desire to understand, and to be 
 understood of others. But the colloquial idiom 
 is raised above the commonplace. It has an 
 added touch of distinction, unobtrusive but un- 
 mistakable ; a beauty or charm which conceals 
 the hand of the artist ; sometimes, too, an 
 energy, a compactness of phrase — quite unlike 
 the flowing grace of the Ionian writers — which 
 reminds us, perhaps too forcibly, that this finely 
 tempered instrument of language has been 
 forged or sharpened in the rhetorical schools. 
 
 It is a style scrupulous in the purity of its 
 diction, in avoidance of provincialisms, in the 
 effort to hit the right, rather than the approxi- 
 mately right word. It has a certain well-bred 
 elegance, which cannot be mistaken for pedan- 
 try. It obeys, moreover, the law of reserve : 
 it wins the goodwill of the reader by leaving 
 something to his own intelligence. 1 In the 
 
 1 Cp. Theophrastus ap. Demetr. De Eloc. 222 ov iravra eir' 
 aKpi^eias del fxaKp-qyopew, dXX' tvia Kara\t.Tre?i> Kal ry aKpoarrj 
 crvvUvai Kal \oyi£e<rOa. e| avrov- avvds yap rb iWeifidiv W 
 aov ovk afcpoarris fjMvov, d\\& Kal fidprvs aov ylverai, Kal (ip.a 
 (VfifviffTepos
 
 226 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 region of feeling it is discreet and guarded. 
 It refuses to speak in accents of emotion 
 where emotion is wanting ; but where real 
 passion has to be expressed, the glow of feeling 
 is at once revealed in the rising tone and in 
 rhythms in which we seem to overhear the very 
 vibrations of the voice. Still, even in its im- 
 passioned and imaginative modes of utterance 
 Attic prose retains the sense of measure, the 
 precision, the sobriety, which constitute its 
 essential character. It is just this union of 
 passion and self-restraint, the appeal to the 
 reason no less than to the emotions, that lends 
 to Greek oratory its incomparable force. 
 
 There was a moment in the fifth century 
 B.C. when the Athenians, shaping their prose 
 under the influence of the Sophists, were 
 tempted to take up the cult of ' Art for Art's 
 sake,' and to aim at aesthetic expression apart 
 from the meaning to be conveyed. They 
 would hardly indeed have subscribed to Flau- 
 bert's saying, that ' a beautiful verse meaning 
 nothing is superior to a less beautiful verse 
 meaning something' : still it was in that direc-
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 227 
 
 tion that the danger lay even in prose com- 
 position. But the just literary instinct of the 
 people, combined with their practical sagacity 
 and the vigour of their political life, saved them 
 from this alluring evil. That the expression 
 in words should be exactly adequate to the 
 thought, 1 and should also charm the ear, 
 became the guiding principle of their literary 
 art. The dislike of the Athenians for false 
 ornament, their intolerance of exaggeration, 
 their power of direct vision, led them to find 
 the perfection of language in keeping closer 
 than any other people to what was simple 
 and natural. Thus they found it possible to 
 reconcile their disdain of mere phrase-making 
 with an exquisite delight in beautiful and 
 harmonious words. 
 
 The value attached to literary form by all 
 antiquity, Greek and Roman, is, as stated in 
 general terms, a familiar and trite idea. But 
 it is of capital importance to remember that 
 in testing beauty of form the Greeks submitted 
 
 1 Cp. Lysias ap. Greg. Cor. p. 4 i] yap yXQrra vovv ovre ttoXvv 
 oiire fitKpdv ^x el > o ^ vous, tp /jl£v iro\u, iroXvs, w ot /xiKpov, p.iKp6s.
 
 228 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 the written word, prose and verse alike, to the 
 immediate judgment of the ear. The lan- 
 guage in which the later Greek critics speak 
 of the harmonies of prose composition might, 
 by a modern reader, be suspected of some 
 unreality. But the truth is that the power 
 of sound, the rhythm and music of the spoken 
 word, was felt by the Greeks in a degree we 
 cannot readily comprehend. ' With harmonious 
 arrangement of words comes Literature in its 
 many kinds.' 1 ' There is a marvellous attrac- 
 tion and enthralling charm in appropriate and 
 striking words. . . . Beautiful words are the 
 very and peculiar light of the mind.' 2 The 
 Chinese, whose language like that of the 
 Greeks is distinguished by the musical, as 
 opposed to the stress, accent, are said to be 
 the only modern people who are equally 
 sensitive to the aesthetic sound of words. 
 
 1 Dionys. Hal. De Comp. Verb. c. xvi 7rao<x hh tcls tG>v 
 6vo/jlo.twv dp/xoeias Tro\v/j.op(pos 6 X670S ylvtrcu (Trans. Saints- 
 bury, Loci Critici, p. 34). 
 
 2 Longinus De Subl. c. xxx I t] twv Kvplwv ko.1 fieyaKoTrpewCov 
 6vo[i6.twv ckXojt] 8av/j.a<jTQs dyet /ecu /caTa/cTjXe? roi/s aKovovras 
 
 , . . (pws yap rip ovtl idiov tov vov to. koKo 6v6fj.aTa.
 
 vi GREEK LITER A R V CRITICISM 229 
 
 The art of printing has done much to 
 dull our literary perceptions. Words have a 
 double virtue — that which resides in the sense 
 and that which resides in the sound. We 
 miss much of the charm if the eye is made 
 to do duty also for the ear. The words, bereft 
 of their vocal force, are but half alive on the 
 printed page. The music of verse, when re- 
 peated only to the inward ear, comes as a faint 
 echo. But it is perhaps in prose that we 
 have most to learn from the ancients in respect 
 of style. They observed the movements of 
 prose rhythm, they felt its harmonies, the 
 happy union of music and meaning, the adjust- 
 ment of sounds to the mood or feeling they 
 would convey — all this in a manner impossible 
 save to those with whom eye and ear, soul 
 and sense, have been trained to work together 
 in perfect correspondence. It is a fact but 
 little known that throughout the Greek period, 
 and far into the days of the Roman empire — 
 to the third and fourth century of our era — 
 the custom survived of reading both prose and 
 verse, not silently, but aloud and in company.
 
 HARVARD LECTURES 
 
 There is a curious passage in Augustine's Con- 
 fessions, one of the few in ancient literature 
 where silent reading is mentioned. 1 He there 
 tells of the difficulty he had in getting access 
 to his master Ambrose, whose rare hours of 
 leisure were spent in reading, and who was 
 often observed to run his eye silently over 
 the page, while ' his voice and tongue were 
 still.' Various reasons are then suggested to 
 account for so strange a departure from the 
 common practice. 
 
 ' To write and read comes by nature,' said 
 Dogberry. Epicurus, it seems, held a like 
 opinion : ' there is no difficulty,' he said, ' in 
 writing.' 2 The Greeks on the whole did not 
 find it so. Verse came to them almost as 
 their native speech. From their cradle they 
 had the gift of song. But the language of 
 prose was built up by long and laborious 
 
 1 August. Confess, vi. 3 ' cum legebat oculi ducebantur per 
 paginas, et cor intellectual rimabatur, vox autein et lingua 
 quiescebant.' In the Classical age dvayi.yi'dxTKeiv is rarely used 
 of silent reading, the full phrase being avayiyvuxxKeiv irpbs 
 iavrov. 
 
 - Dionys. Hal. De Comp. Verb. c. x\iv.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 231 
 
 discipline. Those who first wrote prose had 
 to create it ; they had no foreign models, no 
 tradition to guide them. The only tradition 
 was the tradition of poetry. 1 From this, by 
 degrees, they strove to set themselves free. 
 But they were haunted by Epic reminiscences, 
 by the old poetic diction, by the rhythm and 
 roll of the hexameter. Even in the philo- 
 sopher Heraclitus hexameter endings are not 
 uncommon; 2 and in Herodotus we find a 
 greater number of beginnings and endings of 
 hexameter lines than in any later author. 
 These early writers easily slip into metre, 
 especially when the thought and diction 
 become elevated ; just as blank verse is always 
 forcing its way into English prose. In Greece 
 snatches of metre and other poetical orna- 
 ments were at first sought out as an embellish- 
 ment of prose. In time the practice was 
 
 1 Cp. Strabo i. 2. 16 tvpwtigto. yap r\ ttolt]tikt) KaracnceuT] 
 iraprjXdev eh rb fiicrov Kal evooKifx-qcev elrc. iKeivrfv (iiiu.ovfj.evoi, 
 Xvaavres rb fxiTpov, r5\Xa 5e (pi'Xdi^avTes tcl Troir)TiK&, avv- 
 eypa\J/ai> oi nepi ~K.ab~f.iov Kal 'bepeKvdi) Kal 'lEKaralov. 
 
 2 E.g. fxaprvpiei Trapeovras aireivai — to p.ev iffxicrv 777, to 5e 
 rifuav Trprjo-Trjp.
 
 232 HARVARD LECTURES vl 
 
 decisively condemned by all good critics. 
 Aristotle, who laid it down that the styles of 
 poetry and prose are distinct, 1 also insisted that 
 1 prose should have rhythm but not metre, or 
 it will be a poem : the rhythm, however, must 
 not be over-exact ; it must be kept within due 
 limits.' 2 What the due limits were, was a 
 question variously answered. For the rest, the 
 rule that prose should be rhythmical, became 
 an accepted canon of criticism. Plato goes 
 so far as to discover a moral danger in prose 
 compositions which lack rhythm or harmony ; 
 to his mind they indicate some disorder within 
 the soul. 3 
 
 While prose rhythm was not only per- 
 mitted but enjoined, another and cognate 
 question, that of poetic prose, was more open 
 to debate. Literary taste was at first divided 
 on the point. When literature descended from 
 
 1 Rhet. iii. I. 9. 1404 a 28 irepa \6yov teal 7ro«ycreus X^is 
 eariv. 
 
 2 Lb. iii. 8. 3. 1408 b 30 did pvdfibv del ex €lv T0V ^byov, 
 uirpov 5e /xri, TrolyjpLa yap 'iaTai. pvd)j.bv 8e fir] d/c/Ji/3iDs. tovto 
 8e £(ttcu iav /J-^XP L T0V V- See also an instructive passage 
 De Subl. c. xli. 3 Laws vii. 810 B.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 233 
 
 her chariot of poetry — to use the metaphor so 
 frequently employed by Greek writers x — she 
 affected the manner of 'high-stepping' prose 
 rather than resign herself at once to ' march 
 on foot ' (7re£o9 X0709). Gorgias (fifth century 
 B.C.) was one of the first to invoke these graces 
 of poetry. 2 Yet he and his school worked 
 at the language in the spirit of artists ; and, 
 though their zeal betrayed them into some 
 overwrought ingenuity, an excessive use of 
 figures, wearisome antithesis, verbal assonances, 
 and so forth, still they had a true presenti- 
 ment of the capacities of Greek speech. They 
 felt that it was possible to impart to prose 
 a nobility of its own ; that it could be lifted 
 above the idiom of daily life, and yet acquire 
 force and precision. ' It is the perfection of 
 style,' says Aristotle, ' to be clear without being 
 mean ' ; 8 — but, he proceeds, ' by deviating some- 
 times from the normal idiom,' ' by adding some 
 
 1 E.g. Plut. De Pyth. Orac. 24 Kar^ij /j.ei> diro t&v ixirpuv 
 ibairep oxy/J-o-Twv r) iaropla. 
 
 2 See Jebb Att. Or. i. cxxiii. ff. 
 
 3 Poet. xxii. I. 1456 a 18 Ae£ews hk apery <ra.(p?i Kal fir} 
 Ta.miv)]v tlvai.
 
 234 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 element of novelty or surprise,' ' the language 
 will gain distinction ' (to fjurj ISicotlkov). 1 In 
 his judgment, however, Gorgias exceeded the 
 proper limits of such deviation. His prose ap- 
 proached too nearly to the poetical manner, 
 and on this account he is censured more than 
 once in the Rhetoric? 
 
 It so happens that a few specimens are 
 elsewhere also preserved of Gorgias' meta- 
 phorical and poetical style. ' At last Sleep 
 begins to lay me beside his brother Death ' — 
 is one of his sayings in extreme old age : 3 
 another is : ' Gladly I go hence as from a 
 lodging ruinous and decayed.' 4 As isolated 
 sayings, these could hardly offend Greek, any 
 more than they do English taste. But in 
 both languages they belong rather to the order 
 
 1 Poet. xxii. 4. 1458 b 2 ff. 
 
 - Rhet. iii. 1. 9. 1404 a 25 ff. ttoi7)tik7] TrptliTT) iyivero Ae£i?, 
 olov i) Yopyiov, /cat vvv 'in. 01 iroWoi tQjv awaidevTOiv tous 
 tolovtovs oiovTai dtaXiyeadat KaWiara. touto 8' ovk ecrriv, 
 k.t.X. lb. iii. 3. 4. 1406 b 9 ff. 
 
 :) Aelian V. H. ii. 35 170?; ,ue 6 virvos dpxerai. irapaKara- 
 TiOeadai Ta8e\<pui. 
 
 4 Arsenius Praedara Dicta Philosophorimi iocrirep e'/c aawpov 
 Kai peovros gvvoikIov d<x/.<.eV«s ciTraXXdrro/xai.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 235 
 
 of poetry, and could not appropriately be used 
 in prose except at rare moments. Of the 
 metaphors which Aristotle cites and censures in 
 prose, two, perhaps, deserve mention. One is 
 from the pen of Gorgias : ' You sowed in shame, 
 to reap in ruin.' ' Too grand and tragic,' says 
 Aristotle ; x and familiar as is the metaphor of 
 sowing and reaping, I think we should concur 
 with him. Even to modern ears the saying is 
 high-flown in so antithetic a form, and it would 
 need a very impassioned context to justify it. 
 It is otherwise with the metaphor he quotes 
 with disapproval from Alcidamas (one of the 
 school of Gorgias) describing the Odyssey as ' a 
 fair mirror of human life.' 2 The most fastidious 
 modern critic would not carp at this. But the 
 word KciToiTTpov in its metaphorical sense must 
 have had something far more daring and 
 unaccustomed for a Greek than the word 
 ' mirror ' has in English. Aristotle's censure 
 of the same writer for employing ornamental 
 
 Rhet. iii. 3. 4. 1406 b 9 <ri) 5e raura alaxp&s ^ v ((nretpas, 
 2 lb. iii. 3- 4- 1406 b 12 KaXbv dvOpuwii/ov /3tou k&to- 
 
 TTTpOV.
 
 236 HARVARD LECTURES VI 
 
 epithets ' not as the sauce of the discourse but 
 as the dish,' x is levelled at a fault of taste into 
 which the Greeks seldom fell. 
 
 Aristotle does not appear to have appreciated 
 either the suggestive capacity of words or their 
 musical value. The most instructive com- 
 mentary on the emotional power of sound, as 
 it was felt by the Greeks even in prose literature, 
 is to be found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a 
 critic and grammarian who lived at Rome in the 
 Augustan age. 2 Many of his literary judgments 
 are prejudiced and unprofitable, but of his fine 
 perception of the harmonies of Greek speech 
 we can entertain no reasonable doubt. In an 
 essay entitled On the Arrangement of Words, 
 that is little read even by scholars, he assumes 
 that the ear demands nobility and charm in 
 literary expression as truly as the eye does in 
 a picture or a statue (c. x.). He holds that the 
 magic of style depends less on the apt choice 
 
 1 Rhet. iii. 3. 3. 1406 a 18 01' yap ^vafxaTL XPV TCU aXX' ws 
 edecr/iaTL reus eirid^TOLS. 
 
 2 On Dionysius as a literary critic see the valuable edition of 
 The Three Literary Letters by W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge 
 Press 1 901), pp. 1-49.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 237 
 
 {e/ckoyrj) of words than on the manner in which 
 they are disposed (avvdeats) within the sentence. 
 Alter their arrangement and you destroy the 
 total effect : for arrangement is like the Homeric 
 Athene, who can at will make Odysseus mendi- 
 cant or warrior, mean or mighty (c. ii.-iv.). 
 Taking the alphabet itself he examines the 
 letters from the euphonic point of view (c. xiv.). 
 Phonetics, it may be observed, never with the 
 Greeks became an independent science. The 
 inquiries made into the physiology of sound 
 had all a bearing on the study of rhetoric, the 
 object being simply to discover what sounds 
 were beautiful or the reverse. Hence the link 
 was a close one which united phonetics on the 
 one hand with metric and music on the other ; 
 and it lay within the domain of the musician 
 rather than of the grammarian to classify the 
 letters of the alphabet. True to this principle 
 Dionysius, in estimating the elemental sounds, 
 relies on the authority of Aristoxenus, the 
 author of the famous treatise on music. He 
 arranges the vowels in order of euphonic value : 
 a, ?;, (o, v, 1. Among the consonants, sigma is
 
 238 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 a letter ' without grace or sweetness, and if 
 too frequently employed becomes very painful. 
 The sibilant sound seems characteristic of the 
 voice of the brute rather than of rational man.' * 
 Some poets, he adds, composed whole odes 
 without a sigma ; 2 and elsewhere we read 
 of a tour de force of the kind attributed to 
 Pindar. 3 
 
 We cannot here follow Dionysius in 
 his intricate distinctions of style. I would 
 refer only to a single chapter in which he 
 appears as the hierophant of a hidden art, one 
 who is prepared to initiate us into the inner- 
 most secret of literature. He asks the question 
 Hozv a prose work may resemble a beautiful 
 poem. The phrases with which he prefaces the 
 inquiry are borrowed from the mysteries of 
 Eleusis : 
 
 ' These things indeed are of the nature of 
 mysteries and not to be divulged to the vulgar. 
 
 1 Dionys. Hal. De Comp. Verb. c. xiv. &X a P l ^e xal drjdes 
 to <j, Kal el -rXeovdaeie acpbopa \vwei • di-pubdovs yap K<xi 
 d\6yov ixdWov ?) Xoyturjs e<pairTeadat. done? (jiwvrjs 6 o~vpi.yp.bs. 
 
 2 elai de ol daiy/xovs (Joas 6Aas eiroiovv. 
 
 3 Athen. x. 455 c.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 239 
 
 It would, therefore, be no impertinence should 
 I invite only the privileged few to be present 
 at the holy rites of literature, and bid the 
 profane close the gates of their ears. For 
 some there are who in sheer ignorance make a 
 mockery of things most serious.' l 
 
 He then expounds the doctrine of rhythmical 
 prose, working on the text supplied by Aristotle's 
 Rhetoric. Prose must be rhythmical but not 
 metrical, poetical without being a poem, and 
 melodious without being a lyric. Next he 
 selects passages from Demosthenes, which he 
 submits to a searching and minute analysis on 
 the side of rhythm. Some of his distinctions, 
 it must be owned, bear traces of the over- 
 elaboration of the rhetorical schools. But we 
 cannot dismiss his general criticism as unsound 
 or fanciful. The whole history of the evolution 
 of Greek prose, and the practice of the great 
 
 1 Dionys. Hal. De Comp. Verb. c. xxv fivarripLois fnev odv 
 HoLKev ij87] ravra, ko.1 ovk eh 7ro\Xoi)s old re ianv infapeadai.. 
 (bar ovk hv eirjv (popriKos, el TrapaKaKoirjv, ols depus eariv, riKew 
 iwl ras reXeras tov \6yov, dvpas 0' eirideadat \eyotpu rah 
 &kocus rovs /Se/STjXoi's. eis ye'XwTa yap i-vioi \ap.{iai>ov<ji to. 
 (XTTOVOaLOTara 01' direipiav.
 
 240 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 masters of the art, support his main contention. 
 The trained oratorical ear was acutely sensitive 
 to euphonious combinations of sounds. No pains 
 were spared that words might be linked together 
 by easy and continuous articulation. Rough 
 and clashing syllables were avoided, and even 
 two vowels in consecutive words were seldom 
 allowed to collide. We can trace, moreover, 
 the stages by which the ample movement of 
 the oratorical period was developed — how 
 the clauses that follow one another in logical 
 sequence and subordination, come to be linked 
 together in a larger rhythmical structure. 
 Recent critics following in the steps of 
 Dionysius have attempted to define more 
 accurately the rules of rhythm and harmony 
 which govern the prose of Demosthenes. But 
 such analysis, probably, can never be more 
 than partially successful. The Demosthenic 
 rhythm in its infinite variety refuses to adjust 
 itself to any rigid framework. No one can 
 fail to catch something of its manifold move- 
 ment, its great rise and fall ; but its laws are as 
 free as the emotion to which it responds. In
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 241 
 
 vain we seek an exact rhythmic correspondence 
 between the members of a period or of succes- 
 sive periods. Rhythmic symmetry of a kind 
 there surely is ; but the attempt to follow it out 
 in minor details succeeds, too often, only by 
 cutting up the period into artificial sections, 
 without due regard to oral delivery or to the 
 natural pauses of the voice. 
 
 The modern world has grown dull to the 
 cadences of prose. We read of Greek and 
 Roman audiences being painfully affected by 
 inharmonious combinations of sound. There 
 is probably no conceivable dissonance which 
 would cause neuralgia to the unfastidious ears 
 of a British audience. English is itself in truth 
 a most difficult language to render musical. It 
 is only when we venture to write it ourselves 
 that we become aware how ugly it can be 
 made, and wonder at the full harmonies that 
 can be drawn out by one who knows all the 
 tones of the instrument. 
 
 Now and then, by a rare chance, we are 
 admitted to the confidence of a writer who 
 
 has mastered the art. There is an article by 
 
 R
 
 242 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 R. L. Stevenson on ' Style in Literature,' * which 
 is a pretty precise modern parallel to the specula- 
 tions of Dionysius. Stevenson, we may be 
 sure, had never read Dionysius — probably had 
 never heard of him. But his manner of treat- 
 ment is curiously similar. ' Each phrase in 
 literature,' says Stevenson, ' is built of sounds, 
 as each phrase in music consists of notes. One 
 sound suggests, echoes, demands and harmonizes 
 with another ; and the art of rightly using these 
 concordances is the final art in literature.' 2 In 
 bad writers 'you will find cacophony supreme, 
 the rattle of incongruous consonants only 
 relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole 
 phrases not to be articulated by the powers 
 of man.' ' You may follow the adventures of 
 a letter through any passage that has particu- 
 larly pleased you ; find it, perhaps, denied 
 awhile to tantalize the ear ; find it fired again 
 at you in a whole broadside ; or find it pass 
 
 1 Contemp. Rev. 1S85. 
 
 2 Cp. Dionys. Hal. De Comp. Verb. c. xvi ware 71-0AA77 
 avdyKTj KaXrif fih elvai \&-w eu y Ka\d iartv ovdfiara, Ka\£>i> 
 oe ovo/j.a.TCji' avWaftas re kclI -ypd/j./j.aTa Ka\a atria elvai, rj5(7di' 
 re did\eKTov {k tCiv 7]8vv6vtu)v ttjv aKoriv yLveadai.
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 243 
 
 into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial 
 melting away into another.' Instances he then 
 gives from Milton's prose, from Shakespeare 
 and Coleridge, tracking in each case the recur- 
 ring letters. And as to the rhythm, he writes : 
 i Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or 
 recitative in music, should be so artfully com- 
 pounded out of longs and shorts, out of accented 
 and unaccented syllables, as to gratify the 
 sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole 
 judge.' He ends a long inquiry by observing : 
 ' We begin to see now what an intricate affair 
 is any perfect passage ; how many faculties, 
 whether of taste or pure reason, must be held 
 upon the stretch to make it ; and why when it 
 is made, it should afford so complete a pleasure. 
 . . . We need not wonder then if perfect 
 sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.' 
 
 Fascinating, however, as are such disclosures 
 of the inner mechanism of the craft, may we 
 not feel confident that the method of production 
 is one thing, and the method of analysis 
 another ; and that neither Demosthenes nor 
 Milton — nor Stevenson himself at his best —
 
 244 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 were solicitous to count their longs and shorts, 
 or consciously played the game of hide-and- 
 seek with the letters ? 
 
 Let us now pass to the age of the Antonines 
 — the second century of our era — and glance 
 at the work of the one man of literary genius 
 whom that age produced : an original writer, 
 who had also many of the gifts of a great 
 critic — Lucian, the Syrian, of Samosata. A 
 pamphleteer by instinct, a light and airy spirit 
 with an exuberant and poetic fancy, a sparkling 
 irony, a singular freshness and delicacy of tone 
 — of all his gifts his inimitable ease and 
 naturalness of manner was perhaps the chief 
 secret of his art. He had a native dislike 
 for falsehood and insincerity in literature as in 
 life. In an age of tasteless pedantry he stood 
 out as a model of simplicity and unaffected 
 good taste. The literary artists of the day — 
 ' Sophists ' as they were called — were as a rule 
 itinerant rhetoricians, whose business it was to 
 handle any theme effectively at short notice, 
 and execute variations upon it in brilliant and 
 acrobatic manner. They had a pretty knack
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 245 
 
 of turning phrases ; but their ingenious conceits 
 concealed an inner unreality and poverty of 
 thought. Lucian set his face against the 
 pretentiousness, the affectation, the hollow 
 imposture which passed for art. His own 
 literary criticism is occasional and unsystematic, 
 conveyed for the most part in parody or lightly 
 veiled irony ; but none the less it is original 
 and genuine criticism. 
 
 In the pamphlet entitled The Teacher of 
 Orators he lays down certain rules which may 
 be thus summarised : First, bring to your subject 
 ignorance and audacity, a stentorian voice, an 
 exquisite toilette, and some fifteen or twenty 
 old Attic words, which must be freely sprinkled 
 as a garnishing to your discourse. They are 
 always beautiful, even when they are nothing 
 to the purpose. 1 Next, press forward, speak- 
 fluently, do not pause to think. Do not trouble 
 to put things in their proper order. Thirdly — 
 and above all — have a chorus of friends to 
 
 1 Rhet. Praec. § 16 Kaddirep ri y}Svfffj.a 67ri'rarre clvtuv. 
 § 18 ko.1 (TriiraiXTa ra 6\iya eKeiva ovop-ara twnroXai'eTU) /cat 
 iiravOdrw . . . KoKa, yap iari nal eUrj \eyouiva.
 
 246 HARVARD LECTURES vt 
 
 applaud you. We observe here the allusion to 
 old Attic words. The love of archaic phrases, 
 which had been one of the passing affectations 
 of early prose, has now reappeared. Words 
 were unearthed or ' dug up,' * no one knew 
 whence, by persons who had never read the 
 ancient writers, and who opened none but the 
 newest books. The taste for archaisms and 
 the craze for novelty generally go together in 
 decadent minds. 2 In another satire, the Lexi- 
 phanes, Lucian administers a drastic medical 
 treatment to a patient suffering from this 
 fantastic disorder ; and finally dismisses him 
 with a little homily on literary education, 
 which has in it the ring of real conviction. 
 The closing words (§§ 23-24) are to this effect : 
 ' Give up the quest for outlandish phrases ; 
 think first of the sense, then of the words. 
 
 1 Lexiph. § 16 roaovTov ea/xov droTrwv /ecu 8ia<rrp6^>uiu 
 ovofidriov, &v to. /xev avrbs eiroirjaas, ret 6e Karopwpvy/xei'a 
 irodev dvaaTrQv k.t.X. 
 
 2 Cp. De Subl. c. v. to Trepi ras vo'foeis kclip 6a ttov8oi>, irepl 
 6 Si] /xaXiaTa Kopv§avrtu><TLv oi vvv, ' that quest after novelty in 
 thought which leads our folk of to-day so mad a dance ' (Saints- 
 bury, Loci Critici, p. 42).
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 247 
 
 Follow the ancient models instead of moulding 
 yourself on the poorest productions of the latest 
 sophist. Be not beguiled by the wind-flowers 
 of speech (ai avejjboivat roiv Xoytov), but nourish 
 your literary sense on the fortifying food of 
 athletes.' 
 
 In Lucian's literary criticisms there is always 
 a tacit reference to the great traditions of the 
 past. One of the evils he discerned was that 
 the various forms of literature were en- 
 croaching each on another's sphere ; natural 
 boundaries were being effaced and there was a 
 confusion of kinds. The pervading influence 
 of rhetoric more than any other single cause 
 brought about this anarchy of taste. Rhetoric 
 was the one educational discipline of the 
 Roman empire and the passport to success in 
 every walk of life. Indeed we find the word 
 ' eloquentia ' employed by Roman writers as 
 the comprehensive term for every form of 
 literary composition, grave and gay, prose and 
 verse. Poetry slowly withered as rhetoric 
 gained ground ; and even literary critics in 
 turn came to treat poetry from the point of
 
 248 HARVARD LECTURES VI 
 
 view of the rhetorical schools, till the question 
 was seriously raised by a Roman writer, 
 Annaeus Florus, of the second century A.D., 
 whether Virgil was an orator or a poet. 
 
 Of all kinds of prose composition history 
 suffered most from this subtle form of cor- 
 ruption. It was held to be a province of 
 rhetoric ; its special department was that of 
 panegyric. 1 The subject to be chosen must be 
 one that was flattering to national vanity and 
 that admitted of skilful embellishment. The 
 art of rhetorical amplification would find full 
 scope in the fictitious speeches which had 
 become a fixed tradition in historical writing. 
 But history was at the same time menaced by 
 the inroad of poetry. 2 It was the business of 
 poetry to supply the engaging falsehood, to 
 adorn the legends, to give an imaginative 
 colouring to the digressions, and offer to the 
 weary traveller pleasant resting-places by the 
 
 1 Cp. Hermog. De Ideis p. 417. 28 ird.vTws Bel k<zI toos 
 luTopLoypdfpovs ev tois TravrjyvpiKo'is Terax9a.L. 
 
 2 Lucian De Hist. Comer. § 8 ayvoeiv eoiKacnv ol toiovtoi 
 (is TroirjTiKrjs /J.ev ko.1 iroi.-qp.a.Tui> aXAcu inroax^&ei-S xal Kavdves 
 iSioi, iffTopias 5e dWoi.
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 249 
 
 way. Thus the clanger which the Greeks 
 surmounted in their vigorous prime, when prose 
 began to advance along the lines of poetry, 
 now, in a new form, assailed historical writers, 
 both Greek and Roman. 
 
 In his pamphlet Hoiv to write History 
 Lucian puts in a plea for accuracy and 
 sobriety ; he protests — as also did Polybius — 
 against turning history into panegyric. 1 He 
 ridicules the writers who affect a vulgarly 
 picturesque style or one overloaded with 
 descriptive detail (§§ 19-20). No less does 
 he condemn that jumble of styles in which 
 fine writing is interspersed with touches of 
 slang — ' the buskin of tragedy on one foot, 
 and a slipper on the other.' 2 He disallows 
 the lawless poetic fancy by which history 
 becomes ' a sort of prosaic poetry.' 3 His own 
 
 1 De Hist. Conscr. § 7 ('a great gulf is fixed ' between history 
 and panegyric) : ayvoovpres (is ov arevip t<2 lad/nip Biupiffrat 
 ko.1 5iarer€iX' crrat V i-CTopia vpbs rb eyKwpiov. 
 
 2 lb. § 22 wore to irpa.yp.a ioiKos elvai rpayudip, rbv erepoi' 
 fxeu iroda iw ep.fi6.rov v^rfKov iTrij3ef3r]K6Ti, Oaripq) 5e advoa\op 
 VTTodeoepLevtii. 
 
 3 Id. § 8 17 iffTopia oe, iju riva KoXaxelav ToiavTi]v 7rpo<T\d,f}y, 
 ri &\\o 7} 7T^j~77 rts Troir)TLK7i yiyveTdt, ;
 
 250 HARVARD LECTURES VI 
 
 conception of what a historian ought to be is 
 in marked contrast with the character of the 
 historian of the day — his servility, his disregard 
 of truth, his straining after dramatic effect. 
 The historian should be ' a free man, fearless, 
 incorruptible, the friend of truth,' ' owning no 
 country, no sovereign, no king ' ; l one who 
 writes not for the praise of the hour but for 
 all time to come. 2 
 
 The triple alliance of history, poetry, and 
 rhetoric injuriously affected, through the course 
 of centuries, the historical tradition of Europe. 
 In recent years a sharp reaction has set in 
 against what is called the literary influence in 
 history. The Muse of history is exhorted to 
 cast aside her literary trappings and assume her 
 severest aspect. She must make herself 
 scientific. Under the aesthetic influence, Seeley 
 urges, history becomes pictorial ; the pictorial 
 point of view is apt to overshadow the historical ; 
 
 1 Dc Hist. Conscr. § 41 a<po(3os, dSe'/caoros, iXevdepos, Trap- 
 prjcrias /cat a.\7]0eias (pl\o$, . . . taos 8iKacrT7]S ei'Vous aTracnv, 
 . . . £eVos iv tols /3tj3Xi'o(s, /cat aVoXts, avr6vop.os, a(3a.cri\evTos. 
 
 2 lb. § 61 p.1] TTpbs to Trapbv fibvov opQv ypa<p€ t . . . ctXXa 
 tou (TVpLwavTos alCovos earoxo-cr/itfos.
 
 GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 a biographical interest is substituted for a 
 political. Attention is concentrated on the 
 mere externals of an event, on its scenic 
 accessories, on all that is personal and dramatic 
 and that invites literary handling. Whereas 
 many of the most important events are con- 
 fessedly dull reading, great political changes 
 being brought about without pomp or glitter, 
 the literary estimate falsifies the true propor- 
 tions of things. The artistic historian rejects 
 elements of serious interest in order to satisfy 
 the taste for the picturesque. 
 
 Few will deny the solid truth that underlies 
 this criticism. But we cannot lightly accept 
 the suggestion that history should emancipate 
 herself from literature. Seeley himself fortun- 
 ately possessed so fine a literary gift as to be 
 unable to carry out his own theory. But the 
 summons has again been addressed to history 
 — and in a more peremptory form — by the 
 present holder of the chair at Cambridge, to 
 quit her old associates and come out into a 
 place of freedom. 1 In the view of this dis- 
 
 1 Inaugural Lecture, J. B. Bury, Cambridge Press, 1903.
 
 252 HARVARD LECTURES VI 
 
 tinguished writer history is not, as for Seeley, 
 limited to the mass of facts which form the 
 material of political science. It embraces other 
 groups of facts and is more comprehensive in 
 its scope. Still for him too history is a science 
 not an art ; ' a science no less and no more ' ; 
 in close relation with ' the sciences which deal 
 objectively with the facts of the universe.' ' To 
 clothe the story of a human society in a 
 literary dress is no more the part of a historian 
 as a historian, than it is the part of an 
 astronomer as an astronomer to present in 
 an artistic shape the story of the stars.' 
 
 Yet may we not urge that the form of 
 a work must be mainly determined by the 
 nature of the subject-matter? Human action 
 cannot be told in just the terms applicable to 
 cosmic processes. History is not merely the 
 story of movements, of institutions, or of 
 changes in the order of society. It is also 
 the story of men, doing, feeling, thinking ; 
 acting as individuals, though within and in 
 relation to the political organism. A purely 
 scientific history could hardly touch the fringe
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 25.5 
 
 of the inward world of human motive and human 
 personality. That world, with its reactions 
 on the outer, can never be reduced to the 
 certitude of scientific truth : its facts cannot 
 be tested or authenticated by the methods 
 which strict science recognises. They need 
 some divining power, some faculty of imagin- 
 ative interpretation to make them intelligible ; 
 and such a faculty demands the art of literary 
 expression. Different periods, again, call for 
 different kinds of writing. In describing scenes 
 of stirring and dramatic interest it is right 
 that the style should reflect the colour and 
 movement of the time. Great deeds should 
 be nobly told. There are other periods which 
 carry within them the silent growth of institu- 
 tions or the shaping of events still in the 
 future. It is the part of the literary historian 
 not to omit these less inspiring pages of 
 history, but to relate them in a manner adapted 
 to the subject. We are here within the proper 
 region of literature. 
 
 ' What a pity it is,' says Edward FitzGerald, 
 ' that only Lying Histories are readable.' Would
 
 254 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 not, however, the unreadable histories — divorced 
 from the literary art and omitting many vital 
 but non-scientific facts — be also to a large 
 extent untrue ? History, in short, would seem 
 to be partly a science, and partly an art. It 
 is a very human affair, this story of the past, 
 and it must be so told that men will read it 
 with sympathy and even with delight. Let 
 us search the records, collate the manuscripts, 
 investigate the sources, classify and collect the 
 facts : yet all this is not yet history, but the 
 materials of history — ' not tragedy,' in Plato's 
 phrase, ' but the preliminaries of tragedy.' * It 
 remains for the writer of genius and imagination 
 to fuse the elements, the outward and the 
 inward facts, into an orderly whole. The 
 antithesis between history and literary history 
 is surely a false one. History rightly told is 
 literature ; but it is not therefore rhetorical, 
 unreal, fantastic. We do not ask the historian 
 to be ' the epic poet or ballad writer in verse.' 2 
 We do say that he should be at once a literary 
 
 1 Plat. Phaedr. 269 A to. irpo rpayuiolas dAX' ov tcl Tpayma. 
 - Seeley, Introduction to Political Science, p. 27.
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 255 
 
 man and a man of science. The task of writing 
 literary history becomes indeed every day 
 more difficult owing to specialised learning, 
 the accumulation of materials, and the stricter 
 standard of truth. To be a literary historian 
 will probably be a rare achievement in the 
 future. But the ideal should not on that 
 account be lowered. What is needed is, not 
 that history should cease to be literary, but 
 that it should be literary in a higher than the 
 ordinary sense ; the style should be more 
 flexible and sensitive ; ready obediently to 
 follow the thought, and delicately responsive 
 to the nature of the subject-matter. When 
 one considers how various that subject-matter 
 is, it will be seen that no literary demand could 
 well be more exacting. I am not sure that 
 the historical scientists would, if they were 
 pressed, reject some such literary ideal. But, 
 in any case, history severed from literature 
 loses her place and power in the world. Her 
 productions become ephemeral ; each fresh fact 
 that is discovered loosens their precarious hold 
 on life.
 
 256 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 Looking back on the general course of 
 Greek criticism we can see that not a few of 
 its defects may be traced to the fact that the 
 Greeks knew no literature but their own. In 
 the region of literary production they were 
 probably the gainers for being thrown upon 
 their own resources. Their literature must 
 otherwise have lost some of that incomparable 
 freshness which distinguishes it from the other 
 literatures of Europe. It could not have 
 evolved itself on the same natural lines and in 
 such close relation to the organic life of 
 society. But the province of criticism is one 
 of observation and comparison, and a wider 
 comparison would have brought with it an 
 enlarged comprehension. The chief danger, 
 perhaps, which besets a critic is that of attempt- 
 ing to restrict the rights of genius by framing 
 arbitrary canons of literary uniformity. Even 
 Aristotle in the Poetics is not free from the 
 failing ; and it may perhaps be questioned 
 whether the highest literary criticism is possible 
 without a knowledge of at least one foreign 
 literature. In the critical appreciation of our
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 257 
 
 own literature no first-rate work was produced 
 till the way had been prepared by the study 
 of Greek and Latin masterpieces. Char- 
 acteristics long familiar became significant only 
 when light was first flashed on them from the 
 study of antiquity. A lesson even in com- 
 parative politics may have a salutary influence 
 on the literary art. In the expiring days of 
 Greece Rome opened up larger horizons to 
 writers who had hitherto been brought up in 
 the seclusion of libraries or in rhetorical schools. 
 The stirrings of political life were now again 
 felt. The History of Polybius was one result 
 of this outlook into a wider world. Greek 
 criticism too had showed signs of renewed 
 vitality ; and the return to a sounder taste in 
 the Augustan age is noted by Dionysius of 
 Halicarnassus as due to the invigorating con- 
 tact of Rome. 1 
 
 It was the confluence of these two civilisa- 
 tions that led to the comparative study of 
 literature in however rudimentary a form. The 
 early experiments were not altogether felicitous. 
 
 1 De Antiq. Orat. proem, c. 3.
 
 258 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 A habit arose of drawing artificial comparisons 
 between Greek and Roman authors. Ennius 
 answered to Homer, Afranius to Menander, 
 Sallust to Thucydides, Livy to Herodotus. 
 Still more remote are the analogies suggested 
 by Plutarch's Parallel Lives. None the less 
 the method was a true one, and needed only 
 riper knowledge and judgment to become 
 fruitful in results. The first Greek critic who 
 employed it to any purpose is the author of 
 the treatise On the Sublime. He has the 
 unique distinction of drawing his illustrations 
 from three literatures, — not only from the Greek 
 and Latin classics, but also, in one passage, 
 from the Jewish Scriptures {Gen. i. 3). 1 
 
 In another respect the same writer ap- 
 proaches to our modern point of view. He 
 thinks of literature not merely as a product 
 of the individual mind, but as an expression of 
 national life. Certain conditions are necessary 
 to produce great thinking and great speaking. 
 
 1 De Subl. c. ix. 9 ravrri nal 6 rCiv '\ov5alwv dfcy/uoderrjs, ovx 
 6 tvxwv o.vrjp, . . . eudus iv ttj eiafloXr) ypd\(/a.s tCiv vbfiuiv 
 "ei7rej' 6 Geos" <pr\u{ m ri ; "yeviadw <pu>s, kclI eytvero ; ytveadta 
 yr) t Kai eyivero."
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 259 
 
 It is not enough that the author should have 
 the natural gift of beautiful speech, or that he 
 should have been trained to emulate the great 
 models of antiquity. An atmosphere is needed, 
 a fitting social environment to call forth his 
 powers. True as it is that elevation of style 
 is 'the far-heard echo of nobility of soul,' 1 
 yet noble faculties may be starved for want of 
 moral sustenance. What, he asks, are the 
 causes for the decline of eloquence ? for the 
 ' great and world-wide dearth of high utterance 
 that attends our age ' ? 2 Two causes he 
 assigns, both of them rooted in social con- 
 ditions. First, the decay of liberty. ' We 
 seem to have learnt from infancy that sub- 
 serviency is the law of life, being from our 
 tenderest years of thought all but swaddled in 
 its manners and customs, and having never 
 tasted that most beautiful and fertile fountain 
 of eloquence, Freedom — so that we turn out 
 merely sublime in Courtiership.' 3 Next, ' the 
 
 1 De Subl. c. ix. 2 v\pos p.eyo.\o<ppo<ivvri$ dirijXTj/xa. 
 
 2 lb. c. xliv. 1 ToaauTTj \6ywu Koap.u.'i tis e7re'x« tov {iiov 
 &<popia (Trans. Rhys Roberts). 
 
 3 lb. c. xliv. t. (Trans. Saintsbury). 
 
 S 2
 
 260 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 love of money and the love of pleasure carry 
 us away into bondage, or rather, as one may 
 say, drown us body and soul in the depths, the 
 love of money causing meanness, and the love 
 of pleasure being the ignoblest of all diseases.' 
 No previous Greek critic, not even Aristotle, 
 had noted the moral atmosphere, the social 
 ideals of an age, as a main factor in the 
 creation of noble works of literature. The 
 only other ancient writer who lays any stress 
 on this topic — now so trite — is Tacitus in the 
 remarkable dialogue De Oratoribus. 
 
 The inadequate perception of the correspon- 
 dence between a writer and his age is closely 
 related to what was perhaps the most persistent 
 defect of ancient criticism — a want of historic 
 imagination, of a faculty for apprehending the 
 whole environment of a bygone time. The 
 critic, as we now understand his office, is an 
 interpreter between the present and the past ; 
 he must be imbued with the historic no less 
 than with the literary spirit. Yet it has 
 taken centuries for this idea to be established. 
 It is foreshadowed in Bacon, who in sketching
 
 vi GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 261 
 
 the principles on which a critical history of 
 literature should be composed, says that the 
 writer should ' evoke from the dead as by a 
 sort of spell the literary genius of the age.' 1 
 Not until recent years has either Greek or 
 English literature been handled in this spirit. 
 Criticism so practised becomes an art of 
 constructive imagination. 
 
 Nor must we forget that the critic's office 
 is not completely summed up in the word 
 ' interpretation.' He must needs form a judg- 
 ment. He cannot renounce this his original 
 function. If there is such a thing as a standard 
 of excellence and a tribunal of criticism, the 
 decisions of that tribunal will admit of in- 
 telligent exposition. ' A judgment,' however, 
 ' on literature is ' — once more to quote Lon- 
 ginus — 'the final aftergrowth of much en- 
 deavour ' ; 2 and the critic is aware that the 
 ultimate appeal is to Time — to the many not 
 to the few, to the consentient opinion of 
 
 1 De Angm. Scient. B. ii. c. iv. ' ut genius illius temporis 
 litterarius veluti incantatione quadam a mortuis evocctur.' 
 
 2 De Subl. c. vi 17 yap t&v \6yuiv Kpiais tto\\?/s ian 
 irtipas reXevraiov eiriytvvy]p.a (Trans. Saintsbury).
 
 262 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 educated mankind. This principle of Quod 
 semper quod ubique in literature is first 
 enunciated in the treatise On the Sublime : 
 
 ' If then any work on being repeatedly sub- 
 mitted to the judgment of an acute and 
 cultivated critic, fails to dispose his mind to 
 lofty ideas ; if it does not leave in the mind 
 more food for reflection than the words seem 
 to convey ; and if, the longer you read it, the 
 less you think of it, there can be here no true 
 sublimity, when the effect is not sustained 
 beyond the mere act of perusal. But when a 
 passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is 
 hard, nay, impossible to distract the attention 
 from it, and when it takes a strong and lasting 
 hold on the memory, then we may be sure that 
 we have lighted on the true Sublime. In 
 general we may regard those words as truly 
 noble and sublime which please all and please 
 always. For when the. same book produces 
 the same impression on all who read it, what- 
 ever be the difference in their pursuits, their 
 manner of life, their aspirations, their ages, or 
 their language, such a harmony of opposites
 
 vi CREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 263 
 
 gives irresistible authority to their favourable 
 verdict.' x 
 
 This consentient verdict of the ages Greece 
 has gained. In the Hymn to tlic Dclian Apollo 
 you may remember the description of the Ionians 
 assembled at their festival : ' Whosoever should 
 meet them at that gathering would deem that 
 they were exempt from death and age for ever, 
 beholding their gracious beauty and rejoicing 
 in heart at the sight of the men and the deep- 
 girdled women.' " What is here said of the 
 Ionians applies with literal truth to the gracious 
 creations of Greek literature — 'deathless they 
 are and ageless for ever.' They are embalmed 
 in writings which possess the greatest of all anti- 
 septic qualities, the quality of style ; — and there 
 lies the answer to the question so often asked : 
 Why can we not be content to read Greek 
 literature in translations ? 
 
 Style and thought perfectly blended — it is 
 thus that Pindar's saying comes true : ' The word 
 
 1 Dc Sit',!, c. vii. 3-4 (Trans. H. L. Havell Macmillan and 
 Co. 1S90). 
 
 2 Hymn to Delian Apollo, 151- 154.
 
 264 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 lives longer than the deeds.' 1 And it is herein 
 precisely that the Greeks stand out as the 
 models of the true literary spirit. They show 
 us that he who would worthily pursue the 
 calling of letters should attempt to rise above 
 a purely mechanical skill ; that, however lowly 
 may be the material in which he works, he 
 must do so in the spirit of the artist, not of 
 the artisan. There is of course a weak side to 
 literary aestheticism. In Don Quixote we read 
 of a certain author who was renowned for ' the 
 brilliancy of his prose and the beautiful perplexity 
 of his expression.' We seem to know the type. 
 Let the phrase be but beautiful and rhythmical, 
 musical and flowing, and it matters not if 
 the fine words conceal emptiness beneath. A 
 literary aesthete was described by Lucian as ' a 
 strange phantom fed upon dew or ambrosia.' 2 
 Him too we know. His home is not upon the 
 
 1 Pind. Nem. iv. 6 : 
 
 pfj/xa 8' epy/J-aToov xpw^Tepov fiioreijei. 
 Cp. Isth. iii. 58 : 
 
 tovto yap adavarov (pwvdev epirei, 
 e'i rts eS ei'7T?7 tl. 
 
 2 Rhet. Free. § 1 1 £eVoe (pdcr/xa dpoaqi rj afx^poala Tpecpofiefov.
 
 VI GREEK LITERARY CRITICISM 265 
 
 solid earth. He sings and soars, he loves and 
 laments, he knows not what or why ; harmonious 
 and meaningless is his song. The cult of 
 the meaningless is from time to time in the 
 ascendent. Once at an exhibition of pictures 
 I stood in wonder before a certain portrait. I 
 begged a friend who was initiated into the 
 principles of the school to explain it. The reply 
 was : ' Think away the head and the face and 
 you have a residuum of pure colour.' Whether 
 this doctrine is to be accepted in painting, and 
 more particularly in portrait-painting, I do not 
 know ; but in literature at least it means sure 
 decay. Think away the meaning, get rid of 
 the thought, and you have beautiful and pure 
 form. No, — form is essential, but not form with- 
 out substance. The supreme merit of the Greeks 
 is that, on the one hand, they felt and showed 
 that beauty is of the essence of literature, and 
 that a formless work of literature is in truth a 
 misnomer, being dead while yet it lives : it may 
 have philosophic, it may have scientific merit, 
 but it will be superseded : what is in it of value 
 will be incorporated with other works : its sub-
 
 266 HARVARD LECTURES vi 
 
 stance is separable from its form. On the other 
 hand, Greek example reminds us that beauty of 
 form is not all. The literary writer, whether in 
 prose or verse, is not a maker of fine phrases, a 
 singer in the void. The Greek poet had some- 
 thing to say, and was not merely concerned 
 how he said it. He was in close contact with 
 realities. He drew his sustenance from the 
 soil of human nature. He touched the springs 
 of national life. Even the idiom of the people 
 he so used as to ennoble it. It is the glory of 
 Greek literature that of all literatures it is at 
 once the most artistic and the most popular. And 
 our hope, our best hope, for the literature of the 
 future is, that as the democratic movement 
 extends and calls forth enlarged intellectual 
 sympathies, the old Hellenic harmony may be 
 re-established between that eternal love of beauty 
 on which all art and literature rest, and that 
 love of scientific truth which is the dominant 
 mark of our own age. 
 
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