LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO MEREDITH REVISITED AND OTHER ESSAYS MEREDITH REVISITED AND OTHER ESSAYS BY J. H. E. CREES, D. LIT. AUTHOR OF DIDASCALUS PATIENS GEORGE MEREDITH ETC. LONDON RICHARD COBDEN-SANDERSON 17 THAVIES INN (COPYRIGHT, 1921) JOHN BELLOWS GLOUCESTER PREFACE The following twelve essays, written at different times in the last eight years, deal with very different writers representative of very different literatures. At first sight there is very little resemblance between Homer and Ibsen, Meredith and Newman, Cicero and Mr. J. D. Beresford. But any method of criticism which is based on really sound foundations must arrive at some general conclusions which it should be possible to apply to writers even as distantly related as those whose works are treated of in these pages. Criticism, to be successful, must not be one-sided. It should view with sympathy, or attempt to view with sympathy, writers of every clime and every age, and though it must be far from sitting on the fence, it must regard with impartial favour the combatants in the secular struggle between the ancients and the moderns, neither contemning the ancients as passe or effete because they are ancient, nor refusing moderns the privileges of genius because they were born in the nineteenth (or twentieth !) century. It must not shirk the difficult task of appraising those who have not received the testamur of many ages, though it must not make a cult of the dernier cri. And, therefore, there may be some justification one hopes for including in a single volume so many different names besides the plea which Samuel Butler wittily advances for publishing that of which the world seems in no urgent need, particularly in an age when conditions seem to have conspired for the destruction of the writer unless he be a novelist. Some of the essays herein included were papers originally put together for a private society at Gloucester (the XII) . The essay on two plays of Aristophanes (" The Acharnians " and " The Clouds") appeared originally in the Gloucester Journal on the occasion of the production by boys of the Crypt School, in 1912 and 1913, of selections from the two plays in the original Greek. The essays were later modified and expanded and now are combined into one longer essay. As for the essay on the Smoke Nuisance (which has been refused a place in various reviews) it can scarcely claim a place by right in the present volume, but at a time when human beings seem to be fast reducing themselves to the condition of mere smoking machines it is only natural that one to whom the vogue of tobacco is a colossal enigma should set forth his opinion as emphatically as he can. It is only right to add that Mr. S. M. Ellis, having, as it would seem, settled the differences existing between himself and Mr. W. M. Meredith, has recently (July, 1920) reissued his book on Meredith, and it can be obtained from the publisher, Mr. Grant Richards. What modifications the book has suffered I cannot say, but I gather from a notice in the Saturday Review of August 28, that it has been shortened. I was able to see a copy of the original edition and my own essay stands as a criticism of the original work. J. H. E. CREES. SCHOOL HOUSE, HEREFORD, NOVEMBER, 1920. CONTENTS PREFACE .. .. i 1 MEREDITH REVISITED 2 2 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS (George Meredith and S. M. Ellis) 16 3 THE ODYSSEY 23 4 VERRES .. 45 5 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES 49 6 THE MEDEA 56 7 IBSEN 64 8 AN EMINENT VICTORIAN 78 9 MR. BERESFORD'S COUNTERPOINT . . . . 86 10 THE SMOKE NUISANCE 98 11 THE GATE OF DREAMS 107 12 LITERATURE VERSUS SCIENCE 112 MEREDITH REVISITED A CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH CRITICISM* 1919 " No man was ever written down except by himself." Jeffrey may tell Wordsworth that " this will never do," Lockhart may bid Keats go back to his ointments and ipeca- cuanha, but Wordsworth and Keats are enthroned with the gods of literature, and their infallible and omniscient censors owe much of their present fame to their fatuous judgments upon rising genius. The truth holds good doubtless of lesser things in literature. An honest piece of work will win whatever recognition it deserves, whether critics are spiteful, fatuous, or merely lazy. A book becomes a very different thing the longer it is studied. Inevitably it presents a different aspect to the harassed journalist who has, with the aid of the index, to pro- duce an appreciation in half an hour or less, from that which it presents to the sym- pathetic student whose time has no competing claims upon it, or to the author who has laboured many solitary hours, and burnt many quarts of midnight oil. In some ways therefore a review by the author might be the best appraisement of a book. He is assured- ly his best expositor. He is able, or should be able, to set forth the things which he was driving at, he has read his book, perchance with loving interest. At any rate the ex- periment shall be tried. The author may indeed be as variable as his most flighty critics. Every man who has toiled his hardest, gone over his pages time after time, filed and polished, trimmed and pruned, knows that feeling of lethargic exhaustion when the unstrung mind turns wearily from the task which has consumed so many hours of ardent enthusiasm and intense thought. The gems which erstwhile seemed so brilliant sparkle no more ; gone is the freshness of those happy turns and sudden inspirations. As he gazes at his creation there are good things visible, but they seem embedded in a mass of dead matter. The whole thing is one vast and mis-begotten chaos. The mind is stagnant, dull as ditch- water, the mental energies cease to respond to the stimuli which once were potent. The author is so numbed that he cannot even correct his proofs efficiently. At other times indeed he may yet win some satisfaction from a perusal of his finished product. Here at least is a condensation of his vaporous fancies, some organisation of a considerable mass of opinions, judgments, moods, some more definite expression of that Protean infinite thing, personality. Here at last in some definite shape has been caught himself. Here is a segment of himself, something that is, and may even abide some little while, (even as long as the British Museum), a clarified record of one human mind. In such a mood he may not be appalled by his own style, or fatigued by his own epigrams. He may even catch himself applauding some apt strokes, or deft phrases, he may even truly in rare cases find himself ejaculating like Swift " Good God ! What genius I had when I wrote that ! " * " George Meredith, a Study of his Works and Personality," by J. H. E. Crees. Blackwell, Oxford, 6/- net. MEREDITH REVISITED But the prevailing frame of mind is neither that of sombre pessimism or sanguine enthusiasm, but a settled, cheerful indifference. An honest workman not a hack may generally trust with reason that his achievement is not absolutely futile, not absolutely worthless. If he had something to say, he has probably said something of this some- thing. But art is long and life is short, and human powers are weak, and language an instrument of many keys requiring skill consummate for the sounding of them all. The artist, or, if you prefer it, the conscientious craftsman, realises at every completion of a fresh task how imperfectly he has succeeded in getting into words his happiest inspira- tions, and how rarely the happy inspiration comes. Yet Hope springs eternal. Onward he goes, journeying always towards perfection, never within a million miles of it, on a quest which he will never accomplish, but which satisfies him by the mere activity He prudently counts on audience few if not fit, he is prepared to divert himself if no one else, he knows that hi the nature of the case none will give the time and thought to his labours which he has bestowed upon them, first in the rough, then in the hewing of them from the stone, then in the final chiselling Resignedly but resolutely he unloads his slow-gotten gains on a thankless and incurious world.* Great is his handicap. He has to express perfectly and easily what he has laboriously acquired, he has to hit the reader in a minute with the accumulation of a month ; a single phrase may have to represent the generalisation of long hours of reading. Here is condensed on one white page of 300 words, scanned by a careless reader in thirty seconds, taken by an irresponsible re- viewer at ten to the minute, the teeming thoughts of long years' experience, the intense literary toil of a whole day. A writer expects but little. He is not perturbed by the light condemnation of a light critic, he is rather surprised than not if any notice his best things, and incense and oblation but discomfit him. A merciless self -scrutiny has strange results. Humility and self-confidence may co-exist It is always easy to be proudly content if one measures oneself by the general average, it is never possible to be anything but humble when aim and achievement are contrasted. Thus the laborious author may combine almost complete depreciation of self with a feeling of not uncertain satis- faction or even arrogant disregard, that extreme of arrogance which is marked by the quiet ignoring of the world He is scarcely amused by not notable anonymity when it tells him his work is not notable, he is equally resigned if he is praised and blamed for the wrong thing, he is as little interested in indiscriminate eulogy as in indiscriminate cen- sure, f He does not ask to be admired, he scarcely heeds it if he is denounced, but what, lodged in a wilderness he craves for, and but rarely gains, is to be understood Such are the reflections which arise in me as I peruse some forty notices of a recent work on Meredith. I have no particular grievance that demands expression. I had a not unfavourable press. There was, not lavish, yet well-considered praise from those whose verdict I would value most. Some who admired too ardently neither Meredith nor his expositor spread themselves in columns, and adorned their effusions with some of * There are some who could say with Samuel Butler " Like the greater number, I suppose, of those who write books at all, I write in order that I may have something to read in my old age when I can write no longer I have published all my books at my own expense, and paid for them in due course." t He is however grieved if only one reviewer notices the care he took upon the index ! MEREDITH REVISITED my best phrases, borrowed without acknowledgment. One kindly critic devoted a leading article to the book, others bestowed the epithet " notable " upon it, (though this must cancel out with others who explicitly declared that it was not notable) one or two em- barrassed by their lavishness. Many praised me for my enthusiasm. Some, on the other hand, regarding me as a blind and freakish satellite, blamed me for enthusiasm. One vigorous assailant declared the book worthless on this account, though, I must add, he ex- pended three columns on the task under the heading " The Book of the Week." The case in point is of importance only to myself, but the general tendency involved is a matter of more consequence. I propose in the pages next following to examine some of these vagaries, and also to set forth concisely and more clearly, if I can, my estimate of Meredith's greatness and my own aim in writing. Of this last first. I purposed, not to write a biography of Meredith, not to garner sheaves of anecdotes illuminating or the reverse, certainly not to search for " chatter about Harriet," not to deal with Meredith the man except as he is revealed in his books, but to write as sound and discriminating an appraisement of Meredith's genius as I could. In this task I sought for principles to aid me. I assumed that there is a science of criti- cism.* I assumed that Meredith was a classic, or at least that there was a prima facie case for this view. I tried to put him in line with the greatest, ancient or modern. I had recourse to such canons of criticism as I could devise myself, or find expressed in the writings of the great critics. I studied the Meredithian novels hi the same detailed manner that one studies an ancient text, though with reference rather to broad principles of treatment, design and construction, philosophy of life, than to linguistic matters, and in all this I took for granted that the training and methods which I had acquired both as a classical student and an historical investigator would be needed in the examination of the works of this modern novelist. I read and re-read him, pencil in hand, I made annotations and abstracts, in my holidays and upon railway journeys when other times did not suffice, and finally, when a considerable mass of material had accumulated, I braced myself for the real task, that of organising this material into a co-ordinated whole. I decided that a catalogue raisonne of the novels was useless, and that if I were neither to weary the reader nor to perpetrate a futile summary of the novels, what I left out would be as important as what I inserted. I selected therefore out of the abun- dance of matter which was now mine only that which seemed to me to illustrate the main lines of Meredith's genius, and the leading doctrines in his philosophy of life. I feel certain now, as I felt certain then, that this was the best method if it could be carried out success- fully of achieving the end proposed. This assuredly is not the method of a per fervid partisan. I admired Meredith from my youthful days, not blindly, and certainly in no sense exclusively. If there be any Meredithians, and if a Meredithian is one who lives and has his being in Meredith, who thinks of nothing else, reads nothing else, and cannot stomach Hardy or Thackeray, Milton or Homer, or any other classic whom you please, because these great men are not Meredith, I assuredly am no Meredithian. I burn no incense at his shrine, I have but * In consequence one critic accuses me of a schoolmasterish tone, and declares that I measure off Meredith with a yard measure. MEREDITH REVISITED two of his novels on my bookshelves. I do not even read him at present. Enough of all great writers is a feast. I have had my feast, I want no surfeit, and T have passed on to others. In due time I shall return to Meredith. Meanwhile I am grateful to one who has given me many hours of keen pleasure (incidentally of arduous toil) but I am still free, " nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri." I take my stand on the view that accord- ing to the laws of probability great genius may arise as easily in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth 01 the sixteenth And as Meredith seems to comply with all the re- quirements of a great man, I rate him as I do. Emphatic expression of a man's belief does not imply the undiscriminating mind. Great writers do occasionally arise, and should be praised according to their merits. Merely to condemn a eulogist as fulsome without condescending to join with him in a long and minute analysis of a writer's work is trenchant, but it is not criticism. Doubtless I admire Meredith highly, but not unboundedly, and not without reserve. Those who read my first chapter and no more, (did any reviewer ever do this ?) might have assumed that the claims made by the author were excessive, but those who had the patience to follow me to the end found surely that I was conscious of the deficiencies of my subject, even though I ranked him highly. I stand outside the circle of the esoteric in moderating my transports, in limiting my survey of the poems to one chapter, in deeming the true poetry of Meredith to be his novels. For this of course the extremist will never forgive me. Leigh Hunt feared to praise Keats as he had desired, lest warm praise and praise from the chieftain of the Cockney School, should merely prejudice a beloved friend. If my praise of Meredith has deterred any from studying him, I am much distressed, but, at a moment when his sun is temporarily behind the clouds, I do not regret that I have laboured as I could to recall the world's attention, and have challenged a verdict. Even if the verdict is unfavourable, there is an appeal. Eclipse follows apotheosis when a great man dies. " De mortuis nil nisi bonum " often reduces to " de mortuis nil." But after the trough comes the crest of the wave, and in time the fluctuations are less violent. At present however admiration of Meredith is " unfashionable." What are the faults which the present age can find in him ? First perhaps he limits himself to a too narrow circle. One ingenious penman drew a picture fanciful but alluring of " an impartial annalist of a perfected, artificial society reared upon the labour of an inarticulate mass to which it owned neither responsibility nor kinship, whose cold brilliance foretold a corruption to be purged only by its dis- solution." The men and women of it are Boccaccio garden-romantics of elegant decadence (Cretans of the Minoan period) magnificiently cultured,* " light artificial beings, lovers of a rather glassy irony and analytic laughter, complicated and remote, yet without wisdom" Olympians, keen advocates of Conscription. f This assuredly will not do. Meredith's characters are not lotus-eaters in a glittering palace. They are, it is true, engrossed in intellectual things which will ever appeal only to a close circle. But neither Beauchamp, giving his life for a waif who falls into Southampton Water, nor Feverel, * An acquaintance with early Greek history perhaps more definite than the reviewer's emboldens me to suggest that both the decadence and " culture " of these Cretans are somewhat dubious. t How unreal all this seems. Am I o'erstepping the bounds of measured criticism if I pronounce this " bosh " ? MEREDITH REVISITED who in the midst of his passion for Lucy thinks of a mission for the fallen women of London, can be branded as selfish, nor can Dartrey Fenellan or Vernon Whitford, Dr. Shrapnel (" do we live in our bodies ? ay, the Tories, the Liberals ") or Nesta Radnor, and as for Victor Radnor, her father, he is at least a Parliamentary candidate who champions progress. All the nobler characters are, not on the side of the angels, but still better, on the side of humanity. Characters like the Blancoves and Mrs. Lovell, the people of Beckley Court and the Romfrey circle are most liable to denunciation for their remoteness, but plainly they are not held up to admiration therefor. Meredith himself was eagerly, even pathetically, anxious to be sympathetic with the Hedgers and Gammons, with Ipley and Hillford Whether or not it is a paradox, the circle of intellectualism, so diffi- cult of access, is least of all exclusive. Condemn the intellectual if you will, but his domination is least tyrannical. His realm is open to any man of intellect, and after all " barriers are for those who cannot fly." And then Meredith is condemned for not having written novels. " We might make bold to say that Meredith was not really a novelist at all. He did not write novels ; he used the novel form as a means of containing and differentiating the generalised ob- servation of his own teeming mind." True, Meredith's conception of the novel form was very different from that of his predecessors. At times it almost seems that its sole func- tion is to philosophize upon life, that a novel is as one reviewer put it, a vast series of annotations. It will not be contended here that Meredith has not extensively modified the novel form. " We are learned, almost academic. The Alexandrine age has come."* The conception of the novel has been widened, perhaps even overloaded. But whatever Meredith wrote it was certainly literature and great literature. This is evident from the admissions of his severest critics. In the novel, if in any form of literature, there is room for criticism of life. Meredith, as one who had thought profoundly upon life, had every justification for indulging freely in commentary upon life, providing that he could achieve literature. That he did achieve literature is evident from the fact that most reviewers who have read him have succumbed to his power, and that the Balaams of contemporary criticism subjoin to the curses of their first three-quarters of a column the precious blessing of their final words. Nothing is more irritating in its way than to read the usual disquisition on Meredith with its seventy per cent, of depreciation, and its thirty per cent of fervid but reluctant eulogy. Meredith's style is " flamingly bad," we tolerate and enjoy it as we tolerate and enjoy the vanity of a man of genius. He is a unique master of dull first chapters, f he tires the reader before he catches his attention, he makes us feel like the first arrivals at a theatre, his people are at cross purposes in a gale, and so forth. But then the censor is swept off his feet. His heroines walk in beauty, not in bustles. His people are full of vigour and lovely dishevelment like dancing nymphs. He was richly recompensed with the poet's wing. Because he has a keener appetite for beauty than any other novelist, therefore his novels have a splendour that even Dickens's lack. When future generations find "Richard Feverel" and " The Egoist " how they will shout ! Another critic has * " George Meredith " p. 12. t One feels inclined to say " Then what of Scott ? " MEREDITH REVISITED it that Meredith's faults are lapses into turgidity, tedious rhetoric, over-emphasis, incoherencies, rankness of vocabulary, over-strained metaphor, allusion, and aphorism,* glaring eccentricities which are the loose ends and lost stitches of a method which, by a prodigious feat of sheer intellectual ferment, tries to beat mature criticism at its own game. But though egocentric he had a fine, a grand, a huge mind. And so the buzz of criticism proceeds. But it will not do. Criticism is impossible in this solemn quarter sessions manner which after reading a portentous homily dismisses erring genius with a caution. " Solventur risu tabulae, nam missus abibit." If Meredith's labours fill no small number of excellent judges and even raging Zoiluses with admiration and delight, it is futile to depreciate the accomplishment. Something has been added to the number of K-nj^ara eg a'el, and if this is so Meredith cannot have failed completely in the form which he essayed. Though it is a great nuisance to oneself and others, cleverness is no sin. Meredith was clever, but cleverness was only one of his numerous qualities. Not all have recognised Meredith's nobility of soul, or marked how his wit and power of phrase, his brilliance of description were all put at the disposal of this quality. In such a mind cleverness takes its place not the highest. Clever by nature, not by laborious effort, Meredith stands far above the contorted ingenuity and twisted paradoxes of the young 'Varsity man. And he is wise as well as clever. The severest criterion of eminence in literature is greatness of soul. Does a writer survey Nature on all sides ? Is his view complete, is his sympathy far-reaching ? Does he conceive literature from a great point of view ? Such a method of discriminating will rule out many a charming and ingenious writer from Sir Thomas Browne to Louis Stevenson, Charles Lamb to Walter Pater. It plainly excludes the adroit dealer in para- doxes, the merely sedulous ape, the man who is all brain and no heart, and the six-monthly novelist. Judged by the test of greatness of soul Meredith stands high. He is a man who has communed with the great minds of the past, and is free of their society. Despite his ardour for progress and zeal for the new, he carries on the great traditions of literature, he writes in the great style. There is nothing commonplace about Meredith, there is no scamped workmanship, there is no pornography steaming hot. Meredith is steeped in great literature, and familiarity with great literature has had its usual effect. This is perhaps granted. Yet, the hostile critic will say, all Meredith's great gifts cannot atone for that crowning fault, obscurity. That Meredith is stiff reading must be admitted. Yet no other style could have expressed his peculiar genius, or his individual ideas, f Like many great writers he creates a universe of his own. This universe we must accept whether we think it capable of improvement or not. A Meredithian novel written in the style of Thackeray or Froude is not conceivable. Those therefore who lament that Meredith was not so simple as Goldsmith, not so pellucid as Newman, not as easily urbane as Matthew Arnold, merely complain that Meredith was Meredith. * A catalogue longer than that of the seven deadly sins. One calls to mind Cardinal Manning discoursing to Mr. J. E. C. Bodley, and ticking off on his taper fingers at least ten heresies which could be found in Dr. Newman's works. (See later p. 80). f I note that some reviewers deny this. It were much to be desired that they should furnish us with a few specimens of a suitable style. 8 MEREDITH REVISITED With equal reason Carlyle was condemned because he wrote like Thomas Carlyle, and not like Gibbon or Macaulay, as though the peasant of Ecclefechan must wear soft raiment and catch the well-bred drawl of a frequenter of Society drawing rooms, or as though the expositor of Sansculottism could write like an Oxford man. It is reasonable to point out that Meredith is not a perfect stylist, that he is by no means a fitting model for a young writer, that at times he glaringly ignores the canons of lucid writing, that minister- ing to a small audience he naturally surrendered to that tendency towards the abstruse which was already his most serious defect. But those who admonish Meredith for not writing simply upon subtle things, who declare that all this abstruseness is gratuitous, and that he could have written and ought to have written just as well in a different style, are merely wasting their time. Again, Meredith's methods of analysis have been subjected to censure. His exposition of the psychology of certain subtle characters and types has been deemed wire-drawn, failing by reason of its very subtlety and elaboration. I will not say that Meredith never offends The intellectual is in disfavour with many critics. He belongs, as they tell us, to a small and pampered class, and has had far too much respect lavished on him. He is in actual fact, they say, a helpless, futile person, or if not that, an idle voluptuary, " one of Boccaccio's garden romantics," out of contact with humanity and scarcely influencing it. The indictment is not true. The intellectual influences men much ; he is well content to let men pick his brains. He and his class are the leaven which leaven- eth the whole mass ; he is of a noble, if monastic type. Vernon Whitford is no child ; he is the noblest of all the retinue of Patterne Hall, though the most learned save one. Dr. Shrapnel suffers grievously from bags of flour at election times, and his letters are voted odious at Beckley Court. But his visionary plans are now practical politics, his wildest chimeras are stale platitudes. Once again I will urge the plea that Meredith in introducing the intellectual into the novel has added to it a new type. Even Colney Durance deserves a niche somewhere in the temple of life, and we should be grateful that at length a creator has been found who can make a wit speak wittily. The hardest trial for one who seeks to appraise a modern author is that those who are lukewarm disapprove of enthusiasm, those who are admirers admire such very different things. The latter tell you with triumphant irrefutable logic that your expositions are too full for the uninitiated, but superfluous for the admirer. Like all others they have their pet admirations, and alas for the critic who thinks differently One who is rapt in Meredith's poetry condemns the "inanity" of any who esteem it less ; another is vexed because some favourite work is not fully appreciated by the expositor. The anti-Meredithians are wrathful because a man has praised Meredith, the Meredithians are lukewarm because they are conscious how much better a book they could have produced themselves. Impaled on this remorseless dilemma one is helpless. Perhaps, faintly trusting a larger hope, I have interested a few outsiders in Meredith, perhaps, as even some critics have prophesied, I have caused a few to take down their Meredith from their bookshelves if only to refute me.* As for the Meredithians proper, they have Moses and the Prophets. I will not hope to evangelise them. * It is strange how many hostile critics have suggested that I shall send many back to Meredith. May it stand me in good stead if and when I meet Meredith in the Elysian Fields. MEREDITH REVISITED Yet it is a great enigma that so many who set out to condemn Meredith end by praising him, that like J. D. B.* they spend three columns on a book " worthless by reason of its enthusiasm," written to celebrate the fame of a writer who possesses some of the gravest literary faults imaginable. They pass these solemnly in review, they are so engrossed in the Arch-criminal himself that, mercifully, they forget his latest advocate. The con- temporary critic, I fear, is too often tossed about by every wind of unsound doctrine. He is swayed by fashion, and fashion has decreed in its mysterious way that one must not wear Meredith now. And so the critics follow the lead, though they do not know even who has given it. Meredith then is obscure in expression, over-subtle in the portraiture of character, afraid of the obvious ; he has written annotations, not novels. It is a formidable catalogue of faults, reminding us of the heroine of " Love in the Valley." " Faults she had once, as she learnt to run and tumbled, Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet." So we may say " Yet, good gossips, genius that makes radiant poem and prose may have faults from head to feet." Did Meredith possess genius, genius in the highest, truest sense, the power to see instantly, to imagine intensely, the impetuous energy which sweeps over and past all difficulties, the nobility of soul, the sympathy with Nature, and the truth to reality which mark the greatest and only the greatest writers ? In my opinion he did, despite the barrier of obscurity which he put between himself and his readers. And here one point needs clearer definition. There is a certain quality in a man of genius which is rarely found elsewhere. It is that divine frenzy, the SV^OVO-HHO-^QS which the Greeks regarded as the peculiar attribute of the poet. It is that quality de- scribed by Shakespeare in his well known lines on the poet's eyes in a fine frenzy rolling. Shakespeare himself is the best exemplar of this quality, but it is found in a smaller degree in other English poets, and it is that impetuous mental energy which Matthew Arnold thought to be the great characteristic of English literature. In this quality Meredith more than any other English writer of modern times resembles Shakespeare, and it was therefore that I spoke of Meredith's mind as Shakespearean. This does not necessarily imply that Meredith was equal to Shakespeare. It implies that there were qualities in Meredith which suggest Shakespeare to the mind, and which place Meredith in certain respects in that class of which Shakespeare is the most shining example, but it implies no more, and my reservation " in some respects " was fully intended. As a matter of plain, obvious fact, Meredith cannot rank as high as Shakespeare. He does not fall to such depths as the writer of the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," or " Titus Andronicus," a " botcher " if there was ever one, but he has nothing like that universality and myriad- mindedness which Shakespeare shows in his greatest plays. Meredith has not that tragic intensity which we find in " King Lear," or that concentrated force which we find in " Macbeth," though in power of philosophic reflection he at times recalls the author of * J. D. B. forgets what Mr. J. D. Beresford sapiently remarks in " God's Counterpoint," " it is, as every advertiser knows, space rather than adjectives that catches the public attention." 10 MEREDITH REVISITED " Hamlet." He has nothing like that free play of unforced humour which the creator of Falstaff has given us. But as an exponent of the Comic Spirit, denned in his own terms, he is scarcely rivalled ; he has a quality which the Elizabethans valued highly, the quality of wittiness, and in this can fear comparison not even with Shakespeare himself. In " wit," esprit, " manipulation of meanings " as Verrall called it, no author has surpassed Meredith, certainly not Shakespeare, some of whose effusions in this genre would be merely booed if they were put on anonymously at a modern music-hall. Shakespeare impresses us almost as much as anything by that wonderful power of assimilation, that quality of being able to pick up anything from anywhere which gave him an extraordinary range of allusion and of metaphor, that marvellous native wit which learnt without schooling, and enabled a youth who left his teachers early and never studied after to achieve such marvellous things as his greatest plays. Meredith had this same assimilative power. No scholar in the academic sense, he strikes us as one of the most learned men of letters that ever lived. He wears his learning " lightly as a flower," and the fertility of his mind is as amazing as that of Shakespeare. It is in this respect that he is Shakespeare's peer. No one could justly say that Shakespeare surpassed Meredith in mere cleverness, in variety of phrase, aptness of allusion, and pointed metaphor. These are not the only qualities requisite for great literature ; the very greatest literature, we will admit, may be austerely indifferent to them. Not a great deal of " wit " is found in Homer, Herodotus, Demos- thenes, Wordsworth and others. But wit for what it is worth and what it can do has never found a more marvellous exponent than Meredith. Great literature demands qualities both of mind and soul ; it needs intensity of imagination and vividness of sympathy as much as, or rather more than, astounding mental brilliance. There is this intellectual quality, hard and gemlike in its flame, in all that Meredith wrote, and weighing well my words, and with full emphasis on my reservation, I declared that Meredith possessed in some respects the most wonderful mind which had ever been given to literature. In his essay on Heine, Matthew Arnold tells us that in the great burst of literature which marked the first three decades of the nineteenth century, England had no mani- festation of the modern spirit, as the spirit manifested itself in Goethe or in Heine. English- men are in the main inaccessible to ideas. It is a text on which Meredith was continually preaching. If it is a weakness in literature to be out of the main current of ideas, it is a weakness of which Meredith is not guilty. If " a passionate, a Titanic effort to flow in the mam stream of modern literature " will win remembrance for Byron and for Shelley, it should win abiding fame for Meredith. Meredith dealt with many of the vexed questions of the modern world, with perhaps the greatest and hardest, the Women's Question, with theology, or perhaps rather the philosophy of life that man must frame for himself. Future generations may therefore turn with admiration to one who was a pioneer in ideas as well as a writer of genius. The comparative method is often as good a way as any of elucidating the characteris- tics of an author. If, for instance, a classical scholar compares Mr. Bernard Shaw to Euripides, whether you agree or not, by working out the contrast you will learn much more about the merits and demerits of the two writers than you knew before. Knowing this, I compared Meredith with Dickens amongst others, and the comparison to me is interesting. Both men are men of native genius, sprung from the English soil ; men with ii MEREDITH REVISITED quick, active ever-working minds, but yet how different ! Admire Dickens as much as you will, but admire him for the right reasons. I am not a Dickensian nor, as I have said, am I even a Meredithian but I shall never cease to regard with admiration the inventor of Pickwick. If by some fiat, all English literature save one hundred volumes had to be burnt, Pickwick most certainly we should need to rescue. But those who are unaware that little Nell is a hopeless piece of mawkishness, that Ralph Nickleby is as impossible a villain as any hack of melodrama ever conceived, that the Mr. Carkers, both of them, are absurd, and Paul Dombey unreal, these people let me put it plainly cannot distin- guish the mock sentimental from genuine pathos, or great literature from the penny novelette. One must take as one's starting point in estimating Dickens's magnificent contribution to English humour, that glorious and unparalleled gallery of grotesques, the dictum that all Dickensian pathos, politics, and sentiment are merely dead matter, and that if all of it were excised from the rest of his works it would be small loss. If Dickens had been given a more regular education, such faults as I have mentioned would have been impossible to him. In this sense he was absolutely untaught and untrained, and without the faintest intention of a sneer, I described him, by the only word which can describe him, as an " untutored " genius. That his contribution to literature would have been more individual and more delightful if he had enjoyed a University education, is an unlikely as that Carlyle would have been a better writer if he had passed through an English Public School and never learnt German. The achievements of Dickens's " untutored genius " are extraordinary. Wise criticism will always recognise both the genius and its untutoredness. From Dickens to Mr. H. G. Wells or Sir Hall Caine is a considerable descent. My view of Mr. Wells's work as commonplace, though deplored by one reviewer, is shared by many. Mrs. Humphry Ward in her Recollections has expressed a similar view, but pro- bably with less emphasis. It is interesting to find J. D. B. coming forward as a champion of Sir Hall, and challenging my awful comparison between the wisdom of the opera omnia* of that eminent writer and the wisdom of a single paragraph of Meredith. But why this vehemence ? Sir Hall has many consolations, and above all the good opinion of his publisher. All great literature demands of its readers considerable concentration. It taxes the attention, and refuses to surrender its secrets to indolent seekers. To say with J. D. B. that one has not time to read Meredith, is, as a friend of mine and an admirer of J. D. B. remarked, merely fatuous. Boswell's Life of Johnson, Paradise Lost, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take some reading, but they are not to be removed from the circle of great literature on that account. Browning again requires from his readers, even as much effort as Meredith to be understood, if understood he always can be. But one can find time for the great writers. Let those who have any difficulty read fewer newspapers and magazines, and fewer contemporary third-rate novels, and they will discover that they have ample time to luxuriate in Meredith. * I was accused by J. D. B. of pedantry for using the phrase. But surely J. D. B. even if his schoolboy erudition was limited to Caesar plus Mr. Giles's " Keys to the Classics," could compass a trans- lation. J. D. B. cannot see the difference between " opera omnia " with the exact suggestion of laboured futility and pompous pretentiousness which I wished to convey and the plain bare phrase " collected works." Bless his simple soul ! 12 MEREDITH REVISITED Perhaps it would have all seemed a needless controversy to Meredith. In a fine sonnet he tells us that " assured of worthiness we do not dread competitors." One's betters are one's masters. " Station is nought, nor footways laurel-strewn Nor rivals tightly belted for the race. Good speed to them ! My place is here or there." It is a fine attitude, and a prudent attitude, and a sensible attitude. Blessed are they who expect nothing. And now for some criticism of my critics. What is wrong with English criticism ? As I look over some forty reviews, leaves of the Sibyl, which as sent me by my cutting agency cram in confusion a small drawer in my desk, I find the oracle of little help. Some critics merely take my book as a peg on which to hang a dissertation or denunciation. They upbraid or discuss Meredith to their hearts' content, but scarcely a word of his expounder and his achievement. Pleasant as it is to find that I have been the occasion of such vigorous mental activity, one still feels that the critic has left his task partly undone. But of those who have given a verdict how conflicting are the sentiments ! Here is one. " A first-rate scholar, Dr. Crees is a true Meredithian, for he writes with a witty dexterity in language and a wide range of metaphor and allusion that reminds us of Meredith himself."* Yet another, after frowning on my " unfashionable " admira- tion and quoting a eulogistic sentence, declares that such writing is " not praise but abuse of Meredith." The kindly critic of Education declared the book " an intellec- tual spiritual feast, a model of brevity for so great a theme greatly handled," but lest I wax insolent the Literary World rebukes me for comments on Meredith's poetry " strangely inane and wide of the mark." A Northern paper condemns me for contrast- ing Meredith with Dickens and Mr. H. G. Wells, but Land and Water is of opinion that I should have considered more closely in what Meredith differs from other writers and thinkers. My vicissitudes continue. The Quarterly Review deems the study "worthy of the master to whom it is devoted" but a Glaswegian, while declaring that the author " discourses with eloquence and considerable insight " sees nothing notable in the book. (How one detests that pestilent heresy which assumes that one can be eloquent while talking of nothing ! It is almost as fatuous as the assertion that there is no difference between the " collected works " and the " opera omnia " of Sir Hall Caine). But it is time for another paragraph. Mr. Tonans in a study of Meredith that must be his proper appellation in the course of nearly two columns declared that the book " should do much to crystallise opinion upon Meredith," seeing that the judgment is " the considered opinion of a man who writes with ability and critical insight," the Guar- dian even deems it " one of the best books of literary criticism published since the de- claration of war," but the Scotsman (Oh ! those unspeakable Scots !) finds nothing new. As I have not been able to prove that Meredith wrote the letters of Junius or * The Saturday Review. As a rule I have not given the name of the journal cited, deliberately. Reviewers have short memories, and there is no need to prejudice them unduly against the present book. 13 MEREDITH REVISITED perpetrated the Whitechapel murders, this is possibly true. No wonder that I put away my leaves and murmur " inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllas."* I hold that the motto of the Edinburgh is entirely true " judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur." It is the business of the critic to condemn bad work as severely as he pleases, and if he will only condemn the half-baked novels written for journeys in the train, the ungrammatical and unscannable verses, the books that are no books, which form nine-tenths of the year's literary output, I am well content, like the slave in the "Frogs " of Aristophanes, to take my full share of any drubbings that are going. " Nothing extenu- ate and set down nought in malice." But modern critics with an eye on the advertise- ment columns are usually as vague and unrevealing as a schoolboy's terminal report. And, as I have shown, they are contradictory. Most reviewers, one feels, might as easily as not have taken the opposite view It is not for their ferocity but for their uncertainty or timorousness that one would condemn them most. The reviewer who is complimentary but superficial is perhaps the most embarrassing. But he is ill paid and ill equipped, and it is a safe maxim, " Don't shoot the pianist, he is doing his best." Not of course that no critics have put their hand upon weak spots. I admit for instance that I am not steeped in the Russian Novelists, partly because my own experience of the Russian novel has not chimed with the lavish eulogies of the present fashion. Had I devoted more time to Dostoeffsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenieff, my comparison might have been fuller Again, it is distressing as I read over my first page to find the style still the same as in my essay of thirteen years ago on Claudian, the same but more pro- lific in epigram, in which style as the New Witness informs us " it is impossible to tell the truth." I cannot help my epigrams, they intrude unbidden I plead guilty with a certain amount of pride to being a schoolmaster, and I do not deny that I have mixed with scholars (" pedants ") and lived mainly with the great writers of the past. I do not consciously love Meredith for his obscurity, and as for the Meredithian secret, so far from making it into a cult, I have tried to explain Meredith to all who care to listen. I admit to an anima naturaliter Meredithiana, but that is no disqualification in a critic of Meredith. Of two faults I have been accused to which I cannot plead guilty. I do not admit that I have been prolix. Rather would I claim that I have compressed as much into two hundred and eighty pages as most could, f and that what repetition occurs is merely that repetition which is needed in any book or discourse to drive points home. Nor can I admit an unbalanced enthusiasm. In my previous literary and contro- versial activities I have been nothing if not critical, and if I am an admirer of Meredith it is not because I have a servile mind. I will boldly aver that my readers though they may not share my admiration there is no accounting for tastes are quite in a position to realise the weakness of Meredith as well as his strength Truly, after this Meredithian conversazione, I am left in a whirl. I ought perhaps to take a vote. Some dozen definitely damn me (one on hearsay for " indiscreet ecstasy," a naval manj), a few more * They depart without guidance and they hate the dwelling of the Sibyl, t One critic admits that I cover a good deal of ground. \ Misled, I think by J. D. B. MEREDITH REVISITED merely damn Meredith. Three declare the book notable, and three declare it not notable, one declares me prolix, another finds that I cover a great deal of ground, five or six declare with sidelong emphasis that the master critic of Meredith is still to be born. But before the returning officer declares the poll he must institute a recount. There have been many spoilt papers, and, as usual, some cases of personation ; Matthew Arnold and Olympian Jove have both, in appearance, voted several times, not to speak of Zoilus. May the best cause win. Yet perhaps if the professional expounder fail me, I must myself approach the search- ing question " What manner of book is my " George Meredith " ? I cannot tell. I have no guidance from the seats of Aristarchus, and immediately it is finished my own work repels me. But in this queer world many books of far less pith have swelled the coffers of the publisher (sometimes even of the author) and perhaps, though I am caviare to the general, I may have pleased a few. The book has one thing in its favour. It was written by an amateur for pleasure, and its failure will not take me to the workhouse or to Waterloo Bridge. What does disappoint me is that in dealing with a man like Mere- dith, many connoisseurs of fine perception seem at the mercy of chance or prejudice. In slightly altered circumstances the critic might have been as admiring as he is un- sympathetic or even blind, headstrong and perverse. Diverting as it is to count ayes and noes, to find equal emphasis and equal conviction in opposing camps, the case is serious too. " Quis custodiet custodes ? " If any do guard and cherish our English literature they certainly must needs be different from the " irresponsible, indolent reviewers " whose judgments I have set forth. Mr. Benson, it is true, has declared that " criticism is ultimately based upon individual opinion, and opinion shifts its channels. There is no scientific standard instantly applicable in the case of contemporary work." But there may be definite general principles not too empirical, which should enable a man to give a verdict not too faulty. If there are not such principles and Matthew Arnold would have vehemently asserted that there are criticism is merely a critic's fad, and fads are worse than prejudices. And so I am left again to analyse my book and self. As I take my lonely walks abroad, the writer of " a notable book " scowls arrogantly on his undistinguished (and undistinguishable) alter ego, the " vivacious exponent of the Meredithian philosophy " condemns that style in which one cannot tell the truth (New Witness), and the " quaint enthusiast " is rather dubious of his twin self's epigrams. How shall we resolve the mystery ? " Adieu," or rather " au revoir, messieurs les critiques." SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS' OR GEORGE MEREDITH AND S. M. ELLIS 1919 No man is a hero to his second cousin. The bump of reverence is not developed in such distant kinsmen. They have perhaps known the great man as a boy, when he was as quarrelsome and greedy as most boys, they have been involved later in family feuds and bickerings, they have freely criticised and been criticised. They are ready to exploit his greatness, and to demonstrate how much the great man owed to his kin, but they love him on " this side of idolatry." When a new book on Meredith by a kinsman was announced in 1918, a book which was declared to contain much new information on Meredith's life and history, those who ad- mired Meredith were keenly expectant. The enterprising publisher sustained the interest by his weekly bulletins, and finally after various delays the book appeared in January, 1919. It was well illustrated, and according to figures given by counsel in the course of legal proceedings, contained 13,788 lines. Of these lines, however, 38 per cent, were quotation, 688 lines of poetry, 1000 lines of prose, and 3,547 lines from lettersf (5,250 lines in all). Mr. William M. Meredith, the son of George Meredith, considered that the Meredith copyrights were infringed and obtained an injunction to restrain the publishers from further printing and publishing " George Meredith ; His Life and Friends in Relation to his Work." At the end of July, as a grand finale, Mr. Ellis and Mr. Grant Richards, the publisher, declared the book withdrawn from circulation, and expressed their regret for the unauthorised use of copyright material. Mr. Ellis also regretted implications in the book concerning George Meredith's life which are not in accordance with the facts. Such is the undignified end of a book whose birth was announced with such a flourish of trumpets. But " George Meredith " was widely reviewed, and Mr Ellis's judgments on Meredith were freely discussed. It is possible to examine them here without infring- ing the Meredith copyrights, and it seems desirable to do so. The book was limited in its scope. It contained, as the author himself avowed, " no profundities of criticism," it would cause " no flutterings of dovecotes of Meredithian culturists, etc. it was " simply the individual views of one unimportant person." The author aimed merely at giving fuller information as to the family history of Meredith and at furnishing keys to the novels, above all to " Evan Harrington," which had long been deemed to a large extent biographical. Unlike another book on Meredith published contemporaneously J the study scarcely dealt with Meredith as a novelist, a technician, or a philosopher, or even as a stylist. We are told indeed that the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. " Subtleties are now discovered which Meredith never intended." * The reader is reminded, see Preface, that Mr. Ellis's book has been re-issued by the Publisher in a somewhat reduced form, and is, of course, procurable in the ordinary way. The review was written before the matter had been settled between Mr. Ellis and Mr. Meredith. t See the Daily Telegraph, April i2th, 1919. The actual total of lines quoted appears to be 5235. J " George Meredith ; a study of his personality " by J. H. E. Crees, Blackwell, 1918. 16 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS Clara Middleton this is flat blasphemy is not a great character compared with Rosa- mund Culling, Cecilia Halkett, and others. She is a " selfish, wayward girl, an undutiful and disobedient daughter, deceitful and prevaricating," a judgment upon which we shall leave all readers of " The Egoist " to give their verdict. The Meredithian style is damned by secondhand* and also in Mr. Ellis's most elaborate sentence. " Its cold glittering artificiality and philosophical preciosity, sheer cleverness, wealth of criticism, riot of outrageous simile, concatenation of antithesis and antiperistasisf make it unique, a tower- ing Alpine peak in literature, crested with eternal gleaming snows." But apart from a few arbitrary and capricious judgments, and the excellent photographs, the book is mainly " chatter about Harriet." What is now ascertained fact as the result of the work of Mr. Ellis and others ? Meredith was born at Portsmouth, in 1828. His grandfather Melchisidec Meredith, was baptised at Portsea Church in June, 1763, and married Anne Mitchell, a handsome woman we are told. Seven children were born to them at 73 High Street, Portsmouth. The Great Mel., like the great Mel. in " Evan Harrington," did not attend to his business as he should have done, but he became churchwarden at St. Thomas's, was an officer in the Yeomanry, and hunted. Of his children, Louisa married in 1811 (aged 18), W. H. Read, who later, in 1832, became Consul-General of the Azores and held a high position in Portuguese Court circles. Her daughter J married the Marquis de Thomar, who became a Minister of State, and in 1870 was Ambassador to the Vatican. (His brother's name was Silva, which reminds us again of " Evan Harrington.") Harriet, another daughter of the great Mel., married in 1811, John Hellyer, a brewer of whom little is known. Another daughter, Catherine Matilda, married in 1819, Samuel Burdon Ellis, Lieutenant in the Marines, who had a distinguished career and became a General and a K.C.B. A son of his, George Ellis, the original of Crossjay Patterne, went into the Navy at fifteen, and was killed at Bull Run in 1861. Augustus Urmston Meredith (1797-1876) the son of Mel- chisidec, and the father of George Meredith, " a muddler and a fool," as his son described him, was, like Evan Harrington, at Lisbon when Melchisidec died in 1814, heavily involved. Mrs. Meredith then looked after the business but later the supervision of it fell to Augustus. Augustus married Jane MacNamara, the daughter of a publican who kept the " Vine." Jane MacNamara was not pure Irish as Meredith liked to believe. She died in 1833. In 1841, Augustus Meredith married his housekeeper, sold his business and went to London. George Meredith, a youth of twelve summers who was already conscious of his superiority and read character consummately, was no doubt neglected. He was however sent to a good school, and in 1842 was transferred to the well-known Moravian seminary at Neuwied. In 1846, at the age of seventeen, he was articled to a solicitor * J. M. Robertson (quoted) " perpetual grimace of expression, twisting the face of speeches into every shape but those of beauty and repose, is in no sense admirable." t Surely a " precious " word. I From this aunt Meredith learnt manners, he declared. He later emigrated to Cape Town, where he founded a business, and was shocked to find his family history revealed and burlesqued when " Evan Harrington " appeared. Things did not go al- together well, and in 1863 he returned to England. His son saw him occasionally but there was no love lost. 17 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS named Charnock, but he soon addicted himself to literature. His mother had left him a little property, and he did not start as writer with only a guinea in hand, nor did he live on cold porridge as legend had it. He married, in 1849, the daughter of Matthew Love Peacock, after having been refused six times, and the story of their life may be traced in the sonnets on Modern Love. His wife left him, and when she was dying Meredith refused to see her. The horror of illness and the circumstances of death which is generally found in the imaginative temperament, is the only excuse, Mr. Ellis tells us, for Meredith's harshness, and no tombstone was put up over the unhappy woman's grave. In his second marriage, with Miss Vulliamy, Meredith found great happiness.* His fondness for excessive exercise gave rise to spinal trouble which left him an invalid for the last part of his life. He became very deaf, but did not speak in the low remote tone usual in deaf people, f He had a perversely exaggerated view of the critics ; J like the hustings orator, he was, he averred, " accustomed to the dead cat and the brickbat." As a matter of fact Mr. Ellis tells us he found recognition from the best critics early, and from 1860 he was comfortably off. He was unattractive in his family relationships. He was almost as great an epicure as Adrian Harley (Maurice Fitz Gerald) he wrote articles on the Tory side for the Ipswich Journal, and he was a publisher's reader without flair. Such are the main counts in Mr. Ellis's indictment. Mr. Ellis has also been at pains to connect various of the novels with Meredith's own life. ' ' Evan Harrington " is an extravaganza (parts of which are very poor !) founded on the shop at 73 High Street, Portsmouth. The shopkeepers are there almost to the life, Mr. Kiln, landlord of the Wellington, Mr. Banes, a pork butcher, Mr. Grossly (Gross- smith), a confectioner, Mrs. Fiske, the wife of a jeweller, and Mr. Goren (Gait), a rival tailor. What Mr. Ellis objects to is the distortion of the character of Strike the Marine and of his lovely wife. Mrs. Ellis, for Mrs Strike is of course she, never contemplated an elopement. After a simple and well spent life she died in 1847 aged 52. Strike " was, it is true, engaged not always successfully in business speculations, and it is possible that he had advised his nephew badly in his railway investments," hence this travesty. || This is however merely Mr. Ellis's hypothesis. The history of Evan Harrington is presented to us as fiction not as family history, and the world at large is not concerned with the undoubted virtues of General Ellis. It is unfortunate in any case that Mr. Ellis never seems to have overcome his prejudice against Meredith. * But this union led to an estrangement between him and his little son Arthur. Arthur Meredith, a boy of rare gifts and promise, died early. As usual, Mr. Ellis puts the blame on George Meredith for the estrangement, though the boy seems to have been of a morose, brooding temperament. t Most people's experience of the deaf will be different from that of Mr Ellis. J Yet when an eminent review like " the Spectator " could speak as follows, Meredith had certainly some grievance. " Mr. Meredith is a clever man without literary genius, taste, or judgment .... He brings no original imaginative power to his task. He sometimes treats serious themes with a flippant levity that is exceedingly vulgar and unpleasant." May 24th, 1862. He certainly did reject Butler's " Erewhon. " From the trade point of view he was probably right, for Butler tells us cheerfully that all his works were published at his own expense and brought in nothing for years. || Mr. Ellis accuses Meredith of " a petty and long-brooded animus against his relatives." 18 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS Mr Ellis supplies a great number of other identifications which are often attractive and convincing though based most frequently on Mr. Ellis's mere ipse dixit. Meredith's first school is described in "Harry Richmond," his visits to Seaford gave rise to "The House on the Beach,"* and his landlady Mrs. Ockenden becomes Mrs. Crickledon, and also sat for Mrs. Berry. Lucy and Richard met at Shepperton Lock, and many scenes in the novels can be localised at Copsham where Meredith lived and worked for some time. The mound where ^Emilia is found singing is the mound at Copsham which was a favourite resort of gipsies, beggars, and tinkers (compare " Juggling Jerry.") Sir Purcell Barrett dies near Blackpool at Copsham, and a night of frost in May which is mentioned in ' ' Sandra Belloni" (with scenery resembling that of the Mound region), is celebrated thirty years later in a fine poem. Blackburn Tuckham is obviously Sir William Hardman, Lady Jocelyn (and Lady Dunstane too) are obviously Lady Duff Gordon, and her daughter Janet Ross was the model both for the divine Rose Jocelyn and for Janet II- chester. What is most interesting is that the Duff Gordons were aware of the delinea- tion, and criticised and approved their characters while they were hi creation. Tracy Runningbrook certainly suggests Swinburne, Fairly Park is Beaulieu and Warbeck Bursle- don. Shrapnel is partly Meredith himself ; Beauchamp is, as all knew, founded on Admiral Maxse, and Leslie Stephen suggested Vernon Whitford. Patterne the marine was no doubt General Ellis, and in this case Meredith freely acknowledges " my grand- father's bravery." Mr. Ellis, not to be outdone in generosity, admits that Crossjay, being a member of a large family, was questionless frequently hungry. And if we should continue Mr. Ellis's series of identifications we should find amongst other things more or less interesting that Lord Ormont was Charles Mordaunt, third Earl of Peterboro' (and had too something of Lord Cardigan in his composition), that Gower Woodseer faintly resembled R. L. Stevenson, that Rockney the great journalist was Frederick Greenwood of the Pall Mall Gazette, and Kirby, the old Buccaneer, was taken from Trelawny, Byron's friend. Some people are much more interested in persons than in achievements, they fasten upon the superficialities or trappings of greatness, they prefer anecdotes to intimacy. To such people Mr. Ellis will seem to have written " an A i book about a C 3 god " to have " woven together a great deal of material about Meredith which is not to be obtained elsewhere in book form "f or even to have compiled " a record essential to those who would understand Meredith and his writings." The book is, so far as the author has linked up literary matter with the facts of Meredith's life, "valuable and illuminating," of all books on Meredith " probably the most significant." Other critics have spoken dis- paragingly of "small talk about Meredith."! " The limitations which Mr. Ellis has imposed upon himself are such that his work can neither be accepted as the final biography of Meredith, nor again as a study possessing the qualities of a work of art .... His critical remarks are sparing, and his narrative is often shrunk to ' biographical links,' connecting quotations from all sorts of sources, including a certain number of letters here published * A great flood occurred in 1876 at Seaford, similar to that in the story. t As a matter of fact, not a few of the facts mentioned in Mr. Ellis' book are to be found in Mr J. A. Hammerton's " Meredith in Anecdote and Literature." J Similar criticisms have been passed upon the still more recent book of reminiscences of Lady Butcher, who is a great admirer of Meredith. 19 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS for the first time. A book is thus produced which may be said to be the prelude or pre- natal state of a book rather than a book in being."* It shows us the wrong side of the carpet. However, as the same critic wittily remarks, we do not often feel ourselves in the position of listeners at a keyhole. " If Meredith were to open the door he would find us for the most part devoutly examining the boots and umbrellas in the hall." Here are two very different points of view clearly expressed. But what of the inner circle of admirers and friends ? It is reported that one feminine Meredithian declared that she could never now feel the same. This lady must have cherished an undiscriminating enthusiasm for an idol of her own invention. Meredith was human and he had human frailties and foibles. The testimony of all who knew Meredith well is that he was indeed a great man, a striking personality, a noble soul. If there were any who imagined that Meredith had no faults, that he sat always upon Olympus, they are well disillusioned, and Meredith is well quit of their admiration. Other men, even if they have not lived in harmony with their wives or have quarrelled with their sons, have still retained the world's respect. And in any case, there are few skeletons in Meredith's cupboard. " Perhaps we never shall find the factor which enabled Meredith to unite Nobility of poetry and philosophy with unworthiness of action, which enabled him to be a fine and attractive personality on one side of his nature and a little mean and cruel on the other." We certainly never shall reduce the innumerable variations of man- kind to a calculus, and we must be content with the complexity and inconsistency of poor human nature. On much of Mr. Ellis's indictment two different verdicts are possible. Even accept- ing the severer of the two judgments, how little is Meredith's position as a great writer impaired ! What does it matter to us how unsavoury Shakespeare's private life may have been, or that Milton was harsh and inconsiderate to his daughters, or that Carlyle had a bitter tongue, or that Dickens was separated from his wife ? When a man sits down to create great literature, it is the nobler part of him which is in action. His meaner agents fall into the background ; it is his finer, loftier, more real, self which alone for the time exists. There is no disclosure of Mr. Ellis which need in any way diminish a sane, well-balanced regard and admiration either for Meredith the writer or for Meredith the man. So much for the side-lights on Meredith's character. As to the information about the novels, two views are possible. It is useful to have one's view confirmed that all great novels are in some sense autobiographical. When we know something more of the details of a writer's life, we may, conceivably, understand still better the things he wrote. But at any rate we are struck by the immeasurable difference between the raw material and the finished product, and we are sometimes dismayed to find the poet's airy nothings labelled with their local habitation and a name. It is for this reason that illustrations of novels, still more of poems, are far more often a hindrance than a help. The Woods of Westermain are far more mysterious and awe-inspiring than Deerleap Woods (near Abinger and Norbury Park) Dartrey Fenellan, that splendid English type, * The Times, February i3th, 1919. So the Westminster Gazette of February 8th. " As a result his book is merely a stage towards the understanding of Meredith, whether personally or artistically considered .... The author knowing too much to be a whole-hearted adorer, is still too timid to be a realistic iconoclast." 20 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS is a far more imposing and magnificent figure as Dartrey Fenellan than as Colonel Burnaby, that gallant soldier whose effigy with fez and side whiskers adorned the walls of so many Victorian households in the eighties, and even Rose Jocelyn loses her ideal charm when we know that she was the talented and charming daughter of a talented and charming mother who smoked strong cigars, and that she wrote in later life not very striking memoirs about " My Poet " and others.* It was the eye of genius which saw the diviner charac- teristics in these human types, and it is genius, and genius alone, which created these immortal presentments. And there is another conclusion which Mr. Ellis's Book suggests. Meredith was probably more aware of his faults than he seems. There is perhaps in every man a duality, a higher self and a lower. The higher self may be overcome by or submerged in the lower at times, but it abides, one would hope, and comes safely through many hurricanes and tempests. In Evan Harrington, Meredith was satirising the whole world ; but consciously or unconsciously he was satirising also himself and everyone who at any time has been uneasily conscious of social deficiencies, ashamed of his forbears, ashamed of his own position, cowering before convention, a worshipper of gilt gingerbread. If he wished to know how a youth, callow, unformed, unhardened, would comport himself amid the stresses and temptations of life he looked within himself. In older days men of piety secretly lamented their shortcomings, secretly scourged themselves, and wore hair shirts. To-day they may, if men of letters, make reparation in a better way. All sinners have an impulse to confess their sins. The man of letters may confess his, symbolically, to man- kind in general, and the whole world is his confessional box. His readers are amused or thrilled and under the mask of some hero of his creation they give absolution to the creator of the hero. What if Meredith had something of the snob in him ? He thrashed it out of himself, and like his own Evan, he emerged from the purgation of his own satire a changed and better man. As one who studiously avoided gossip in his own study of Meredith, I will admit that Mr. Ellis's book of anecdotes affords food for thought. It does not contribute greatly to our knowledge of the real Meredith, it is in no sense an authoritative exposition of the verdict of considered criticism. A writer who thinks Clara Middleton a bad undutiful girl, f and Willoughby Patterne a tragical figure, who deems the "Tragic Comedians" too short and finds "One of Our Conquerors " difficult to read, is far from the centre of Meredith. But those of us who are English will be relieved to find that Meredith was less Celt than he thought J and the grammarians who will some day doubtless expound the novels and poems will have some advantage, thanks to Mr. Ellis, over Homeric commentators. Despite the search of generation after generation Homer's grandmother is still unknown, but Meredith's kept a Portsmouth public-house, and the topography of Meredith's works is now clearer. Yet one still wonders why Mr. Ellis wrote his book. Was he intimate * See " The Fourth Generation " by Janet D. Ross. How thankful one is that Rosalind and Miranda never wrote their Reminiscences. t And yet she was kind to Crossjay, uncle Crossjay, shall we say ? t It will take several generations at least to carry back the Meredith family on either side either to the land of the Cymry or Hibernia. Meredith is mainly good Hampshire. 21 SKELETONS IN CUPBOARDS with Meredith ? We have not even Mr. Ellis's claim for it, and as far as the book demonstrates the two men may never have met. Was it that he had some grudge against his kinsman ? He seems to be sniping at Meredith from behind cover, he temporises, willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike. " Habent sua fata libelli." The fate of Mr. Ellis has been to appear as the chief actor in a fiasco, and that book which was to set forth in final and authoritative fashion the facts of Meredith's life has disappeared with an apology for infringement of copy- right and incorrect implications into the limbo which is reserved for those books which never come to birth and with them for books which never live after birth.* Requiescat! * See note, p. 16. 22 THE ODYSSEY 1918 " Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne ; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold r Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien." KEATS (On Homer). " rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen." HORACE (On Homer). Great writers suffer as much from the idolater as from the iconoclast, from comfortable neglect as from insolent disesteem. They are first flouted and not read, and then canonised and not read save perhaps by schoolboys, ignorant of their blissful fortune, who loathe their begrimed Virgil or their dog-eared Shakespeare, or " that hateful Tennyson." Their niche in the temple of fame is usually a page or two in a textbook of literary history. And, as an able critic* has said, great books, like certain insects, have a curious way of shamming dead when dangerous persons are abroad. One of criticism's chief functions, therefore, is to restore and to recall to life the great writers, to interpret them anew, to infect others with the critic's own enthusiasm, to rescue masterpieces from the gnawing bookworm and the dusty pre-eminence of library shelves. Critics must see the immortal in the " dead " language, the mortal in what came hot from the press yesterday. En- grossed in the tendencies of the moment, lured by the " last cry " of the present day, intrigued by the ebullitions of the futurist, we take the verdict of past criticism for granted. We shrink from the truth which is so venerable that it is a platitude, we vaguely feel that the past has nothing new to say to us, that its writers give us nothing new to read. We are of course wrong. A great work of literature has perennial charm, abiding truth, and the complete critic is he who can be thrilled by Homer as though he flourished yester- day, and can appraise Rupert Brooke or Herbert Trench as though they lived two thousand years ago. Let us venture on a voyage of discovery. We shall not have the awesome thrill of the astronomer when some new planet swims into his ken, but we shall experience, if fortune be ours, the scarce less delight of recapturing something of the charm of literature's most perfect achievement. * Mr. T. R. Glover " From Pericles to Philip." 23 THE ODYSSEY Homer is too big to be a cult. He needs not votaries that assemble at due seasons to celebrate their hidden rites, mysteries doubly delightful in that the vulgar understand them not. Even the Philistine might listen, not too long, with interest to the recital of the banquets of Homeric heroes, or the description of that wondrous bedstead which Odysseus, first of practical men, did build, and a sojourner at Lord Rowton's lodging- house might hear with a chuckle how Odyssey, on bivouac in a colder latitude than Thames Embankment, gained a comrade's mantle by a stratagem. Homer let us for the nonce venture on the vast assumption which that single word implies Homer is a very Proteus, and eludes us in all his different aspects. He is a mine of folk-lore, a treasury of archaeology, an authority for historians, a text for students of primitive custom, for contending cities an oracle, for young Greeks a Bible, for epic poetasters a quarry inexhaustible. We shall regard him here as literature, avoiding all but the very fringe of that Higher Criticism which has dissected him into a score of rhapsodes, and analysed him into three or four strata. Age cannot wither or custom stale his infinite variety. We cannot weary of that freshness as of the morning dew, that romantic vision of the world's earlier ages revealed in the greatest of the Classics, that grand simplicity, that unbroken sympathy and harmony with Nature. As for him who contemns Homer and spurns the epic " vetabo sub isdem sit trabibus fragilemque mecum sol vat phaselon," let him not launch on my frail barque or sit 'neath the same beams as I. In the dawn of Western literature the Iliad and the Odyssey shine out with startling suddenness. We cannot doubt but that a series of sacred bards born ere the age of Agamemnon must have been needed for the begetting of a Homer. The Iliad the elder brother of the Odyssey has won a higher eminence in the suffrages of the world at large. The splendour of its setting, the brilliance of its description, the power and pathos of its ending, " the tale of Troy divine," has overshadowed the subtler charm, and the less obvious force of the tale of the wanderings of much travelled Odysseus. The Iliad has a hero, hard and wilful as youth will be, yet with a glorious halo investing his brief life, strangely beautiful in the foreshadowing of an early death. " Quis strepitus circa comi- tum ! quantum instar in ipso est ! sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra." Youth will be served. Odysseus, middle-aged, shrewd, prudent, a skilful manager, a wily politician, cannot hope to compete against his younger rival. Moreover in the Iliad we seem to be always looking down from an Olympian height upon a struggle of the mightiest in the world, a contest into which the gods themselves deign to enter. We are held in suspense at the alternation of success and failure, enthralled by a brilliant picture of humanity, thrilled by the sight of greatness, strength, and beauty, now triumphing, now hurled into the dust. " Upon Death's purple altar now see where the victor-victim bleeds." And at length there comes the wondrous climax when Achilles, overwhelmed by the fate of his beloved Patroclos, at last makes his entrance on the stage of battle and slays Hector, the glory and the bulwark of the Trojans, and then that most pathetic of all scenes in which Priam endures what none had endured before, to kiss the hand of the man who had slain his son, the prelude to that colossal tragedy of the ruin of Troy which worked so much upon the imagination of Euripides, the " realist."* * In " The Trojan Women " and " Hecuba," above all. 24 THE ODYSSEY Yes ! if we wish to indulge in the bad habit of placing in order works of differing charm and different design, we may say with Longinus that in the Odyssey there is not the same profusion of accumulated passions, nor the supple and oratorical style packed with images drawn from real life. From this point of view the Odyssey is " a sinking sun whose grandeur remains without its intensity." But literature need not always be tense moments. Those who laud the Iliad at the expense of the Odyssey have missed one of the greatest things in literature. The subdued grandeur, the homelier tale, the equal or rather the greater art, the more level fulness of achievement have a charm and spell which it is difficult to resist. We have here literature at its best and freshest, with none of the faults of modern days to be sloughed off, literature stripped of its garish ornament, its false sentiment, its exaggeration, its rant, or its sophistication. We have things limned as they are, viewed through the limpid air of Ionia, not through the distorting hazes of Romance, fresh, vivid, and infinitely touching, ever obedient to the precious maxim ju-ijJev ayav, nothing in excess. Just as the Iliad, the epic of the palace and the combat, shews us war's alarms and the tented field, so the Odyssey, the epic of the farmhouse, the home, and all homely things, shews us the arts of peace, the craft of man as well as the might of force, and it has too a charm'd magic casement opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Let us take one or two passages in the " pale and far-off shadow " of a prose trans- ation.* " Thus he spake and led the way, and they went with him. So they brought all and stowed it in the decked ship, according to the word of the dear son of Odysseus. Then Telemachus climbed the ship, and Athene went before him, and behold, she sat her down in the stern, and near her sat Telemachus. And the men loosed the hawsers and climbed on board themselves, and sat down upon the benches. And gray-eyed Athene sent them a favourable gale, a fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea. " And Telemachus called unto his company and bade them lay hands on the tackling, and they hearkened to his call. So they raised the mast of pine tree and set it in the hole of the crossplank, and made it fast with forestays, and hauled up the white sails with twisted ropes of oxhide. And the wind filled the belly of the sail and the dark wave seethed loudly round the stern of the running ship, and she fleeted over the wave, accom- plishing her path. Then they made all fast in the swift black ship, and set mixing bowls brimmed with wine, and poured drink offerings to the deathless gods that are from ever- lasting, and in chief to the grey-eyed daughter of Zeus. So all night long and through the dawn the ship cleft her way." This is no laboured passage, there is no straining after effect, but all is as clear and vivid and animated as literature can hope to be. To be so simple, so direct, and yet to leave so lasting an image on the reader's mind is a lost art. We cannot imitate it, we can but admire. Or take a passage particularly beautiful in its native Greek, in the luscious concourse of sweet vowels, and its exquisite unstrained sentiment. " Stranger, there is yet a little thing I will make bold to ask thee, for soon will it be the hour for pleasant rest, for him on whomsoever sweet sleep falls, though he be heavy * The quotations are throughout from Butcher and Lang's excellent translation. 25 THE ODYSSEY with care. But to me has the god given sorrow, yea sorrow measureless, for all the day I have my fill of wailing and lamenting, as I look to mine own housewiferies and to the tasks of the maidens in the house. But when night comes and sleep takes hold of all, I lie on my couch, and shrewd cares thick thronging about my inmost heart, disquiet me in my sorrowing. Even as when the daughter of Pandareus, the brown bright night- ingale, sings sweet in the first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the trees and with many a turn and trill she pours forth her full-voiced music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew with the sword unwitting, Itylus the son of Zethus the prince ; even as her song, my troubled soul sways to and fro." In what resides the charm and power of this ? It baffles us as we analyse it, it flees from us when we seek to grasp it. It is this very simplicity no doubt, simplicity which when genuine is so nobly attractive, in its counterfeit so sickly and disgusting, a quality so difficult to define or to attain. To hold the mirror up to nature, how easy it seems, how hard it proves. And the secret of this simplicity has been revealed to this earliest of masters, it comes to him almost, one would think, without an effort, it delights us by its very unstudied ease. An ancient critic as we have said detected in the Odyssey signs of declining genius, and found it a tame comedy of manners compared with the high tragedy of the Iliad. No record of human life when told by genius is tame, and the history of Odysseus of the many wiles, how that he journeyed to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, and suffered many things at the hands of Polyphemus, how ^olus received him gladly and sent him on his way, how Telepylus of the Laestrygonians brake his ships and slew his goodly-greaved companions, how he endured the wiles of Circe, how in a benched ship he fared to the dark house of Hades, how he heard the song of the Full-voiced Sirens, how his company slew the kine of Helios, how the nymph Calypso kept him in her hollow caves, how he came to the Phseacians, who sent him to his own land, and how he took vengeance upon the suitors who had importuned Penelope, this tale may merit many epithets but hardly that of " tame." It was heard assuredly with vast interest by its earliest audience as they sat in the long winter nights. " Lo," says Eumaeus, " the nights now are of length untold. Time is there to sleep, and time to listen and be glad ; thou needest not turn to bed before the hour ; even too much sleep is vexation of spirit." Or as the disguised Odysseus declares " verily it is a good thing to list to a ministrel such as this one, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I say that there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feast in the halls and listen to the singer, and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and a wine-bearer drawing the wine serves it round and pours it into the cups " Its stories are greedily devoured by children now, its combination of thrilling adventure and broad sweeps of character will endure until humanity suffers some revolutionary change. Some may prefer the battle scenes of Troy, the systole and diastole of the great struggle beneath the walls of Ilion, the exploits of the great Greek captains, but me rather, in most moods delights " that bowery loveliness," the romance of land and sea, the combat of man with the elements, his persistent resolution in adversity, his indomitable cheerfulness. The Odyssey is in twenty-four books and contains over twelve thousand lines. A work of these vast dimensions must needs find room for many different things. First 26 THE ODYSSEY in time and place come its fairy tales. The earlier half is a huge Marchen, in which the exploits of Odysseus braving the powers of nature, defying giants, ogres and enchan- tresses are told with great and interminable charm. The contribution of the fairy tale and of romance to literature is no doubt considerable and not to be despised. It pervades Spenser ; there steals out at times in Milton a vision " Of faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres or of Lyones, Launcelot, or Pellas, or Pellenore." But nowhere else has the legend achieved the perfect charm of the Odyssey. The true begetter of this section of the poem is as Odysseus might have said Ovrif, No man ; it is the anonymous spirit of the Greek race which has shaped these enchanting fictions, the epic poet has merely taken this exquisite material and given it a more finished form. The story of adventure delights us all in youth. We love to hear of peril hard upon the heels of peril, and hairbreadth escapes, " of antres vast and deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven .... and of the Cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders." We are not too discriminating in our criticism, or too squeamish in our appetite. The tale of adventure is therefore often artless. But the Odyssey is wrought with consummate art, and the character of Odysseus himself and its sustained conception would suffice to redeem the tale from triviality. Still for those whose interest in Jack the Giant-killer and his kind is soon exhausted there is the consoling prospect that the rest of the tale moves in a differ- ent region. We have not left the realm of marvellous happenings, but the hero is con- cerned with a design which is not more unnatural than that of wresting his house and heritage out of the hands of those who are devouring it. How he succeeded and how he lived happily ever afterwards, till he again was smitten with the lust for travel, is told in the last twelve books. The greatest artist is in closest contact with humanity, and at many points. One of the glories of the Odyssey is that its realism is unquestionable. The age of the artifi- cial and the sophisticated was not yet. People enjoyed their meals, they loved to put forward their hands not their forks to the fare prepared, and they delighted to hear how other men put from them their desire of eating and drinking, they lingered with a curious interest over the details of the cooking of a dinner, they honoured an Alcinous for his love of good fare and his hospitable temper. The Odyssey is the epic of small things. It takes us into the palace, but it also takes us to the kitchen and the steading with its byres and middens, it deals with all men, noble, base, and knavish, in something like a Chaucerian catholicity. It stands firm and rock-like because it is built upon the funda- mentals of human nature. That is marvellously slow to change, despite the wireless telegraph, Long Berthas, gas-shells, and all the other machinations of Science applied or misapplied. The Odyssean code of ethics is not ours, its standard of comfort, its mode of life is very different, its polity was unlike, its climate, customs, modes of thought other than ours, and yet that one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin asserts its usual power. We have heard much of realists in modern days. The first, and best, and greatest of all realists is that " great unknown," the creator of the Odyssey. 27 THE ODYSSEY A great poem asserts its power in the most subtle ways. Men may, if they will contemn its plot as mere machinery, but the cumulative effect of different episodes and sections all cohering together, all leading up to one long-discerned and long-prepared conclusion, is not to be ignored as trifling, or to be dismissed as mere contrivance. Even German acuteness has scarcely discovered any trace of faultiness in the Odyssey, and those who have wished to sunder the poem into different sections, have met with scant favour even in the fatherland. The poet plunges in medias res. The gods are in session and decide that Calypso shall be bidden to release Odysseus from his captivity upon her island. He builds himself a raft and after much tribulation twenty days on the open sea he reaches the land of the Phseacians. Meanwhile Telemachus his son goes to Sparta in search of his father, but learns little from Menelaus and Helen, though they entertain him kindly. Odysseus tells Alcinous and his court the story of his wanderings, and is then conducted in a single night to his beloved Ithaca. From this point onward the tale of his return proceeds in the leisurely style of great authors towards its due conclusion, its reAor, the slaying of the suitors and the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. For the first time in literature we have the interweaving of two motives, the wanderings of Odysseus and the adventures of Telemachus in the quest for this father. The poet turns from one theme to the other, he combines the different sections of his story in a way which none before had taught him, until the confluent streams of narra- tive unite and flow to their appointed end. In this connection one must point out how admirably the working out of the tale of Odysseus illustrates the principles of construction to which the poet instinctively and unconsciously conformed. Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, and the plot thickens at once. He is treated with disdain and contempt by all except kindly Eumaeus. He has ox feet flung at him, and is the butt of the clumsy wit of the suitors, yet he is fated to overcome them all. The scene between him and Telemachus, the inter- view between him and Penelope at night, the dramatic recognition of him by the old nurse Eurycleia, the boding prophecies of the seer Theocly menus to the "fey" suitors all lead up to the itepnttrtia, the reversal. It is in the great manner, the simple manner too, which only a few, including Scott in his finest novels, have ever achieved. Ad- mittedly it is difficult to see how Odysseus and his son Telemachus and their henchmen manage to slay fifty young men who might have rushed their opponents. Here, it must be confessed, things happen after the manner of a fairy tale, and the dea ex machina is everywhere, now in the guise of Mentor, now flying in such fashion as a swallow flies, now holding up her destroying segis. But standards of credibility vary in every age, and in any age they vary with the individual. The standard of the Homeric Greek is different from that of Professor Huxley or Lord Rayleigh, the standard of Lord Rayleigh is different from that of Sir Oliver Lodge. But there are many delightful touches in the delineation of Penelope's character and the situations which arise are worthy of the most skilful of the moderns and beyond their powers. After we pass from the most primitive epochs, the main outlines of human nature in all ages seem much the same, and the broad lineaments of human character appear to change as slowly as the great landmarks of nature, Land's End or Beachy Head. Just as Piltdown skulls and palaeolithic tombs can demonstrate how little the human 28 THE ODYSSEY anatomy has been modified in length of time, so a poet like Homer proves how much in common we still have with an age so distant and so far behind us as the Mycenaean epoch. It is a time when people have not yet learnt to be artificial or conventional. It faces from day to day the basic facts of human life, it knows how foolish it is to forget one's cloak when on outpost duty, that the nights are cold and the rime is sharp in the early morning, that times are hard for the poor as always it knows how kings and princes can be harsh and oppressive, how shameful it is to be constrained to send in, daily, three of one's best porkers for the insatiate youths who are courting the mistress, it knows what shameless hussies the serving maids may be. It has a special grievance against the importunate belly with its unconscionable demands, " the wretched belly, a thing accursed, that works much ill for men," that causes benched ships to be furnished, and bears men over the unharvested seas. It knows what a rough life is that of the beggar and the vagrant (even though suppliants all are of Zeus) what a bane the pirates are, and what a hankering they have to kidnap sons of princes. Education is too often mere sophistica- tion. It teaches men to use sounding words and not to understand them, it imposes artificial modes of expression and insincere conventions. But strip off this crust and how much of the Homeric Greek is still found in the twentieth century man, above all if he lives in the country. Nearness to Earth is a great bond of union. There is something elemental, something fundamental in the types we meet in the countryside, something simply grand, and gloriously homely in the old men whom one hears conversing outside the hamlet church, or on the village green, or in the railway carriage, which one perceives to be closely akin to Eumaeus the leal swineherd, or old Laertes, clothed in his patched doublet, with his clouted leggings of oxhide, his gloves and goatskin cap, that type primae- val and yet abiding which Meredith has caught and marvellously rendered in his dis- torted way in Master Gammon and Andrew Hedger. There is a great charm in the characters of this simpler age, an age before the micro- scope or the miniature painter. The artist deals in broad, big sweeps, he has no desire to anatomise and no conception of such a method. And yet his creatures walk and move about on castors like the works of Daedalus. " Then up came a common beggar, who was wont to beg through the town of Ithaca, one that was known among all men for ravening greed, for his endless eating and drinking, yet he had no force or might, though he was bulky enough to look on. Arnseus was his name, for so had his good mother given it him at his birth, but all the young men called him Irus, because he ran on errands, whensoever any might bid him. So now he came, and would have driven Odysseus from his own house, and began reviling him and spake winged words. Get thee hence old man, from the doorway, lest thou be even haled out soon by the foot. Seest thou not that all are now giving me the wink, and bidding me drag thee forth ? Nevertheless, I feel shame of the task. Nay get thee up, lest our quarrel soon pass even to blows." How clearly the scene comes before us, how vividly the speaker depicts himself. There is not in the Odyssey the modern multifariousness of type, nor the modern variety of all sorts and conditions of men in cosmopolitan cities. Many of our best beloved char- acters were then in embryo. King Alcinous is the original ancestor of the Fat Gentle- man of Pickwick, and the King in Tennyson's "Sleeping Beauty" the "reverend dame" is the precursor of Mrs. Rouncewell, Irus himself will stand for Pistol, and Melantho for 29 THE ODYSSEY Becky Sharp, Hortense, (the maid of Lady Dedlock), and the soubrette in general. The soul of Richard Feverel once inhabited the body of Achilles, and the bard himself was the Shakespeare, Henry Irving, and Charlie Chaplin of his time ; Alcinous, what a swarm of offspring he has by others ! Yet no artist ever had a finer eye for character, or a greater mastery of the art of delineation. Homer might seem to deal with only a few main types, yet all his personages live, nay ! throb with vitality. They are types and yet individuals, they are individuals and yet for the subtle modern they sum up whole classes of men. Odysseus himself seems to impersonate one whole side of humanity. He is the man of affairs, handy with brain or tools, shrewd, cunning, good-natured, likeable, yet an in- veterate liar. He is of the supplest, and yet no god, no goddess, no force of nature can turn him from his design, or cause him to forget clear, rugged, far-seen Ithaca. He is deceitful, unscrupulous, a romancer, cruel on occasion, and yet for once we descend from our moral platform. For his ruling passion is a love of Home. He is a good son, and a father of his people, " one that wrought no iniquity toward any man, nor spake aught unrighteous in the township, as is the wont of divine kings. One man a king is like to hate, another he might chance to love. But never did he do aught presumptuously to any man." In all his adventures, in his fight with the elements, in his struggle against the suitors, we feel that he is the protagonist of the human race. He is the great persuader, a man of rare patience, rerxafl* &j xpaJfy,* a man of affairs, the opportunist who will bend to the popular will if thus he may at last secure his purpose, fair and just as far as a man in hard times thwarted by an evil destiny can be, and one with a splendid eye to business. He desires no grande passion with a goddess or an enchantress ; the homely affection of his wife who is no goddess and whose face is stained with tears is more to him. He can bide his time and pocket his pride, but when the chance comes of taking vengeance upon those who have outraged him on his own hearth, the vengeance is complete. His abiding helper is Athene, that is, if we care to allegorise, Wisdom, Prudence is ever by his side, whispering in his ear, counselling and admonishing, and furthering his plans. He is the first pan-Hellene, the first Greek statesman, and the vivid Homeric portrait was stamped on the minds of later writers as a lasting type. He " morigerates " in a way that Bacon would have admired, but he does not breathe the air of courts, he loves the sky and sea, and his face is tanned by the sun. Achilles, we have said, is the hero of youth ; in Odysseus middle-age has its hero. Odysseus has lost the impetuosity of youth but also its waywardness. He has lost some of that vividness of the senses, and swiftness of impulse which marks the early twenties, but he is almost as keenly interested in life as the hero of the Iliad, and certainly a closer observer. He must hear the music of the Sirens, though prudence must bid him first bind himself to the mast, he must revile Polyphemus. He is less self-centred than Achilles ; wife, son and father are all things which pull at his soul and lead him homewards. He can break forth in rage as furiously as Moses. When Euryalus gainsays him, he has a good mind to slay him but a better not. In general he is gifted with a marvellous patience, he is a remarkably good business man, he takes the greatest care of the rich presents from Phaeacia, and is most thoughtful to bestow them in a safe place. Yet he would not have wrecked an expedition for the sake of his y/>a5, his special prize, * " Endure, my soul." 30 THE ODYSSEY he is the incarnation of compromise, the man of tact and wiles, the great persuader. He is, to adopt the nomenclature of zoology, a wonderful, perhaps the earliest, type of the " homo sapiens." It takes all kinds of characters to make an epic. Odysseus the contriver, the schemer the man of affairs who never loses heart, who always submits to the yoke, who does not defy facts, but gently, persistently, and oh ! so patiently gets round them, has not the tragic beauty of our youthful hero, a Feverel or an Achilles, but the hearts of those who too have shouldered the yoke, and spent themselves in labour and persuasion will beat responsively to the hero, and not criticise him because he looked to his gifts. But though Odysseus is not a youth, he has not seen three generations like Nestor, he can still bend the mightiest of bows, he is in his wiry middle-age, he is as fresh in in- vention and as resolute in will as ever in emergency, the Robinson Crusoe of the ancient world. His followers dwindle and dwindle, till their captain alone remains. But he is undaunted, and he has powerful friends. He swims and swims, finds shelter on a raft, and takes himself to shore with great skill when he at length finds the mouth of a fair flowing river, smooth of rocks, with a covert against the wind. He meets, not Man Friday but a bewitching maiden, and enlists her aid. He is a great man with his hands, and has made a bedstead whose post is an olive bush, which he hews and smoothes and planes and inlays until it is a marvel to behold. He never knows defeat in battle, though he loves stratagem rather than the knockout blow ; he can plane with the adze, and wield the bow, and he is a skilled helmsman. Not many things in the Odyssey are more noteworthy than the loving interest which is manifested in everything connected with handicraft. Odysseus can blaze out into ferocity. Naughty serving maids win scant shrift, a suitor even when repentant finds no mercy, the son of Laertes likes to have his own way (what king does not ?) but he is humane and sympathetic, a kindly master, a king who has regard for public opinion, and a leader who loves to exercise his great skill in managing men. He is above all a true Greek, and in him we can discern the lineaments of the Athen- ian whom a famous chapter in Thucydides portrays, and of the most ingenious and dexterous of all Athenians, Themistocles. It is on Odysseus that our gaze is mainly fixed, but there are others, limned with not less skill. Telemachus is a fiery youngster still in the callow stage, with all the makings of a man in him, still undeveloped, still unable to restrain his passionate wrath, despite his epithet TTSTTW^VOS, discreet. But he is not destined to be the hero of an epos. He has the petulance of Achilles, like him he paces the sea shore in anger, but he is not the son of a goddess, he meets with no ennobling calamity, he comes to no sudden end. His mother is a much more significant figure. Her character is delineated with consummate skill and refinement. We must not be misled by analogies from Polynesia, such as our anthropologists provide us in profusion. How much dignity and queenliness is there in this quiet, oppressed chieftain's wife. Helen and Penelope are not squaws ; they are both great ladies of rather chequered experience living in a simple age, Helen in particular with a fine tact, the charm of the splendid beauty, and a delicacy of feeling which would have made her the ruler of a modern salon. No more striking proof of the development which the Homeric age had reached can be found than in the high stage of manners which such female characters illustrate. It is not that THE ODYSSEY Penelope either does or says much. She must suffer rather than do, she must submit rather than protest, at most she stands by the doorpost of the well-builded roof holding her glistening tire before her face and listens to the minstrel or rebukes the suitors. A weary lot is hers of scornful importunity and hope deferred, for is it not ever true that men must work and women must weep ? Yet in all her restraint there is the mark of a strong character. She has a refinement and a dignity of bearing which bewilders her suitors but makes them keep their distance. Few characters who take so small a part in the action of a tale impress the reader so much. Though we sit most often in the hall where suitors fill themselves with wine and wheaten bread and flesh of pigs, though the handmaids are as busy as the waitresses in a crowded restaurant, and the noise and uproar is continual, there is ever in the background and above the shouting that woman in the upper room, oppressed yet queen of all hearts, gifted with that strange power which quiet gentleness so often gives a woman, loyal and stedf ast in her purpose , long-suffering, hoping against hope, discreet and reverend Penelope, Sla. yyvouxwv, godlike among women. Penelope is the skilled housewife, the exponent of the domesticities. Without her, little as she does, the Odyssey would be merely a tale of warfare and adventure. She illustrates Ruskin's view that the greatest writers all take most pains over their female characters.* It is Odysseus' house, Penelope and her womenkind, which give the Odyssey its distinctive charm and make the poem the poem amongst many other things of the domestic affections. Remove the scenes in the house of Odysseus and the poem would collapse. Noblest of all other characters is Eumseus, the swineherd of high birth. Nowhere in the Odyssey does the nobility and bigness of human character stand out more sharply than in those scenes in which this simple yeoman-slave appears. The farmer derives his sustenance from Earth, he tends it, tills it, watches the seasons, and there is in con- sequence something great and primitive and elemental in the farmer of even the most advanced age. And as Eumaeus sits by his fireside in the evening eating hog "by the solid hower " like Andrew Hedger communes with the hardworn vagrant his master in disguise, and meditates upon things in general and particularly upon the hardness of the times, we win a delight that only too rarely modern realists can give us. Everything human is interesting to the eye that can see in everything the essential and the permanent. We listen with ears attent to the simple, artless, recital of Eumaeus' life history told as graphically as Defoe would have told it. Eumaeus is a noble character, loyal to his lord and mistress, and to the young master who has gone to Sparta in quest of his father. He is shrewd withal. He pities the mendicant , entertains him for are not all suppliants of Zeus ? but disbelieves him, for the vagrant is a Cretan, and all Cretans, as Epimenides discovered later, are liars. The stranger shall have good fare and fitting harbourage, but he need not seek to win a night's shelter by sanguine forecasts of the master's return. Yet when Odysseus at length reveals himself, Eumaeus will go to death with him, with a loyalty of the antique kind when service sweat for duty not for meed. Like the poet himself, he is simple, noble and direct. * See " Sesame and Lilies." 32 THE ODYSSEY As lifelike, and perhaps even more charming, are the scenes amongst the Phaeacians. It is a land in which the sun is always shining, and the sky is always blue, and every- one is prosperous, the land too of orchards. " And there grow tall trees blossoming, peartrees and pomegranates, and apple trees with bright fruit, and sweet figs, and olives in their bloom. The fruit of these trees never perisheth neither faileth winter nor summer, enduring through all the year. Evermore the West wind blowing brings some fruits to birth and ripens others .... There too, skirting the furthest line are all manner of garden beds, planted trimly, that are perpetually fresh, and therein are two fountains of water, whereof one scatters his stream all about the garden, and the other runs over against it beneath the threshold of the courtyard, and issues by the lofty house, and thence did the townsfolk draw water." And hard by is the high roofed hall with a gleam as it were of sun or moon, where Alcinous sits and drinks wine, "like an immortal." The fairy element is of course palpable in a story which deals with mariners who can achieve a week's journey in a single night and whose ships can be turned by an irate deity into a mountain without much comment. Yet even in this fairyland everything is to the life ; Nausicaa, for instance, first and most charming of all charming girl heroines in the not too lengthy list which includes Perdita, Miranda, Rosalind, Rose Jocelyn, and Clara Middleton. Ignorant of convention, naive, with no affected reserve, yet with an innate nobility and purity which takes the heart by storm, she is delightful, even when she goes out washing. Like a heroine of Meredith's she " carries youth like a flag." Phseacia is a land where women have much influence, a land in which there is no false shame. Nausicaa goes forth with the family soiled linen and spends the whole morning at work on her brother's laundering such is her coy pretext though as her jocose papa sees, she is partly thinking of her own trousseau. The women live an unrestrained life out of doors, emancipated in the word's best sense, and respected, in frank fellowship with their compeers of the other sex. There is nothing nobler or more delightful in Homer than this free comradeship of the sexes which knows no taint of morbidness or prudery, so far removed from the niminy piminy of the Victorians. Nausicaa would have startled Jane Austen, for she can wash, walk and play ball, and when she sees a hero but of doubtful pedigree prays openly that the gods may give her such a husband. But Mrs Grundy is out of place in Phseacia. Let us ignore her shrieks and outcries, and join with Odysseus in wishing that the gods may grant her all her heart's desire, " a husband and a home and a mind at one with his may they give a good gift, for there is nothing mightier and nobler than when man and wife are of one heart and mind in a house, a grief to their foes and a joy to their friends, but their own hearts know it best." Such too had doubtless been her mother, kindly Queen Arete, whose aid is so needful for a suppliant and so sure to gain a favourable hearing from her spouse. And then there is good King Alcinous himself, so genial " he must have been a jovial king " so good natured, as regardful of his wife's opinion as a proper husband should be, a kind father though inclined to tease, a hospitable host with a warm heart for suppliants, and a prudent monarch who always carries public opinion with him, for there are un- gracious folk about who will rebuke even kings' daughters. There are few things more interesting in the Odyssey than this study of early kingship, with its absence of the trappings of feudalism, and ignorance of the figments of Divine Right, even though kings 33 THE ODYSSEY are descended from gods. It has a wholesome regard for the critics, those terrible people whose tongues are always wagging. Whether it is a royal maiden who is too free with a stranger, or a king who is too open-handed to a suppliant, " there are but too many insolent folk among the people." Phaeacia, a realm sundered from all other lands, de- scribed in so vivid a vignette, is a peerless fairy region. The lustrous rays of romance bathe its high wall and towers, and its fair haven and narrow entrance, and the curved ships on either hand of the mole where all the folk have stations for their vessels, each man one for himself, where they look to the gear of the black ships, hawsers and sails, and fine down the oars, the land where all fruits grow and it is never winter. The omission of the Phaeaciad would have made the Odyssey incomparably duller. It has all the charm and imaginative thrill of the " Sleeping Beauty " without Tennyson's too courtly sentiment. The one hundred and eight suitors are less minutely delineated. Their leader is Antinous, who has all the insolence of youth without its frequent attractiveness. He is chief of his peers in counsel and in speech, it is he who ever takes the lead, whether to propose the ambushing of Telemachus on his return, or to display the overweening arrogance of the suitors. He is heedless of the claims of the weaker, cruel to his inferiors ; he would have been vulgar if he had lived in later ages. Though one or two others, Eurymachus, Polybus, and Leiodes are slightly sketched, the rest are ciphers, ne'er-do- wells, idlers, " nebulones, fruges consumere nati," indistinctly outlined because in truth, like Ripton Thompson, they have no character. We get what is all we need, a vague impression of lubberliness and loutishness, an aggregation of " cubs " such as the twen- tieth century can produce profusely, creatures who swagger and domineer, who are in- solent to inferiors and ill-bred to servants, insufferable when they assert their impor- tance, youths who hide their confusion however with delicate laughter not the hoarse guffaw of nowadays, and failing to win the favour of their mistress, are content to share a rapture with a serving maid. The jeunesse doree of Ithaca and the neighbourhood is not so highly developed a type as modern times have evolved men had not yet devised so many ways of wasting time and money but they are as overweening and disdainful as one could desire, their main virtue being that they generally return home to sleep, and that right early. Whatever else it has, the Odyssey has a unity of effect, and it is worth while noting that, whatever doubts philologists have had as to the composition of the Homeric poems, most men of letters have been convinced Unitarians. There is an " atmosphere " pre- vailing from the first book to the last. It is not that local colour which modern writers toilsomely provide in big splashes, it is something subtler and more pervasive. The Odyssey is a harmony. We feel that we know and apprehend the Odyssean world. It is an age of curious contrasts, of polished refinement yet of crude barbarian survivals, an age in which women are respected and esteemed, more powerful and more prominent than the Athenian woman of later times. It is an age with almost settled standards of morality, though it knows the most startling reversals of fortune, and sees sons of wealthy men kidnapped and sold into slavery ; and also it is an age in which piracy is a recognised profession, and Autolycus, only two generations back, could win fame and applause because he surpassed all men in robbery and perjury. It is conversant with turbulent 34 THE ODYSSEY nobles, avowf^, who need a tight hand, and kick over the traces while the master is away, it knows of savage mutilations and barbarous revenges, and yet is thrilled when the minstrel, like to the gods in voice, strikes his lyre and chants the tale, of fallen Troy, maybe (for men prize that song the most which rings newest in their ears), or of the Calydonian boarhunt, or of the slaying of Agamemnon, for such things are the crown of the feast. It is hospitable and does not enquire of guests their business till the second day. It loves good eating, (in a princely house " it snows meat and drink,") and it approves of kindness to the poor ; but it is an age in which public opinion is somewhat ahead of public practice, an age in which ethics outstrip theology, an age in which young bloods flown with insolence and wine can flout prophets and elders. It is much given to omens, it takes a simple pleasure in an eagle appearing at a propitious moment, and it is quick to detect a god in his birdlike disguise. And yet it is an age in which the political sense is developing and monarchy is limited by public opinion, and that censori- ousness which is always ready to find fault with rulers. Odysseus must justify the slaugh- ter of the suitors to the Ithacans, and this matter is so important that even a goddess must intervene. Alcinous is influential, but he fully appreciates the advantages of an approving vote, and is fully resolved to give the opposition no chance. It is because kings are resolved to give him no handle for criticism that Thersites does not appear in the Odyssey. Though kings and even swineherds enjoy rude plenty, times can be hard, and scions of noble families may be reduced to beg their bread. Neither the bard nor his hearers, nor Odysseus, are foolish enough to ignore the main chance, and Odysseus' careful attention to his presents from Phseacia wins even divine approval. Mankind a thousand years before Christ does not seem to vary an extraordinary degree from mankind nearly two thousand years after Christ. Old men were garrulous, men of all ages loved banter and the pointless jest partly redeemed by its naivete ; young men were awkward, undisciplined, inclined to swagger and to rowdiness, and serving -maids were pert and for- ward. We cannot feel that the life of the Odyssean age is incomprehensible. Our age is superior in material comforts, and many of the refinements and elegancies of life, but the cinema is in no way superior as a form of entertainment to the minstrel who moved his hearers to weeping or held them the long winter nights. Antinous is no worse than a Prussian Officer, and even the monster liner and the aeroplane scarcely outdo the expeditious Phaeacians who, however far the journey, bear men to their destination in a single night. It is perhaps more clear by now what qualities in the story of Odysseus have charmed so many. It takes a vast assemblage of qualities to make a poem endure through ninety generations. First, the poet is in perpetual contact with life. In the greatest poets Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism (to borrow convenient labels which somewhat artificially describe a writer's work), mingle their forces. There is in the Odyssey, even in its most marvellous passages, an all -pervading realism, a nearness to and a joyous interest in life in its most matter of fact circumstances and its homeliest details. There is that sense of the strangeness, beauty, and mystery of things which is the foundation of all genuine romance, but there is none of that spurious sentiment, that maudlin gush which too often passes for romance. The tale of the shipwrecked mariner who returns un- expectedly long after all hope has been abandoned, is an oft repeated motive in stories 35 of all ages and amongst all nations. It has been garnished by sugary sentiment, and veneered with deadening artificiality in the Laureate's Enoch Arden. Enoch is always reflecting d la Lord Tennyson, admiring the scenery of the Southern Seas a la Lord Tennyson. He is a mild inoffensive man whose whole attitude towards life is unnautical. He sells fish or rather " ocean spoil in ocean-smelling osier " and, as Bagehot has well pointed out, he is never obvious, prosaic, healthy, but always refined. Tennyson's art has been used here to distract us from unattractive realities. " I'm sorry for Mr. Blue- beard, I'm sorry to give him pain. But a terrible spree there's sure to be, When he comes back again." Such would have been the attitude of Kipling's character in " In Life's Handicap," such of the sailors depicted by Mr. Conrad, or Mr. W. W. Jacobs, such is not the language of the Laureate's hero, or the mid- Victorian attitude towards things which are not " nice." Life is one vast drawing-room in which are congregated Kings who endured with mild sadness conjugal infidelity, and gentle seamen with their faces washed and their hands clean, keeping in the background their " ocean spoil in ocean- smelling osiers," polite and self-complacent courtiers. It is a place where everyone, including the improper, is proper in behaviour, and the female annuitants are the moral policemen, and the curate of convention fixes the standard of manliness. But in Homer there is no sentimental fallacy. The curate has not yet been invented and the moral police are inoffensive. Some one may land on your shore if you live near the coast ravage your fields, burn your house, ravish your women, and kidnap your children to- morrow. If you offend powerful men you may any day make a voyage to King Echetus, who will maim and mutilate you, or you may pass from prince to slave without hope or remedy. Life is often hard, but we shall do well enough if we can get our two meals a day, and something warm to wrap us during the sharp nights when the night comes on foul with a blind moon, and Zeus rains the whole night through, and still the great West wind, the rainy wind, is blowing. Homer, being a very great poet, never forgets the primal necessities. He has no false shame at being hungry. He will describe " very carefully and slow," as becomes such serious business, how they led in a five-year-old bull, which they flayed and busily prepared, and cut up all the limbs and deftly chopped them small and pierced them with spits and roasted them cunningly, dividing the messes. "So for that livelong day," and many other days, " they feasted till the going down of the sun, and their soul lacked not the equal banquet." The equal banquet, for each must have his due portion, and it is not least of Eumseus' merits that he " well knew what was fair." Homer takes a loving interest in the cooking of a meal, and assumes that his hearers are sensible enough to do the same. He knows that the fairest maidens have good appetites, and would have approved^of Mrs Fleming's recipe for healthy girls " good beef and good bread." And therefore when Nausicaa goes out to do washing, the poet sees that the luncheon basket is well filled. He is never afraid of household details. Odysseus boasts that none can vie with him in piling well a fire, in cleaving dry faggots, and in carving and roasting flesh and in pouring out wine. And we are told of the twelve women who ground the barley and the wheat (the marrow of men), and of the sweeping and sprinkling of the hall, and of the wiping of the tables clean with sponges, the cleansing of the mixing bowls and well-wrought double beakers. The old nurse THE ODYSSEY prepares a bath for Odysseus, and we must learn that she puts the cold water in first and then the hot. It is this instinct for reality, this nearness to life, which assuredly is the cause of the poet's vividness and directness. If a poet's vision is not blurred by sentiment or false romance, if he " has his eye on the object," he can portray things in their sharpest out- lines, he can hunt his quarry without much beating of the bush. It is a sense for actual things which takes one straight to the main point of a story. One could paint a picture of Eumaeus' house, with its courtyard of stone, its fence of white thorn, and stakes set thick and close, and its twelve styes each for the grovelling brood of swine (" but the boars slept without ") and amongst the many valuable things which we learn from Homer is that the best way of protecting oneself against dogs is to fling oneself on the ground. The description of the sea, its terrors and its quick changes, has suggested that the bard may have sailed frequently o'er the ^Egean, and one might well infer from the vividness of the narrative that he had also known the joys, and some of the trials of the swimmer. His swimmers are crusted all over with brine, and after engulfment in the floods of angry Poseidon, they bring up vast quantities of salt water. The greatest writers illustrate the Terentian " homo sum, nihil humanum alienum a me puto."* The dictum applies with particular force to " Homer " in the Odyssey. There is in him a joy of living, a delight in human life in all its aspects, a catholicity of taste, a spring of bonhomie such as we scarcely find again until we come to the creator of the Wife of Bath or mine host of the Tabard. Like Chaucer, Homer is a prince among story-tellers, but he is more, incomparably, than that. There is a simple greatness of soul, a keen perception of the pathetic, a vivid sensibility to all the different notes of passion to which we can trace no parallel in the genial patriarch of English literature. For in' truth it is almost Homer's greatest achievement that he has proved that the mere narrator, the teller of tales, whose first task it is to minister to the deep-seated hunger of the human soul for events and facts, can rise to the loftiest heights of poetry, and take his throne on Parnassus' topmost peak. Sagas have grown in many languages and amongst many races, but only in Greece has the saga-poet won the highest fame. Homer lived in an age which it would seem loved poetry, and was a fitting theme for poetry, and which comprised in its poetry its amusements, its mental food, its encyclopaedia of knowledge, its store of wise counsels and sage exhortations. But even with these advantages and with the additional advantage of a perfect language as his vehicle, he achieved the miraculous. There is nothing, we will admit it once again, in the Odyssey like the greatest passages of the Iliad, the surge of combat, the ebb and flow of battle, the glitter and the glory of the splendid pictures of the embattled hosts, the spectacle of life grouped round them. Those who make sublimity the only test of the finest literature will be disappointed in a poem which does not set out to be sublime, but to be almost homely in its humanness. Yet as Longinus concedes in his striking phrase, there is the mellowed sunset glow, the quiet confidence of an assured mastery. And Homer wrote in the most beautiful of all languages, and the most beautiful of all dialects of that language, with its liquid flow and play of vowels. Beside golden * I am a man, I think nothing human foreign to me. 37 THE ODYSSEY Greek all other languages are as silver, copper, or some baser strain. The mere charm of sound intoxicates. Homer flows and flows for ever the perfect type of his own line : Iv. aKacXappslrao ftaftuppoov CLxtavoto There are no lines so massive, so monumentally sententious as many in the ,/Eneid, there are no jewels five words long (though in Homeric Greek nearly every adjective is itself a jewel), there are no Dantean oracles, but there is a melody in Homer throughout which can be found rarely elsewhere, and which our Spenser in the Faery Queen, despite the obvious differences, alone can in some measure suggest* for English readers. And like all great poets Homer has his criticism of life. He had not the misfortune to live in a highly introspective age in which analysis is carried to a morbid degree and atoms anatomise atoms, but he is a wide-eyed contemplator of life, of life in a simpler stage but closer to the fundamental things. Despite his pervading cheerfulness, Homer, like Goethe, knew that in this life we enact Hell. Even in that age the note of melancholy was sometimes sounded. " Of all the creatures that breathe and move upon the face of the earth, nought feebler doth the earth nurture than man. Lo, he thinks that he shall never suffer evil in time to come, while the gods give him happiness, and his limbs move lightly. But when again the blessed gods have brought for him sorrow, even so he bears it, as he must, with a steadfast heart." " Man's life is brief enough ! And if any be a hard man, and hard at heart, all men cry evil on him for the time to come, while yet he lives, and all men mock him when he is dead." Yet how much happiness as he shows us is there in the simpler things, in the sights and sounds of nature, in the love of man and woman, in wedlock, in the devotion of parent towards child and retainer towards master, in wine and wheaten bread, and paunches and good swine's flesh. We feel all this despite the marvellous impersonality of the poet, his self -suppression, the entire absence of subjec- tivity, of the " lyric cry," that aloofness beside which self revelation seems advertisement, and egotism mere folly. All the surer is the poet's judgment, all the firmer the ground on which we tread. But we are convinced that the divine minstrel who can thrill men with such delight, who can move them to tears, hold them in breathless suspense, or dissolve them in ecstacy by the charm of the Muses, himself was moved and enthralled by the spell of poetry. Profitless as in one sense such questioning must be, one cannot leave without one word the crux of the whole matter, "who was Homer ?" "was there a Homer or an Homeric college ? " If one plunges deep into the waters of that controversy which has ever been flowing since the Prolegomena of Wolf in 1795, one becomes almost metaphysical enough to believe that a thing may be and not be at the same time. All great literary critics, from Aristotle down to Goethe and Matthew Arnold, have stoutly maintained the unity of the Homeric poems. We need not doubt but that in that far off age the sense of personality in literature was merely rudimentary, that difference of individuality and difference of style was not as in these modern days. Individuality of style in one sense scarcely existed there might be and without question there was difference of genius but that sense of self, that definition of the individual which turns the feeling of the ego into egotism was as yet unborn. There was a communistic sense of authorship which * Of course the differences also between the rhythms of Spenser and Homer are very great. 38 THE ODYSSEY to-day is inconceivable ; a man was not too proud to collaborate, to add his part to the great temple of the saga without even leaving his mason's mark, an Homerus fecit. All poets composed in the Epic style, and there is much to tempt us in an argument by analogy. Just as the Greeks, seeing the unity even in the diversity of Ionian, Dorian, ^Eolian, feigned that Ion, Dorus, and JEolus were the three sons of the original Hellen, so per- chance when men found that the Homeridae, to whom was entrusted the Epic heritage, dwelt in many cities, they invented an original Homer who naturally was claimed as a native by every city where the Homerids were strong.* So with the Hebrew writings too. In many of the prophets we find insertions and additions plainly of a later age and by a different author. He who interpolated in the book of Isaiah or the prophecies of Jeremiah his own warnings and denunciations was well content if he could edify his own contemporaries. He sought not fame with posterity, he was conscious of inflicting no wrong upon the original writer. Copyright, and the conception of plagiarism did not exist. We can proceed best by negatives ; the antinomy may never be resolved. That the Iliad and the Odyssey consist of different strata clearly defined, that they are composed of various lays with their accretions roughly stuck together, which by some miracle combined into a marvellous poem, is incredible. That the poems sprang full grown from the head of some single bard, that the story suffered no rehandling, that no addition, no removal, no expurgation was ever experienced, that it has been transmitted verbally entire, or nearly so, without change of idiom or of dialect, it is madness to believe. We see in the Iliad and Odyssey that unity of effect and that unity of tone which in all other cases we attribute to the energies of a single mind. That the Epic Sagas were the growth of centuries, that they were wrought at in very truth by the whole Greek race, that they were sifted, and winnowed, and purged, till the adventures of Odysseus became indeed the Odyssey, and the tale of Troy became indeed " the tale of Troy divine " is beyond all reasonable doubt. That some time in this process there came a great poet, or two great poets, who achieved the Iliad or the Odyssey such as we know them, that it is they who gave these poems those great qualities which put them beyond and above the numerous other Epics which flourished once and now are gone, is true unless great poetry owes its being to accident. That the Odyssey in particular is a product of consummate art is generally admitted. The skill is ever present but never obtruded. It is rather an exquisite sense of the fitting, a feeling for proportion, a tact which in the development of the story gives to each thing its due share and no more for like Eumaeus the bard knew well what was fair than laboured and avowed craftsmanship. It is a marvel that in this early age, without a model save the efforts of unknown predecessors, the poet or poets of the Homeric age weave together a double strand. The main section of the narrative, the adventures of Odysseus, his home-coming, and his vengeance upon his foes, is most skilfully united to that of the journey of Telemachus in quest of his father, and the two stories combine in one when Odysseus and Telemachus meet at last. It is a thrilling story of adroit manage- ment and hairbreadth escapes with a dea ex machina to aid in which virtue finally triumphs and overweening pride meets its Nemesis. The tale moves on in the leisurely * See on this point Thompson's " Studies in the Odyssey." 39 THE ODYSSEY style in which great authors delight, till Odysseus at length regains Ithaca. He is at once encompassed by perils more dire than those of his previous journeyings. Tele- machus on his return from Sparta meets his father at Eumaeus' steading and they concert a plan. Odysseus disguised as a beggar goes to his own house, and a scene as striking follows as the scene in "Ivanhoe" when Rebecca and Isaac of York appear in the castle of Cedric at the revels of his Norman guests. Homeric manners are not of a finer pattern here ; Odysseus receives an ox's foot, a missile rather than a present, and is forced to contend in pitched battle with Irus, the greedy bully. Odysseus persuades the suitors to try to bend his bow, himself handles it, and the carnage begins. The revels of the suitors, the omens which portend their fate, his wife's hesitation but final recognition of him, all lead to the appointed conclusion. Odysseus is restored as king, and his old father may spend his declining years in peace. It is not merely the art which is concerned with planning the development of a story and with making its several parts cohere that is found in the Odyssey, important as such skill is in every large poem. The art is all- pervading, it is found on every page and in almost every line, it is the art which knows how to conceal itself. It is so spontaneous and unaffected, and yet it can outdistance the cleverest young men of the early twentieth century. It has a wonderful organ to play upon, and can illumine the most ordinary things with the light of another world, it can transform even a catalogue into a thing of sheer beauty, it can be matter of fact and yet be noble. To it nothing is too low or too strange or too odd for poetry, and yet all is transmuted into fine gold. It is not descriptive in the modern sense, it does not seek to exploit to the full all the possibilities of pathos and sentiment which a situation may contain ; the godlike bard is bewildering in his common sense. Compare the description of the sacrifice (Book III), a picture in which every figure stands out in the sharpest outline, with the celebrated passage in the " Ode on a Grecian Urn."* compare the grotto of Calypso in Book V. with any highly wrought description in Tennyson, and the superiority of what Bagehot called the pure style as compared with the ornate style is manifest at once. There are many incidental beauties in the Odyssey, the wailful lamentation of the nightingale, the description of the Elysian plain, of Phseacia, and a host of others, but they are merely incidental, they come, they pass, and they are gone. They arise naturally, they are not sought after as chances for display, the poet does not linger over them. We seem to be forbidden these methods of a simpler age. We can but stretch out our hands in admiration over the gulf of time and thought and manners which separate us, and seek for a brief moment to recall all the grace and glory of the Juventus Mundi. We shall not then judge the Greek Epic by its fine passages, though fine and even brilliant passages it has. The whole is greater than the part however splendid, and the effect of the whole is what constitutes a great long poem. Greatness does not depend on purple patches, it is rather the texture of the whole that matters. Indeed, the phrase purpureus pannus, purple patch, condemns itself. A literary work is not a patchwork quilt, a fantastic motley of delightful hues, it is a unity and a harmony. Our verdict on the Odyssey or the Iliad may not be a judgment on a particular book or books, it * Of course many of us like Keats and his rich fare better than Homer's simpler but better food. Yet Homer is the greater. Keats has not the classical spirit. That does not mean that we should not admire him, but we must not admire him for the wrong reasons. 40 THE ODYSSEY must be based on the cumulative effect of the whole work, and that will be a thing both greater than and different from the sum of the effect of all the different parts. There is one parallel, one single parallel perhaps, in modern times, in that glorious epic of two dozen volumes known to us as the Waverley Novels. Scott in many points of artistry is plainly inferior in his mastery of language, he is no lapidary of finely chiselled speech, he wrote in prose not verse, in English and not in Greek, and in a poor North British species of English often slipshod, journalistic, and even ungrammatical, though by reason of a simple nobility of nature which delighted in everything connected with his fellow man he may be rightly called most Homeric of modern writers. Yet the critic who reads but one or two of the Waverley novels and doubts and hesitates, will find, if he passes on to eight or a dozen, that he must bow before the spell of the Wizard of the North. A novelist of vogue who, with diligence at least praiseworthy, puts out his couple of novels in a twelvemonth, recently delivered himself of the dictum that the world and no doubt hard-worked novelists had not time to read such novelists as George Meredith. Such a disability extends doubtless to long poems as well as to romances. But Homer, like many of the great narrators, will have none of such heresy. He knows that all things have their end, but that delightful things may end too soon. He goes his own pace, and he takes his time. What is the secret of the charm which has enthralled so many generations ? It is again and again a charm based on the homely, common things, appealing to the sim- plest, which are the profoundest, feelings. The wanderer meets his mother in the under- world. " O mother mine, what fate of death has subdued thee ? " And he is told : " not Artemis slew me with her kindly shafts, and no disease has come upon me, but yearn- ing for thee, and care for thee, O glorious Odysseus, 'tis this that has reft from me my life." Or again, the king disguised as vagrant enters his own house. Argos, a youthful hound when his master had departed, lies now despised upon a midden, full of sores. Twenty years have passed since last he saw Odysseus, yet now the faithful brute recognises, alone recognises him. Worn out by age, neglected, he wags his tail, and pricks his ears, too weak to do more. Dangerous though it may be to do so, his master weeps at the spectacle. He passes in, and the fates of death overtook Argos immediately. Nothing is more odious and unreal than that poodle love which is manifested is such things as Matthew Arnold's "Geist's Grave," and the poem of Martial on the puppy which never misdemeaned itself in its master's drawing-room. Here there is something more real and more respectable. Homer would have been quite unmoved by Sterne's dead donkey except in so far as it was disagreeable to his nose. He does not leave out the midden because it is indelicate, nor does he expatiate on the sores because they heighten the pathos of the situation, but he feels that even a dog, when it is faithful, deserves a memorial, and he is versed in canine as well as human nature. The thing is told and done with, but even because he refuses to squeeze out the last drop of the pathetic, he touches us the more. An austere Athenian historian declared that nobility was one of the essential elements of simplicity. Homer had demonstrated the truth some centuries earlier. There is nothing of the false heroic in the Odyssey. It is in the similes that the poet's wide range of allusion is best evident. He is not quaint, or low, and scarcely grotesque, for grotesqueness THE ODYSSEY perhaps implies a certain oddity in the possessor of the quality. But Homer has no sham dignity. He will compare the texture of a garment to the skin of a dried onion an analogy which would have shocked Pope and does not hesitate to describe a certain henchman as round-shouldered, brown-skinned, and curly haired. It is not to lofty tastes quite dignified, but we have Eurybates limned in as lifelike a manner as the Par- doner. The panic-stricken suitors are compared to a drove of kine harassed by the gad- fly, their assailants to vultures of crooked claws and curved beak. A sleepless man tossing in bed a is paunch full of fat and blood turned before the fire in order to roast the better, and a fit of sullenness is likened to a bitch pacing round her whelps and growling, which is at any rate graphic. When the comrades of Odysseus lament they are compared to calves lowing and skipping before their dams. These graphic similes do not affect us as they affected their original hearers, but others delight us by some sudden and un- expected turn of thought. Odysseus is fain to return to Ithaca, as he will at sunset ; we are given a vivid extract from the annals of the poor, as true and as arresting now as then. " And as when a man longs for his supper, for whom all day long two dark oxen drag through the fallow land the jointed plough, yea and welcome to such an one the sunlight sinketh, so that he may get him to supper, for his knees wax faint by the way, even as welcome was the sinking of the sunlight to Odysseus." Another touching com- parison appears when Odysseus is within sight of land after much tribulation. " And even when as most welcome to his children is the sight of a father's life, who lies in sick- ness and strong pains long wasting away, some angry god assailing him ; and to their delight the gods have loosed him from his trouble ; so welcome to Odysseus showed land and wood." It is as simple and pathetic as Euripides " the human," only more so. Our poet is no preacher, though the Odyssey, like the Iliad, soon became a textbook of morals and good manners, which the Greek boy studied from his earliest years and some times knew by heart. The poem evidences a simple though not shallow faith that things in the end will come right, and that good will triumph. There is no unreasoning optimism ; the poet was in too close contact with human nature for that. He admired the gods as some admire the grand world of fashion, smiling at or ignoring its peccadilloes. He thereby incurs the wrath of Plato, whose austerity could not brook any laxity on such matters, even in a poet. But despite Plato Homer's general tendency is as elevating as one ould wish, and no poet has shown more plainly that he thought nobly of human nature. It is an incurable habit of the human race to hunt for allegories and hidden meanings. Even Horace, who discourses about the Odyssey in a pleasing satire, cannot debar him- self from moralising on the steadfastness of the man of Ithaca, to whom his little island and his homely spouse were more beloved than a goddess's grotto. But it is ill work to turn great literature into moral discourses, and we can look elsewhere for homilies on the abuse of wine and other excursions into ethics. When Homer had been turned into heroic verse after the best Popeian models by the waspish bard and his hired (but ill paid) auxiliaries, a natural reaction led men to emphasise the simplicity of the Greek Epic. True as this view is in its place, it does not involve the absence of all art. It is its splendid story that first won length of life for the Odyssey, but it was that wonderful artistic sense which all Greek authors seem to have that perpetuated it, and preserved it still pre-eminent when the Cyclic poets were all 42 THE ODYSSEY forgotten. Homer is full, but rarely prolix, and rarely grotesque. He is not infantile, he has not the " simplicity " of the idiot boy. For this reason we are constrained to classify him quite apart from the ballad writers. To compare the Odyssey to a collec- tion of ballads is entirely to mislead. Arnold showed his insight not least when he re- fused to put the author of the history of the man of many wiles who wandered far and wide and saw many cities of men and suffered many woes within his heart, beside the naive inventor of " Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter," or beside the modern who evolved " And scarcely had she begun to wash, When she was aware of the grisly gash, Above his knee that lay." Simple as the point of view of the poet was, it was still the point of view of a great artist with a wide experience of life. And he was skilled to portray types that still endure and still delight. His characters, in the modern slang, " convince." The admirers of " The Idiot " doubtless claim for its author classic rank. Take any passage of the Odyssey and compare it with the chapter in which Rogojin and his gang visit Nastasia Philipovna and buy her hand with 100,000 roubles. They laugh, they yell, they scream, they jump on chairs to view the burning of the 100,000 rouble notes, which finally are not burnt. And all this frenzied behaviour, which would not be permitted in a London publichouse, even near Waterloo,* takes place in a St. Petersburg society drawing-room. We are separated from the one writer by nearly thirty centuries, from the other by a bare fifty years, and yet Eumseus, Arete, Antinous are natural and credible, the others are barbarians, untutored, uncivilised, who will need some centuries yet of tendance before they can enter the comity of nations. Constantly in reading the Odyssey we are reminded of other achievements in litera- ture widely differing. It is a proof of the poet's universality. Now we have a fairy tale such as Jack the Giant-killer or one of the Arabian Nights, now some reflection on man's frailty will recall to us the Psalms. Stevenson would have loved to tell the tale of the kidnapped boy and the false frail nurse and the mysterious Phoenician and his secret signal ; Victor Hugo's Guernsey hero Gilliatt's battles with the devil-fish do not excite our interest more than Odysseus' woes upon the sea. The great Robinson Crusoe him- self was not more skilful with his hands, more of a philosopher perhaps, but more long- winded, and Adam Bede was not a defter man with the adze, the planing tools, and the saw. We have a picture of human life stripped of all its conventions, and therefore appeal- ing to all. In truth it is human nature in its broad outlines which is the proper subject of all poetry, and wherever the poet's genius can disentangle the essential from the in- essential, and lift out the permanent from the impermanent, there is deathless literature. The great poet has his spell like the Faery Prince of Tennyson. He can cut through the brake, the close-matted burrs and briars of pedants and of sciolists, he comes and brings the magic word and makes " the long-pent stream of life dash downward in a cataract." Or shall we say that every great poem is an eternal Now, and that genius has charms which can call back to the realms of life even those who have gone down to the House of Hades ? The poet gives then the wine of genius and the red blood courses through their veins again. Once more Odysseus lives, and Penelope, and honest Eumaeus. Once more we seem to wait, and wait in vain for the homecoming of him of the many * Written in War-time. 43 THE ODYSSEY wiles. It is afternoon, and the suitors are gathered in the halls of Odysseus. It is after- noon, and the sun shines in full splendour. The time of feasting will come, but not yet. The noble wooers are flaying goats and singeing swine, getting ready the banquet. Eu- mseus has brought three fatted boars, the best in all the flock, Melanthius tethers the goats beneath the echoing gallery, and Philoetius brings a barren heifer and fatted goats. Some suitors take their pleasure in casting of weights and of spears, they listen to the wrangling of Irus and a plaguey vagrant, they cast the quoit, they boast, they laugh delicately. The boy Telemachus looks on, his face flushed with anger. Scarce can he restrain his passionate fury, silently he vows vengeance while Antinous jeers at him. The reverend housewife strives to keep the wanton queans in order, and chides the pertest and most forward. And now they put the swine's flesh on the fire, they roast, and draw all off. They sit them down in rows, and the henchmen pour water on their hands, and the maidservants pile wheaten bread by them in baskets, and pages crown the bowls with drink. They put forth their hands to the goodly feast, they shout approval of the minstrel. At last the sun sets, and all the ways are darkened, and homeward they re- pair. What if to-morrow discreet Penelope declare her mind ? 44 VERRES 1917 Rascaldom and villainy have their types and ideal forms no less than the virtuous and saintly. To be " absolute in one's numbers," to be the ens of baseness, the ne plus ultra of knavery, the apotheosis of thievishness, is in itself a distinction which calls for the admiring contemplation of beholders who can marvel, momently unmindful of their moral sense, at a quality purged of all dross of virtue, purified of all alloy of excellence. It is with such respectful admiration that we behold the lineaments of the immortal Pecksniff, the monumental embodiment of a nation's hypocrisy, it is with not less deep regard that we can contemplate the consummately limned visognomy of Gaius Verres. The delineations which stamp their impression longest on the mind are those which are wrought on a grand scale, a mighty canvas with an infinity of small touches. The cumulative effect of such transcends by far the sharply etched in petto sketches of a few lines or pages, difficult as one's impression is at times to materialise in words. We have a more real conception of a character spread over a whole novel than of a character portrayed in a dozen lines. And here in the heart of classicism, least where we should have expected it, embedded in the works of the great Tully, exemplar of the Classical spirit, is a picaresque romance of the ancient world, which takes us by some odd unstudied whim of Fortune, on a tour via the cursus honorum through the provinces of Rome in a way that Le Sage might have envied, revealing to us the fortunes of a hero who was a villain, rake, a petty thief, a grandiose robber, and a Roman magistrate. For the first time in the recorded history of man was a character portrayed after this gigantic fashion. Rome of the golden period of its literature had no novel form, but the Verrine speeches were some compensation and a substitute. All Roman literature seems based on rhetoric. And the speech form, aided by the wonderful complaisance of the Roman Law of evidence, has here shown a wideness of scope and a plasticity in execution which we should have deemed incredible without this dazzling example. The massive cliff-like language is fashioned and polished with a wondrous perfection of ex- pression, it is an overpowering revelation of the might of language which makes all life its province. The heavy, stiff, ungainly Latin of the early age has become the most malleable of things. The whole diapason of emotion is sounded, every resource of trope and figure called into play as occasion serves. The scathing acid of unrestrained in- vective, the stiletto sharpness of the sudden thrust, impassioned apostrophe, broad irony, cruellest ridicule and no greater hardship has villainy than that it makes men ridiculous the light jest, and the noblest grandeur of language, all are enshrined in this wondrous monument to the power of speech. No wonder Rome flocked to such an enter- taining spectacle, or that Verres at length robbed his spectators of an almost gladiatorial delight. He was too wonderfully limned. Gallant, connoisseur, high adept in the art of winning blood from stones, skilled manipulator of forms and precedents, he almost stares out of the canvas at us. A fly embalmed in amber is a charming spectacle, but the fate is unwelcome to the fly. The weakness of the biographical romance is its lack of backbone, its succession 45 VERRES which is not a sequence. Even with the greatest of its exponents the yawn may follow the laugh. In the Gesta Verris the yawn rarely is heard. In the variation of manner the orator is supreme. There is the grand impassioned style, the artful prelude of alluring interest, the apologies for lengthiness, and the promises not to be tedious, the light con- versational digression, most finished in its art and ease, the mocking commentary, the elaborate highly-organised period, the swift, sharp, rapier strokes of dialogue, gossip about Cicero himself, topics of the day deftly introduced, and ever and anon some grand passage which knits all together and reinforces the theme in burning words which show a power of swaying men rarely equalled combined with a never equalled art, and behind it all the vivid sympathy, the ardent temperament, and the imaginative intensity which alone achieve great oratory or great literature. " Cedant arma togse, concedant laurea laudi." There was some justice in the lines. But another line, of Ennius's, suggests itself " Moribus antiquis stat res Romana viresque." It was a noble old line, and Rome's true strength was based on morals of the olden time. But Rome was living on its moral capital, was indeed long bankrupt when Verres went to Sicily. If there is anything of the comic in the Verrine speeches and there is certainly such an element it is a tragi-comedy, as Cicero was aware. Rome had made its provinces into the similitude of a milch cow. Its tax-farmers and its governors, jointly or in combination, robbed the provincials of their hard-gotten gains ; an empire was a valuable asset. That millions might suffer to gratify the pride of a dominant race, or to glut the greed of a clique of nobiles was a wrong which Rome only in spasms of philanthropy ever regarded. "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento." And, alas ! though the haughty were quelled, the vanquished were not always spared, and the law of peace not always imposed. Verres then was not an innovator as he no doubt often exclaimed to sympathising circles of Massilians. He was merely the reductio ad absurdum of the Roman system. Let old ideals of honesty and equity be flung into the waste basket, let the principles of Cato be superseded by the practice of Tammany, let ' graft,' oppression, brutal contempt of law prevail, and we shall have the Augean stable which Augustus, to his eternal honour, swept away. Verres was merely a man of disreputable antecedents whose open flouting of the decent conjoined with a certain ingenuity and waggishness which shocked the more hypocritical, lighting upon an orator whose extraordinary range of expression comprised wit, impassioned eloquence, stinging invective, and a satiric power such as no Roman had previously manifested, won him an immortal notoriety. He was not such a noble swash- buckler as Milo, nor such a frenzied revolutionary as Catiline why be so when there are provinces to loot ? nor such an able man as Antony, but he can take a leading place in Cicero's gallery of worthies. We do not hate him. The interval of twenty centuries assures him of a sheltering Statute of Limitations. We canonise our rogues, if they are bad enough, though they must tread the Via Dolorosa to Tyburn gibbet ere our lenity is assured them. Jack Sheppard has never lacked his train of sympathisers ; others beside De Quincey have chuck- led with grim glee over classic instances of Murder as a fine art. We lovingly cull choice garlands of villainy as we turn over the 350 pages of this epic of rascaldom and oppression. Let us glance at our hero's progress. 46 VERRES Verres started his career as quaestor, a suitable office, for the quaestor kept the money chest. The struggle between Marius and Sulla was in full swing. The quaestor finally left his consul Carbo, and the money disappeared, except 600,000 sesterces which were " deposit- ed at Ariminum-." As Ariminum was sacked, the Verrine ingenuity in devising modes of peculation shone forth as brilliantly in this first essay as ever in his later enterprises. He was now to serve his apprenticeship of knavery in the provinces. His journey to Cilicia, where he was to be legatus of Dolabella, was like the passage not of a Roman legatus but " a devastating plague." Being in need of money a frequent case one would suspect he demanded aid of a magistrate at Sicyon. The magistrate refused and was left half dead, almost stifled by a fire of green and damp logs which Verres had kindled in a narrow place. At Lampsacus there was a bold case of attempted outrage, vividly told, and listen- ed to, no doubt, with breathless attention. The honour of Philodamus' daughter was assailed in her father's own house. There was a riot when the Lampsacenes came to the rescue, a lictor was killed, some slaves and the chief pimp Rubrius were wounded. This was intolerable. Philodamus and his son wicked creatures who defended themselves were after trial by set form adjudged guilty of death, and met their end in the forum of Laodicea. It is but a slight matter that when Verres reached Myndus he took a fancy to a small boat sent by the Milesians to escort him, appropriated it, sold it, and sent the crew home on foot, Nor is it strange to find that this thief knew no honour, and that when he returned he turned King's evidence and gained his chief's conviction. So the leisurely record of misfeasance takes its course. Verres now became praetor, and reaped a golden harvest. The administration of justice offered unequalled facilities for money making. Verdicts were sold, Chelidon, his mistress, obtained and reversed decisions with equal facility. Principle and system mattered nothing, as the cases of Asellus and Olympus showed. But the jewel of his praetorian decisions was that con- cerning sarta tecta exigenda, the repair of public buildings. Junius, who had been re- sponsible for the well being of the temple of Castor, died. The temple was handed over in perfect repair to the praetor. One of his " dogs " remarked that there was nothing to be done here except to bring the pillars to the perpendicular. Verres' researches had not extended to geometry, and he needed enlightenment. But he soon grasped the brilli- ancy of the idea, had the contract for re-setting the pillars, which could have been done for 80,000 sesterces, given out at 560,000, a profit of 480,000 gained by the adroit use of applied mathematics. But all these achievements were only the prelude to his crowning work in Sicily. Sicily was a province of great fertility, occupied by a thrifty and hard-working race, so devoted to Rome that even a tax-farmer or a trader was not unpopular there ! It was a very profitable province, all the more useful by reason of its " suburbanity." It was this province, inhabited by such a submissive people, that a course of unscrupulous exactions and unblushing rapacity was to reduce to an untilled desert. Even the Sicilians lost their love of the Roman tax-farmer, and visited Verres with curses not loud but deep. Finally such was the general insecurity produced by this deliberate and systematic chicanery, that all refused to till estates which brought them only ruin, and Verres' successor had to implore his subjects to return to their farms and make abundant sowings, pro- mising them to sell the tithes according to the Hieronian law. Pressure was brought to 47 VERRES bear upon him, and he in consequence threw every obstacle in Cicero's way. But there are limits to the oppressor's power, limits to the endurance of the most long suffering, and all the states of Sicily, save the Mamertines (who were the accomplices of Verres) were to be found at Rome, assembled to bear witness against their tyrant and to behold with exultation his downfall. The young and rising Cicero was invited to plead the cause of Sicily, and despite the manoeuvring of Verres, who sought to find an accuser who would let him off lightly, he was appointed prosecutor by the court. A speedy trial was everything. Cicero was given one hundred and ten days for collecting evidence, but he was ready within fifty (August, 70 B.C.). Even so Verres was still playing for a draw ; next year the circumstances would be more favourable. Then Cicero made the greatest sacrifice an advocate can make. His brilliant exposition, his burning denunciations, his thrilling peroration, all these did he surrender. He proceeded at once to call his witnesses. In three days Verres saw that the game was up, and withdrew to Massilia. The case was finished in his absence. He was condemned to exile and a heavy fine. Cicero published his speeches, and the impassioned Verrines stand somewhere near the " divine Philippics." Those who call Cicero a mere word-spinner must admit that his energy did not fail him here, nor later in the matter of Catiline. Success, alas ! is baneful to many. To Cicero all his life after his consulship in 63 B.C. was an anticlimax. " O fortunatam natam me consule Romam." Like Caesar, he had lived enough for glory. But the jaded, tedious, disheartened " laudator temporis acti " was once the energetic ambitious young barrister who had a great career before him, the most brilliant career in the pacific arts that Roman ever had. " The last infirmity of noble mind " great technical accomplishment, the piteous plight of the Sicilians for his zeal was not all selfishness all combined to achieve an overwhelming triumph. But plunder, peculation, rapacity and outrage are not merely themes for brilliant rhetoricians. It was the inherent weakness of the situation that well-meaning men like Cicero, despite their own humanity and high principles, were mainly occupied in bolster- ing up a criminal system, in trying to heal a gangrened body politic. The senate and the equites, the nobles and the capitalists had thought of empire merely in terms of gold and silver, they deemed imperialism simply a profitable speculation. But tyranny ruins the tyrant as well as the subject, and the Nemesis of Republican Imperialism was that it engendered avarice, cruelty, faithlessness, and the coarsest materialism, and that the old loyalty to one's fellow citizens, the old devotion to country, the old virtues of thriftiness and self-denial seemed an empty dream. The Republic perished, to the woe of the Old Guard of grinding capitalists and grasping oligarchs, but to the joy of millions. For the people that had walked in darkness now saw a great light, and the poet of the new era could give utterance to a new policy as well as his own pious, loving instincts, when he spoke of sparing the subject, and of learning to succour the wretched: ("haud ignara mali miseris suc- currere disco "). Even in dealing with the brilliance, the wit, the satire, and the onset of the Verrines, our last thought should be of the tears of human things. "Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." 48 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES The Comic Spirit has its manifestations in every age and in every clime. Different as its outside semblance may be, Humour is, one would hope, to be found everywhere. Scientists have sought to find in Humour that quality which distinguishes man from the brute beast, thinkers with visionary and prophetic eye have declared that when the perfect man arrives he will be found to possess, perhaps as his master quality, a perfect, an exquisite, sense of Humour. The humorist is never merely a funny man. It is sometimes the very tension of the seriousness of things that makes him shriek with laughter rather than with agony. At times the great humorist, like the great writer of any sort, must see life steadily and see it whole. It is because Aristophanes was in contact at so many points with the life of the most gifted city that the world has ever seen, that his works are of such abiding interest. Contemporary politics, the suffrage question, current literary and aesthetic controversies, current scandal, religion, the Mysteries, the war that was bleeding Athens white, philosophy, genuine or quack, the iniquities of the very great, and the peccadilloes of the very little all is fish that comes into his net. In Aristophanes we see Athenian life at its best and at its worst. In these dramas are focussed in a picture of dazzling brilliance everything that could interest the Athenian of the day. Like the Roman Juvenal, Aristophanes could have claimed that he had gathered into his plays in one gigantic hotchpotch all the desires and passions, all the crimes and weaknesses, all the freaks and phantasies of mankind, and had made of them one huge laugh. Aristophanes, the greatest Athenian writer of Comedies, and in the opinion of many critics the greatest comic poet that the world has seen, was born half-way through the fifth century before Christ, and his literary activity ranged between the years 427 and 388 B.C. He is the best representative of the " Old Comedy " of Athens, the Comedy which is a humorous medley of politics, satire, and invective, a mirror of the life of the age in all its manifold activities. In the course of time such freedom of attack became unpopular, and the " Old Comedy " developed into the very different and far tamer " New Comedy," of which Menander was the best exponent, aiming at the delineation of different types of humanity, and eschewing all excursions into politics. Comedy in Aristophanes' time fulfilled many functions. It was press, platform, pulpit, and " Mr. Punch " in one. It is the best expression of Athens' greatest privilege, freedom of speech, and those who regret the strictness of the modern law of libel would have found Athens a Paradise. Aristophanes was not in sympathy with the democratic advance which marked his age. Yet in spite of his violent attacks on political opponents, he contrived to escape serious hurt, and no more striking proof of the tolerance of the Athenian democracy can be given than the fact that year after year the citizens assembled in their theatre to listen to and to laugh at his denunciations of their policy and his censures of their failings. Except for the meetings of the popular assembly, the stage was the only convenient place for the free expression of opinion on all matters under the sun, and liberally did the comedians avail themselves of their privileges. Aristophanes 49 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES is adverse to everything new, whether in politics, the Drama, or ideas, and he vehemently attacked two great pioneers of human thought, " Euripides the human," the tragedian whom he so violently yet so divertingly caricatures, and Socrates, the creator of Philosophy. He is a comic writer, with wonderful flashes of poetry, and his plays, with their exuber- ance of humour, their swift transition from subject to subject, caused Heine, the great German who was so much in sympathy with him, to compare them in a striking passage to " a fantastically ironical magic tree, springing up with blooming ornament of thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing, chattering apes." But a brilliant English critic, J. A. Symonds, has summed Aristophanes up in a still happier judgment : " Granted that he was more of a Merry Andrew than a moralist, we must surely be blind if we fail to recognise the deep undernote of good sense and wisdom which gives eternal value to his jests worse than blind if we do not honour him for valiant and unflinching service in the cause which he had recognised as right .... Aristophanic comedies are in one sense a radiant and pompous show, by which the genius of the Greek race chose, as it were in bravado, to celebrate an apotheosis of the animal functions of humanity visions, Dionysiac day-dreams from which the nation woke and rose and went about its business soberly, until the Bacchic flutes were heard again another year." The mere outline of a play will suffice to show how different were the tastes of the Athenian average man from those of his compeer to-day. A performance of a play was a religious ceremony as well as an aesthetic delight, but, just as in the Middle Ages the Lord of Misrule held Saturnalia for a brief space, during which nothing human or divine was exempt from the jester's criticism, so in Greek Comedy we must not expect to find all our gods dignified or respectable. Such is the dearth of tragic poets in the world above, that Dionysus, the god of wine, is going to the under-world to bring back Euripides. He is accompanied by his slave Xanthias mounted on an ass. The god asks advice of the hero Heracles, who has been there before, and in- quires the best inns, shops, and places of refreshment. He is told by Heracles, who de- lights to frighten him, that he will at length reach an enormous lake of fathomless depth, fare for transit two obols (about three pence). God and slave proceed toward the lake and attempt to persuade a dead man on the same errand bent to carry their traps. But they fail to come to terms, and the corpse at last roundly declares, " Strike me alive if I take that." Xanthias, a far finer fellow than his master, nobly consents to trudge on with the luggage, and they at length reach Charon the ferryman, finding him bawling out, " Who's for the rest from every pain and ill ? Who's for the Lethe's plain ? " Slaves are not taken aboard, and therefore poor Xanthias has to walk round. Dionysus gets in, sits on an oar, and otherwise behaves as a landlubber, profiting little from Charon's instruc- tions in the noble art of oarsmanship. As soon as they start they hear the lovely strains of a batrachian chorus, which sings a chant with a burden of " Brekekekex, koax, koax," a close representation, as travellers tell us, of the Greek frog's croak. This interruption puts Dionysus out, and a heated dialogue between the god and the chorus ensues. The Frogs are skilled lyrists, as the following extracts from Roger's brilliant translation will show : " Loud and louder our chant must flow. Sing, if ever ye sang of yore, 50 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES When in sunny and glorious days Through the rushes and marsh-flag springing On we swept, in the joy of singing Myriad-diving roundelays. Or when fleeing the storm, we went Down to the depths, and our choral song Wildly raised to a loud and long Bubble-bursting accompaniment " Dionysus mockingly screams out the refrain, but the chant continues until the journey is ended. When Xanthias joins him the adventures of the pair really begin. Xanthias vows that he sees a monster before them. Dionysus gets behind him. The monster is transformed into a charming maiden, and Dionysus is to the fore again. The Chorus of those who have been initiated into the Mysteries is now heard, and it gives utterance to a strain of charming poetry such as is often found mingled with Aristophanes' wildest merriment. The members of the Chorus rehearse in full those solemnities which it had been their delight to perform in the upper world their procession, their hymns to Per- sephone, Demeter and lacchus, and their departure to the Thriasian plain. The way- farers now knock at a door which is opened by ^Eacus, porter to the infernal deities. When the latter sees Heracles, as he thinks for Heracles has lent Dionysus his lion- skin and club his rage is unbounded, and Dionysus is threatened with all Hell's most fearful punishments. While ^Eacus goes to fetch his ministers of torment, Xanthias at Dionysus' request hurriedly changes his attire. Straightway a serving maid enters who accosts Heracles-Xanthias in the most alluring way, and presses him to come in to the luxurious dinner which is just ready and piping hot. This will not do for Dionysus, and another lightning change is effected. But now an irate landlady appears with painful recollections of Heracles' guzzling propensities, and of the huge bill which he had run up and forgotten to settle. Between her and her servant Plathane the pseudo-Heracles gets well abused, and the viragos declare that they will each summon to their aid their favourite politician. ^Eacus now arrives, and not knowing which is the god and which the serving man, belabours both lustily. The pair show much ingenuity in explaining away their cries of anguish, and the perplexed door-keeper at length refers the matter to his master Pluto, who, being a god, will know at once. After a noble Parabasis, an address to the audience on all things in general, in which the poet appeals to his fellow-citizens to be guided by their wisest men in the great struggle with Sparta which was then running its course, we have a second part in which the rival claims of the great tragic poets ^Eschylus and Euripides are canvassed. Each poet presents samples which are very characteristic. The parodist and the carica- turist, to achieve greatness in their genre, must have real original genius. Aristophanes shows both here and in many of his choric odes that he has a genuine lyric vein, and that he can rise to heights of great poetic beauty. Inevitably in a ravesty of this sort manner- isms and superficialities are chiefly dealt with, but the grandiloquence which was the bad side of ^Eschylus' grandeur, his pomp of words degenerating into pomposity, his cloudy mystery of phrase are as accurately hit off as the wire-drawn cleverness of Euripides, his innovations in metaphor, his incoherent emotionalism, the sentimental cater- waulings which he substituted for the manly, simple strains that appealed to musical critics TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES of the old-fashioned type. Either poet declaims some of his lines into a pair of scales, and Euripides, who is not a verbal heavy-weight, kicks the beam. Finally ^Eschylus, the declared victor, sets off for the upper world with Dionysus. A contrast between a play such as we have outlined and a modern revue, for in its loosely-knit texture the " Frogs " may in some respects be compared to a revue, gives the measure of the mental difference between the Athenian and the modern Englishman. Comedy was the people's rare but universal treat. Each year as the Dionysian festival came round there were performances of tragedies and comedies which the people sat through as patiently as those who attend an Eisteddfod. The parallel is close, as prizes were awarded after the rival plays had been performed. A trilogy of tragic plays was performed in the morning and a comedy in the afternoon, and this Gargantuan banquet was celebrated three days running. Those citizens who could not afford the price of admission were in later times given free entrance. We fear that such a literary repast would not attract huge audiences nowadays, and that a disquisition on the merits of two rival poets would cause an exodus in a modern theatre, but Aristophanes emphasises the fact that the audience are keenly interested : " Each a book of the words is holding ; never a single point they'll miss. Bright their natures, and now, I ween, Newly whetted, and sharp, and keen. Dread not any defect of wit. Battle away without misgiving, sure that the audience, at least, are fit." Fit audience but not few. "The Acharnians" another of Aristophanes' plays has a more definite tendency. It is at once a political manifesto, an earnest appeal for peace, a literary travesty, a violent attack upon those who disagreed with Aristophanes' views on politics and the drama, and a vivid picture of contemporary democracy that renowned democracy of Athens which was the perfect flower of popular government, compared with which most modern democratic systems appear incomplete and illogical. It is impossible to under- stand the play without some knowledge of its historical background. In 425 B.C., when the play was first performed, Athens was in the throes of the Peloponnesian War, the most celebrated of those internecine wars in which the Greek devoted his wonderful energy to the futile task of slaying brother Greeks, with calamitous results to his civilisa- tion and political freedom. Athens, the brilliant centre of all literature and art, the scene of the most glorious triumphs of the human mind, and the great naval power of Greece, confronted Sparta, the oligarchic military State, whose members gave their whole lives to the profession of war and despised the arts of peace. The strange and inconclusive conflict between whale and elephant to use Bismarck's image describing a war between a naval and a military Power had now lasted six years. Athens was not an island, but the Long Walls which she had built at the advice of her great statesman Pericles practically rendered her unassailable by land, and Sparta's power of mischief was limited to an annual invasion of that part of Attica which was not encircled by the Long Walls. When all possible damage had been done to vines and crops, the Spartans retraced their 52 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES steps homewards, and the Athenians, embarking on their ships, returned the compliment by landing at various points and harrying the territories of Sparta's luckless allies. The struggle appeared interminable, and a Peace Party, small in numbers but supported by many high-born Athenians, and aided by the genius of Aristophanes, enunciated on suitable occasions " Stop-the-War " views. Dicaeopolis, the exponent of this policy in " The Acharnians," is a typical elderly Athenian farmer, tired of the restraints of Athens, where he has been cooped so long, and anxious for peace. We find him in the place of assembly waiting for the citizens to arrive and for business to begin. He has come " prepared to riot, wrangle, interrupt the speakers, whene'er they talk of anything but peace," and we know that meetings of this turbulent democracy could be very lively. At length the Prytanes, the Presidents, appear, very late, and a start is made. Some envoys have been to the " Great King," the King of Persia, and they make their report. Dicaeopolis, who has pronounced views as to the payment of envoys out of the public purse, continually interrupts. The envoys profess to have brought a Persian with them, " The King's eye." Dicaeopolis is indignant at the sham ; but ,in spite of all, the " King's eye " is invited to dine with the Prytanes. A Thracian chieftain volunteers help, but the lavish rate of pay suggested makes Dicaeopo- lis groan. Finally Dicaeopolis resolves to conclude a special private peace with the Spar- tans by the aid of Amphitheus, who brings him three sample bottles of peace. The first is a five years' brand, and is rejected with disgust because it smells of tar and naval preparations. The ten years' sample is not much better. The thirty years' brand, how- ever, is accepted with enthusiasm. Dicaeopolis goes to his house in the country and pre- pares to celebrate the rural festival in honour of the god Dionysus. But the people of Acharnae, a deme or village in Attica whose inhabitants occupied themselves with the manufacture of charcoal, have got wind of his intentions. The Acharnians are described as " stout hearts-of-oak " and the devastation of their lands by the Spartans has only embittered them. They pelt Dicaeopolis with stone, and threaten excitedly to slay him. At last in desperation he vows that he will slay something that they greatly prize, and fetches out a hamper full of charcoal whose existence he purposes to terminate, a parody of a famous tragic scene. He is granted a hearing and goes to Euripides, the tragic poet, who was noted for his habit of bringing heroes in rags and tatters upon the stage in order to excite pity. Euripides is hard at work, but is wheeled out, still busy at his manuscript. Some suitable garments from Euripides' wardrobe of properties are brought, and after an amusing dialogue Dicaeopolis is just going when he bethinks him- self that he needs " a little tankard with a broken rim." Euripides accommodates him, and Dicaeopolis is grateful, though the former thinks that after this lavish generosity he might as well shut up shop. But Dicaeopolis has forgotten the thing on which his whole success depends. He must have some chervil from Euripides, whose mother, as his detractors averred, had been a greengrocer. Euripides retires indignantly, and Dicaeo- polis proceeds chervil-less to his ordeal. His speech is the central passage of the play. The war, he says, is not entirely the fault of the Spartans, but is partly due to the worthless gang of informers, parasites who batten on democracy. He gives a scandalous account of the origin of the war, insinuating that the great Pericles, " the Olympian," thundered and lightened and confounded Hellas S3 TWO PLAYS OF ARISTOPHANES merely because two of Aspasia's handmaids had been abducted. The Chorus of Achar- nians listen with mixed feelings. Half are won over, and the defeated section call to the General Lamachus for help. Lamachus is a " Bombastes Furioso," a Pistol who speaks " in Ercles' vein," but in spite of Aristophanes' delineations of him he was an able general who died a soldier's death in Sicily. Dicseopolis jeers at him for taking public money and mocks his continual refrain " the people's will." Finally the general retires discomfited, and Dicaeopolis establishes a market where anyone, Spartan, Megarian, or Boeotian, may buy, informers alone excepted His first visitor is a Megarian, a man who, ruined by the war and reduced to the direst straits, brings his two little girls to sell disguised as pigs. In the broadest of dialects he threatens that if they do not squeal loudly enough he will terrible prospect take them home again. There is an amusing scene between the Megarian and Dicaeopolis, who penetrates the disguise of the little girls but agrees to buy them, giving in return some garlic and salt. There next appears a Boeotian, whose approach is heralded by some pipers. Their discordant efforts bring Dicaeopolis out in a rage. He relents when he finds that the Boeotian has a varied assortment of wares mats, herbs, lamp wicks, birds, and even an eel from Lake Copais ! He accepts these ecstatically, but the harmony is disturbed by the entrance of an informer, a class who seem to have been as unpopular as the modern inspector. This gentleman objects to the lamp wick as contraband, and proves elabor- ately that it might set fire to the arsenal. However he is quickly gagged and packed off with the Boeotian, who hopes to make a fortune by exhibiting this queer animal. The play ends with another scene between Lamachus and Dicaeopolis. The former has just been summoned to military duty in the mountain snow, but Dicccopolis jeers at all his preparations, and to plague him starts cooking the dainties which he has just pur- chased. The spectators are given an actual demonstration one might say a cookery demonstration of the material benefits which a restoration of peace will bring in its train. Merely to hint that such a play in modern times would have been slain before it birth by the Defence of the Realm Act, and that its author would have suffered ruin is to indicate how far we have progressed in the paths of freedom since then. But Aristo- phanes was no anti-patriot, he was merely a stout party man and a good hater, who realised that in 425 B.C., the war between Athens and Sparta was a drawn game, as it would have continued to be indefinitely but for the frenzied Sicilian adventure. Even a deadly contest between Dorian and Ionian would not prevail upon an Athenian to give up his time-honoured franchises, above all his nap^