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The art of the Greek sculptors of the great age is known to us by long familiarity. None of the Greek statues upon first sight appear strange in any respect. There is no need to look long, to orient mind and eye, before we can understand them. We feel ourselves immediately at home. Our own sculptors learned their art from them, filled our galleries with reminiscences of them. Plaster casts more or less like them are our commonest form of inappropriate decoration. Our idea of a statue is a composite of Greek statues, and nothing speaks more for the vitality of the originals than their survival in spite of all we have done to them.

The same is true of the Greek temple. No architecture is more familiar to us. That pointed pediment supported by fluted columns—we are satiated with it. Endless replicas of it decorate the public buildings of all our cities and the sight of it anywhere is an assurance of something official within. Greece has been copied by sculptors and builders from the days of Rome on.

The art of the literature of Greece stands in singular contrast to these, isolated, apart. The thought of the Greeks has penetrated everywhere; their style, the way they write, has remained peculiar to them alone. In that one respect they have had no copyists and no followers. The fact is hardly surprising. One must know a foreign language very well to have one’s way of writing actually altered by it; one must, in truth, have entered into the genius of that language to such a degree as is hardly possible to a foreigner. And Greek is a very subtle language, full of delicately modifying words, capable of the finest distinctions of meaning. Years of study are needed to read it even tolerably. Small wonder that the writers of other countries left it alone and, unlike their brother artists in stone, never imitated Greek methods. English poetry has gone an altogether different way from the Greek, as has all the art that is not copied but is native to Europe.

This art, the art natural to us, has always been an art of rich detail. In a Gothic cathedral not an inch is left unelaborated in a thousand marvellous patterns of delicate tracery worked in the stone. In a great Renaissance portrait minutest distinctions of form and color are dwelt upon with loving care, frost-work of lace, patterned brocade, the finely wrought links of a chain, a jewelled ring, wreathed pearls in the hair, the sheen of silk and satin and fur-bordered velvet, beauty of detail both sumptuous and exquisite. It is eminently probable that if the temples and the statues of Greece had only just been discovered, we would look at them dismayed at the lack of any of the elaboration of beauty we are used to. To turn from St. Mark’s or Chartres to the Parthenon for the first time, or from a Titian to the Venus of Milo never seen before, would undoubtedly be a chilling experience. The statue in her straight, plain folds, her hair caught back simply in a knot, no ornament of any description to set her off, placed beside the lady of the Renaissance or the European lady of any period, is a contrast so great, only our long familiarity with her enables us not to feel her too austere to enjoy. She shows us how unlike what the Greeks wanted in beauty was from what the world after them has wanted.

So the lover of great literature when he is confronted all unprepared with the Greek way of writing, feels chilled at first, almost estranged. The Greeks wrote on the same lines as they did everything else. Greek writing depends no more on ornament than the Greek statue does. It is plain writing, direct, matter-of-fact. It often seems, when translated with any degree of literalness, bare, so unlike what we are used to as even to repel. All the scholars who have essayed translation have felt this difficulty and have tried to win an audience for what they loved and knew as so great by rewriting, not translating, when the Greek way seemed too different from the English. The most distinguished of them, Professor Gilbert Murray, has expressly stated this to be his method:

I have often used a more elaborate diction than Euripides did because I found that, Greek being a very simple and austere language and English an ornate one, a direct translation produced an effect of baldness which was quite unlike the original.

The difficulty is there, no doubt, and yet if we are unable to get enjoyment from a direct translation, we shall never know what Greek writing is like, for the Greek and the English ways are so different, when the Greek is dressed in English fashion, it is no longer Greek. Familiarity has made their statues and their temples beautiful to us as none are more. It is possible that even through the poor medium of translation we might acquire a taste for their writings as well, if, in addition to the easily perceived beauty of such translations as Professor Murray’s Euripides, we were willing to accustom ourselves to translations as brief and little adorned as the original, and try to discover what the art that resulted in the Parthenon and the Venus has produced in literature. To be willing to learn from the Greeks in this matter also and to be enabled not only to feel the simple majesty of the Greek temple along with the splendor of St. Mark’s and the soaring immensity of Bourges, but to love the truth stated with simplicity as well as the truth set off by every adornment the imagination can devise, to care for the Greek way of writing as well as the English way, is to be immensely the richer; it is to have our entire conception of poetry widened and purified.

Plain writing is not the English genius. English poetry is the Gothic cathedral, the Renaissance portrait. It is adorned by all that beautiful elaboration of detail can do. The words are like rich embroideries. Our poets may draw upon what they will to deck their poems. They are not held down to facts. Greek poets were. “The Greeks soar but keep their feet on the ground,” said Landor. Our poets leave earth far behind them, freed by what the Greeks had small use and no name for, poetic license. Our minds are full of pictures of “caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,” of “flowers so sweet the sense faints picturing them,” of “sermons in stones, books in the running brooks,” of “magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas,” of “the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ... still quiring to the young ey’d cherubins.” When Homer says, “The stars about the bright moon shine clear to see, for no wind stirs the air and all the mountain peaks appear and the high headlands,” when Sophocles describes “White Colonus where the nightingale sings her clear note deep in green glades ivy-grown, sheltered alike from sunshine and from wind,” when Euripides writes, “At high-tide the sea, they say, leaves a deep pool below the rockshelf; in that clear place where the women dip their water jars—” the words so literal, so grave, so unemphatic, hardly arrest our attention to see the beauty in them. Our imagery would have left the Greeks as cold. Clarity and simplicity of statement, the watchwords of the thinker, were the Greek poets’ watchwords too. Never to them would the humblest flower that blows have brought thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. A primrose by the river’s brim was always a simple primrose and nothing more. That a skylark was like a glowworm golden in a dell of dew or like a poet hidden in a light of thought, would have been straight nonsense to them. A skylark was just a skylark. Birds were birds and nothing else, but how beautiful a thing was a bird, “that flies over the foam of the wave with careless heart, sea-purple bird of spring”!

The Greeks were realists, but not as we use the word. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it:

Bring white milk good to drink, from a cow without blemish; bright honey, too, the drops the bee in her flowery work distils, with water that purifies, drawn from a virgin spring—

The strange glory of the narcissus ... a wonder to all, immortal gods and mortal men. A hundred blossoms grew from the roots of it and very sweet was the fragrance, and all the wide sky above and all the land laughed and the salt wave of the sea.

As flakes of snow fall thick of a winter’s day, and the crests of the high hills are covered, and the farthest headlands and the meadow grass and the rich tillage of men. Over the inlets and the shore of the gray sea fast it falls and only the on-sweeping wave can ward it off.

These three instances, from Æschylus, the Hymn to Demeter, and the Iliad are selected almost at random. There is hardly a Greek poem from which such examples could not be taken. The Greeks liked facts. They had no real taste for embroidery, and they detested exaggeration.

Sometimes, if rarely, the Greek idea of beauty is found in English poetry. Curiously, Keats, than whom no poet delights more in rich detail, has in the Ode to Autumn written a poem more like the Greek than any other in English; the concluding lines are pure Greek:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The things men live with, noted as men of reason note them, not slurred over or evaded, not idealized away from actuality, and then perceived as beautiful—that is the way Greek poets saw the world.

It follows that the fancy which must ever roam very far from home, played a humble role in Greek poetry. They never wanted to “splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.” What have not our lover-poets said of their beloved! Earth in her springtime, the starry heavens, sun and moon and dawn and sunset, have not sufficed for them:

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,

Save wings, for heaven—

Everyone can supply quotations for himself.

The Greek lover-poet kept his Greek sense for fact. Occasionally he would allow himself a brief flight of fancy: “Flower among the flowers, Zenophile is blooming. My girl is better than garlands sweet to smell.” But as a rule he was chary of imagery and of adjectives as well. One epithet or two, at most, contented him: “Golden Telesila,” “Heliodora, delicate darling,” “Demo with the lovely hair,” “Wide-eyed Anticleia,” “A forehead white as ivory above dark-lashed eyes.” Such modest tributes were all that the girls whose beauty inspired the Greek sculptors could win from lovers who had been trained in the Greek way.

Everywhere fancy travels with a tight rein in the poetry of Greece, as everywhere in English poetry it is given free course. Byron uses no curb when he wants to describe a high mountain:

—the monarch of mountains.

They crowned him long ago

On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,

With a diadem of snow.

When Æschylus has the same thing in mind, he will allow himself a single touch, but no more:

the mighty summit, neighbor to the stars.

Coleridge is not using his eyes when he perceives Mont Blanc

like some sweet beguiling melody,

So sweet, we know not we are listening to it—

Pindar is observing Ætna with accurate care:

Frost-white Ætna, nurse all year long of the sharp-biting snow.

Coleridge was letting his fancy wander where it pleased. He was occupied with what he happened to feel when he stood before the mountain. Obviously he might have felt almost anything else; there is no logical connection between the spectacle and his reaction. The Greek poet was a precise observer giving a truthful account of a great snow mountain. His attitude was that the mountain is the important thing, not this or that fanciful idea it might suggest to him. He felt limited by the facts; the English poet was completely independent of them.

Meleager prays for night to come as a Greek lover would do: “Morning star, herald of dawn, swiftly come as the evening star and bring again in secret her whom thou takest from me.” Juliet’s prayer is after the model of English poetry:

Come, gentle night; come, loving black-brow’d night.

Give me my Romeo: and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine,

That all the world will be in love with night—

“Gray dawn,” says the Greek lover, “hater of those who love, why risest thou so swift around my bed where but now I nestled close to Demo? Would thou wouldst turn thy fleet steeds backward and be evening, O bearer of the sweet light that is so bitter to me.” Not in that direct and literal fashion does the English lover cry out upon the dawn:

What envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty morning tops—

The influence of the English Bible has had its share in making the Greek way hard for us. The language and the style of it have become to us those appropriate to religious expression, and Greek religious poetry which makes up much of the lyrical part of the tragedies, perhaps the greatest of all Greek poetry, is completely un-Hebraic. Hebrew and Greek are poles apart. Hebrew poetry is directed to the emotions; it is designed to make the hearer feel, not think. Therefore it is a poetry based on reiteration. Everyone knows the emotional effect that repetition produces, from the tom-tom in the African forest to the rolling sound of “Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us—to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them—when we assemble and meet together—to ask those things which are requisite and necessary—” Nothing is gained for the idea by these repetitions; the words are synonyms; but the beat upon the ear dulls the critical reason and opens the way to gathering emotion. The method is basic in Hebrew poetry:

To cause it to rain on the earth where no man is, on the wilderness wherein there is no man.

Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, thou that didst not travail with child—

The complete contrast this way of writing offers to the Greek can be seen most clearly in passages where the idea expressed is the same. In the Sermon on the Mount—the style of the New Testament is, of course, formed on that of the Old—occurs the passage:

Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

This thought is expressed in the Greek way by Æschylus:

Men search out God and searching find him.

Not a word more is added. The poet felt the statement as it stood adequate for the idea and he had no desire to elaborate or ornament it.

The chorus in the Agamemnon, to which this sentence belongs, is a good instance of Greek brevity and straightforwardness:

He wills and it is done. One spoke, saying, God cares not when men tread underfoot holy things inviolate. But who spoke thus knew not God. We have seen with our eyes the price they pay whose breath is pride, who dare beyond man’s daring, whose dwellings overflow with riches. The greatest good is not there, wealth enough to keep misery away and a heart wise to use it. Gold is no bulwark to the arrogant, to him who spurns out of sight the great altar of God’s justice. Temptation that persuades to evil, offspring intolerable of far-seeing destruction—when these constrain, there is no remedy. No hiding place can cover sin. It ever blazes forth, a light of death.

All these ideas are found repeatedly in the Bible and are familiar through many a well-known verse from psalm or prophet, but written as the Hebrew writes they are so long that quotation here is impossible.

One parallel, however, must be given in full. A familiar and completely characteristic example of the Hebrew way is the description of wisdom in Job:

But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not with me. It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold. Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?—Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

The thought behind these sonorous sentences is simple: wisdom cannot be bought; it is the reward of righteousness. The effectiveness of the statement consists entirely in the repetition. The idea is repeated again and again with only slight variations in the imagery, and the cumulative effect is in the end great and impressive. It happens that a direct comparison with the Greek way is possible, for Æschylus too had his conception of the price of wisdom:

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

This passage is as characteristically Greek as the quotation from Job is Hebrew. There is little repetition, little enhancement, in the statement. The thought that wisdom’s price is suffering and that it is always paid unwillingly although sent in truth as a gift from God, is stated almost as briefly and almost as plainly as is possible to language. The poet is preoccupied with his thought. He is concerned to get his idea across, not to emotionalize it. His sense for beauty is as unerring as the Hebrew poet’s, but it is a different sense for beauty.

The same difference between the two methods is marked in another parallel where the wicked man is shown praying to deaf ears. In the Bible it runs:

When distress and anguish cometh then shall they call upon me but I will not answer; then they shall seek me but they shall not find me.

The Greek expresses the bare idea, not a word more:

And does he pray, no one hears.

Socrates and Phædrus once were discussing a certain piece of writing for which the younger man had a great admiration. He insisted that Socrates should feel the same. “Well,” said the latter, “as to the sentiments, I submit to your judgment but as to the style, I doubt whether the author himself would be able to defend it. I speak under correction, but I thought he repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or want of pains. And he seemed to me ambitious to show that he could say the same thing over in two or three ways—”

We are lovers of beauty with economy, said Pericles. Words were to be used sparingly like everything else.

Thucydides gives in a single sentence the fate of those brilliant youths who, pledging the sea in wine from golden goblets, sailed away to conquer Sicily and slowly died in the quarries of Syracuse: “Having done what men could, they suffered what men must.” One sentence only for their glory and their anguish. When Clytemnestra is told that her son is searching for her to kill her, all she says of all she feels, is: “I stand here on the height of misery.”

Macbeth at the crisis of his fate strikes the authentic note of English poetry. He is neither brief nor simple:

—all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage—

The English poet puts before his audience the full tragedy as they would never see it but for him. He does it all for them in words so splendid, in images so poignant, they are lifted to a vision that completely transcends themselves. The Greek poet lifts one corner of the curtain only. A glimpse is given, no more, but by it the mind is fired to see for itself what lies behind. The writer will do no more than suggest the way to go, but he does it in such a fashion that the imagination is quickened to create for itself. Pindar takes two lovers to the door of their chamber and dismisses them: “Secret are wise persuasion’s keys unto love’s sanctities.” This is not Shakespeare’s way with Romeo and Juliet. The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.