Essays of poets and poetry, ancient and modern

Front matter

MUDBE'Sj^^ LIBRARY,

ESTABLISHED 1842. ''V^

MUDIE'SgiS'UBRARY,^

Preface

It is needless to say that no one of the nine Essays contained in this volume has been written within the last two years and a half.

The earliest, that on the " Art of Translation," was first published as long ago as 1895, in the Quarterly Review, the others in the same periodical, or in the Monthly Review, at intervals extending over some ten years. The latest, that on "In Memoriam after Fifty Years," appeared in the Edinburgh Review early in 1906, shortly after the first, and separate publication by Lord Tennyson of this poem with his father's annotations. I had hoped to have reprinted these Essays, as I am now doing, in book form, before the present date, but delayed to do so, promising myself more opportunity of rehandling than I have ever found time to accomplish. When in 1906 I became Vice- Chancellor, all hope of considerable retouching in any near future entirely disappeared. I was confronted with the alternative of allowing them to wait still longer, or of reprinting them as they were, with such limited amount of revision as had been, or was now, possible.

I have to thank my old friend and publisher, Mr John Murray, for much consideration and kindness added to that for which I was ah-eady largely in his debt, and I must express my vi PREFACE

acknowledgments to Messrs Longmans for allowing me to reprint the Edinburgh article. I am indebted to not a few friends who, at the time when the articles first appeared, or since, have furnished me with valuable corrections or suggestions, notably to Dr Paget Toynbee, who read through for me the article on " Dante and the Art of Translation," both when it first appeared and again in the proofs a short time ago.

I am further under much obligation to Lord Fitzmam'ice, who wrote spontaneously to tell me that Gray's copy of Milton was to be found in his brother's Library at Bowood, and to Lord Lansdowne himself, for being at special pains to enable me to inspect this most interesting relic, which deserves more thorough study than I have yet been able to give to it.

A word of sincere gratitude is also due fi'om me to Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoUendorf for letting me use the long and interesting extract from his letter on the article about Sophocles, an informal but, as I think scholars will agree, very valuable contribution toward our realisation of that ever-interesting figure.

Finally, I have to thank Mr George Stuart Gordon, one of the junior Fellows of my College, for most kindly reading through the whole of the proofs as they were passing through the Press.

T. H. W.

Contents

I. Sophocles and the Greek Genius II. Matthew Arnold

III. The Art of Translation ....

IV. Dante and the Art of Poetry

I. Sophocles And The Gkeek Genius

" Fortunate Sophocles ! with wealth and wit Together blest, he lived, and full of days He died ; his many tragedies were fair. And fair his end, before the evil hour."

So, at the death of the great Attic tragedian, sang the comic poet Phrynichus, one of his younger contemporaries ; and after-ages have always dwelt on the same characteristics, which are indeed singular and significant.

The "lives" of "the poets" are only too often some of the saddest reading in the world. Truly they seem to have "learned in suffering" what they have "taught in song," and to have poured out their bitter-sweet notes, like the legendary nightingale, with their bosom against the thorn. Want, exile, passion ill-assorted, unhappy marriage, feuds with friend and foe, melancholy and madness, scBva indignatio, the pangs of envy or of sensitiveness, an early or a tragic end — these have been not seldom their lot. Glory is theirs, but purchased at what a price !

Some exceptions there have been— Sophocles,

A

Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare probably, Ariosto, Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson. But conspicuous among the exceptions is Sophocles. Both the ancient and the modern world have agreed to account him among the very happiest of aU poets, happy in his era, happy in the circumstances of his life, happiest above all in his own sweet and sage temper ; " the happiest of all Greek poets on record," as Swinburne called him long since; the " gentle Sophocles," as, by a felicitous transference of Ben Jonson's well-known epithet for his immortal friend, he styled him the other day.

Other contemporaries who were able to look back on the career of Sophocles echo the same note as Phrynichus. Aristophanes, whose glorious, graceless comedy spared no one else, spared him. The motive of the " Frogs " is, as every one knows, the proposal to recover for Athens, now sadly shorn of poets, one of the great tragedians of the generation which had just p9,ssed away.

" Why do you not bring Sophocles back from the grave, if you want one of the dead poets on earth again?" says Heracles to Dionysus. "Because, my dear sir, he will not come. He's too happy where he is, his sweet temper, his bonhomie, make him welcome everywhere. When he arrived in the lower regions he found his old friend and rival ^schylus enthroned. He only kissed him and clasped his hand, bidding him keep the throne, and so preserves his character still, ' Serene in life and after life serene.' "

And Plato, no lover of the poetic temperament, in the ever memorable opening of the " Eepublic," says the same, and uses the very same untranslatable epithet. He introduces Sophocles as an

SOPHOCLES' SERENITY 3

example of one who in his May of life had enjoyed gustful youth to the full, but who could grow old charmingly, with a resignation worldly at once and unworldly. Well balanced and "serene," when one asked him, "How is it with you and Love, Sophocles? Are you still the man you were?" "Hush! hush!" he said, "we must not use such talk. Rather I have gladly escaped from the tyranny of a wild and mad master."

Doubtless he had escaped from other tyrannies and torments. Even he must have had his struggles. Good fortune brings its own enemies, its own friction of envy and detraction. Life had not always been smooth. He had not always been successful. His greatest play only won the second prize : once the Archon would not grant him a chorus at all. Gossip and scandal had gabbled and hissed around him. Lesser men, minor poets and interviewers, had presented him in their belittling mirror. It may be his own kin had sought to push him from his throne and try on Jiis royal crown before his death. One of the comic poets called his poems literally " dog rimes," and said he seemed in writing his plays "to have collaborated with a barking hound,"

It is true that the details of his life must remain dubious, for the record is scanty and mainly traditional. But, on the whole, tradition, in such matters once discredited, has rather recovered than lost authority. Such evidence as that of Plato and Aristophanes gives fixed points of light ; and the broad facts remain, especially that of his relation to the evolution of the Greek drama.

JEschylus, with his magniloquence, nobly

4 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENroS

grandiose, like "the large utterance of the early gods," -i^schylus, whose

Sophocles, with the perfection of his art ; Euripides, with his romance and novelty — they are all Greek, and they are all great. It is, however, of the essence of Sophocles, it is the secret and the sum of his happiness, to hold in everything the middle position. He was born just at the right moment. The peculiar glory of Athens falls entirely within a single century — the fifth before Christ. The date 500 B.C. found her still undeveloped, 400 B.C. left her ruined. The first two decades were decades of gloom and struggle. Marathon staved off the onset of the East; but it was only after Salamis and Plataea that the Persian peril ceased to be an everpresent overwhelming terror. It was between the two naval battles, Salamis and ^Egospotami, that the brief splendid day of Athens flamed and faded. The fifty years between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars were its high noon. These years are the years of Sophocles. Salamis, the greatest land-mark in the political history of Athens — in some ways of the ancient world — ^is also the most notable in her literary history.

" From Marathon to Syracuse Are seventy years and seven ; for so long Endured that city's prime which was the world's."

In the battle of Salamis, and in the van of the fray, iEschylus fought, as he had fought before at Marathon. Its glorious agony lives for ever in the surging, glittering rhythms of the Persse, which

THE mEAL GREEK BOY 5

ring as though Marlowe had sung the story of the Armada in the " mighty line " in which he had, the year before that great fight, given to the stage " Tamburlaine the Great." On the day of the battle, Euripides, according to tradition, was born. And what of Sophocles? His part was neither purely active nor purely passive, but eminently notable and appropriate. Neither the woes nor the throes of the victory were his. He was chosen for his beauty and his promise, as the prize-boy of the class-room and the playing-field, to lead the choristers who sang and danced in celebration of the crowning mercy. The picture is one which appeals to the imagination. Sophocles, afterwards to be the ideal Greek man, is here the ideal Greek boy.

" There the ancient celebration to the maiden queen of fight Led the long august procession upward to the pillared height : There the hearts of men beat faster while the glad Hellenic

boy Ran and wrestled with his fellows, knew the struggle and the

joy; From the deep eyes in his forehead shone a radiance brave

and fair.

Flashing down his shapely shoulders ran the splendour of his

hair."

It is thus he first comes upon the world-stage ; and the appearance is significant.

For one thing is certain, that he had received that first of gifts, a good education. It seems probable that his father Sophillus^ was of a middle station in life. Some have put him too low and called him a blacksmith or ironmonger; others, on the ground that his son in later life held office

1 Or Sophilus ; possibly a variant of Theophilus, " Godloving."

in the State, have imagined that he must have been of good family. Probably he was neither, but was a well-to-do bourgeois, keeping a small manufactm*- ing business, such as Demosthenes' father kept a century later. In Athens, as elsewhere, the sons of such men have had perhaps the best of all starts in life. What is clear is that Sophillus gave his son the completest training then available. In particular his master in music and dancing, Lamprus, was the first and most fashionable teacher of the time.

That the young poet was beautiful and clever, that he was graceful, agile, and athletic, is vouched for by the story we have recalled. It is vouched for again later on in his life. He sustained the title-r61e in his own piece " Nausicaa," embodying the story of that most delightful of - Homeric heroines. In a charming scene, as every one remembers, she leads her maidens in a combination of dance and ball-play. Sophocles threw the ball, as the Greek expression was, in consummate style. In another of his own pieces, " Thamyris," he played the lyre ; but he gave up acting because his voice was thin and weak. All this, however, came later in his career. Meanwhile his boyhood was like that of any other Athenian gentleman's son. His home was the most beautiful spot in the neighbourhood of Athens, a "garden" not "wholly in the busy world nor quite beyond it," the Horseman's Knoll, as it was called — the "White Knoll," as he himself styles it — a low mound of light-coloured earth, swelling from the Attic plain, and covered with a boskage of laurel, olive, and vine, through which

EARLIER MANHOOD 7

trickled the unfailing rills of the little Kephisus, nourishing the daffodil, "a garland for the gods," and the gold-gleaming crocus, and keeping fresh the green dells in which a crowd of nightingales sang sweetly and unceasingly.

Of the poet's earlier manhood, from 480 to 468, we know nothing. He is called the pupil of JEschylus, as a great Italian painter is often called the pupil of his chief predecessor. That ^schylus gave, or Sophocles received, lessons, is not to be believed ; but that, as a happy reverent spirit, he fell at first much under the influence of ^schylus and learned from him, there can be no doubt. The "Ajax," one of his earliest plays, is full of .^schylean words, taken mainly, as Professor Jebb notices, from the Persse ; and it was perhaps with mingled feelings that he found himself preferred at the age of twenty-seven to his master. The story of the victory is well known, althongh of doubtful authenticity. What it emphasises is, that from this time Sophocles undoubtedly held the foremost place among Athenian poets. So much is clear from Aristophanes. The old men might prefer JEschylus, the yoimg men Euripides, but Sophocles was hors concours. Such was doubtless the judgment of the generals, even if the story of their award is not true. It was, as Professor Phillimore well puts it, the judgment of " the man in the street of Athens."^ It was also the

1 Aristophanes ("Peace" 531) makes one of his Chorus include, as one of the blessings of peace, "the songs of Sophocles." The scholiast says that Aristophanes praised Sophocles only to damn Euripides, whom he hated. But Aristophanes no doubt also represents the popular taste.

judgment of Xenophon and, perhaps we may divine, of Plato. And it was to be the judgment of Cicero and Virgil, and of that still more popular critic, Ovid.

Sophocles acquired, too, a public position. He was made, as we know from inscriptions, Hellenotamias in 443 or 442. He was sent as a general to Samos about 441. It has been argued that this means little, especially as regards his poetry. It is not so clear that this is the case. Professions were not then so much differentiated as they are to-day. Every Greek gentleman was bred to arms and familiar vnth the simple conduct of war as at that time carried on. Sophocles might well have been, if Greek comedy is to be trusted, as good a general as Pericles. It is true that Ion of Chios, in his "Reminiscences," entitled perhaps "Celebrities I have met," gives a gossiping, and not unscandalous, account of his encountering Sophocles at a dinnerparty in Samos, and how he displayed his generalship in manoeuvring at the dinner-table. "I am practising tactics," he said, " because Pericles says I am a good poet but a bad general." But Ion, Plutarch tells us, also described Pericles as "stiff and proud," and indeed thought it right to show the seamy side of great men. It is said more specifically that Sophocles was defeated in a naval skirmish by the famous atomic philosopher Mehssus. Fancy a campaign conducted by Gladstone and Tennyson, in which Tennyson should be defeated at sea by M. Pasteur! But M. Berthelot held a portfolio in a French ministry, and a suggestion was made in the Boer War

A POLITICAL PERSONAGE 9

that Mr Kudyard Kipling should have a command. And is not Mr Haldane, the author of "The Pathway to Reality," Minister of War 1 Professor von Wilamowitz-MoUendorf, indeed, lays more stress than other scholars have done on Sophocles' public and official career. He maintains that his holding these offices was neither accidental nor ornamental, but shows him to have been definitely a leading politician, and even a party man and important supporter of Pericles.

A figure and a personage, then, in Greek society, the compeer of Pericles, the friend of Herodotus, to whom he addressed an Ode, he ranged among the foremost men and minds of his day, interchanging with them, doubtless as an equal, ideas on the events and movements of his time. Whatever he was in the field, it is certain that his poems contain much political wisdom. Such passages as the famous

" Stone walls do not a city make^ but men ; "

or again,

" Whereas Nor fort nor fleet, empty, is anything. Desert of men to be its complement,"

have passed into proverbs for every age and time. They gave him the reputation for that aphoristic eloquence or mastery of phrase which Plutarch attributes to him. He held a position not unlike that of Tennyson, who could venture to advise Gladstone about the extension of the franchise, and whose phrases or "sayings" are the crystallisation of the political wisdom of his time. It was the same cause, doubtless, which led to his being made a " Lord of the Treasury," and being employed, like a French or American man of letters, Chateaubriand, or Hawthorne, or Motley, or Lowell, on various embassies. In the last years of his life, when, after the awful calamity of Syracuse, the democracy was discredited^ and an attempt was made to frame a new constitution with a more restricted franchise, an assembly was summoned, not in Athens, but at his own Colonus, by which he is said to have been appointed one of a Committee of Ten, to devise a new constitution and submit it to the people. The result was the appointment of the famous or notorious Four Hundred. The identification is not absolutely certain, but there is no real reason to question it, and the story preserved by Aristotle, that Sophocles defended the course adopted by saying that it was not indeed ideal, but the best under the circumstances, is quite in keeping with his character.

For he was probably a moderate in politics as in everything else, and meant the Four Hundred to be merely an executive committee and not the tyrannical junta which it proved. As R. A. Neil, of lettered memory, writes, in his most suggestive introduction to the "Knights," the spirit of Attic literature is in the main that of moderate, not extreme, democracy. Sophocles was in any case a patriot, and even when Athens had seen her best days remained faithful to her. Euripides, also a democrat, but disillusioned — "exacerbated" by the jingoism, as Dr Murray implies, though he cleverly avoids saying it, of the Athenian democracy — fled to the court of Archelaus of Macedonia, which was like a Radical taking refuge with tJae Czar of Russia, and there composed that swan-song, strangely,

HIS PASSING 11

wildly beautiful, which Dr Murray has reproduced with so much genius and sympathy, the " Bacchee." Sophocles was also invited by the despot, but he would not go. Then came "the sombre close of that voluptuous day." Euripides died. When Sophocles heard it he put on mourning and bade his chorus appear without the usual wreaths. The scene is admirably given by one of Euripides' best lovers, Mr Browning : —

" Enters an old pale-swathed majesty- Makes slow mute passage through two ranks as mute.

Priest — the deep tone succeeded the fixed gaze —

Thou carest that thy god have spectacle

That, since Euripides is dead to-day,

My Chores, at the Greater Feast, next month,

Shall clothed in black appear ungarlanded.

Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles

'Twixt rows as mute, to mingle possibly

With certain gods who convoy age to port ;

And night resumed him."

His own end followed just in time, " before the evil hour." The story of the manner of his death and of his burial are both significant. The better versions of the first are pretty, the legend of the last is lovely, but chronology pronounces it apocryphal.

It was indeed time for him to depart. His domestic relations were too probably not happy. Like Goethe after Schiller's death and the shock and sequel of the battle of Jena, marrying Christiana Vulpius, then flirting and quarrelling with Bettine, incurring the contempt and censure of his family, the aged and over-amorous Sophocles had perhaps fallen into the hands of an old man's young wives. They preyed upon him, perching on his house, as the forcible Greek saying had it, " like owls on a tomb." "Whether his sons ever really brought that famous action de lunatico inquirendo which was dismissed upon Sophocles reciting the song from the "(Edipus at Colonus," is doubtful, though Cicero, a lover of a good story, accepted it. It is very probably a scene from a comedy, based perhaps on an exaggeration of the real state of Sophocles' relations with his family.

Browning's verses strike the true note of his passing, a note first heard nowhere else but in the CEdipus itself. For Sophocles was a many-sided character. He was not only a soldier and a statesman ; he was also a priest, or something very like it, in the technical sense. Like Dante, who was inscribed of the Guild of Apothecaries, he seems to have had some connexion with medicine ; he reared an altar, and wrote a hymn, to Asclepius, the god of medicine, which long remained famous. But he also held a sort of private prebend or priesthood in connexion with Alcon, a brother hero with Asclepius. He was even supposed to have entertained Asclepius, and after death was himself canonised as "The Entertainer."*

This, too, is appropriate to his character. For not merely was he religious, but he was definitely pious. A poet, and especially a dramatist, must not be judged by isolated passages or sentiments put into the mouths of his characters; but the whole temper of Sophocles shows this, and the

1 See Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf s letter at the end of this volume.

MYSTIC AND PIETIST 13

tradition that he came into collision with the esprits forts of his day, and offended them by his avowed orthodoxy, is verisimilar enough. We know little about the so-called "Mysteries," or the place they held in actual Greek thought and life. But one of the most famous passages about them is a fragment of Sophocles, in which he attributes to them a saving grace.

"Thrice happy," he sang, "are they among mortals who have looked on these rites before they pass to the world below. They alone will have life in the next world, the rest will have there nought but misery."

It is said that Diogenes asked, " What do you meani Will the thief Pataecion, if he dies a mystic, have a better chance than Epaminondas, because he has been initiated 1 " — thus anticipating the famous dispute between Cardinal Newman and Canon Kingsley over the Church's lazy and ragged, but religious beggar-woman and the State's pattern man.

The eminent German scholar, Uhich von Wilamowitz-MoUendorf, lays special stress on Sophocles' piety as emphasised by these stories, and thinks it the key to the understanding of the " CEdipus Tyrannus."

" We " (he says) "are smitten to the ground by the awfulness of the story. Sophocles was not so. He had a warm piety in the heart of a child. The weakness of man was to him only God's opportunity. He believed in the gods as he believed in the oracles. Such piety is not found in .^schylus. Can we doubt that Augustine would have found in Sophocles, and not in his two comrades, a kinsman of heaven ? "

Such his own generation certainly held him. He was beyond all others, they said, the darling of the gods. He retained, in fact, not a little of the olderfashioned piety which belonged to the aristocratic leaders of his day, to Pericles and to Nicias.

Is such a character, so practical, so sensuous at once and saintly, intelligible or realisable by us to-day ? The poetic temperament sometimes takes this cast. On this side, as in other points, there is not a little resemblance between the " gentle " Sophocles, and the tender, pious Virgil, a wizard in his own and immediately succeeding days, a saint in the Middle Ages. But Virgil, studiis Jlorens ignobilis oti, though full of practical sense, was not a man of action. We have compared Sophocles, too, with a poet who has much in common with Virgil, Lord Tennyson.^ He has more points of contact with another poet, very different from either of these. It is said that Sophocles has no modern parallel, and strictly speaking this is true. The nearest perhaps, on the whole, or at least the most suggestive, as we have already hinted more than once, is Goethe, The differences are very great. Germany is not Greece. Neither Frankfort nor Weimar, nor both combined, are Athens. Yet in the man Goethe, in his temper, in his physique, there is much that helps us to understand Sophocles.

Born in a middle station, yet a natural aristocrat, strikingly handsome alike in youth and in age, mingling passion and reason, familiar with

1 Professors Campbell, Butcher, and Phillimore, have all pointed out the similarity of Sophocles' style to that of Virgil and Tennyson, especially in its trick of giving to a word a sort of aura of association, and thus many meanings at once.

PARALLEL WITH GOETHE 16

affairs as well as with books, prosecuting art and culture and science, and all amid the storm and' thunder of a national struggle and mighty battles, minded ever " Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen, resolut zu leben," to him also may be applied Matthew Arnold's famous lines about one

"Whose even-balanced soul From first youth tested up to extreme old age. Business could not make dull, nor passion ttdld. Who saw life steadily and saw it whole."

Nor is it unlikely that their author in writing them had, perhaps unconsciously, in his mind both his artistic and literary heroes. The picture of Goethe with his sunny playfulness of wit and temper, as portrayed for us by Eckermann, may help us to understand the picture of Sophocles, which has already been alluded to, preserved by a less flattering witness than Eckermann, Ion of Chios. The famed combination of Heiterkeit, "blithe serenity," with Allgememheit, or "breadth of view," makes in both, though in very different forms, a complete ideal; while the deeper side of Goethe, that piety which all his sensual worldliness could not entirely obliterate, may be found in the treatment of religion in "Wilhelm Meister," both in the story of the Scheme Seele, and still more in the symbolic and mystic interpretation of Christianity which concludes the miscellaneous phantasmagoria of that strange book.

The social status of the two poets presents a further parallel.

" Placed midway between the perilous extremes of affluence and want, Goethe's whole career received a modifying impulse from this position.

He never knew adversity. This alone must necessarily have deprived him of one powerful chord which vibrates through literature. He never knew the gaunt companionship of Want, whispering terrible suggestions. He never knew the necessity to conquer for himself breathing-room in the world ; and thus all the feelings of bitterness, opposition, and defiance which accompany and perplex the struggle of life, were to him almost unknown ; and he was taught nothing of the aggressive and practical energy which these feelings develop in impetuous natures. How much of his serenity, how much of his dislike to politics, may be traced to this origin ? "

So writes, in the opening pages of his book, his English biographer, Mr G. H. Lewes.

Goethe, again, had his acquaintance with afiairs, both civil and military.^ He was a Privy Councillor at five-and-twenty ; and, just before he wrote his " Iphigeneia," he was appointed President of the Military and Causeway Commission for the Duchy of Weimar, so that he composed that famous piece, as he said, with " one foot only in the stirrup of Pegasus." He was interrupted in its composition by the riots among the starving weavers of Apolda. When it was first acted, he played the part of Orestes himself, and in the handsome prime of his young manhood — he was then just thirty — was likened to Apollo descended from heaven to present in bodily form the beauty of Greece. Truly a Sophoclean apparition ! It is of no little importance that both poets were practically and personally acquainted with the

1 His latest and most complete biographer, Dr Bielschowsky, lays great stress on his official and "business" career, and his political instinct and insight.

COMPARISONS WITH GOETHE 17

details and diflficulties of staging and presentation. In this respect Sophocles was pre-eminent. His famous introduction of the third actor, his breakingdown of the practice of writing "tetralogies," or cycles, rather than single plays, like his improvements in dress and decoration, owe, doubtless, something to this conversance with the actual possibilities. It is noticeable that Goethe, in criticising Sophocles, lays special stress upon this acquaintance with the stage, as shown in both the "Philoctetes" and the "(Edipus at Colonus." It is pretty clear too that, like Aristotle, nay, probably following both Aristotle and Lessing, he took Sophocles as the norm and canon of Greek tragedy. Thus in his critique of " Cymbeline," the reviewer of Shakespeare, he says, should consider "how Sophocles would have handled the same material."

Finally, Goethe reminds us of Sophocles in his blending of reason and passion. He was eminently susceptible of beauty, and he yielded often, too often, to its spell. He was aware of this himself. Is not his confession,

in the same key as Sophocles' famous answer already quoted? And might not Sophocles have replied to Ion in Goethe's line,