Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

A History of Classical Greek Literature. By the Rev. J.P. Mahaffy, M.A., Fellow and Professor of Ancient History, Trinity College, Dublin. New York: Harper & Brothers.

It is easy to imagine a history of Greek literature which should be not only useful and stimulative to the student, but fascinating to the general mass of intelligent readers. The literature of Greece is not, like that of modern nations, the mirror of a many-colored life; but the originality, variety and perfection of its forms make it on the whole the most complete and splendid representation of thought and imagination which the world possesses. While it owed little or nothing to any foreign influence, it was itself the source of all later conceptions of literary art, and though it exists only in fragmentary remains, these still furnish the chief standard of excellence in nearly every department. The subject is therefore unique both in the value of its materials and in the definiteness of its limits. What is demanded for the adequate treatment of it is not universal knowledge, but minute and thorough scholarship; not a wide and diversified experience, an unlimited range of sympathies, the power of detecting subtle motives and disentangling complicated threads of action, but a comprehension of the simple and eternal elements of character and conduct, the faculty of tracing a specific development from its origin to its decline, while indicating its connection with other indigenous growths of the same soil, and a vivid sense of the marvellous rapidity and exquisite beauty of the simultaneous or successive unfoldings. Given these powers, unhampered by any defect of mere technical skill, and it is hard to see how any mind susceptible of being interested in their application to such a topic could resist their sway.

We do not know what ideal Mr. Mahaffy may have formed of the task he has undertaken or of the qualities demanded for it. His preface gives no intimation on this point, and his "introduction" affords only negative evidence in his refusal to follow "the usual practice with historians of Greek literature" and "begin with a survey of the character and genius of the race, the peculiar features of the language, and the action which physical circumstances have produced upon the development of all these things." Instead of any discussions of this nature, which "in many German books are," it appears, "so long and so vague that the student is wearied before he arrives at a single fact," the natural division of literature into poetry and prose is made the starting-point. The former, in accordance with "a well-known law of human progress," precedes the latter, but is gradually supplanted by it. "This may be seen among us in the education of children, who pass in a few years through successive stages not unlike those of humanity at large in its progress from mental infancy to mature thought. We know that little children can be taught to repeat and remember rhymes long before they will listen to the simplest story in prose." On the other hand, "when the majority of people begin to read, poetry loses its hold upon the public, and the prose-writer, who composes with greater simplicity and less labor, at last obtains an advantage over his rival the poet, who is put into competition with all the older poets now circulating among a more learned public." In accordance with this profound yet simple theory—from which we gather that the Golden Age of the poets was that in which there were no readers—the work is divided into two nearly equal parts, the first dealing with poetry and the second with prose, and this "is now the accepted order among the German writers on the subject."

In the first volume epic, lyric and dramatic poetry are dealt with in the order in which they are here named, while in the second the arrangement is strictly chronological, taking up historians, philosophers and orators as they appeared upon the scene. Except in the case of the epic and the drama there is no examination of the rise or nature of any particular form of composition, and the exceptions merely touch the familiar ground of the origin of the Homeric poems and the rise of the Æschylean tragedy. Some account is given of the principal authors, their works are more or less fully enumerated and some of them analyzed, style and similar matters are discussed in a summary and decisive tone—critics, ancient and modern, who have held different views from those of Mr. Mahaffy being sharply reprehended—and the final sections of some of the chapters are devoted to bibliography, including modern imitations and translations. Although Mr. Mahaffy is never otherwise than terse—or, more properly speaking, curt—he sometimes condescends to repetition. Thus he tells us in three or four different places that Sophocles and Thucydides "play at hide-and-seek with the reader." These two authors, thus happily classed together, represent "the artificial obscurity of the Attic epoch," in distinction from "the pregnant obscurity" of Heracleitus and Æschylus and "the redundant obscurity of some modern poets." The attempt of "Classen and others" to explain the involutions and anacolutha of Thucydides by "the undeveloped condition of Attic prose, and the difficulties of wrestling with an unformed idiom to express adequately great and pregnant thoughts," is triumphantly refuted by the statement that "Euripides and Cratinus had already perfected the use of Attic Greek in dramatic dialogue," and "in Attic prose Antiphon had already attained clearness, as we can see in his extant speeches." As Classen, in his discussion of the question, has not omitted to notice Antiphon, it may be doubted whether he would accept this fact as conclusive. Another point in regard to Thucydides is introduced in a manner that prepares us for some startling disclosures: "As regards the historian's trustworthiness, it has been so universally lauded that it is high time to declare how far his statements are to be accepted as absolute truths." But expectation subsides when we are assured in the next sentence that "on contemporary facts his authority is very good, and so far there has been no proof of any inaccuracy brought home to him." He is open to doubt, it appears, "only when he goes into archæology," by which term Mr. Mahaffy understands early Sicilian history, which "reaches back three hundred years, nay to three hundred years before the advent of the Greeks." It has "only lately," it appears, been discovered that Thucydides had no personal knowledge of the events of that remote period, but "copied from Dionysius of Syracuse," and hence "the whole tradition requires careful consideration." In that case, we fear, the "high time" for deciding on the "absolute truth" of the historian's statements will have to be indefinitely postponed. Meantime we learn from the work before us the striking fact, that "the night-escape of the Plateans from their city," as related in the third book of Thucydides, "has been reproduced in our own day by Sir E. Creasy, in his Greek novel, The Old Love and the New." It has sometimes been debated whether the Greeks had any novels: it is now settled that they had one—written by an Englishman. It is to be hoped that this discovery will give a new impetus to the interest in Greek literature, which must be at a low ebb if Mr. Mahaffy be correct in stating that "even diligent scholars find it a task to read a dialogue of Plato honestly through." To be sure, if Plato's style and matter were simply such as Mr. Mahaffy describes them, there would be no great inducement to make the attempt. The same remark would apply to most of the extant plays of Sophocles. The Œdipus Rex, in particular, reveals itself in Mr. Mahaffy's analysis as a mere farrago of inconsistencies and absurdities. In allusion to the very different estimate of Professor Campbell, Mr. Mahaffy remarks, "Though I deeply respect this simple-hearted enthusiasm, it does not appear to me the best way of stimulating the study of any writer." Still, Mr. Mahaffy can occasionally defend a Greek author against the strictures of other critics. Thus he cannot agree with Mr. Simcox in giving "some credence to the attacks on Demosthenes charging him with unchastity. These," he observes, "the whole man's life and his portrait-statue forbid us to believe." We do not quite understand how the fact that Demosthenes was a "whole man" tends to rebut the charge referred to, and if what Mr. Mahaffy meant to say be "the man's whole life," this is simply begging the question, a part of that whole being the point of dispute. But the evidence of the "portrait-statue" is, of course, resistless, and one cannot but regret, in the interests of public decency, that testimony so conclusive is not admitted in modern trials involving a similar issue. One great characteristic of Mr. Mahaffy's style is an unsparing use of the first personal pronoun. "I think," "I do not think," "I conceive," "I believe," "I advocate," "I infer," "I would select," "I had predicted," are forms of expression strewn abundantly, often in clusters, over the pages of the work, the subject to which they refer being generally one on which most other people do not "think" or "conceive" as Mr. Mahaffy does. One is reminded of an epigram on Whewell, master of Trinity College (Oxford, not Dublin), after the appearance of his Plurality of Worlds:

William Cowper. By Goldwin Smith. (English-Men-of-Letters Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

Much thoughtful and sympathetic criticism has been written on the life and writings of Cowper, without any new facts being brought to light or any decided progress made. His character reveals itself and his life is minutely recorded in his correspondence; but the few points which his letters leave unexplained still remain obscure after long search and study. The question of his rupture with Lady Austen, for instance, is just where Hayley left it. His poems present elements so apparently irreconcilable that, while their qualities are universally recognized, their place in literature is still an unsettled one. The reader of The Task may ask himself in one breath whether it is poetry at all, or whether it be not great poetry. There is no trace of the instinctive poetic utterance of bards such as Shelley and Keats, but there is a constant appeal to the strongest and most elementary human feelings, rarely met with in any but the greatest works of art. It was never Cowper's fate to be exposed to that brilliant but unsympathetic criticism which is the most short-sighted kind. No comprehension of him can be got without bringing in feeling as a factor of judgment, and it would not be singular if the moral beauty of his verse should blind readers to its artistic faults. As a matter of fact, however, the tendency now-a-days is to exaggerate Cowper's position rather than his qualities, and this arises not from warmth of feeling, but from hasty dogmatizing. There is a marked difference between The Task and any poem preceding it, but the distance from The Task to The Excursion is still wider. The resemblance to Wordsworth in the former poem is tolerably superficial: it is a likeness with a difference. Cowper was the observer, not the priest, of Nature, watching her minutely and tenderly, but with none of Wordsworth's passion. The finest passages in The Task are wholly descriptive, and of description pure and simple there is very little in Wordsworth's writings. Neither is there any strong proof of Cowper's influence in the work of his successor, though the influence felt most strongly by each was the same—that of Milton. When M. Taine speaks of the revolution effected by Cowper as one of style, when Mr. Lowell characterizes Wordsworth's blank verse as "essentially the blank verse of Cowper," those eminent critics agree in exalting Cowper above his age at the very point where he is most closely bound to it. In sentiment he made a certain advance toward Wordsworth, though on a lower plane, but in diction he is distinctly of the eighteenth century. His style is often as artificial as that of any of its rhymesters: it is full of inversions, freighted with long, formal words, and still more marred by others of a false dilettante ring. Wordsworth would never have spoken of "embellished Nature," "embroidered banks," or applied the word "elegant" to a rose, any more than he would have used "lubricity" or "stercoraceous" in verse.

Yet, formal as Cowper's language often is, narrow as are the ideas which take up a large part of his writings, the essence of his poetry is its truth. A false note in feeling he seldom struck, and the most artificial language cannot hinder his lines from going direct to the heart. The high-water mark of his genius was reached in two or three poems in which the words are in full harmony with the thought and reflect it limpidly, with no attempt at the "embellishment" which he too frequently employed.

In a book designed to introduce the subject to many readers we could have wished for a little more sympathy of tone than Mr. Goldwin Smith has allowed himself in his otherwise admirable volume. It is hardly necessary, for instance, to insist on the obvious narrowness of Cowper's religion. That the book is too short is a failing on the right side, and chargeable to the plan of the series rather than the writer, whose terse style and excellent arrangement make it full of interest. Cowper's life and poetry are bound together in a singularly close union. He belongs by circumstances rather than by genius to those unfortunate minds which, thrown off the proper balance, have gained a deeper insight and a stronger hold upon others through their very weakness. What lends a peculiar pathos and charm to his figure is the purity and gentleness of his mind, the efforts by which he clung to truth in the cruel darkness of mental disease, and the innocent gayety and light-heartedness which alternated with gloom. Like Rousseau, Cowper had, by the very reaction from sadness, a rare keenness of enjoyment. Little things were enough to feast it, and hence the most trivial matters came naturally into his verse. His poems have certainly had a varied history. Written to afford occupation to a mind on the verge of madness, linked with the slightest events of his daily life, it has been their fate to serve for a long time as poetic tracts, and afterward to be exalted by critics as prophecies of a new order of things, the beginning of a literary revolution.

Barbara; or, Splendid Misery. By Miss M.E. Braddon.—For Her Dear Sake. By Mary Cecil Hay.—Daireen. By Frank Frankfort Moore.—Two Women. By Georgiana M. Craik.—Prince Hugo. By Maria M. Grant.—From Generation to Generation: A Novel. By Lady Augusta Noel.—Young Lord Penrith: A Novel. By John Berwick Harwood.—Clara Vaughan: A Novel. By R.D. Blackmore.—The Heart of Holland. By Henry Havard. Translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey.—Reata: What's in a Name? A Novel. By E.D. Gerard.—Mary Anerley: A Yorkshire Tale. By R.D. Blackmore.—Poet and Peer: A Novel. By Hamilton Aidé.—The Pennant Family. By Anne Beale. (Franklin Square Library.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty, and A Bundle of Letters. By Henry James, Jr.—Tales from the Odyssey, for Boys and Girls. By "Materfamilias."—Life of Charlemagne. By Eginhard.—The Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone: A Biographical Sketch. By Henry W. Lucy. With Portrait.—British and American Education. By Mayo W. Hazeltine.—Mrs. Austin. By Margaret Veley.—Business Life in Ancient Rome. By Charles G. Herbermann, Ph.D. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.